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i swear i'm going to write about something that doesn't piss me off after this!!! i swear. i just need to get this out, so i can move on.
※ WARNING: i'm going to be really mean about the game "tales of arise", and probably spoil... multiple portions of the game.
⚠️⚠️⚠️ SPOILERS EVERYWHERE, SERIOUSLY ⚠️⚠️⚠️
i took a break and then came back to this, today, near the end of the month when i felt even more incensed over it all. now that fascists are gloating more openly than usual world-wide, and, especially in my home country, i feel the need to come back and finish what i started—a review to describe my discontent with this game. but where do i start when i don't have many positives to list?
the good —
- the graphical evolution of tales of, in the sense that the models and the environments look spectacular. while not entirely my favorite depiction of a world, given that i think the cell-shaded worlds of abyss and vesperia will stand the test of time more with their colorful environments, and xillia with the unique designs of its location in places like fennmont and auj oule, i can acknowledge that the game is pleasing to look at. there were a couple fields here and there where i stopped just to gaze at the landscape in the distance, and i appreciated that everyone in the cast had different animations for running and falling off very high platforms. i love the difference between dohalim crashing to the ground with as much dignity he can muster, when compared to the way law falls on his ass... or something. it's been a while.
- the weapon skins system is a nice something i wouldn't mind coming back in a later tales of.
- switching between benched party members mid-battle is easy to execute.
- uhhh... the owls are cute?
the bad —
- battles were fun for a couple hours. every character's move set has real synergy, and the cut-in boost strike combination attacks you can perform look really cool. really, really cool, only you'll be seeing them ad Infinium because the only efficient way to kill enemies is to stagger them and then eliminate them instantly through a boost strike. once i realized that, grinding became such an unimaginable chore, and this is coming from someone who loves mindless grinding. i also realized about ~15 hours into the game that every single boss battle was essentially an HP soak with an adds phase, and god. it's not fun. it's not fun and it sucks to say that, because the action gameplay in tales of is legitimately my favorite. i'm one of those freaks who loves to bind 16 artes to every button possible to do weird combos, and you CAN do those combos. it's just. much more efficient to do the same boring sequence every single fight, and nothing about the game really challenges you to do much more than that. maybe it would feel... better, if bosses didn't completely ignore hit stun, a status that rewards a player for being Really Good, but they do. i'm sick of these mmo-adjacent boss fights that're becoming more and more prevalent in rpgs. no, i don't want an adds phase. no, i don't want the bosses to have endless amounts of health and an easily dodgeable pattern. i want whatever the hunting blades had in tales of vesperia. i want bosses that raze the party and provoke the narrative. they kind of had it with the lord that casts indignation at a certain amount of health, but... everything after that was a drag. build that gauge as fast as possible. instant-kill. rinse and repeat.
- the skits. hear me now: if they decide to animate skits like this again, i will never forgive bamco for as long as i live. what happened to our gorgeous drawn skits of yore? the ones with actual character???? arise's skits are like, not even a halfway decent comic. the paneling is atrocious, and so are the models just... staring into space for almost every cut-in, where their expression or posture just barely change depending on the angle. here, let me throw in another panel of shionne rolling her wrist ineffectually in annoyance. i've only seen that bland display a thousand times by now. not only are they painful to look at, but they're also painful to listen to too. characters frequently run themselves in circles discussing a topic, and with nothing new to add to the point that it made me feel like i was going insane. a good chunk of them reiterated things literally presented in a scene two minutes prior. the other chunk of them were... like, there to show the characters "bonding", but they bond off the weak premise of the narrative and constantly change the axis of their morality depending on what the story needs to deliver... or worse: say some far-out shit i really didn't need to hear, like kisara and her musing of, "are we the baddies, because our perspective as the oppressed in the face of our oppressors is a biased one????" the random conversations that occur on the field are more interesting than skits. flat-out.
- the world-building is ass. you can tell me that's the result of hundreds of years of slavery in-game, and i will just wave a hand in your face.
- the way the entire main cast was pushed into super forced pairs from the get-go. maybe i should've expected it when a boy is the only one who can oh-so-conveniently touch a girl that no one can touch.
