Finished Red Dead Redemption 2. The game finally caught my interest in the last 20-25%. Started to care about the story and some of the characters. It was also nice to play the epilogues, it connects the game with Red Dead Redemption 1. There are also some very cinematic moments in the game, enjoyed those too.
Overall, not a bad game, just not for me. I recall loving the first game when I played it on PS3, so maybe it's just me who has changed.
Didn't play too much of Splatoon Raiders, but I think I am nearing the end. Most of the may have been revealed, so there shouldn't be too much of the game left. Also, changed my main tank from Speed to Power. It has the better combination of gadgets that I want.
Played some more Final Fantasy XII - The Zodiac Age. I am finally in mid game. Got access to second license board, and spent over an hour agonizing over which combination of classes to go with, and that's when you can reset them (almost) anytime, imagine how long it would take me decide if the choices were permanent.
Happy with most of the combinations. One characters has Melee + Melee combination, most of the others are Melee + Magic, and 2 are Magic + Magic. So both set of parties have one pure mage, and two melee users with magic for healing or certain cases where it is required.
Currently at a boss which applies tons of debuff for my whole team, and I don't have any magic to dispel that. The last shopkeeper was selling Esuna (magic to remove all debuffs from a character) but I was tight on money and hadn't had a need for that yet, so didn't' buy it, will probably have to go back and get it. The boss isn't too difficult but when your characters can't even hit it, or do any damage, or case any spell, you can't really do anything no matter how easy the boss is otherwise.
Started Hogwarts Legacy on PS5. Objectively, the game is probably not as good as RDR2 (they are so different that we shouldn't even compare) but going from a slow game like that I instantly fell in love with character movement of Hogwarts Legacy and how fast everything is in the game. The game isn't bad, but I think I wouldn't have liked it as much I did if I hadn't played it right after RDR2. Not to mention as a Harry Potter fan it's great to see a modern game in Hogwarts and the wizarding world.
The game has it's bugs though. Around 4-5 hours in, it refused to start the next main mission, and turned out it's a known bug, you have to start this mission right after finishing the previous one, without doing anything else in-between, otherwise it has a chance of getting stuck. Only solutions are loading a previous save or restarting the game from start. I almost gave up then, cause while you can get to that mission in around an hour and half if you only do the main missions, I had spent hours exploring, solving puzzles and collecting stuff. Didn't want to do all that again.
Eventually decided to load a previous save from couple of hours ago and play again. Hope there isn't anything like that further in the game, I am saving before and after every main mission just to be safe though.
What about all of you? What have you been playing and/or plan to play?
I would love to hear what you think of Tales of Arise as you progress in the game. Some of my friends (not big JRPG fans) had issues with pacing in the second half of the game, and ended up dropping the game.
Your friends were right. The writing isn't great from the start and gets worse as it goes on, but towards the end the pacing gets unbearable. There's a few hours of uninteresting lore dumps, often for stuff you could have figured out on your own, occasionally interrupted by really annoying fights. I didn't have particularly high hopes for the story, but at some point it starts getting in the way.
I've reached the final dungeon and decided to give up. As @Phelpssan@lemmy.world mentioned, it's incredibly tedious, to the point where I tried lowering the difficulty to rush through it, but it still takes ages.
Overall I wouldn't recommend it. I was hoping the gameplay would redeem it, but it never really evolves, often getting worse when some enemies (including all bosses) disable the main mechanic. As I mentioned in my other comment, the party AI only makes it worse.
I've only played Vesperia out of other Tales games (I've played most of it, but dropped it close to the end). Compared to that, I found the skits in Arise to be really boring, as a lot of the times instead of characterizing the cast, they'll just repeat something from the last story cutscene adding nothing. Again, comparing to Vesperia, I found the characters to be either dull or unlikable due to this and how some things are handled in the story.
Speaking of the setting: without going into too much detail, I don't think the themes are handled well. Also the world feels weirdly small, most maps are just corridors and not particularly creative.
I was hoping for the opposite reaction, so that I could tell them how they don't know what good games are 😀
Thanks for the review though. I still have a few Tales games to play before Arise, so will decide whether to play it or not then.
My usual recommendation for Tales games is Graces F. Story is standard "power of friendship", but has the best battle gameplay in the series and a great cast with hilarious interactions (in particular in the "Lineage & Legacies" extended epilogue).
I also have to include some praise for Berseria, the gameplay is not as good (very "button mashy") but the cast is amazing, honestly one of the all-time best "band of misfits" teams in gaming.
Could you go into more detail on the combat in Graces F? It looks similar to Vesperia which I mostly liked towards the end, after unlocking most stuff, although TP sometimes felt too limiting. I see Graces F has an artes gauge like Berseria and Arise.
Tales of Graces F was probably the first Tales game I played. It has been quite a while since I played it on PS3, but I don't think I played the Lineage & Legacies prologue, as I don't have the trophy for it. According to trophy guide: "After the main story, you will want to start Chapter 9: Lineage & Legacies from the Extras menu to complete the entire story." I apparently didn't do that.
I don't remember the story, just the main protagonist and some gameplay bits, so it won't be an issue to replay the game, but with so many games yet to play I doubt I'll go back to it anytime soon.
Sure I'll keep you updated. I think I just passed the midpoint and I'm stating to see some writing issues. The 4th area had a rather nonsensical scene which I feel was there just to prolong the chapter.
On the gameplay side, it's mostly enjoyable, although I've been using only Alphen and it might be getting a bit stale. I'm trying to switch to other characters but they feel a bit clunky. One thing I'm not enjoying at all are the boss fights. They play pretty differently from normal encounters, since you basically lose some mechanics and the party ai is really annoying as you can't set per-member strategies.
I'm a both a JRPG fan and and huge Tales fanboy (played all games, even the ones that never got officially localized) and I agree 100%. Game starts great but loses a lot of steam midway, plus it has the fairly common Tales issue of a rushed final act where you see obvious cuts due to time or budget constraints.
Also has one of the most boring final dungeons in recent JRPG history with a ton of incredibly annoying damage sponge enemies.
Thanks. I'll go in with proper expectations. Still have tons of other Tales games to play though, starting with Xillia.