Retired Tales of Arise (PS5)
Ok this one hurts (between Scarlet Nexus and this I'm really on a roll...)
I estimate from googling I'm around the 60% mark of the story (just beat 4th lord); sad thing is the first 40% or so I really, really liked:
- Lovely artstyle, it's typical fantasy anime but it's very clean and highly detailed
- Nice soundtrack
- The combat is flashy and satisfying in its RPG DMC-like nature with high number of options available
- The story up until now has been interesting, driven by the pacing as slowly more of the world is introduced to the player, and more of the mystery behind the two leads backstory is unfurled, and on that I particularly liked the dynamic between the two leads
- It also felt refreshingly old school, this isn't a huge big open world, more like a series of connected smaller areas
But there has been one problem that seemed to rear its head early on which has only grown arms and legs since then, and that's the balancing around the boss battles and item resourcing.
The boss fights are very clear significant walls in difficulty compared to all other fights you face, nothing shocking there in principle for a boss fight to be harder than regular fights obviously. However, those bosses are massive damage sponges and most fights take a surprising length of time to actually complete, and what this has meant in my experience has been that most boss fights I get through I do at the cost of A LOT of potions etc.
Ok, what's the problem, just get more potiions?
Well they're all pretty expensive, the orange gel in particular (a pretty basic item for recovering the equivalent of MP) has reached near meme status in subreddits etc from what I can see given its comparatively high price.
Ok, then just get more gold? Yeah, there's the thing you can't earn gold from fights. You have to either find it lying around in the world, complete side quests, or sell off unwanted goods. The first 2 of those 3 are of course quite finite.
All in, this has meant that towards the point in the game I was at, I felt the need to spend literal hours to grind out extra xp levels and doing the fishing mini game for extra funds. Not fun.
Ok, just turn the difficulty down? Did that but at that point the game just becomes a mindless and unsatisfying button masher.
Perhaps there is something I'm missing (I don't think the game does a great job of teaching some of its systems, most especially the artes) but online it seems that this issue is one of the biggest complaints of the game, so I don't think I'm not alone, despite the cries of "git gud" from some and the suspicious offer of mtx for ludicrous amounts of gold.
But by the point I got to I seen I still had about 10 more bosses to fight before the end of the game and I just couldn't do muster the energy at that point to go on.
Shame I was really enjoying this one.