I’m not a writer, but finding myself no longer the target audience of multiple series I like has inspired me to write about at least one of them. and while the new target audience is obviously allowed to enjoy the new direction of these series, I’m likewise allowed to think it sucks ass when something unique I like about a series gets shaved off.
I’ll make it clear from the start that this blog post is specifically about Arise’s Battle System™ (well, a large portion of it is also about Vesperia’s, too). there were things I liked and disliked about other aspects of the game, but the main attraction for me in the Tales series (or the games in it that I’m personally into) has been the combo mechanics specifically.
prior to Arise’s release, there was a lot of talk about how the preview boss footage and demo showed bosses not reacting to being hit in the way that they used to in previous games. they still had SOME sort of reactions, but they weren’t reactions to the specific attack that hit them (save for like, tiny counter edge flinches and context boost attacks/strikes/whatever and Alphen’s BA? I think that one’s literally just “knock dudes down”), seemingly just taking a certain amount of damage and then doing a little flinch animation.
it seemed to me like a bizarre choice that just straight up removed any boss’s interactivity with what was my favorite part of the series in the first place. some people rejoiced, for now they would have to “respect” bosses and their moves more by dodge rolling into everything. apparent one hit Iron Stance breaking combo gods who’d never seen super armor in their life were everywhere, posting they were pleased that no more were the days of easily comboing every single boss to death.
on the other side I saw some who shared my sentiment that it was wack to massively diminish the reward for learning how one’s moveset can connect together, and for outplaying a boss by learning its moves and to how to skirt around their hitboxes as they got to do what they wanted when they still had the already existing “respect the boss” mechanic active, the previously mentioned Iron Stance (or Void Attack).
I also saw some people repeatedly deny shit straight up shown in the few boss fights we got to see before full release and claim there wasn’t enough of a sample size to make any judgements (even on the shown bosses themselves for some reason???), and mock people for expressing that said bosses were hinting at mechanical changes that disappointed them, but this ain’t about that.
something I was not expecting to see however, was someone referring a series of moves done to a super armored enemy who shrugs them off as a “combo.” apparently to the person who posted this, a combo was just… a series of moves done, reactions to individual move properties be damned. maybe it’s a difference in gaming background (perhaps said person had a lack of interest in fighting games or beat em ups, or whatever) but I found myself baffled.
but even more baffling to me was when they decided to make a direct comparison to another game in the series, Tales of Symphonia, claiming that you “functionally” had the same amount of time to “combo” a boss. they put forth the argument that, despite the fact a Symphonia combo could be dropped if the party stopped hitting a boss, it was the same thing in Arise despite that the boss does not seem to give a shit whether you keep or stop hitting it while it is downed/flinching, because you’re supposedly working toward triggering another flinch, and that even if you don’t get that flinch immediately, you can just “perfect dodge and continue the combo.”
huh??
the fuck do you mean continue the combo? the combo’s over! the motherfucker is back up, moving and motherfucking grooving. that shit is no longer a combo! nevermind the fact that even when downed or flinching they ignore any individual properties a move has in terms of hitstun, knockback, juggling ability, knockdowns, downed hits/OTGs, restands, etc, the shit that manipulates an enemy’s state/position and makes combos interesting to me in the first place. all absent in this interaction. at most all that matters is the damage done, the hitbox size/location, and where the move leaves the character. nah who cares about all that other nerd stuff though, man? as long you’re still hitting them, it doesn’t matter what the fuck the boss is doing. apparently.
obviously, I do not share the sentiment, because all those previously mentioned things are what’s interesting to me, otherwise a combo is just a number going up while you wail on a brick wall. in other words, an MMO rotation. not that such a thing is necessarily bad, but I did not get interested in Tales because I thought doing MMO rotations on bosses was appealing. there is simply not enough complexity in the characters’ movesets/game mechanics for that to be interesting to me. (here is where I’d start ranting about shadowbringers monk but I’m simply not going to do that. today, anyway.)
