Tales of Arise release date and gameplay trailer revealed

Release date 9/10/21 on current- and past-gen XB/PS and Steam.

7 min gameplay video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IaLC3rqK6U

My thoughts... Well, 1. it easily has the best looking environments of any anime JRPG I've seen or played (Atelier, SAO, God Eater, Neptunia, Trials of Mana remake, and even prior Tales games). One of my biggest (if not my ONLY) complaints about anime JRPGs is how "lifeless" the environments and towns generally feel and look. Usually due to low poly count, flat surfaces, lack of elemental effects or environmental movement, lack of PEOPLE or other forms of life, etc. Arise's environments look pretty well-detailed, up there w/ more bigger budget JRPGs or JP games in general like FF's, Nier Automata, Sekiro, MGS5, etc, tho still missing some "life" (is that much more expensive to put in some non-hostile animals here or there? some extra flora?, etc?).

2. The release date is cool in terms of giving me time to still work on my backlog and some other upcoming games. But it's also the same day as Life is Strange: True Colors and a few days before Deathloop - two games that will take priority over Tales of Arise. And just a couple weeks after Kena is released, which I'd say is about equal to Arise in terms of priority. So...it'll have lots of competition for my money and/or play time.

3. Combat looks great. I only played Tales of Zestiria and loved the combat. It was known to be one of the easier Tales games, but I got stuck on a boss I could not beat. And I did not feel like loading a prior save just to grind. Especially since it wasn't really my stats that were bad, just the design of the boss and its timing of attacks, inputs, etc (it was the heavily armored army/knight guy in I think the first big town you visit outside of your own home city, a fight in front of a church, iirc?). If memory serves me right, he was known to be extremely hard for that point of the game. Regardless, I still never played it again after that. Experiences like that are what make me lukewarm to playing another Tales games (along w/ the drab environments, but that's been addressed).

So overall, game looks cool and I'd love to play it. But just not sure if I will, at least not at release. What are your guys' thoughts on the game and series in general?

I agree with most of your observations. Zestiria was great, my only real problem was that while in co-op, the camera during battles would go ballistic. It's really weird to think of a Tales game without co-op though. And upon investigation the director's comments justify in the decision don't really justify it. Wanting to put more focus on character cooperation. I believe he means that he wants more of a focus on AI cooperation, but I have trouble understanding why there needs to be a difference other than the teams inability to program a camera system that works for two people. But I think they got over that with Berseria. My wife hates that game so I didn't get to spend as much time with it as I wanted, and will likely go back to it on my own, but I don't think there was nearly the camera problem that Zestiria had. And we've played every Tales game together since Abyss. We started with Xillia and when we caught up, we went back to Abyss and Vesperia. So it'll be weird having a solo run, likely at the same time. Not sure if I'll have to buy the game twice. And I kinda wonder if that's Bamco's MO. To get more money from co-op people who only buy one copy, now likely have to buy two copies. Pretty lame. But I know Tales teams are always on the chopping block, so I'm obligated to support them, especiallysince the game does look really good