Tales of Arise

Playtime: 25 Hours

Suspended 12 June 2025.

Playing on PC with an XBox controller; gameplay is heavily action-oriented so KB/M doesn't make much sense. I wanted to play it on the Steam Deck originally but it murders the battery; the game also looks quite pretty so it's worth it. Ended up pausing it in the final dungeon of the 4th main chapter (Mahag Saar) since I started losing motivation to play the game and I didn't want to burn out completely in case I wanted to continue it down the line. From what I can tell, this is just a bit under halfway through the main story so it feels like a good place to pause.

So much of this game, and Tales games in general, feel like an off-by-one error for my tastes; there's lots of promise in what I played and I did maintain a legitimate interest throughout my playtime, but it just wasn't enough to capture me completely. For context, I really enjoyed Berseria despite not being the biggest fan of its combat mechanics, and despised Vesperia for its less-developed, almost unplayable combat in comparison (at least from the first dungeon -- I had no interest in wasting any more time, even if it gets better). My take on this game is really no different; the combat is my main sore point with this game, and probably the main reason why I can't drum up the motivation to continue for now.

The combat in the Tales games generally sits in a weird middle ground between action-heavy mechanics and slower, skill-based mechanics. (Skill as in abilities/powers, not "git gud".) I find the result of the combination to be a bit of a sluggish mess; combat is too quick and too much of a slugfest to string together intricate strategies between teammates, yet bosses and other larger enemies are so tanky that you'll be whacking away mindlessly at them for ~5-10 minutes while you chip away at their enormous health bar. Every single boss fight in this game felt 2-3 times as long as it should have been. Stuns and status effects are a thing in these games, which feel awful for an action-based combat system (but are honestly reasonable conceptually), yet they seem pointless in the player's hands most of the time. I've noticed the issue between overworld trash encounters and boss fights is that the boss fights feel artificially lengthened for the sake of showing off all of the combat mechanics, as mobs die too quickly to make statuses & super moves particularly useful. In an overcompensatory move, boss fights end up dragging out, and end up ignoring other mechanics -- most bosses can't be stunned (or recover almost instantly, rendering any follow-ups pointless) and can't be broken, making mid-air chains mostly useless. Just like so many other RPGs, Tales is no exception to the common mistake of making bosses immune to pretty much anything other than straight damage, which is a big reason why the boss fights continue to be such a drag. For the most part (despite my following complaints), I think it's more a matter of the combat not being for me and less of it being "objectively" bad, whatever that would mean. Another notch or two towards full action, or towards a more methodical RPG approach and I think it works for me, but the precise balance it has right now just falls flat.

Pretty much all of my time playing the game was spent controlling Alphen, since he felt the most fun to actually use. I briefly tried using some of the other melee characters but they just didn't quite cut it for me, and the ranged characters just never feel good in action games due to clumsy targeting; the genre just isn't built for it IMO. I noticed that a lot of skill combos don't chain gracefully into one another - mid-air follow-up attacks frequently whiff completely due to some weird execution delays or messed-up targeting, several skills involve long attack chains that do not keep enemies trapped in place, effectively stunning the user for the remainder of the duration, and targeting in general is incredibly annoying to grapple with for some reason. Worse, Alphen's special abilities involving the Flame Sword require the skill to finish executing before he begins a slow charge-up to pull out and do a power attack. I don't want to exaggerate the issue, but some enemies can dodge or de-stun quickly enough that the power attack whiffs even if you start it while the enemy is stunned, making it useless. This is especially notable on bosses, which can barely be stunned or broken to begin with, and recover far too quickly for you to ever score a hit this way. To me, this is why I feel like the combat feels sluggish and unresponsive -- the game tries to give you a bunch of powerful tools to handle enemies, yet makes them wholly ineffective in any of the encounters that actually matter. On top of all of that, enemies (or more commonly groups of enemies) can and do stunlock you with no way to fight back; my record is about 15 seconds before my inputs were meaningfully registered due to repeated knockdowns, stuns, etc. This is one of the few things that I feel very justified in calling straight up bad design, which is unfortunately held over from the other games and is not likely to be changed.

Outside of the combat, the story is decent but maybe not anything special. I've not been spoiled on any specifics but have a general idea where things are going, and I feel like it's a very solid concept that just feels kind of weird in practice. With five of these realms under different kinds of oppression from Renan overlords, this plot kind of feels like a checklist. You start with the violent slave driver, then the manipulator turning the Dahnan populace against each other. Then, to break the pattern, the third realm is under relative peace, before we're right back to sadism with the fourth realm. It also turns out some Dahnans end up being just as bad as their captors once they take the reins of power, what a surprise! Honestly, I don't think these story beats are bad, but I'm probably just too jaded from dealing with so many games and stories treading this same ground, the trail once blazed now beaten into a deep trench. At some point, I just got tired of it - there's always some resistance movement, there's always some random evil Renan, and so many of the subplots per chapter play out the same way despite the different environments and background of each region that it all kind of melts together. The earlier parts of the game essentially ruin the later parts of the game through repetition. Less realms in the first bit (even if it was just 4 instead of 5) and a faster exit to the second part of the game (spoilers - the crisis is much bigger than just Renans > Dahnans) might have worked a bit better, but I think a lot of it is just exhaustion with gameplay for me as well. In any case, I don't view the story particularly negatively so far, and it's decently close to being very good.

Characters are in a similar spot - again, your party feels like it was designed by checklist though the diversity is a very good thing, with everyone having very different perspectives and personalities. I'm just jaded again, having seen similar tropes in Berseria and in plenty of other RPGs. So far, I feel like the characters have a limited amount of personality outside of a couple of major traits though. Early on in the game, Alphen and Shionne had a nice dynamic since a lot of the scenes they had together established some interesting traits of the characters beyond the basics. Once the other party members started joining, though, the skits decreased and the actors per scene diluted commentary to the point that I don't find Kisara, Dohalim, or even Law & Rinwell very interesting. Even worse, I feel like this game is written with an incredibly preachy tone at times. The tone of the game and even most of the side scenes is almost uniformly depressing to the point of desensitization due to monotony; tons of skits are about how oppression ruined everyone's lives, and lots of scenes just feel like apology olympics, with Shionne and Dohalim being guilty by association like 10 times an hour. Some of the writing feels like it's treading down the same path as dumbass Twitter/BSky conversations where someone goes out of their way to post their qualifications and disclaimers about white guilt and shit. The fundamental characters are very interesting in my opinion; if more time was spent letting their personalities actually breathe, I think it'd be a great cast - but again, off-by-one here as well.

At the end of the day, I know that this series just isn't for me - I bought this when it was cheap because it was well-received, and also because I wanted to give Tales a chance to wash the terrible taste of Vesperia out of my mouth. What I've gotten here so far has been good, but just not tuned enough to my personal tastes to keep me enthralled to the end. I'd like to come back if I can drum up some interest again after a while away from the game (maybe later this year?) -- TBF I already paused once after the opening hour(s) of the game -- but I know for a fact that this is the last game I'm playing in this series.