Tales of Arise beaten:

1.5 years after the game's release, I finally have a PS5 to play it, and now I've beaten the game.  I stuck with 'moderate' difficulty after finding 'hard' too hard.  Moderate difficulty, the standard difficulty, was plenty hard enough for me, I escaped every fight by the skin of my teeth.  The last boss also pushed me to the brink, with my characters dying to his massive AOE black hole technique that's impossible to dodge because it covers the whole screen.  The four elemental lords were all scarily hard, requiring rare and unreplenishable resources like Omega Elixirs, Elixirs, Heavy Treats and Gold Gels.  But I did beat them, and every other subquest the game offered, before taking out the last boss.  It was a full completion of the game -- including a full owl collection.

I used my last Grape Gels fighting Vohran in a very Cloud vs. Sephiroth like final encounter, that too went down to the wire.  If it's like that on 'moderate' difficulty I don't want to think about 'Chaos' and 'Unknown' and the like.

Now that the game is beaten there's a bonus extra dungeon where you can challenge characters from previous Tales games.  I went ahead and beat Edna who was the first bonus challenge, and she too was extremely tough.  I beat her with only Rinwell still standing, which means in a few seconds if I hadn't won Edna would have won, because characters don't stand for long without heals.  Edna looks very cute with the enhanced PS5 graphics. (Last time I saw her was on the PS3 so this is quite the facelift.)

If the bonus dungeon gets too hard I might just give up and call it a day, but if it stays manageable I'd certainly like to meet the other Tales characters and see their PS5 versions too.  Rinwell is definitely the best character in the game, she's very expressive and emotional, she feels more alive than the rest of the party.  It doesn't hurt that she's also the strongest character in the game, due to her survivability, due to her being able to inflict damage at long range floating high in the sky safe from all enemy counterattacks.

Tales of Arise took 64 hours to beat, with this bonus content it could last even longer.  It was a massive game, but I do feel it was padded out with unnecessary repetitive content.  Everyone talked about their motivations and history a million times, even though we already knew all that from the previous time they'd talked about it.  Or seen it ourselves because we were playing the character when the events they're reminiscing about happened.  If the game had cut out all the fat it could have easily been reduced to 40 hours or so.

The best scenes in the game were unrelated to the actual plot.  They were scenes where the party interacted with each other.  Rinwell interacting with her owl, or with Law, or Alphen romancing up Shionne, or the pancake cooking contest (generally any conversation about food was funny and warm).  Shionne is actually better looking than Rinwell, especially in her 'Maiden' outfit (one of the best dresses I've seen on any girl), but Rinwell's personality overwhelms that gap.

The fights are certainly adrenaline inducing due to how rapid events unfold and how scarily powerful all the bosses are.  But I dislike the lack of control I have over my character (over the AI characters too for that matter) due to the pace of events.  Out of this wide range of available techniques you could use any given second, really I ended up fighting with only five all game long.  This is because in a split-second decision situation, you need something simple and reliable you can immediately turn to, there's no time to think over whether some other move is technically better in this exact situation, you're using multiple moves per second while also keeping track of the enemy's attacks and trying to dodge them, while also managing all the boost attacks of your AI characters and item uses.  It's just too much.  The 'right' answer is always the simple one you can remember, not the most effective one that's somewhere deep in your button combination list.

In any case, the Tales franchise is alive and well, Arise is a hall of fame game with hall of fame characters.  I'm not the only one who rates this game highly, it won the game of the year award for 2021, so a lot of people share my view.  Compared to Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Xenoblade 3 it's a midget, but we can't all be the best ever.  There's a lot to be said for good enough.

After Tales of Arise I need to go back and beat Tactics Ogre Reborn and Star Ocean the Divine Force.  This is only January and I plan to play video games all year long.  There's no end to them.

Isekai Nonbiri Nouka is really messing with my head.  I know the story from the manga and I always thought it was only decent.  But this anime looks so good, sounds so good (both voice acting and music), is so vivid and happy in atmosphere, it blows its own manga version away.  Is it possible for an anime to be great through sheer value added, regardless of a middling plot?  If so this production would be the first proof of concept of such a thing.

Meanwhile Russia has taken Klyshivka, something I anticipated a little too early but is now the case.  Krasna Hora is holding on for some reason but it still can't be long before it falls too, trapping Bakhmut in a three-way horseshoe.  Despite these perilous conditions Ukraine is reinforcing Bakhmut and fighting on like there's nothing to worry about.  And as a result of sending so many forces to Bakhmut, they've left Zaphorozia province wide open, which allowed Russia to advance along the entire front and claim a dozen villages today.  Villages don't matter much, Russia can brag once it has taken some major cities, but things are certainly moving in a positive direction all over.