Close to finishing the game's content, so I thought I'd take a moment and type up my long-winded thoughts. No doubt this is a week or two after most people have already moved on to something else. What can I say? When I find a game I like, I savor it.

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My background with this series:

My experience with the Tales series is limited, but I did thoroughly play the two entries that most people seem ready to agree as being the top placers: Vesperia and Symphonia. I remember liking Symphonia quite a bit, and would have played it again on PC, but it's a port of the PS3 version (I think), and this unfortunately means it's locked at 30fps and nobody has figured out a way to unlock it. When I played it back in the day, it was on GameCube, and ran at a silky smooth 60fps. I'm simply not going to replay a game 20 years later in a literally downgraded iteration, especially when that downgrade violates my #1 rule when it comes to games.

Vesperia, I played for over 200 hours both times I played it, with the latter being on PC of course. The PC version had catastrophic framerate issues which I was able to solve to some extent with SpecialK, but even said app could only do so much about the game's framerate problems, and it was a perpetual struggle. That said, Vesperia was easily the best Tales I've played.

I also played about 60% of The Abyss (could not warm up to the protagonist, in spite of the character arc he was given), and all of Tales of Xillia, the latter of which I remember very little about. The Tales series seems to be famous for being hit and miss.

Without further preamble, I'd rate Tales of Arise above Symphonia and possibly even above Vesperia. When the game is "complete", I'll have a better idea of whether this is merited. This conclusion weighs the game's strengths & weaknesses, which differ from those of Vesperia quite a bit.

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Brief analysis of strengths and weaknesses:

Visuals are a strong point in this game. Sometimes it's breathtaking. Most of the time it looks like an XB1 game that I happen to be running at 4K60. Either way, it's a conspicuous new plateau for the series. Combat is among the best I've experienced in any RPG. The dub is great. (Sacrilege!) The pacing of the game's content is excellent—I guess they know what they're doing after over a dozen entries.

The scope of the game is definitely smaller than the likes of Vesperia. There are fewer things to do, and for the things that the two games share, such as the recipe system, Arise typically presents only a simplified version with way fewer variables. In the case of recipes, to elaborate, the game doesn't keep track of who's made what, or how good they've gotten at it, and ultimately the need to create meals gets vastly outpaced by the rate at which ingredients flow in, even without one needing to buy anything. This was not well balanced.

The lack of an overland map system is the main culprit in not only making the scope of the game feel diminished, but also in enhancing the sense of linearity. And this game is unfortunately very linear. The map of the world could best be described as the letter T. On the other hand, the whole world does feel more tangibly interconnected. After all, a world map system inherently cordons every locus of exploration off from each other, so that they're effectively just a series of miniature worlds. Still, I have to make the case for the world map system because a larger scope and a proper sense of exploration (and rewards for said exploration) are bigger plusses than the satisfaction of knowing how the different lands are connected to one another.

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Nitpicks and other observations:

* Fast travel. I hate fast travel. It's a cop out. It says: "Your game is not entertaining enough to justify the X minutes it would take me to travel from A to B using the game's provided gameplay, so give me a hack that lets me skip your content." I would have been more tolerant of this if they had provided a story conceit, such as a special spell that lets one travel to places they've been before. But I still would not have been fully content. (And no, that would not have been the same thing as fast travel. Do you even RP?) This one probably needs to be filed under "shortcomings of a system that foregoes an overworld map".

* You know those semi-cutscenes where two characters talk to each other and they didn't want to spend money on more dialogue so they just had folks voice things like "Yes!" "No way!" etc.? In the English dub, these were evidently translated with zero context, and so they come out as in total disagreement with the context of the dialogue they're used in. As a conspicuous example, Alphen will often say "Juuust great..." in an irritated way that is completely at odds with the persona the game takes pains to establish for him. These dialogue snippets probably should have been redone, with close attention paid to the context where they're used, so the translations could be more useful.

* It would have been nice if, during combat, whenever somebody went into overlimit, the GUI element for their character would indicate their overlimit state. I would say a good 20% of the time somebody went into overlimit, I could not tell who it was, because they were being drowned out (or didn't say anything), and also hidden in the chaos of battle, so the only way to figure out who entered overlimit was to keep guessing until I found the right one, which unfortunately squandered that precious overlimit time.

* Secrets. This game is very sparse when it comes to secrets. Vesperia is on one end of this scale, where a good chunk of its content is hidden behind multi-step secrets that practically demand a FAQ, but Arise is on the other end of the scale, where it hands the entirety of the game's content to the player on a silver platter. While I can understand the frustration of Vesperia's case, the opposite case is, in my opinion, more frustrating, because it ensures that you have very little incentive for exploring nooks and crannies. Sure, there are probably folks who want their RPG to be a straight shot from beginning to end, but I am manifestly not among that number.

* (MAJOR SPOILER.) So the final dungeon. They named the individual areas after past Tales games and paid homage through the use of what I assume to be battle / overland music from those past games as well. I saw it coming: Six worlds, and everyone knows Vesperia is the best Tales game, so it's going to be the last one, right? Indeed it was. But then I got to the "Vesper" world and... it had absolutely no homage to Vesperia, at all. Not in visuals, not in music, not in a special character appearance. They could have named it anything. What a disappointment.