I’ll preface this long disorganized ramble about combo mechanics I like in another Tales game by stating that boss fights are not my primary interest as combo dummies (even if it is fun to bully one now and then) but I just enjoy interacting with the combo system and experimenting with moves in general, and having that part of boss fights removed (in a game with SO MANY GOD DAMN BOSSES, even reused as normal fights!!!) was an extreme disappointment to me during my casual playthrough, in addition to my gripes with Arise’s combat system in fights against normal “combo-able” enemies like random knockdowns combined with a lack of OTG moves.
anyway let’s go over some shit I DO like which became irrelevant in Arise’s boss fights, and a lot of it in normal fights too.
Tales Stuff I Like: Vesperia Ramble
to be specific, what I like most is the discovery phase of figuring out which moves link to each other in ways that are less obvious than just doing one after another, or finding combo paths for moves that don’t seem useful at first glance.
don’t expect anything too structured here, I’m just putting down what comes to mind. also there may be a slight focus on Judith, as she’s by far my favorite character in the game, even though I do find everyone enjoyable to a degree. also, I’m probably not going to talk about overlimit here because I don’t really use it outside of the skills that activate it for a certain number of hits.
Arte Chain Rules
“hey, that just makes it harder to do combos!” – me, here, today
it sure does, and what that does is give me a goal. it provides rules to break while still maintaining a combo. let me bust out a little goofy ass chart I made.
gracefully illustrated here are the arte chain paths for Vesperia, including all relevant skills. I left out Judith’s jump cancel because it’s essentially just a reset in the way manual or spell canceling into a guard is. with the relevant skills, you can just chain these moves into each other and go down each of these paths once without having to reset to neutral without any fuss, besides sometimes having to mash with moves that have particularly small buffer windows for canceling into another. and what happens if you use up all this shit, is the combo over? no! keeping the combo going anyway by ignoring these rules is a big part of the fun in my opinion.
unlike Arise’s combo counter, which will sometimes keep going up while the enemy starts moving as long as you keep wailing on them without letting up for a period of time, Vesperia’s is a combo counter that stops counting up either when the enemy stops being defenseless (e.g. hitstun runs out, or the enemy lies on the ground long enough to get up and become invulnerable for a tiny period of time before returning to their neutral state) or a boss does a reversal, which will pause the counter until the move is either punished, continuing the combo and raising the counter further, or the boss resets to their neutral/idle state, and the combo drops.
this combo counter lets someone playing Vesperia figure out if something is a “true” combo, and is helpful for knowing when you’re successfully linking together moves through hitstun alone.
speaking of hitstun, let’s talk about this first, as it is the closest to the way Arise’s “true” combos work, or it certainly SEEMS that way, given I’ve literally had normal enemies ignore moves that’d normally juggle without ever touching the ground.
maybe this is the same phenomenon as when I’d use Law’s Death Blossom several times in a row while fishing for its random knockdown, and if it didn’t knock down within a certain amount of uses, around 4 or 5, every single time I used the move afterward without waiting for a moment would make the enemy flinch for just an instant with some absolutely minuscule hitstun, then start walking/turning around as if nothing had happened.
anyway let’s get into the ways one generally gets moves to connect in Vesperia.
Resetting the Arte Chain with Hitstun
though I’m referring to doing this on standing enemies in particular as to distinguish it from the knockdown section later on in this post, this can also apply after using moves that restand enemies in the knockdown state. when I was first playing Vesperia and trying to learn about manual canceling, I’d often seen mention of one particular loop:
Yuri gets Cerberus Strike particularly early in the game, a move with enough hitstun that it lasts long enough to link it into itself when manual canceled, essentially giving Yuri access to a combo that lasts until he runs out of TP, or something else hits and interrupts him. useful for locking down a single target, relatively easy, and unless you’re going into Vesperia already knowing about manual canceling, not immediately obvious.
now hitstun loops are cool and all but it’s not all that interesting on its own, it’s practically just using the same move over and over in a CC/AC/TC style game but with extra steps.
let’s mix a little bit of knockdown in there for an example of linking moves through hitstun applying to restanding an enemy, here’s something I enjoyed finding out worked:
goal: follow up Luna Fang without chaining directly into another move (also find a use for aerial normal Down 2)
here is Luna Fang, a move I’d previously dismissed during the casual story playthrough part of my little Vesperia journey as “the worse version of Luna Talon” as all it seemed to do was bounce me off a dude’s head and leave me in a terrible position for following up on the same guy, and had too much recovery time before it could cancel into most moves.
