I've been a fan of the tales series ever since Tales of Symphonia. It felt like a group of friends going on an adventure to save the world. The dungeons, monsters, and traveling the party did made it all a great escape. Tales of Arise is similar, but the game has a darker approach and the characters are no longer chibi, making the visuals feel more mature. These are all things I welcome, as I am well into adult hood now. However, the overworld is replaced by linear areas, with the main form of travel being fast travel. This took away a bit of the immersion. I understand the devs may have taken out the overworld because traveling did become a little tedious later in the old Tales games, but I felt the immersion was worth it.
The combat system is one of the biggest changes. Arise has perfect dodging, which is a great addition. Timing and reflex was now a necessary skill to have. I love perfect dodging, parry, perfect shielding in any games. I'm a big fan of QTEs, as long as it isn't spammed too hard. The fighting animations, the visuals of the attacks all had an omph, and it felt good to cut down enemies.
The huge issue however, is the party strategy management, and the enemy HP pool. Bosses specifically are the worst. They have massive HP pools, you can hardly see their HP dwindle unless you stared at ot every 5 mins. It's ridiculous. All those epic attacks you dish out, all those crazy animations mean jack all when after a really strong looking charged up boost attack ends up cutting down less than 0.01% of the bosses' HP bar. As the game progresses the bosses become more and more like damage sponges. It also doesn't help that my entire party are squishy af. A regular boss attack can take away half of a characters' HP. Meaning 2 or 3 regular hits, and my characters' gone. This means a lot of CP is needed to heal and revive. This CP gauge usually runs out about 10% way into the fight, which then I have to use CP recovery items, which cost a fortune. Buying 10 will wipe out all the currency you've collected. Clearly the devs did not intend for the players to use that much. so what to do? Well, there is the strategy modifier. This is where I could customize and change the party's strategy mid-fight. There defensive strats, and offensive strats. The problem is even the most defensive strats, my party eventually dies. There's no option to have my party run away, and dodge everything. Eventually, they're gonna be retarded and get hit by a couple attacks and die, or I'd have to waste precious CP on them. I blame this on poor AI design. There's also no option to have the AI heal ONLY ME. When I set it to heal, they bring back the idiot AI, and guess what, they'll die again in a few seconds. Absolute headache. Change strats was also not very intuitive. I'd have to pause the game and press a button a couple times to set the strat I want. This broke the pace, which I'd have to keep doing it every minute. FF13 is a game that relies on strategy change as well, but it could be done on the go without breaking any pace. That's how it should've been done!
There is the option to have the AI use only long range spells. This meant I'd have to go through every single one of their spells and see which were long range and didn't have long charge times. This was way too tedious for me. I play a Tales game to hack and slash and have a blast. Not micro-manage AI behavior. I'd be playing an RTA or turn based RPG if I wanted to do that. This is real time combat for f*** sakes, akin to Kingdom Hearts, God of War and the like. I DON'T want to be micro-managing, especially mid-fight.
Overall, this game is a huge disappointment, which is really unfortunate because I loved where the story was going. Shionne was also a really interesting character. The topics the story touched on were mature, like discrimination, and oppression. The dynamics between the characters were also kind of interesting.