mmmmmmm Dungeon Milk

im playing Tales of Arise but I'm not gonna do like a whole-ass thread about it just came out so people care about spoilers

currently my review of Tales of Arise is that Tales of Arise is a Pretty Okay Game

nice to play a tales game with generally solid combat

(yes I know berseria stans are a Whole Thing but they are also unfortunately Wrong)

anyway behold: cute anime girl

Anyone familiar with UE4 want to explain what's going on with this light? Check out how the lighting on the wall completely changes when the chandelier gets occluded

I'm guessing this is SSGI? The chandelier has no actual lights and is just using emissive materials?

Or even weirder: this spot?

SSGI + oddly-configured screenspace shadows maybe? I thought unreal used screenspace for like short-range contact shadows, not.... whatever is going on here

it's clearly not a normal light; but whatever it's trying to do it isn't really succeeding

the more I look for it the more I realize MOST lightsources involve Screenspace Weirdness and cease to exist when offscreen/occluded, at least in indoor scenes

Check out the weird low-res aliasing on the wall above the wardrobes. Seems to be aligned on screenspace mip boundaries

Pretty much every surface has this weird melting/shimmering effect as the lighting constantly shifts (and maybe reprojects) as the camera moves around

I'm assuming Tri-crescendo doesn't have the budget for custom rendering tech so this is all just UE4 doing its thing?

Tales of Arise currently attempting to triangulate some sort of moral lesson, in which killing mass-murdering tyrants is good, unless you're mad at them when you kill them, in which case you've become a monster who's as bad as they are

it's extremely funny playing this immediately after Persona 5, i.e. Literally The Only JRPG With A Coherent Worldview That Wasn't Written By Yoko Taro

tales of of rise

rinwell you are a caster

you're wearing like a shirt

please stop trying to punch dragons and stand somewhere other than the dead center of its attack radius

so tales of arise is I think the only UE4 game I've seen that has basically zero fucked-up smeary TAA/reprojection artifacts

I don't know if that's due to recent versions getting better at avoiding artifacts, or if bamco/tri-crescendo just knew enough to disable every reprojection-based effect since their art style doesn't require most of it anyway

notably scarlet nexus was full of wild ghosty SSR chaos. Really curious how much overlap between the code vein/scarlet nexus/tales teams existed. They're all stylized UE4 but take very different approaches, and they're all credited to bamco studios first + one other team

later parts of tales of arise getting some real xeno- vibes lol

thus far I would def classify it as a For Fans Of The Genre kind of game, but it's pretty good

Writing isn't particularly deep but it's consistently *surprising*, which is pretty neat. Does a good job of, like, playing with genre tropes and taking them in unexpected directions

ⁱ ᵈᵒ ʷⁱˢʰ ᵐᵒᵗᵒⁱ ˢᵃᵏᵘʳᵃᵇᵃ ʷᵒᵘˡᵈ ˡᵉᵃʳⁿ ᵗᵒ ʷʳⁱᵗᵉ ᵐᵒʳᵉ ᵗʰᵃⁿ ˡⁱᵏᵉ ᵗʰʳᵉᵉ ˢᵒⁿᵍˢ ᵗʰᵒᵘᵍʰ

there's a random piece of armor named Wedding Dress and I think this is simultaneously a Xenogears reference and an Undertale reference??