Game looks interesting, I want to get it, but I'll need to finish Berseria first, which I picked up years ago and seem to play 6 hours per year for some reason.

I've had my copy pre ordered for a couple of months on PC. Very excited for Tales of Arise and I'm glad it's getting good scores.

I just hope the story is good. Everything else seems amazing.

Bamco decided to add the demo on PC, so I was able to give it a try, left with more worries than anything else. Also there isn't other threads to make my ramble so I'll just post it here.

Mixed on combat, the Tales of system had a good, consistent gradual improvement, Xillia's combat being pretty excellent and the peak, Zestiria was a worse Graces as far as the tempo and flow of movement went, Berseria was its own thing that is inferior to either system, and Arise is like a weird spin on Berseria's combat that feels worse from the get go, the camera positioning is more akin to a traditional action game, the problem there being that Tales of Arise is still a party based RPG, so is doesn't allow to have a good view of the enemies and the party around you like usual with the series, the lack of a proper lock-on, as far as I could tell, makes attacking more of a hassle, again an issue that is made existent by getting rid off what was a good system, that being the linear combat. Pair attacks are seemingly less varied than the link combos from the Xillia games. I do like the individual abilities that you can summon from each character tho, is a good addition in terms of adding a layer of strategy.

Presentation wise, I'm not a fan of the "art direction", sometimes it looks fine, other times it looks like one of those fan remakes done in unreal engine, as a whole uneven, likewise the skits don't gain anything from going 3D, since is kept pretty much the same in terms of being more static cutscenes with some expression changes, which is just better to use the far superior 2D character frames like the previous games. Distinct lack of functionality of visuals in combat, is hard to tell apart artes like healing circle, due to how lowkey they made the effects of it.

I don't like the frequency of voices, which I don't think it was ever an issue with the previous games, here everyone is talking over each other with no breathing room.

And while it was just a small portion of the game, I'm not too keen on how much the battle dialogue is being too pushy of the romance aspect, Tales of sucks at romance when they are being too explicit with it, takes away from the natural chemistry the parties are supposed to have.

Another thing I do appreciate is that the areas aren't too big, I was pretty surprised that it actually felt smaller than the areas from the PS3 games, at least the area in the demo.

I'll still get around to playing it in full, but I'll probably leech it off a friend and see if it gets better before buying it myself.

Never played a Tales game before but this looked very very good from the videos I saw of it. Bought it on PC, played just a bit last night and I'm enjoying it so far.