Tales of Arise Review (Kal)
This one is going to come down to taste.
The graphics are great, nothing to say in that regard. Story is your standard JRPG fare, not bad per se but it's not going to win any awards, and it comes with a boatload of cliches (whether this is good or bad is up to you). Character are decently likeable, and there's a crafting system that's not too annoying.
What will make or break the game for you is the combat.
The combat system is dynamic and satisfying. It's probably one of the best in the Tales series at least. You've got a string of basic attacks, and your special skills (called "artes"). You can only do a certain number of attacks in a single string, and the artes use a rapidly regenerating ressource. The point is to coordinate between the different characters to string together a barrage of attacks, where once you've reached your limit (used all your attacks and burned all your skill points), another character is hitting the enemy so the combo doesn't break while you "catch your breath", so to speak.
Enemies initially resist your attacks, but after being hit enough their guard break and they start to get hitstun, hence the need to keep the combo up. On top of that, each enemy will have one or more "attribute" (flying, armored, casting, etc) and each character has a special attack that correspond to one of those attributes and will knockdown and interrupt the enemy when used.
The result is a combat system that's relatively simple to approach but actually has a good amount of depths, and results in flashy and impressive fights.
HOWEVER, there are a couple of decisions the devs have taken that ultimately ruin the experience for me and are the reasons I'm not recommending this game.
-They really wanted you to do combos. Understandable, since this is the point of the combat system. However, in order to do combos, you need an enemy to hit. And enemies disappear the moment they're killed, so you can't keep up a combo on a dead enemy. The result : every enemy is a big freaking sack of hit points. Every. Single. One. Even basic ones you fight by the dozen.
Now, combats are still relatively short, but they're involved. Even if it's just a random wolf identical to dozens of others I've already fought, I'm still going to need do my whole basic attack string and add artes to do a good 20 or more hits before it goes down. Sometimes, a trash mob is just a trash mob, you know? I should be able to down it in a couple hits and move on. But not in this game. Ya GOTTA combo.
It also makes you feel weak, as your damage number are very low and the enemies' healthbar are noticeably slow to diminish. Not a great feeling.
-For some reason, bosses (and any "large" monster) do not interact with that combat system at all. Because they are completely and utterly immune to hitstun, and therefore cannot be combo'ed at all. You CAN briefly interrupt them on occasion with the attribute special attacks I mentionned earlier, but those are limited, and once a boss gets low on health it becomes immune to those too. On top of that, if regular enemies are already sacks of HP, bosses put them to shame. As in "the first boss has nearly 20K hitpoints when your attacks are dealing sub-100 damage each at that time".
Also, they hit extremely hard, and you cannot cancel an animation, so using any of your stronger artes, which will typically have a longer animation, is therefore basically a death sentence. The end result is that oftentimes the best strategy for boss fights is to run like a chicken, pinging the boss with weak ranged attacks, sloooooowly whittling down its immense health bar, and throw a knockdown attack every now and then when it becomes available to get a second or two where you can actually hit it with your good attacks. It's baffingly different from the normal combat and typically not a good time.
-The AI is bad. You can customize their behaviour, but for some reason there are no option to setup the AI for each character individually, even though it's possible in other Tales game. Want to have your healer passively stay away from danger so they're able to heal the moment it becomes necessary? Great, your tank is now ALSO staying away from danger! Isn't that awesome?
And even beyond that, it's extremely limited. For example, there are two types of artes, ground and aerial ones. Well, the AI never jumps. It's not too bad usually, since there are ground artes that make you jump as part of the animation, allowing you to string together ground and aerial artes for a combo, and allowing even the AI to get in the air to use aerial artes... for most characters. There's one who doesn't have any "rising" artes, and therefore will never use a good third of her arsenal if you let the AI control her. (Oh and she's the healer, so if you're thinking to just control her yourself to use her to her full extent, then congratulation, you now have to babysit a bunch of idiots).
-The game heavily discourages grind by making enemies give greatly diminishing returns in terms of experience. The result is that you cannot grind to overpower the previously mentionned problems, or even simply because you enjoy it. Well, technically you can, but the exp slows to such a trickle that leveling up past the "intended" level of each area would be disproportionately long.
So in the end I didn't enjoy my experience with the game all that much, which is why I didn't recommend it. But if you've read my previous points and thought "that doesn't sound that bad" then by all mean give it a go, as I said at the beginning it comes down to taste in the end.