Tales of Arise – JRPG Review

Tales of Arise is a single player 2021 Japanese RPG released on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One & Xbox Series X/S. It’s the 17th game in the Tales series.

***This review contains spoilers.***

Tales of Arise was a very popular RPG for 2021 and 2022, receiving many awards for its production, which incidentally also suffered setbacks in its attempt to be a multiplatform release. Unlike many previous games, it doesn’t have multiplayer support, which is a shame in my opinion, as is probably another symptom of the multi-platform decision. The game was supposedly targeted at new and veteran fans of the series.

Another Cliché Plot from the annals of JRPG tropes

The plot is probably one of the most disappointing parts of the game, as from my view, it actually has a lot of potential in the world they’ve crafted, however it falls into the usual JRPG cliche of fighting some type of god who is puppeteering things from behind the scenes. A very lazy and poor writing trope that is very common in JRPGs in general, and disliked from my view. It is truly a waste to hide the great foe of a game until the end, as it makes the game more hollow in its conclusive moments.

Games that do their main foes well are, for example, Final Fantasy 6 and 7, where the main foe is teased throughout the game and makes important arrivals into the gameplay. Leaving a foe unrevealed till the end generally leaves a sour taste in the mouth of a gamer, who has struggled through the plot to only be rewarded with an ass-pull from the writer.

The plot of Tales of Arise is that, the Great Astral Spirit arose from focused energy on the planet Rena, and decided to grow more powerful by absorbing another planet’s energy, that is Dahna, which is a twin planet to it, and should have combined with at creation but didn’t.

The spirit does this by mind controlling its planet’s lifeforms the Helganquil, to kidnap and brainwash Dahna’s people, who have affinity to astral energy to re-create them as the highly advanced race called Renans. The Renans then invade Dahna and create a two tier society of Renan’s ruling over Dahnan’s as slaves. The Dahnan are harvested for astral energy, which has been split into its elemental types in different zones.

Alongside this is the creation of a sovereign and a maiden who are two Dahnans who are supposed to funnel all the energy of Dahna into the Great Astral Spirit through a ceremony. 300 years ago Alphen was part of this ceremony, but his paired maiden Naori at the time thwarted the ceremony as she envisioned the disaster. She wiped Alphen’s memory with a convenient mask and sent him back to Dahna, where he awoke some centuries later and became a slave to the Renan’s. The game begins with Alphen meeting and helping Shionne, an ancestor of Naori who escaped capture by a Renan lord.

To cut the story short; the two go on a journey with 4 other characters to overthrow the Renan rule and eventually unveil the plan of the Great Astral Spirit and save Dahna and all its people.

The first half of the plot works out very well, even as it courts the usual idea of slavery and subjugation by an evil empire that is common in JRPGs. The second half involves the other planet and its evil overlord spirit, revealing the overarching plot of what its motives are and how it’s been puppeteering everything.

They try in this game to create their own Sephiroth in the form of “Vholran Igniseri”, another Dahnan who was turned into a sovereign and is essentially an evil and domineering character to face off against Alphen as a rival. However they fall short massively in my opinion, the character has very little depth, and is basically just an “evil guy” with a samurai sword who wants to rule everything. He makes a couple of appearances, is fought and defeated, and then randomly gets pulled back into the game at the end for another final fight with him.

Linear gameplay that becomes boring

The gameplay in Tales of Arise is very linear; it involves running through mostly extremely linear levels and fighting through groups of placed mobs that reappear if you rest, therefore are grindable. You then get to a healing point, and then fight a boss. You can teleport around the world to complete side quests, which are generally either kill x amount of enemy or kill this big enemy, or give them some cooking items.

The game adds these weird moments where you need to spend cure points to open a path or heal a person. These just seem completely pointless to me, because CP can just be recovered at any campsite, or with a cheap item.

There’s not much else to the game; that’s the main gameplay, run through the level, do the battles or flee them, kill the boss, listen to pointless exposition by the character cast, then onto the next area to do exactly the same thing. Oh I forgot, there are 30 odd owls to collect by finding them.

