Tales of Arise

CaughtCross said:

I am a little pass the 2nd lord and was fighting some boars when mid fight a dragon landed and join the fight. It was nearly as strong as a boss fight and caught me off guard. Is this just random or is there a mechanic at work in which a dragon appears mid fight?

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It's one of these big mob thing only that it's not on the map, but always pops when you do that fight, you get a sidequest for it like 5mins later once you get into the city, but he's somewhat high lvl the first time, he fucked me up too but and then you can see in the monster list thing he's like 26 or 27 or so and you're probably 18 that's why he smashes you, I did him after the rest of the area rather than right away.

Delly said:

This is my first Tales game and I'm enjoying it so far. Seems a bit shallow on some of the RPG side of things, I just upgrade weapons basically taking the highest damage, upgrade armor taking the highest defense. The only thought I'm really having is picking the right accessories for the right scenario. That said, I'm enjoying the combat/gameplay.

I basically went no life this weekend and

Spoiler: Minor story spoilers

I'm past the 5 lords section of the game.

I thought I had beaten the game but in typical JRPG fashion it continues on, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

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Yeah gearing is usually pretty simple, only thing is you used to unlock passives and shit out of items in the past couple Tales I played(berseria and vesperia), like you'd need to fight a certain amount to fill up a bar on a given weapon, and you'd learn a passive out of it, so you'd want to buy every weapon and learn everything slowly and you had some switching to do when you did boss fights and shit(cause often you'd be learning skills off a shit weapon from 1-2zones back unless you grinded hardcore). But other than that it's pretty straightforward, although this one you can craft accessories, and they have random stats on them, so you can grind materials and then make some unique pieces depending on RNG. Like I got a nice 15% magic attack(which is the base accessory) with bonus 60magic attack +7.5% fire(but not fire spells sadly) Lower Aggro S accessory on my mage and shit.

Droigan said:

Question though, is there any reason for later to keep old weapons/armour? Or can I sell them? I know some of these games can be "oh you sold your original rusty weapon? No ultimate weapon for you!"

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Armor no reason afaik, but weapons you want to keep, like many old Tales, you need old weapons to make better ones sometimes. Like you'll get Refined Weapon X or whatever and it uses usual monster materials+old weapon, so if you vendored it, you need to recraft it and it's just a waste of money. Started seeing these in the 4th area which I kinda expected so I had kept everything.

If you need money, you can grind those mining nodes for a few minutes, actually makes pretty decent money, more so than fighting. Although I haven't had to grind anything, just doing sidequests has been enough without selling anything and having to buy Life Bottles a fair bit.

Xexx said:

When do you get to refine weapons? i can craft but i havent seen anything about refining - when does that come into play?

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It's just crafting, but you craft a Refined version of the weapon(well the name isn't always refined, some are but for example the books for Rinwell are like "Name of the book Vol. 2" and such), just means you need to keep your old weapons cause they can be upgraded, Tales often do that stuff.

I'm at the point where a lot of sidequests open up at the same time and fuck they needed to put a level req in the quest log or somewhere, it's fucking stupid when a bunch of the quests are around 38-42(when my chars are 36, so it's doable normal stuff), but then you have like a lvl 48, 60 and 66 quest mixed in for no reason. Also access to various places that have 60mobs in them but at least these you can kinda run out(kinda only, one of them you can't, have to reload to a previous save). Just kinda weird, I get that's the point of the story where it "opens up" a bit, but the fact you can't tell how strong something is before entering fights(and for some of them you just enter a fight without even seeing a monster) sucks. Luckily, they have autosaves so you just reload before and go do something else.

Other issue so far I've had is spells are terribly balanced. All the long cast spells aren't really worth casting unless you need to aoe a lot of things and even the short small spells are super poorly balanced, with Air Thrust doing like twice the DPS of Spread, even though Spread aoe is tiny and it can more easily miss stuff and still does more dmg than Thunder Blade even though that one needs to be cast much closer, plus Air Thrust is projectiles so it hits stuff in the air easily. It's just weird shit, makes the boss fights very spammy on the Rinwell, it's strong though, like spamming 2k dmg attacks for 2AP every second or so, while other chars get stuck into long animations doing 600-800dmg and what not, and you can cast from range obviously. Sucks though cause I liked Magilou's spam combo stuff a lot more, it would let you cast even the slow spells quickly once they were comboed after each other, but in this the combo cast speed bonus is small enough it barely matters or you need too high combos to make it work with the longer spells(not sure which tbh). Also makes spell charging super gimmicky, it's just not better than spamming the short spells over and over instead.

Other than that it's pretty nice, characters are pretty interesting so far and the story, while not super surprising, is nice enough.