The Tales games are pretty famous, among the people who play them, for looking at first glance like ordinary, by-the-numbers JRPG plots, but they actually tend to have a lot going on beneath the surface story-wise, and it's around the end of the first third that things generally start to kick off. Though, for the older ones, some of the things they did have since become the by-the-numbers cliche approach. And if Arise turns out to be as simple as it looks, then that's kinda disappointing. It would explain all the complaints in the Steam reviews, though, if they're Tales fans who expect better.Plot is by-the-numbers- I saw a lot of complaints about this in the Steam reviews but, my dudes- what do you expect from this stuff? Granted I could be missing something special from the earlier entries but I feel I'm not because otherwise the series would be more famous outside of weebs/gamers. It would be Final Fantasy.
If you end up liking Arise enough to try any of the others, Berseria and Vesperia are the two that I'd recommend; Berseria is a little more 'modern' in its gameplay and Vesperia more 'dated', but they're both solid. Abyss is also great (if you can deal with Luke starting out pretty unlikeable, he gets better), but that isn't on any modern systems.
Cooking's been a staple of Tales for a long-ass time, at least since Symphonia. (Edit: PS1 remake of Phantasia, so since 2000 apparently.)There is even "cooking" as a lame mechanic because of course there is.
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