Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Mixed Feelings on Tales of Arise

 Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 242021
 

It’s Christmas Eve (which, remember, means it isn’t Christmas), but we aren’t talking about a Christmas game today.

No, we’re going to talk about Tales of Arise.

Tales of Arise was one of my most-anticipated games of the year, and during the first few weeks after it came out, I played it nonstop and felt it had the potential to become one of my favorites in the series.

But now that I’m done, I find myself with mixed feelings.

Parts of the game were great, but later parts ended up feeling… just okay, to me. So let’s step back and take this one piece at a time.

Gameplay in Arise feels significantly different from past Tales games. Dodging is much more important in combat, and the combat overall is much tougher. Constantly being on the brink of using all my healing items was the norm for much of the game, especially since gald is hard to come by. Yet it walked a fine line where I always was able to get just enough to make it through.

Now, this is tarnished somewhat by the DLC practices. Arise’s DLC is slightly intrusive, with the camp menu reminding you that there’s DLC to buy. Some of the DLC providing exp boosts, gald boosts, additional abilities, etc. also makes it tempting to buy it when things get tough.

You do not need DLC to beat Tales of Arise. However, it sometimes feels like the difficulty was set to make you think you should.

Outside of combat, gameplay also involves things like gathering ingredients, fishing, and other little details that made it fun to explore. You can cook for buffs when you set up camp, and you eventually get a ranch as well (although I felt it was underutilized; it just gives you a supply of meat).

This game is also beautiful! The breathtaking environments are what stood out to me the most. Every area made me pause and look around to take in the sights.

Moving on to the story, this is another Tales game that involves two worlds, Dahna and Rena. Dahna has been invaded by people from Rena, who subsequently enslaved the Dahnans. You play as Alphen, an amnesiac slave who can’t feel pain, who ends up joining forces with a Renan woman named Shionne trying to overthrow the Renan lords for her own purposes.

Although I made a lot of joking Tales of Symphonia comparisons in the early hours (okay, for like half the game), I did enjoy the story for a while. The characters are likeable and have a good dynamic, and the story is pretty interesting. Aside from one point that made me pause the game in anger to RANT, the story was off to a great start.

Click for Tales of Arise spoilers
That point was, as you might guess, the Almeidrea scene with Law and Rinwell.

Look, I get what it was going for. Revenge is bad. Perpetuating a cycle of revenge is bad. Killing someone out of hatred is bad.

But when we have spent the entire game so far on a mission specifically to kill the lords, Almeidrea is a clear and present danger and arguably the most evil of the lords we’ve seen at that point, and she is standing right there, Law turning his back on her to stop Rinwell from killing her because he doesn’t want her to be consumed by hatred and kill out of revenge (and Almeidrea just stands there waiting patiently for them to be done) comes across as borderline nonsensical.

Then they don’t even have to deal with the consequences of how to nonlethally stop someone as dangerous as Almeidrea, since she dies anyway.

But in the final arc, things just… I don’t want to say they fell apart, because they didn’t. This isn’t a Tales of Zestiria situation. Instead, it feels like the final arc is rushed.

So much story is crammed into such a short period of time that it loses its impact. Some parts of the plot just needed time to develop more gradually and immerse the player as much as earlier events did.

Click for Tales of Arise spoilers
I thought the Red Woman twist was pretty neat. I’d been suspicious of her for most of the game, so I felt so vindicated that this silent background NPC I was paranoid over actually was someone important.

But after that, it just hurtles through plot points and revelations so fast it’s hard to take them all in.

(I also think the Red Woman design is creepier than the Helganquil, so they became less intimidating once they started using their true forms.)

I wasn’t crazy about the Great Spirit and its motivations, either. I wish they would have gone all in on the ancient aliens angle instead of having the Helganquil be puppets of a planet’s will trying to save itself.

