Tales of Arise

I quite enjoyed Tales of Berseria, so naturally, I thought I'd give the next game in the series, Tales of Arise, a try.
As usual, there's a huge focus on the story with cutscenes and dialogue taking up about 40% of the game time. You can kind of skip a lot, but I would insist that if you're not at least moderately interested in the story, don't even bother with this game. The general idea of the story is nothing new - common people rebelling against a magic-wielding oppressive elite. You're playing as a mysterious man who has conveniently forgotten his entire past, and are mainly joined by one of the elite who for some reason has turned on her own people.
The first two hours of the game had maybe 30 minutes of gameplay, and so after having listened to a movie's worth of dialogue, because the story had failed to grasp me, definitely not to the level of Berseria at least (even though it wasn't amazing there either), I dropped it.

As for the gameplay side, the combat felt maybe a little bit better. It's hard to tell after multiple years. It's an action combat system where you control one character in a party of four, with the other characters controlled by AI. You have the option to choose who you control, and actually have a reasonably extensive AI customization menu. It definitely had more options than I felt like I needed to fiddle with, and that's good. What's not good is that the game still hasn't gotten rid of permanent stat increase items that make the most sense to be piled onto a single character, essentially forcing you to choose a main character you will play with all the time, at least if you want to be efficient. You have the usual attack combos, aerial attacks, magic attacks which use a quickly refilling resource, as well as some other attacks. Honestly, nothing remarkable, even without considering that my standards for action RPGs have gone up in the past few years.
The depth of combat and character customization has definitely gone down. Equipment and attacks are simpler, with fewer stats, and there is less choice to be put into what you wish to use. So, again, a step down from the previous game.

As I already said, I got about 2 hours in before I dropped it. It just seems to be worse in every way compared to Tales of Berseria, and even that I would barely say I enjoyed. The graphics are better, I guess, but they're nothing remarkable either.
If you're a fan of the Tales series and want to play it for the story, which you expect you will like, then I guess it's fine to try. But on a personal level, I can't recommend it.