Video Games Are Too Long: How the Promise of ‘Tales of Arise’ Falls Short
My perspective on the length of video games has taken some dramatic turns over the years. When I was younger, I hadn’t figured out my gaming tastes to the same extent that I had my music or literature tastes. Instead of reading deep dive analyses, exposing myself to reviews, and seeking word-of-mouth recommendations, I would perform a cost-benefit analysis thinking primarily in terms of whether the game I’d next purchase would keep me occupied for a few dozen hours or not. Money was scarce, and I remember savoring experiences like Okami and Persona 3: FES for this very reason.
Later in my life, I hopped on the neverending treadmill of “culturing myself” with a mixture of games – games that had made a lasting impact on the medium, games that were currently in the zeitgeist of the industry, and new games that I was simply excited to play. Since deciding to write and speak publicly about video games, I have worked to overcome the insecurity of feeling as though I’d never have time to play everything that I’m interested in. Playing overlooked classics like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess or Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars has involved a lot of backtracking through retro hardware and emulation, while newer consoles like the Nintendo Switch and the PlayStation 5 have kept me looking for groundbreaking titles in the modern era.
Once my approach to games shifted from scarcity to abundance, I noticed myself paradoxically putting off longer games that I knew would suck up my time. Games with stellar reviews like Red Dead Redemption 2 sat unopened on my shelf for years before I’d get around to installing them, and this neglect is largely due to that aforementioned desire to play everything. In the back of my mind, every 50 hour game I commit to could be ten indie games totalling the same length. At the same time, however, when I look at my top 100 favorite games of all time list, many of the highest ranked games are easily some of my longest gaming experiences: NieR: Automata, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Persona 5 Royal, and so forth. There’s ultimately a tension, then, between my reverence for magnum opus-like games and tiny indie gems.
Getting Started With Tales of Arise
Every now and then, especially when accompanied by strong hype and word-of-mouth, I decide to sink my teeth into another long game. The most recent iteration of this deep-seated decision was when I purchased a copy of Tales of Arise, my first and currently only Tales game. In lieu of more games to play on my PlayStation 5, I found a cheap copy on a discount and popped in the disc. I wanted to play something that would occupy me for a little while, temporarily pausing the “what do I play next” choice, and Tales of Arise felt like it would be easy-to-follow comfort food.
From what I understand, the Tales series perfectly fits the mold of JRPG tropes. It follows the arc of the (male) hero’s journey, from humble beginnings to attacking and dethroning God, as it were. Instead of any specific plot point in Tales of Arise mattering too much, the story feels largely like an exploration of characters and their relationships. The protagonist of Arise is initially known as Iron Mask, named after the magical seal that covers his entire face, leaving only his white tuft of hair poofing out the top of his scalp. Over the course of Arise, Iron Mask adopts his true name, Alphen. We learn over the course of the game about Alphen’s identity and why it has been hidden – or masked – in the first place, which ultimately becomes a central hinge of the game’s more magical and political plot elements.
Combat takes a more action oriented approach than the traditional turn-based JRPG, at least in Arise, following the footsteps of Final Fantasy VII Remake. Combat in Tales of Arise involves running around an arena with stamina gauges of sorts that, when refilled, allow you to use a number of various abilities and attacks, stacking up for combos and weakness-related damage effects. I have always been a fan of traditional JRPG combat, but I believe this active battle system is much more compelling from a gameplay perspective, and hope that more hybrid models of combat will be explored in the genre’s future.
Between its tropey characters and engaging combat, Tales of Arise takes dialogue as its centerpiece throughout the main story’s 40 hour runtime. Not a battle goes by without cries from the attacking characters; especially by the game’s end, these battle cries grew exhausting to the point of wanting to mute them. (“This ends now,” yells the renan Shionne, to which Alphen follows up, “Consider yourself finished!” If you know, then you know.) The characters almost never stop talking, and I found myself in endless dialogue exchanges known as “skits.”
In Arise, each new geographical location is accompanied by three to five skits, which involve a series of animated stills that are framed to the player like comic book panels. In these brief skits, important lore is emphasized or basic character development is established. They are all fully voiced, so they are pleasant enough when first listening to them; by the end, however – and there are 300 skits to find and sit through – I started clicking through them just for the sake of completion rather than adding depth to the story.
The skits in Tales of Arise are completely optional, so they don’t bog down the already substantial runtime of the experience, but the sheer abundance of their presence in the game is a microcosm of how overly stuffed this game truly feels. The same feeling applies to the game’s myriad sidequests, which, again, feel ripped right out of the Final Fantasy VII Remake playbook – but not in a positive way, unlike the combat comparison. In both games, but particularly in Arise, most of the side content fails to be engaging.
The Feeling of Bloated Content in Arise
Almost all of this optional side content takes the form of fetch quests in which you either gather raw materials for cooking or kill zeugels – the game’s way of categorizing monster-like enemies – and returning to the person who sent you on this errand for a small reward. Luckily, I found these rewards to generally be worth it – earning you a mixture of gald (a gold-equivalent currency) and ability points for combat skills – but the act of completing these side quests is inescapably dull. There’s just no life to almost anything this game wants you to do outside of the main story.
The only optional activity I sort of enjoyed involved a hide-and-seek styled task of finding the game’s copious owls. These owls can be found throughout each region of the game’s world, hidden throughout the environment in niche alcoves. When entering a new area, Hootle, the adorable winged companion of your party’s character Rinwell, will alert you to the presence of one of these hidden owls. When found, the owl will be seen wearing a goofy accessory, which you receive for your party members to wear. From devil horns to silly glasses to various mammalian tales, I enjoyed the aesthetic customization of my characters, placing a red hibiscus in Shionne’s hair, giving Alphen wolf ears, and the lot. These accessories even make their way into the game’s many skits and cutscenes, truly adding a layer of personalization to the experience of advancing the story.