But no one suffered from this breakneck pacing more than Vholran. When he showed up at the end, I realized I barely knew more about him than I did at the start. He suffers from a severe lack of character development, especially for the important role he has. His design is cool and he has some cool scenes, but he’s pretty bad as a main villain.

(And I call him the main villain lightly, really only because he’s the final boss.)

Sometimes the dialogue and subtitles just didn’t match up, too, but that’s a minor complaint.

So in the end, I’m not sure how I feel about Tales of Arise. A significant portion of it is an excellent Tales game, and it’s definitely worth playing, but my final feelings toward it ended up being much more lackluster than I expected.

Tales of Crestoria is Shutting Down

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 082021
 

When we discussed Tales of Luminaria back in August, I said, “I really hope this isn’t a sign that Crestoria will be shut down like the others.”

Sadly, it was.

Tales of Crestoria will be shut down on February 6. This isn’t just a shutdown in the west like what happened to Rays, either. It’s shutting down in Japan as well.

I’ve seen fans saying there were warning signs before the announcement of Luminaria that Bandai Namco no longer saw Crestoria as a priority, but it’s still disappointing.

The story of Crestoria will be continued in another form, although they haven’t explained that yet. I’ve heard it has a good story, which is why I was hoping to play it someday when I had a device that could run it.

Personally, I wish they’d release an offline version or a non-mobile game, but that seems unlikely.

More than anything else, this announcement makes me lack confidence in mobile Tales games. Tales of Link? Gone. Tales of the Rays? Still going in Japan, but shut down in the west. Tales of Crestoria? Shutting down in February. I’m intrigued by Tales of Luminaria, but who knows how long it will be around for?

(It’s unfortunate that online-only mobile games seems to be the go-to format for smaller spin-off titles now, too.)

How do you feel about Tales of Crestoria and its impending shutdown? How do you think they will handle the continuation of the story?

Tales of Luminaria Has 21 Main Characters and Weekly Episodes

 Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 272021
 

The Tales of Luminaria live stream took place last week, and we would have discussed it sooner except that we had Bayonetta 3 news for the first time in almost four years.

The live stream gave a basic overview of the game and its structure, which revealed some interesting details.

First, there are 21 main characters.

That’s a massive main cast for a Tales game to start with, and they’re all being considered main protagonists. Each character will have their own story, which in some cases will give you different perspective on the same events. They are split into three factions. Eight characters belong to the Federation’s Knight Academy, another eight are part of the Empire’s army, and the remaining five are adventurers who team up to pursue their own goal.

One episode will be released a week, and each will take about an hour to complete. Each character will have 8 episodes, and after you play Episode 1 for each character, a special “crossroad” episode will follow.

21 intertwining stories sounds like a massive game, and they estimated it would be like three console Tales games. If we assume 8 episodes for each character plus 8 crossroad episodes, at one hour an episode, that’s a 176-hour game.

Gameplay footage was also shown during the event, starting at 31:54 in the video.

A lot of people have been critical of it for not looking like a Tales game, but while combat looks very different (it’s using basic touchscreen controls), I was pleasantly surprised by how much it looks like a regular game. You run through the game environments, encounter monsters, talk to NPCs, and so on.

The game also has full English voice acting, and the main composer is Go Shiina. That stood out to me because the most epic song on Zestiria’s soundtrack were his.

There will also be an anime adaptation called Tales of Luminaria: The Fateful Crossroad. It will follow one character’s point of view and include content from the middle, instead of being an adaptation of the game’s beginning like Crestoria’s anime.

I’m very interested in how Tales of Luminaria will turn out. They confirmed that you do not need to pay for characters or main story episodes, so it doesn’t seem to lend itself easily to intrusive gacha mechanics. However, it’s still a free-to-play game with in-app purchases, so my theory is that the purchases (preferably not gacha, but probably) will be weapons/equipment.

I doubt my tablet will be able to run Tales of Luminaria, but if and when I replace it, I’ll be interested in giving this game a try once it’s out. How do you feel about Tales of Luminaria?

 Older Entries  Newer Entries