a couple hundred hours later and I found myself slapping this bad boy in one of my arte slots on a whim, using it on a downed enemy, and finding out that if you hit it low enough to the ground, you land before you get the bounce while restanding the enemy. not only that, but the recovery is rather short and the hitstun is long enough that you can link into some ground moves with no need for a manual cancel or anything.
is it oddly specific to want to restand certain downed enemies directly beneath you while resetting your arte chain and double/triple jump? yes, but what made it rad is that I found a way I could make use of an arte that wasn’t immediately obvious and made it worthy of taking up one of my arte slots every now and then.
sure, I could easily just use staff Moonbeam->jump cancel->touchdown/Luna Talon->Crescent Strike, but I enjoy finding and then taking the scenic route through combos. though, for a more practical reason, I’m normally using spears for the Crescent Strike side switch, which means I’m stuck with the garbage version of Moonbeam which barely launches and has insanely long recovery to the point of being nearly unusable.
emphasis on nearly.
but we’ll get to that later.
Juggles
while I think the enemy knockdown state is what’s unique about Vesperia in particular in the context of the Tales series, it do be having some juggles too, especially Judith. but despite all the talking about Judith, I’m actually going to be using examples that don’t involve her! instead, for the first I’ll use Patty.
goal: hit this spinny gun move on an enemy in the aerial downed state before they touch the ground
the part I want to draw attention to here in this gif is the Trick Trick Glove->crit-braniac-upward-normal-attack (boy what a mouthful, I’m now dubbing it Spinny Gun). because the boxing glove also puts the enemy in the knockdown state while launching them, if I were to have done the Spinny Gun move slightly later, the enemy would touch the ground and the normal would have whiffed entirely, which isn’t that big of a problem followup-wise for crit form Patty (literally just cancel it into Little Big Chef on whiff), but it is a big deal for me, who wants to use this cool spinny move on an airborne enemy as a fun self imposed challenge. I like the spinny gun move! I thought to myself “I wonder if I can juggle an enemy into this” and then went searching through Patty’s movelist for ways to make it happen, and found another combo path out of Trick Trick.
another alternative approach I can see is if Trick Trick gave me the hammer instead, I’d go for a Risky Cast->Big Risk while the enemy’s stunned on the ground to see if I’d end up with a move good for juggling into Spinny Gun. hey wait a minute, we’re talking about knockdowns again! but we’re not leaving the juggle section behind just yet.
the knockdown state comes into play even when juggling an enemy as it changes the orientation of their hurtbox and provides you with more time to follow up an attack when they hit the ground in the downed state. speaking of juggling from moves that knock enemies down, let’s take a look at how Arise handles this situation!
oh. they just… ignore whatever you hit them with afterward. sounds kind of familiar. anyway, back to Vesperia!
here we’ve got an example of me using the combination of Devil Rage Rise’s huge launching power and the extra time before the enemy gets up in order to set up for only the swing and projectile of Diablo Hyper Buster to connect, letting me juggle into Reaper Knock’s baseball. very impractical due to requiring a certain distance from the edge of the arena, but very satisfying. this extra time to set up for Diablo Hyper Buster is important as despite the fact that it can hit downed enemies, it is not an OTG move, a distinction I’ll get into soon.
KNOCKDOWNS
now before I make this statement, I have not played every Tales game. as of now I’ve finished (in order) Berseria (which put me off the series for years), Destiny PSX, Eternia, Vesperia, Xillia, Xillia 2, Hearts R and Arise. I’ll get into Rays at some point, but I’ll wait until I can read well enough to not have to rely on translation videos or Bluestacks’s screen translator thingy, and I’m “in the middle of” Graces F, Zestiria, Innocence R and Destiny DC, and I’ve touched upon Abyss, Symphonia, Innocence DS, and Legendia. Vesperia, Xillia 2 and Hearts R sit at the top of my favorite games in the series I’ve finished, with Vesperia the definite #1 as it just really meets my combo restrictions/combo freedom sweet-spot.
all that was just to give some background before I say that Vesperia has the most depth in its OTG game in the series. like, that probably isn’t a controversial statement, right? there’s characters whose movesets are built around the state, as one might see a hint of in the full version of that earlier Karol juggle.
goal: land a hit with Reaper Knock’s baseball with the enemy in midair, starting with the enemy in a standing state and Mighty Charge not active before the combo
in the games I’ve played, the gameplay around the downed state is either
1: moves without the OTG property whiff on downed enemies
2: you can hit dudes that are downed but it has no reaction beyond damage unless you use OTG moves (does Xillia 2 petrify work on downed enemies? I don’t remember.), or,
3: you can hit dudes that are knocked down and they react to knockback, but the knockdown state is an indicator that enemy (including normal enemies) is going tech out of the combo soon (if not stunned).