- the...
story
all of it. which, if you liked it... cool. i didn't. in fact, it might be the single worst narrative i've ever trudged through in a video game. it's almost insulting how quickly arise backpedals on anything it said in the first few hours, on top of how even fourty hours in we're still having these skits that are like, but you need to have kindness and understanding. the game starts with the violent liberation of an entire area from the lord that's oppressing them, and immediately backtracks on the message of rising up against your oppressors on the way to cyslodia. zephyr starts to curb alphen's desire to fight ( where it's implied that alphen believes they need to pull a killmonger to survive ) by preaching on him he'll be without his own free will if he's a slave to his vengeance, and it's so. cringe. cringe, but not in a good way. i feel like they have things to say through-out this game, but they always take the worst route to telling them... with the worst dialogue ever. which is, of course, no fault of the translators, who did an excellent job of localizing this game. when the cast isn't completely reiterating the very last scene you just watched, they're all spouting empty platitudes to each other that ring even more hollow when you, as a player, don't feel all that compelled by the narrative the characters are trying to push. as soon as zephyr dies, alphen, who has only known him for? maybe a week?? starts to wax poetic about the ideals he verbally passed on, to the point of mansplaining to other members of the cast what their morality should be, until the writers decided they needed to up the ante somehow by giving him a ~super sad genocidal backstory~ to make him question literally everything he'd learned up until that point. one could say it's justified that he got so attached to zephyr, given they'd all been slaves trying not to form personal connections given someone might die the next day, at that point, but the death of his guy catapulted too many things in the plot that i totally couldn't stand. and alphen still won't stop talking about the guy almost forty hours later. damn.
the game proposes that "slavery is a state of mind" amidst lords that have little to no backstory and are comically evil, and also vouches over and over that hate is bad!!! and hierarchy-based societies, too, are also bad, but maybe it's all a result of our innate need to oppress each other or something, says kisara. if only it wasn't so up its own ass to deliver the obvious. every realm depicts a caricature of oppression of its own. spin the wheel, and pick from (1) indentured servitude with torture, (2) a stalinist police state, (3) the enlightened centrist capital where everyone is happy to be a servant and there are "how to slavery for dummies" books in the mansion library, and (4), the resistance group that's totally just as bad as the oppressors that turn them into sludge water for energy. the sheer nonsense of what's happening on-screen most of the time had me howling.
but wait. there's more...
the very end of the game pulls the rug out from under the player and literally everything they've ever said, by introducing... aliens. aliens that've been brainwashing and manufacturing the "renans" they stole off dahna, to convert them into ... renans that will enact their desire to carry out the great will of a spirit that controls them. aliens stuck in a hivemind, controlled by their mystical spirit queen bee. which, the renans you've been fighting this whole time, who travelled to dahna to oppress people for hundreds of years, are revealed to actually be dahnans. they're literally the same people, and by introducing a third party, it narratively erases the oppressing caste of their culpability in the entire thing by saying, uhh... we were manipulated into doing this. which is stupid as shit, and even more insulting when a one-off npc delivers most of this knowledge to you. dohalim has a dramatic moment here that's like, "maybe i was a slave all along too," and i couldn't laugh any harder. whatever, tales of arise. this is the greatest asspull of all time. fuck fighting the systemic root of oppression. alien bees did this. the planetary consciousness gone mad in a need to combine the planets is a dumb metaphor for togetherness and harmony. i could keep going ... on and on about certain plot points, but. okay. enough.
- alphen: i never thought i'd ever have a least favorite tale of protagonist, but here we are. captain mansplain. mr. static progression gone wrong. i didn't dislike him initially, and his character design is cute as long as he keeps that mask on, but oh. my god. alphen starts the game as an amnesiac, quickly works his way up to hero, and then ends the game as hero. he's a caring, "big brother" mentor to the younger characters in the game... where all his "explaining" is mostly ideas he's learned from other people. he's the leader of the party despite not knowing shit, really, thanks to all those years of intubation and of being a slave, and yet the game keeps having him yell over other people and their experiences. some "team dad". the constant flip-flop of his relationship with shionne takes a major turn after they retrieve her after her kidnapping, where alphen suddenly starts... robbing her of her agency entirely because he's worried about her? good guy alphen, telling shionne what she actually wants, and, "whether you like it or not, I’m taking matters into my own hands!". he's earnest, but that doesn't mean half the shit that's coming out of his mouth is good or entertaining. and when i thought i was neutral on him, they revealed his incredibly forced, pitiful backstory, making me dislike him more. i can't believe he looked up at the great spirit and was like, "can u just stop being mean to shionne :(" and that was the end of the game.
