Tales of Arise, Scarlet Nexus & Code Vein

It was too hot to keep playing Skyrim VR recently, so I decided to take a little break and try out a few demos. First up was the newly released Tales of Arise. I don’t believe I’ve played a Tales game before, although part of me recalls owning Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube so I’m really not sure. The first thing that struck me about Arise is how damn pretty the game looks. It has this ‘watercolour’ style to it that’s really quite lovely to look at.

The demo is a little weird in the sense that it doesn’t begin at the start of the game with a single character, limited abilities and a basic tutorial, but with a party of six(!) characters to control at around level 25 and more skills than you know what to do with. It really does throw you in at the deep end.

Combat, initially, felt incredibly messy. Flashy and exciting with cool, totally over the top animations? Sure. But I didn’t have a f**king clue what was going on. I was winning fights, but I didn’t really know how. You have a basic attack combined with 3 special abilities plus ‘boost’ attacks (at least, I think that’s what they’re called) provided by your party members, each of which has a very different optimal use.

There’s also a combined party attack that can be triggered, weak spots on certain enemies, elemental resistances, different attack types for when you’re on or off the ground. It’s a lot to take in, not to mention the strategy system in which you can customise how your party members fight when you’re not directly controlling them.

I was winning fights, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. So I bumped up the difficulty from standard to max. This meant that enemies now had a lot more health so fights took longer to beat, giving me more time to figure the combat out – and once I did, I really started to enjoy it. But now that I do have a much better grasp of how the combat works in Arise, do I still think it’s a little messy?

Yeah, I do. A lot of the time the game can get a little too flashy for its own good. Don’t get me wrong, it looks fantastic, but when so many animations and effects are popping off all over your screen, it’s sometimes hard to keep up.

The creatures you fight are pretty neat and I like the look of the world – at least from what I saw in the demo. From a story and character point of view, it’s hard to say because the demo doesn’t give a lot away and I tend to skip story stuff when I’m playing a demo anyway so I can just focus on the gameplay.

Overall, I enjoyed the demo a lot and was actually thinking about picking it up straight away, but then I saw the three different editions and the 100 or so quid of DLC including XP boosters, costumes with unlockable skills and various gold and item packs. It might be that none of this stuff is really needed or important, but when a game offers to let you buy levels for your characters, you do have to wonder if the game has been deliberately designed to encourage such purchases. I mean, why else would people buy them if they didn’t feel they had to?

Next up was Scarlet Nexus a third person, sci-fi action RPG. Once again, I skipped all the story stuff, but it’s a game set within some kind of cyberpunk-esque dystopia post-apocalypse (?) . . . or something. I like the look of it. The visuals are a little drab and gloomy but they do a good job of setting the mood.

You play as a new recruit to some kind of special forces team all of whom have special brain powers like telekinesis and you go on missions into the world to fight what look like giant evil plant monsters and other weird shit. You can choose between two characters each of which plays a little differently and – at least based on what I saw in the demo – follow slightly different pathways through the same core campaign.

You have a squad backing you up but you don’t control these other characters directly. Instead, you can call upon their brain power and utilise it in combat. It’s kind of like each party member is a different magic spell you can trigger for a limited time with various effects all of which will be more or less useful depending upon the situation and the enemy type you’re fighting.

The combat is pretty fun, although given that the variation between the two playable characters doesn’t seem that great, I do wonder if the game will become a little bit too repetitive on a second run.

Overall, I liked what I played and will probably pick up on sale.

And finally we have Code Vein which is, more or less, anime Dark Souls. Seriously, that’s what it is. You collect souls from enemies – although they’re not called souls. You rest at bonfires to restore your health and estus flasks – although they’re not called bonfires or estus flasks. You have a stamina bar, light and heavy attacks, dodges and parries . . . yeah, it’s Dark Souls but with anime girls and a booby slider.

And I’m okay with that – but I can’t say the demo did a good job on selling me the game. The actual combat feels a little weak. It’s hard to say based on the demo, but the attack range always felt a little off. Enemies didn’t always seem to react to blows properly and would occasionally get stuck within the environments in ways that could sometimes be beneficial, but other times would be annoying.

Visually, the game was pretty drab, and not in a good way. Maybe it was just the opening section and enemies, but there wasn’t anything particularly exciting from a visual or design point of view. I also didn’t really care for the combat. Unlike Arise and Nexus, I didn’t bother finishing the demo. Not one I’ll be picking up, even on sale.