Reached the 4th main area in Tales of Arise, got the full party, game is getting a little better, but is still something that I would say is the worst game in the series since Graces, which is still a decent enough time for me this being my favorite RPG series, but still, disappointing.
I do praise the general size and design of the areas, since Xillia they been going for far too large without anything interesting going on, Berseria added the orbs but that wasn't a great solution, I'm definitely surprised they even decided to go back to a more compact design, and I hope they stick with that. Dungeons aren't terribly interesting but is not something I can only fault Arise with, definitely left those good old days behind since Xillia, and only had the odd exceptions of the 4 elemental ruins and final dungeon of Zestiria, still had some hopes since they went back to the compact design.
Combat is a very mixed bag, is not fundamentally bad, but is still getting worse since they dropped the Linear Motion System, a decision I'll always find puzzling since it never really got stale and kept getting better and better, Xillia 2 remains the peak of the series combat. I guess is really imperative that we have control of the camera, but now is easier to miss attacks without a line lock on for the enemy, lots of attacks and artes feel very loose compared to better action games or previous entries, camera is absolutely terrible for the series, AoE for spells are hard to tell thanks to the particle effects, the overly reliance on the boost break means that every boss has to die by one, which doesn't take too long to build once their life is at 1, but what is the point, it also means that sometimes they drop damage sponges that can only be killed by boost attacks, and the whole system is just a worse concept from the pair up mechanic in Xillia, which had even more unique combos and animations to boot, and partly the unison attacks from Symphonia, which again, had far more variety than this, and honestly the whole mapping is awkward as hell, thanks partly due to the perspective and new system, the numbers of art is cut down and sensitive to height instead of letting you chain moves in a way one would find intuitive, now we need buttons for jumping, individual artes, normal attacks, guard and dodge are separated, you have to hold a bumper to have access to boost abilities from companions outside of battle, is all so annoying. A point of praise I can give at least is that I do like the individual boost abilities, they add a decent layer of strategy depending on enemy behavior, I could probably think of stuff that the series has done better with such an idea before, but I'll give it something. Despite all of that, I do find a sense of entertainment out of battles, but it comes at the cost of a lot of comfort.
Presentation is quite something, visually the game can either look good enough or really bad, it goes up and down, I feel like the enemy variety has gone down quite a notch as well, game has a decent amount of nice vista shots, when the art style actually works, so it also has some of that going for it, I quite liked the last couple of cities, all in all, Vesperia remains the visual peak in 3D for the series. Music is something that it will probably share with Graces in terms of quality, this is definitely a bottom of the barrel score for the series, it has never been an Atelier or Final Fantasy in terms of consistency, but it can do far better than this, themes with actual energy, and stuff beyond mostly orchestral music, like did they forget Tales of always puts heavy emphasis on synths, guitars and the like, this score puts me to sleep. Dub is standard Tales of, which means I'm fine with it, kinda was hoping for something like Symphonia and vanilla Vesperia level in terms of the dub quality since they wanted to focus on earning a more worldwide audience, but is not something I'll hate on the game for, it still does the job fine enough.
Story and characters so far, very questionable to say the least, I guess I appreciate that we got a twist of having two worlds out of the way right from the start, but that just leaves the question of what they'll do now, they clearly took a page out of Symphonia's story, with the not Exspheres and the not Desians, and their Cardinals, but taking a page out of my favorite RPG is a double edge sword. So far the first two cities were pretty uninteresting, but the next two actually have something going for it, so that is slowly improving, is not masterful by any means but is at least doing something with it. Characters are a different story, this is definitely the most dry cast of the series, they have like zero chemistry with each other, like on their own they are already pretty tame, a tame side that I don't think the series should go for that, and is not something that this story warrants, specially when is not as dark as something like Xillia 2, or Berseria, or Abyss, and Xillia 2 had the dorks that is the group of Xillia. Skits are pretty bad, presentation keeps losing charm since they got rid of the little frames for the characters, they seep in too much main plot that should go in cutscenes and not skits, there is a bunch of just gameplay exposition in them, is like a 5 or 10% of them that are actually entertaining or interesting skits so far. Don't like that they got rid of the victory quotes, those were always cute.