- shionne: the queen of wasted potential. at the halfway point, she had essentially cemented her way into my top three. i genuinely think they could've had some really strong moments when it comes to unveiling shionne's trauma, her longing for a genuine connection, and the true essence of bonding with her. however, it feels like she often gets overshadowed by alphen, where he argues over her preferences for her own good or whatever, albeit after a couple serious conversations together regarding her boundaries and what she doesn't like. still. the crux of it all is how deeply her character was constructed to revolve around the one man who can touch her, from the start of the game to the very cheesy end with a fucking marriage to top it all off. often-times the other cast members are like, "boo hoo i'm worried about shionne, but we shouldn't bother her!" and i'm like please... please, bother her. please let someone else start to gradually form an emotional attachment towards her so i can feel more for these characters, man. then they deus ex machina'd the whole thorns bullshit so she never has to form a proper bond with anyone that isn't alphen again. moving on.
- rinwell: not much to say here. she was... okay? i've seen some criticisms over how abrasive she was at the start of the game, but like. she's valid. her entire village was massacred, and she's the only one in this cast bringing up some very obvious points about their lack of culture and how all this subjugation has only made the land suffer, too. i mostly enjoyed her banter with dohalim, which were some of the rare moments of conflict within the party to actually discuss some worldbuilding without just... reiterating something you already knew. my actual issue with her wasn't her fault.
- law: and here-in lies my issues with rinwell. when i initially said, "oh, they wrapped up law's arc in about 20 minutes in-game", i wish i hadn't been right. law gets his chance at revenge. law spends most of the game being an ineffectual mood-maker. and law also tries to... stop rinwell from taking her revenge, when he had his, which might be one of the worst scenes in the game. murdering people with hatred in your heart is bad, guys! what a dumbass message to send after literally already doing that in an earlier realm. law is also zephyr groupie #2, because that's literally his dad, who also left behind his wife and child to engage in liberation quest instead of taking them with him, which. they made up so fast upon meeting again. it's so... forced. i felt nothing. i felt more when i made law crash to the floor from several stories high, or when he took a knife to kisara with his spy skills that mysteriously vanished until the plot needed them. also, how come after fifty in-game hours i only started getting on-field dialogue of law trying to goad alphen into cat-calling with him...? that should've been in front of me sooner. tch.
- dohalim: the only guy in the party who remotely comes close to being somewhat of a standard tales of character, albeit with a backstory just as stupid as the rest of them. they gave him an easy-out from his little oppression realm solely because he's bound to be a member of the party, surely, but that doesn't mean i don't think the reveal of his not-purely-altruistic goals of making his slaves feel equal to the ruling class just because he's got some kind of ptsd over people crying isn't dumb. a small handful of sub quests focus on dohalim's attempts to make up for his shame of being complicit in subjugating an entire people, and i genuinely appreciated when the narrative continued to have people push back at him... or remind him of his privilege. it's like someone else entirely was in charge of writing him sometimes, where the depth they attributed to him stood out as being more consistent than pretty much anyone else. the game also isn't afraid to point out all his major flaws alongside his upper class "perfection". it's no wonder he shot up to most popular character of the year over alphen for talesfes, when combined with his looks and the excellent voice acting of kase yasuyuki. he beat mikleo, guys, and for that... i owe him my utmost gratitude. the only character to make me laugh because his stoicism was comedic at times. that still doesn't mean anything about his backstory was good, or that he doesn't say some pretty dumb shit at times... just, he's the one shining light in the cast, as far as i'm concerned. a character with his own goals and aspirations.
- kisara:
"kisara: being very mad
literally the skit after: becomes dohalim’s mommy again"
yep. she spends half her time parroting her brother's ambitions to try and figure out what she should do, and the other half trying to mother the whole party. a hard pass from me.
oh god. did i really just type almost 3k words on how much i dislike this game. yes. throws it at you like eminem. this is the first tales of i've ever played, knowing i would never play it again. i'm going to sacrifice a goat every year in an attempt to stop bamco from making the next mainline game anything like this, if possible. that is... if they ever make another one. i might buy us little trophies to commemorate the fact that we survived this narrative or something.