I'm reading through the Famitsu interview. IDK if anyone's translating it in full at all or if ppl are just summarizing it, but here's some interesting things I didn't see talked about in the news yet:

- Rowe and Rinwell are vaguely talked about as being younger than Alphen and Shionne. Tomizawa says something about being concerned that with us only knowing Alphen and Shionne, ppl would think the game was more serious and thus "the spirit of what makes Tales of" would be "lost"

So Rowe and Rinwell are designed the way they are and being shown off now because their ages are closer to what ppl consider the standard age for Tales protags.

- There ARE STILL MORE PARTY MEMBERS TO BE INTRODUCED, specifically we will be getting more RENAN party members than just Shionne. The interviewer pointed out that with only knowing 4 party members rn, 3/4 of them are Dahnan, so "There's more party members of course, right?"

And Tomizawa was like "Yeah yeah of course! There's still more party members. There are Renan ones too!" and also how the theme of the game is what divides the two races and the conflicts between them, and we'll see that with how they interact in the party.

And of course "Please wait for further news" I'VE DONE MY WAITING TOMIZAWA!!!! 2 YEARS OF IT!!!!!

- I'm glad that axe-wielding dude finally has a name and some details about him but lmao "I'll reveal how Alphen and the others confront him later" *looks at previous trailers*

In previous trailer analyses I've done, we can see him fighting us ALONG WITH the fire elemental they confront at some point, so I can make guesses Tomizawa lol. If he collects fire elementals (why...?), probably he hears about us coming to steal one and tries to stop us.

I'm on the Battle System part of the interview and from what I understand of the explanation, Boost Attack and Boost Strike seem to work similarly to Link Attacks and bursts from Xillia. That's what it reminds me of anyway. It emphasizes working with friends/party members.

Tomizawa also says Mystic Artes are returning but will be shown off at a later time.

- No restrictions on combinations for Boost Strikes, so basically, every party member can work with every other party member and can perform a Boost Strike regardless, so he encourages us to experiment and play how we want, nice.

- The interviewer brought up the before mentioned MAs to talk about and Tomizawa's talking about how every Tales game has a different method of activating MAs and that that's true for this game as well. Also that a main feature of Arise's battle system is the dodge roll.

He says that the dodge roll was what they decided to do instead of the usual "guard and accumulate a gauge" that we've known for like 10+ years. It creates a system where we can see the attack incoming and immediately counterattack (so sorta like Graces' battle system).

He does mention that though they designed it with the intent of making the battles faster and more action-like so that ppl who like action-style combat will enjoy it, he didn't want to leave older fans who may not be used to it out in the cold, so they worked to make it as

intuitive as possible, and there will be features like difficulty settings and autoing. He said the goal was to make it so that everyone can play, even if they're not good at action-style games.

- Ooh, he says that every enemy in the game has attacks that are designed to be interrupted and avoided. But obviously, there will be some attacks that are more difficult to dodge by having either small or extremely short tells.

- Interviewer comments that in older games you usually defended to build a gauge before making a big counter attack and Tomizawa says that while there IS a gauge in this battle system, it accumulates through aggressively attacking so that you're basically never not attacking.

- Oh here's the question where he talks about the victory skits. Interviewer asked about what happened to them since, as we saw in the gameplay footage, they're not there. Tomizawa says that while they were developing the game, he took considerable care in balancing elements that

increase the fun of the exhilarating battle system with field exploration, so they wanted to make the transitions between those two states as smooth as possible. While victory screens and full victory skits are considered a Tales staple, they hinder that smooth flow (agree tbh).

So the goal this time was to make it so that if you touch an enemy on the field, you enter a battle. And then when you defeat the enemy, you return immediately to the field. BUT, in order to keep a sense of "Tales of", we get the conversations/commentary after battles that we saw

I think that's a fair compromise imo. From a design perspective that makes sense, and personally from watching how it works it seems fine to me. In his answers, Tomizawa constantly stresses making Arise an "RPG for this era" which goes back to how "evolution and tradition"

are at the heart of the design philosophy they went into this game with. (The following is my own thoughts btw) Tales has always been a great series, but a lot of what held it back is that previous directors/suits were way too afraid of changing ANYTHING.

Zestiria was the first time they actually tried to make major changes to the usual Tales formula, but even then they were miniscule changes that amounted to simply swapping certain things. And then they basically made it so that they could easily fall back into the old ways.

Consider: When Zestiria came out, there WAS NO HEROINE. There was considered to be NO OFFICIAL HEROINE, after decades of every game having a heroine. Narratively, the things that typically went to the heroine went to Mikleo instead.

But then backlash happened and now suddenly they officially push that Rose is the heroine. They literally just baby stepped outside of the traditional norms they'd built up and made it so that in case of backlash "Oh no, see, it was like that all along!"

This is a prevalent problem in a lot of Japanese industries and companies, where many older ppl don't want to innovate or are too afraid of innovating when they really really need to, past the point of stagnation until a series basically DIES via obscurity.

GDI Twitter I wasn't DONE TALKING yet but fine I'll send the thread anyway fdhvbdfvd. I have more to say and read of this interview.

But anyway, my point is that it feels like Tomizawa is giving the series the much-needed innovation injection and REAL change that it was missing.

I loved victory skits as much as the next long-time Tales fan, but imo they were starting to get old. They were fun the first few times of a game, but after a while you'd reach the point of mashing continue just to skip them. I don't consider this a loss tbh.

Anyway, continuing on with the interview...

- Interviewer asks since the release date announced is 4-5 months away do they plan to release a trial version of the game. Tomizawa says COVID has made things difficult for them but they're considering it and would like to.

- Interviewer is like "Well now we're all expecting more info, so will there be more in the wake of this announcement?" and Tomizawa is like "Yes yes, there will be more info!! If we stopped again everyone would get angry." YOU DAMN RIGHT I'D BE ANGRY LMAO.

- Ah there it is, interviewer says it's tradition for Tales games to have a characteristic genre name, so what is Arise's and Tomizawa DOES indeed confirm that it's "RPG that tells the dawn of the heart". Because the word "arise" has the meanings of "stand up" and "dawn", so

for that reason they coined "dawn of the heart" because...something about wondering what the dawn is that's told in the hearts of all players and not just what happens in the story. Interesting wording Tomizawa.....

That was the last question for that interview, but Famitsu also released a video "interview" between Tomizawa and Iwamoto where they discuss the aim and general concept behind Arise in a very short 2 1/2 minutes. Some new footage is in it.

I have no idea what's exactly being said in it though, my JP skills fail me there but there are JP subs on it and it's not region locked:

That concludes this thread lol sorry I rambled so much >_<.