Now we gotta talk about the music. Sakuraba. I figured he'd be the one doing the music again. See, I have a problem with this composer. He can do a good tune, but most of the time he just spreads his talent too thin over too many games, resulting in not only a lot of cues or even complete tracks being shared between those games (e.g. https://youtu.be/6ZXDD2ddEHw and https://youtu.be/-NixbN61QaY ), but the overall quality of the music being, well, mediocre. In my opinion, he's a mediocre composer who has occasional moments of brilliance. His soundtrack for Vesperia was, with the exception of a very small handful of tracks, an outright betrayal of that game.

With that having been said, Tales of Arise presents us with an interesting case. Sakuraba seems to have decided to approach things differently. Instead of making too much music and spreading the quality thin, he made too LITTLE music, with many adventuring tracks being used in multiple locations throughout the game, but the quality of that music is a step above his normal output. Now, I'm not trying to suggest he's suddenly out of his mediocre tier. The music in Arise is still mostly pretty forgettable. But it sounds more epic/orchestral than in past games—perhaps a direct reflection of how the game looks compared to the norm—and less like, well, MIDI arrangements. Context is important, though. Take the Final Fantasy XIII games. All three of those games, which I happen to have enjoyed quite a bit, had a LOT of very good music. (E.g. https://youtu.be/fhAr-eqB-i0 ) Head and shoulders above almost anything in Arise. I can at least be thankful that Sakuraba's reliable strength is his battle themes.

And that's it. All I can think of at this moment. I still have a few things to do on my current playthrough, and then I'll debate tackling the super hard difficulty or putting the game on hold so it can mature with DLC.

You don't like games with fast travel? OMG I live for fast travel. I'm a newish gamer, I played AC Odyssey i cannot imagine playing that game with out it. Even this game, i've just few days ago, beat - Sovereign Vholran, that was a major fight for my butt (i'm not good) and now I'm avoiding going to the next level and have been fast travelling all over the place doing the side quests - i've taken out the big Preying Mantis at the beginning and got a few flowers that made my cp bigger. Just procrastinating before i go on even further. Fast travel for me is essential

My argument is mainly a philosophical one. The best case scenario, for cases where you want to be somewhere else but don't feel like physically retreading the same path, is that the game provides you with a non-immersion-killing way of getting from A to B fast. For a game like Tales of Vesperia, this is straightforward enough: The game uses a map system and you can approach different locations in a reasonably non-linear fashion. This is objectively superior to telling the game to engage what is effectively a teleportation hack.

When a game is deliberately designed as basically one long hallway, yet also gives you reasons to want to return to past locations, there are always better ways of handling A to B needs—even if it comes down to "using a spell" to achieve the same effect as traditional fast travel, that at least permits the illusion of not putting your characters in stasis while they "travel the distance off-camera". It would satisfy both those who do care and those who simply don't.

There are always "no fast travel" mods for, say, Bethesda RPGs, and they are always quite popular ( https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/35171 ), even though all they do, literally, is legitimize the player's choice not to use fast travel. So this isn't some fringe concern.

Re: the non-fully voiced NPC dialogues :

I personally would have preferred those to simply be not voiced at all, just the text. I find it really weird and not at all additive to hear grunts, hmmm?'s, yeah's and whatever. Don't see the need to do it that way, just keep those text only.

I don't care about Fast Travel. Some games I use it, some times I won't. Most of the time it's up to you. In this game I use it more than I might, since you often cannot avoid enemies you don't want to repeat-fight 10000x while trying to just run through areas, but that's less the fault of Fast Travel and more the fault of the map and purposeful "trap you in battle triggers" game design.. :P Which reminds me a little of some of the old "random encounter" world travel/world map systems.

Originally posted by CatPerson:

I don't care about Fast Travel. Some games I use it, some times I won't. Most of the time it's up to you. In this game I use it more than I might, since you often cannot avoid enemies you don't want to repeat-fight 10000x while trying to just run through areas

If I'd known how much back and forth the game was going to have, not to mention just how linear it was going to prove, I would have given in pretty early on. But my point here was to stress that there are, shall we say, "immersion kosher" ways of letting the player skip content that they could have tapped into, with this being a fantasy game.

Honestly the game feels half assed. Like they intended it to be lvl 70 or 80 end, but due to budget, covid, time constraints forced out and incomplete.

But the time I got to the main boss I was lvl 70. And due to that marathon, warped out, beat the earth shrine, wind tower as well, and legendary fish boss and light flower boss. Well was 70 after doing these.
Beat main boss, then earth shrine zones, picked up owls, beat all other sudequest.

At no point did my lvl progress or fsme feel like it had to be postgame.

Graphics in towns great, open world, meh. Looked old, sword rats latest games graphics blow it away.

Story first half ok. Second half rushed and meh. Felt not well plotted out, again rushed. I also reloaded my older steam games, no tales game ended so early on.

Toon progression. Shield girl and ruler both great. Two main toons forgettable full of hate and anger.

The kids bad, but I do like they had three age groups to attract different audiences to the game.

Fishing was a bust, introduced so late in game and so complex it frustrated me and not relaxing to me.

So much racism sjw politics in the game it felt like a commercial.

Tales of Z still better, same for tales of B.

What's Sword Rats, if I may ask?

Regarding the politics. The vibe I got from that wasn't politics so much as one of the go-to cliches for making the world a better place. While I did find it cloying for the basic PSA flavor it unavoidably had, there was nothing about it that screamed "other side of the extremist fence." And I consider myself more antagonistic to that kind of burden than most. Frankly speaking, a Japanese studio is the last place I would expect to see that flavor of extremism coming from. (Not counting, say, a Nintendo game getting a hamfisted localization.)