Vesperia has a couple more OTG interactions, and the kinds of moves that can interact with downed enemies come in two types. moves with the OTG property, and moves with hitboxes that reach low. the difference between these two is that a move with the OTG property will always hit a downed enemy until their get-up invulnerability starts, whereas moves with low hitboxes will only connect right as the enemy tries to get up, as there’s a brief period of vulnerability then. to demonstrate, I’ll compare two of Judith’s grounded normals, Down 1 and Up 1.
the downward normal attack here has the actual OTG property, which means there’s no need for me to bother trying to time it. the upward stab however whiffs unless I time it right with the enemy’s wakeup. this sort of move is harder to use on downed enemies due to the variation of enemy hurtboxes and wakeup timings, but the fact it does work expands the amount of moves downed enemies will react to beyond just OTG moves.
goal: hit Firefly’s arrow and trap and a Violet Snake on a grounded enemy without setting either one up before the combo
some moves also treat the “just landed on the ground” state separately from the “settled on the ground” state. let’s show off some examples with Judith’s Sundering Moon and Flynn’s Rising Falcon.
all very neat stuff I had a bunch of fun finding out and trying to find applications for. oh, and that thing about spear Moonbeam being garbage I said earlier? let’s take a quick peek at what I managed with that.
goal: make Spear Moonbeam not ruin my fucking combo
previously I saw spear Moonbeam as a liability. later? a challenge. how the FUCK do I get this garbage ass move to connect into something else with its abysmal launching power and long ass recovery that can’t be jump canceled until I teleport back? it was not hitstun that did the job this time, but instead managing specific heights of me and the enemy, and a little bit of bonus time at the end due to a knockdown.
first, I needed to make sure I teleported somewhat close to the ground for my return point to be able to follow up Moonbeam before the enemy stood back up.
second, I needed a move that sent the enemy way higher than me, and could be canceled out of relatively quickly so I could catch the enemy with Moonbeam’s spear toss in order to slow the enemy’s descent.
lastly, I needed to be certain that the enemy was at just the right height to land right into the actual blast hitbox of Moonbeam late enough that I’d be left with enough time to follow it up after the forced teleport recovery with an OTG restand Luna Fang, resetting the arte chain and leaving me free to do do a ton of things without dropping the combo.
heck yeah, another path to mark on my figurative combo map.
wait, wasn’t this post supposed to be about Tales of Arise? well let’s see how arise handles OTG interactions!
uh… is that it?
okay… I can get more gauge to down them again sooner I guess, but like, is there anything unique I can do to them while they’re down? besides… damage?
wait, there aren’t even any OTG moves??
oh. okay.
wait, what do you mean some moves just randomly knock enemies down? in a game with no OTGs???
peep the whole thread on twitter to see a person who should have been doing something more fun with their time descending into madness.
so we’ve got moves that essentially function as knockdowns… at random. in a game with no OTGs. why?
no really, why? is it that knocking an enemy down is supposed to be “go do big damage with alphen’s flame sword” time and getting a knockdown randomly from certain moves like Beast Assault, Death Blossom or Thunder Blade is supposed to be “lucky”? the fact that it’s random makes it unreliable crowd control, so what else could it be?
well, even if the knockdown state is no fun, at least juggles are still cool, right?
ugh. even assuming this is like, a punishment for using the same move too much, it’s still wack. I’m already limited by the cost to perform the arte in the first place, and why shouldn’t I be allowed to do stuff like this anyway?
it looks (and sounds) funny, it’s fun, and it was a reward for having a long enough aerial combo to get put into overlimit.
oh wait.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO REPEAT MOVES FOR ENEMIES TO JUST REFUSE TO BE JUGGLED IN ARISE.
for instance, take a look at these two separate strings in this gif and take note of the difference in the enemy’s reaction.
