overdrive's Tales of Arise review

I finished this not long ago! Can't say I noticed the palette swapped enemies, but someone tipped me off to play the game on Easy, which probably left less time to notice swaps.

Judging by the "arena challenges" that are fixed to Normal difficulty, Normal is perhaps too long for a zillion standard battles. For many of us, at least.

I liked the game, but it still took ages to finish because of one problem you touched upon. This might be the preachiest RPG ever. The endless cutscenes that are nothing but group therapy sessions...it raises questions about where the developers' heads were. I finally had to skip 'em!

P.S. Which is better: calling the intimidating enemies "zeugles", or the end movie that included Hootle in the list of heroes?

Easy likely would have made battles go by more quickly, but on normal, I did like how I was tested against tough enemies, even if part of that was due to it taking forever to chip away 100K+ health. It was a give-and-take where I didn't like how it took forever to win, but it was a bit thrilling to be in a situation where I had to use magic-restoring or resurrection items regularly, while looking for any opportunity to trigger allies' special moves.

Zeugles was definitely a choice for what monsters are called. And I also loved the hand-waved explanation for why they are everywhere. "Well, you see, the Renans bred them for use in battle...but they kinda let a lot of them get away and they went feral and are everywhere!"

As for the palette swaps, there is a guide on GameFAQs that has an illustrated bestiary. Under "normal" monsters, there's a total of 24 designs, with most being used 3-6 times. Wolves are the worst at 15 (eight normal and seven "alpha" versions which are the same, but larger). There also are 17 forms of soldier, although one could divide them into more categories as you have swordsmen, shielded ones and gunmen. Included in that 24 is one possibly unique model that only is in a dungeon meant to be tackled in the post-game (you get the quest to go there earlier, but it's higher-scaled than the final dungeons) and 6-7 that are somewhat degraded versions of bosses and get placed in the final few dungeons as tougher-than-normal encounters.

For a bit there, I was worried I exaggerated things because of all the wolves and soldiers, but no. There are about 15-16 monster designs that provide the bulk of your fighting with a few more that are more specialized in use, so you do basically fight the same stuff over and over in battles that last a bit too long.