The game gives you optional talking moments, which expand on the characters, but these don’t really bring much depth or humour, and are mostly just inane conversations that give very little information about anything important. Aside from this the voice acting in at least Japanese is excellent, and they do a very good job of creating a persona for the characters. Unfortunately the writing isn’t good and the game doesn’t really make you care much for the characters aside from the main female lead’s loneliness which is on constant reminder as she suffers from a curse of thorns, where anyone who touches her is hurt. Of course the main male character loves to touch her suddenly with a grab or a hug, to show that he doesn’t care about the thorn damage, and she recoils to string along the romance or lack thereof.

The combat system is a bit tiresome; it’s not terrible, but it’s nothing special. There’s a heavy focus on evasion and boost attacks. Enemies are mostly whittled down with no real change of pace; you just combo abilities, and use boost attacks when they come up. Each character has a unique affect to their boost attack, such as spell interruption, charge interruption, breaking armoured foes, etc. These are basically held until needed or used at will. It ends up actually much more interesting to play as the spellcaster Rinwell, rather than the main character Alphen, as spell usage has some skill with timing. Your party can be set to auto and do their thing, since it’s fairly cumbersome to switch to each one to control. There’s no environmental angle to combat and the weakness system is mostly inept. Combos are ok, but don’t feel especially rewarding. It actually performs much better to just spam certain abilities that are overpowered, and dodge frequently, whilst having either Shionne or Dohalim heal when needed.

The best and worst

The animations in this game are top tier, probably some of the best animations in a JRPG so far. They’ve done an exceptionally good job in this department, and I can only heap praise on the art team. All the special attacks look amazing, and they do feel varied and good to use. Bizarrely they don’t really seem to change the tide of combat too much though, normal critical attacks can do more damage in the time you’ve watched the animation sometimes, which is a bit disappointing and further shows how the game doesn’t use its strengths well at all.

The worst thing about the combat system is the character voices, which shout out every time they make a move; this turns into a mess of shouting as everyone just shouts over each other. This is common in Tales games, and some people seem to like it. However it’s clearly annoying to certain players and it makes no sense why it shouldn’t have an option to either turn it off or limit it to just the controlled main character or boost attacks, as if you mute voice volume, it mutes in conversations too.

The music of this game is completely forgettable; high quality but it adds no “oomph” to anything. Nothing is catchy or gives you a strong impression. It’s just “high quality” background music. The main theme isn’t bad, but much of the music simply doesn’t connect too much. There are games that you play and want to listen to the OST over and over again, this just isn’t one of those games.

One of the good things this game does is throwing in some anime cinematic sections for the culmination of certain points in the plot. I think this idea is great, and it works really well. Unfortunately the plot is terrible and the characters aren’t built up well enough, so they don’t really add as much as they could. This has been an uncommon and underused feature in JRPGs, probably due to the cost of such things. Cinematics really feel like a reward for getting through the plot, and anime fits the game’s style perfectly.

A game that lacks inspiration and only really delivers on looks

Overall this is a very surface level RPG aside from how it looks, you can feel how rushed development has been outside the visuals, and it shows poorly to me. The game looks absolutely beautiful, the character design, animations and environments, but put together it’s a hollow linear experience that whilst might be slightly enjoyable for the first half of the game, becomes a slog that you don’t really want to finish off.

You can tell they cut a lot of content to get the title released, as its release was even delayed from 2020 to 2021. There’s a new game plus for the game, but speed running and replayability have basically zero interest in my view.

One of the worst things this game does, is hawk DLC in the form of cosmetics and boosts. This is a complete cash grab and should be shunned from gaming, it’s basically inexcusable and I hate how games do this nowadays. That alone drops the game into unrecommended territory for me.

It’s definitely not worth the full price tag, since this is a late review. The game is far more affordable now and is usually heavily discounted off its base price.

If you love anime style looked games, which are easy to play and understand, then maybe this game will be ok for you.

To sum up the game in a few words it would be “Beautiful yet uninspiring”.