THE MOTHERFUCKER IS LITERALLY REGAINING HIS IRON STANCE SUPER ARMOR IN MID FUCKING AIR. A GOD DAMN NORMAL ENEMY. AND THIS IS NOT THE ONLY NORMAL ENEMY THIS HAS HAPPENED WITH.
how the FUCK did you fuck up juggles???????????????? the point is as long as you catch that motherfucker before they touch the ground, you should get to do whatever you want with them.
one could argue that this is another one of those “restrictions” I like but this one doesn’t inspire me to find some fun solution to it, and with no ToHR-esque aerial tech out, as well as the combo counter still going up for some reason, just makes me feel like I’ve been robbed. and even if it did have visually obvious aerial tech outs for normal enemies like Hearts R (a game built around specific restrictions with fast moves, hitstun decay and increasing enemy gravity as combos get longer), Arise doesn’t have enough interesting air moves to justify this restriction in my opinion, especially when compared directly to Hearts R, which has who I think is one of the sickest characters in the series.
I WISH more things in Arise inspired me the way a character like Gall does, or anyone from my favorite Tales games. but so many moves in Arise are “what you see is what you get.” the closest it came to holding my interest was Law’s Glimmer Dragon launching enemies into the air when only coming in contact with its late hitbox.
Rinwell’s magic charge thing was somewhat neat too, but I don’t have the patience for casting and charging up spells every time I want to use it, and honestly I just wish she were in a different game (like, besides Rays. nothing against Rays, though.)
I could go on about how lame it is Arise’s matching Boost Attack gimmick reward is a knockdown in a game with the most boring knockdown rewards,
or how annoying it is to deal with armored or evasive types when the corresponding BA is down,
or how after a point in a combo with enemies at lower health you can’t use BAs for combo extensions because the input overlaps with Boost Strikes,
or Arise’s excessive normal enemy superarmor (Hearts R also has this, but it doesn’t feel quite as egregious when its characters’ movesets are more fun to maneuver around enemies with),
or how the CP gauge feels more like I’m being punished for how stupid my party’s AI is rather than having anything to do with me (causing me to permanently bench Kisara and Alphen),
or the way everybody feels like they’re buttered up as they slide around to the side or past enemies when doing attacks up close,
or how somebody’s so proud of Creepzilla they made at least 4 variations of the same fucking boss and used most of them as normal enemy fights (among other reused boss enemies),
or the way air and juggle combos feel less varied due in part to the way artes have been separated into explicit ground and air categories making things many moves that function like launchers grounded-only moves, as well as the lack of an aerial knockdown state that incentivizes keeping an enemy from touching the floor,
or the arte slot reduction to 6 ground and 6 air instead of 16 + however many of those 16 work in the air,
or the way your basic attack chain doesn’t reset when jumping out of a move (even in its recovery as opposed to an early jump cancel),
or how insanely fucking wack it is Arise confirms that they’ve decided to entirely abandon LMBS in the mainline games, I could go on about these things, but I think I’ll stop here.
part of the reason why this game bothers me so much is that it’s not the only game series that’s just decided to trim down or outright remove parts I love.
also in case this post wasn’t inflammatory enough, fuck PSO2NGS by the way. at least it’s still a neat character creator even if the combat puts me to sleep. anyone who says removing JAs made the combat more fluid is corny, especially when First Blood was made a universal FREE skill as First Arts JA Addition so you no longer had to throw in some filler move before actually doing what you wanted to after approaching enemies or their weakspots. all removing JAs did was make it more mashy.
clearly many people disagree, with the overwhelming response to the removals of JAs being “finally,” but my idea of fluidity is a goal one works toward by learning their moveset and how to apply it to each combat situation they encounter with an end result being a spectacle that gets more impressive the more you know about a game’s mechanics and how it plays, not just making everything easy as fuck while looking flashy.
as if the disappointing mechanics changes weren’t enough, they slashed the tires of base PSO2, the only MMO I’d still felt like popping on for a few hours now and then even after nearly a decade of getting my fill of it, in order to focus on a new version of it that removed aspects I liked. thanks sega.
anyway, as for Arise, at least it taught me that I most certainly do not have to spend 60 whole ass dollars to “find out for myself.”
Mousing Around 