Recent reviews by Hubby

Tales of Arise was a game that I myself had anticipated and I must say it's an game to sink your hours into. The world itself has a beautiful atmosphere with lots of color to set yourself into the settings that you take place in. The upgrade graphics, art style, and visuals are pleasing to look at while traveling through. The added animated cut scenes by Ufotable and the music alongside it create big and memorable moments to look back on. The soundtrack gave the game even more life as we entered through important scenes and entered new territories.

While I'm not the most well-versed in the Tales of series only playing games such as Symphonia, Abyss, Vesperia, Berseria, and Zestiria, the game has left a good impression character wise. To me, Tales of was always the game that had very strong characters and a weaker story which is completely fine. The character growth was well paced with each chapter and the way each character lightens up to each other is wonderful. They meshed well together with their personalities and created very silly moments within the group. While most of these are very lighthearted, if there was a dialogue that did not have a major point or was completely unrelated I found myself skipping through them. I felt the shorter and one-liner dialogue from the previous titles felt more impactful and left a better impression overall. Some of these are similar to Berseria dialogue where the extra dialogue would take forever to get to the point. While many people liked this, starting off with the older titles made me appreciate the shorter interactions rather than a longer script.

The game itself wasn't linear as the previous title Berseria and provided plenty of sidequests and extra areas to explore. There are plenty of activities to do in the game with Fishing, Artifacts, quests, exploring, and extra fights to provide more content. The one thing I constantly had trouble with playing on the Medium difficulty was collecting money. I always felt that upgrading and getting items would be the thing on the side that I would constantly need to do. While the quests did give money, sometimes the rewards wouldn't be enough for what I had spent for say an optional boss fight. The prices of the items were pretty high and maintaining them would be the problem for me personally. Another problem was reusing of boss enemies as normal enemies. While this is fine to have, I felt as though some of the normal encounters were drawn out as well. Overall, there are plenty of things to do but there are some aspects that limited my progression.

The gameplay was very fluid and simple. Having good positioning and understanding the flow of battle is very easy to get into while starting the game. As someone who mostly played fast sword characters such as Repede from Vesperia, Lloyd from Symphonia, and Luke from Abyss, I found myself playing different styles. I mostly played Dohalim, Law, and Rinwell. While playing outside of my comfort zone I loved playing these new styles and you don't need to limit yourself to the main character. Try out all of the characters and you might find some enjoyment outside of your comfort zone.

Overall, there's plenty of customization on your first playthrough. You can play and progress through the game however you want and it's always rewarding to do option content. There's plenty of activities to do in the game but there are some bumps in progression for me. Overall I would recommend this game to newcomers of the series because of it's accessibility and how easy it is to understand the game. It may not be for everyone because the Tales of series are notorious for being long, but the payoff is something amazing.