JRPGs, at their best, are about Hanging Out. Maybe there’s an evil empire you have to deal with, or some Sword of Light you have to find, or maybe you have to deal with geopolitical turmoil between neighboring nations before you’ve even graduated from your school for future war criminals, but no matter what major struggle presents itself, it’s secondary. Your primary drive, in the best JRPGs, is to Hang Out with your weird little group of pals.

That’s rarely more clear than it is in Tales of Arise. The plot involves an empire of bad guys and killing god in the usual JRPG fashion, and the combat is reasonably entertaining action RPG fare where you find the one objectively best attack and use it over and over again forever, but none of that really matters. The game is about wandering from city to city and helping the locals, recruiting some of them into your party, and Hanging Out with them.

Some pals meeting a new pal

It’s because of this dedication to Hanging Out that the game provides what it calls “skits.” They appear regularly throughout the game, and while they’re optional, you’d be a fool not to view them all, because they’re the true joy of the game. Every skit presents your various weirdo party members reflecting on something they’ve just seen, or discussing your current place in the overarching story, or just getting to know each other to such a thoughtful and detailed degree that you end up knowing things like their favorite foods, and their romantic dreams, and their various grievances and friendly petty annoyances with each other.

Even other mechanics that are more common in JRPGs are deeply and specifically tied to your party members. Fishing, for example, is a staple of the genre, but it isn’t unlocked in Tales of Arise until a particular character with a penchant for fishing joins your party and introduces it as a new way to Hang Out. It has gameplay benefits, of course, but as with other staple JRPG mechanics – cooking, for example – it’s a fundamentally relaxing pastime that adds an element of low-stakes camaraderie and domesticity to your party dynamic. It’s actually discussed in skits, not just mechanically, but as a specific interest of a fully-drawn person.

This skit is getting a little romantic

But what makes these skits and Hang Out mechanics so important isn’t just the way they let you, the player, get to know these characters; it’s the way they let the characters get to know each other independent of you. As the game progresses, all of the Hang Out mechanics sell the bonds between the characters, and you feel that they’re actually friends who genuinely care about each other. In turn, when you face rudimentary twists of the plot that in a lesser RPG would feel rote – “someone’s been kidnapped, or whatever!” – there’s actually a sense of urgency, because you believe in their relationships.

It’s a striking difference from a game like Octopath Traveler, for example, which highlights the extreme opposite of the Hang Out design. Like Tales of Arise, Octopath Traveler delivers an ensemble cast of JRPG regulars with backstories to explore, but as you collect new party members in Octopath Traveler, they don’t interact at all. It’s a strange choice, given that it often leads to ludonarrative dissonance when characters act like they’re alone despite you having a full party right there, but more than anything else, it’s alienating. The characters don’t connect with each other in any way, and as a result, you don’t connect with any of them.

Getting to know our party members

Most JRPGs employ the Hang Out design, at least to some degree. It’s even implicit in the slack-jawed blank-slate everyman protagonists you see in games like Dragon Quest XI, or Lufia, or Chrono Trigger. They’re a cypher, a player-insert that, in theory, allows you to feel like you’re hanging out yourself, and while I’m skeptical as to how well that works, it speaks to the same philosophy. A JRPG can be a lot of things, but it wants to have a bunch of characters with recognizable silhouettes, and those characters want to Hang Out.

They don’t all reach the heights of the skits in Tales of Arise, though, because the skits make the characters feel alive. Each skit feels like a conversation that would be happening with or without you, even when you choose to view them or select not-so-meaningful dialogue choices within. They feel like the natural progression of relationships, as if you could walk away from the game and the characters would know each other a little better by the time you got back. They make the characters feel like people, rather than mechanics that exist only in service of you.

Also, I hate to spoil this, I really do, but the protagonist, the amnesiac who everybody Hangs Out with despite the fact that he’s a weirdo who feels no pain and wears a face-covering iron mask? You’re not going to believe this, but he’s actually a dreamy anime guy under there.