havent finished it yet, but 80 hours in and Im gonna say Xenoblade Chronicles 3

I don't stay up on games as well as others, but I am playing Tales of Arise and it is one of the best jrpgs I've played in a long time. Great story, visual, combats, music, etc. I got the super deluxe edition for $50, seemed like a reasonable price. I've been waiting to play it since $100 deluxe is something I refused to support.

Enjoy what you enjoy, but the story and characters in Arise are hot garbage. The characters are extremely 1 dimensional and the story does nothing new for the industry. It falls back on a ton of cliches accompanied by poor writing. I literally could not finish the game (watched a YouTube video of the ending) and I love the Tales of games and JRPG’s as a whole and I’ve been very strong on my stance that it’s one of the worst triple A JRPG’s I have played in a long time. 

To each their own.  Frankly I prefer the more simple approach to characters and story.  Most modern jrpgs are just plain silly in their complexity, just my opinion.  

I don’t mind simple every now and then, but when simple is is flattened out by whiny characters with writing of a 14 year old fan game, it shouldn’t be considered a ‘great story’. Nothing about it is great. It’s just, there. Mediocre. 

 I just dont understand the appeal for that game at all. Even the graphics, while the art style is absolutely amazing, the geometry pop in is horrendous and completely destroys the immersion. Even Xenoblade 3 has better geometry pop in. 

You must be fun at parties. "This song sucks, the chord progression is derivative and the guitar tuning is generic."

who the heck cares, dude, it's still got me dancing. 

I've been playing the ps5 version.  I've yet to notice pop in.  I'm 10 hours in.  I love it thus far.  

Uh, Valis the Fantasm Soldier, that got a collection release this year, so it counts right? All my favorite games of this year has been old ones, be it that I played them for the first time or replayed them, Tales of Destiny PS2 Remake, Tropical Freeze, 999, Shadow Tactics, Troubleshooter, the original RE2, etc.

The next best thing that is actually new would be Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga, very simple story and presentation, but what a fantastic strategy game with a pretty interesting difficulty curve. 

Also King of Fighters XV, really the major thing holding it back is the still lackluster visuals and the animation work not being done with the level of intent and purpose that sprite based games would have, but still, it has the good story set pieces that SNK knows how to do within the constrains of an arcade mode, awesome music, mechanically solid, really fast, and a pretty good and substantial roster.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is pretty good but not without issues, the nerfed roster of abilities, lesser variety of enemies and bosses really hurt it in its action game side, the extra dimension doesn't really change the gameplay format, so is essentially a 3D Return to Dreamland style game, so I can't really let slide those elements since that extra axis doesn't really bring anything new in the grand scheme of things, still, a less good RtD game is still really good.

Worst thing I finished this year is Tales of Arise. The first Tales of game that actually bored me, hope that isn't a bad omen, don't really want to drop another series I love.

So people can’t be critical of games now unless you ‘suck at parties’? 

The story and the characters aren’t good— characters do not grow at all, the story is extremely basic and the characters exacerbate the poor, redundant and repetitive/filler writing. 

The issue is more based on wording your opinion as though it is fact.