In my initial trophy hunt, I went out of my way to finish all the sidequests, listen to all the skits, cook all the recipes, find all the owls, fully level up my characters, and so on. There are other systems in the game like farming for animals that I haven’t even fully delved into, and yet I got the sense around hour 30 of my playthrough that I was wasting my time. Tales of Arise has a robust fast travel system, and most online trophy guides frame many of the game’s trophies as unmissable, so I decided to start beelining towards the credits, realizing how much story I had left ahead of me. I was only approaching the halfway point and feeling a small degree of burnout, so in order to preserve my generally positive impressions on Arise, I started lurching through cutscenes and boss battles.
Even my more streamlined approach to Tales of Arise left me feeling exhausted with aspects like combat. To my horror, I finished the final boss battle, according to the guide I had been using to look out for collectibles, and expected the credits to roll. They did not. Instead of the credits, my characters looked up ominously to a planet hovering in the sky, now bearing more questions than answers. Instead of the game coming to a satisfying conclusion, the story was only truly beginning to escalate. We were about to go to outer space, to Lennegis.
How Arise Overstays Its Welcome
Don’t get me wrong: I think that all JRPGs are more badass when they dramatically escalate – in terms of scale, stakes, setting, etc. – but I think Tales of Arise overscopes itself. Enemies and locations start to feel needlessly elaborate or haphazardly reskinned. Fake-out endings with false final bosses are not particularly distasteful to my interests as a player, but Tales of Arise doesn’t feel like it earns this drawn-out conclusion. It took me around 40 hours to finish the story that I and the characters were expecting; it took nearly another 30 to finally claw my way to the credits. As the game displayed fewer story beats, it padded those in-between moments with dungeons and combat encounters that lost their luster quite quickly. Tales of Arise, a game so dependent on its characters and the dialogue between them, became a podcast game for me.
Not only did Tales of Arise fail to earn its length and deceptively framed endings, but it also failed to reinvent itself in a meaningful way throughout that extended duration. Perhaps a new character could have been introduced to the party, or maybe the enemies could take a dramatic turn towards rethinking how you engage with combat, or even the music could have taken up the tropes of a different genre. But no, Tales of Arise overstays its welcome like a house guest that won’t relinquish the couch, and I ended up feeling like this game was a chore rather than a source of storytelling and entertainment – which is ostensibly why I enjoy video games in the first place.
Tales of Arise is Too Long
I’ll never forget when Jason Schreier, one of the industry’s most insufferably annoying and investigatively compelling journalists, provoked enraged discourse in the wake of The Last of Us Part II by pointedly tweeting, “Video games are too long.” If I had read this take back when games and money were scarce, I would have vehemently objected. Nowadays, when time is truly the scarcest resource when deciding which games I intend to play, I couldn’t agree more. Video games commonly do not respect your time, especially in the wake of the pervasive ethos of open world design where bigger and more are synonyms for having “improved” your game.
Recently, a discussion surrounding this open world ethos arose in the gaming discourse regarding Elden Ring, a staggeringly large world that feels like an intentional contrast to another massive open world released around the same time, Horizon Forbidden West. Both games have been juggled together in the same breath as one another because they share so many core design traits; the idiosyncratic and arguably recalcitrant design philosophy in Elden Ring – which, on the Triple Click podcast, was recently articulated as the distinction between transparent and opaque open world designs – has caused many people to praise the greater emphasis on exploration and genuine discovery in Elden Ring compared to Horizon Forbidden West.
With this difference in open world design philosophies in mind, it’s worth clarifying that Tales of Arise is not an open world, but it certainly fits comfortably in the trenches of “transparent” world design that Horizon Forbidden West belongs within. Both games explicitly mark the borders of their map, include icons of uncompleted tasks around the world, and explicitly point you where to go next. I am not entirely convinced that Tales of Arise should have been designed in a more opaque fashion a la Elden Ring, but I bring these comparisons up because I’d like to suggest that all three games fit into Schreier’s above epithet of games trending towards being too bloated, too “long.” Tales of Arise may not have a million outposts to clear, but it might as well have; for, between the countless enemy encounters, relentless environmental exploration, and a seemingly infinite drip feed of iterative content, the reason I felt burned out on the game by the end is very likely the same reason why I ignored basically all the side content in Horizon Zero Dawn, for example. Many games, especially high profile boxed releases like the three games mentioned here, would benefit from a more scrupulous editor. Or, at least, I would think of them more fondly if they were not hell bent on dragging themselves across some arbitrary metric of “hours played.”
Tales of Arise is not an inherently bad game, just one that I wish had more confidence in its brevity. Instead of having anything higher level or of philosophical substance to say, Tales of Arise feels like it is content feeling analogous to a soap opera of character dramas. I still foresee myself thinking back on its striking character designs or listening to the addicting loop of the main battle theme. But apart from those more aesthetically oriented aspects, I don’t think there’s much in Tales of Arise that strikes me as memorable or worth returning to. It’s a shame, because I am now less inclined to install other Tales games like Berseria and Zestiria, both of which sit unplayed in my library and that have similarly positive word-of-mouth. Instead, I’ll move on to other games and see if there’s another hundred hour epic like Persona 5 worth diving into.
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