Tales of Arise

good jrpg so far, cheesy cute anime cringe but tolerable cus the rest is awesome lol

I adored this game. I played a whopping 4 Tales games before Arise and never finished any of them. This one had its hooks in me from pretty early. The game is absolutely gorgeous, when it came out, it was possibly the most beautiful 3D JRPG ever made. Nowadays FF16 or Rebirth may have something to say about that.

The combat system is super fun when taking on mobs, comboing enemies as Alphen feels fluid and perfect. Going "unlimited" with the help of boost attacks/strikes is so fun. Boss fights aren't as fun however, because u cannot combo them.

I love the characters. This is my favourite JRPG party. Shionne, Dohalim and Rinwell are standouts for me. The comeraderie within the group feels so wholesome, especially with Kisara exuding mom energy all the time.

The story is pretty solid for the first half but in the latter stages does fall off a bit unfortunately. Same goes for dialogue, as that gets pretty repetitive in the latter stages, as the game's main theme is used to beat u over the head on a constant basis.

Overall really good package. Sucks that I couldn't give the devs more money as I bought this on deep sale, but it is definitely worth the full price (but u should deff get it on sale at this point since it goes on sale often and for like 10$). I eagerly await the next Tales entry however, and at that point I'll set my sins right and be there day one.

This is my second Tales game, and I went into it expecting the overall quality to be better than Berseria, and boy, was I wrong.

Yes, the graphics are good, and the environments look nice, but honestly, that's about it for me, other than the fact that there is fast travel, unlike in Berseria. And in the second half of the story, when you leave the main planet, the rest of the game is just sci-fi hallways.

While the combat was decent enough, I honestly prefer Berseria's combat over Arise's. Something about it just felt hollow, and when you hit an enemy, it just didn't seem satisfying at all. The AI for the rest of the party members is absolutely horrendous, probably some of the dumbest I've seen. They would just run straight into the enemy's attacks and die.

The character models feel stiff and lifeless, even in the main cutscenes. And when comparing, Berseria's models had far more expression than Arise's. In the skit cutscenes, they transitioned to using 3-D models instead of the 2D images of the characters, like Berseria did. It made them feel more lifeless due to the models, and it wasn't entertaining to watch. The character design was meh; some were okay, and others were not.

The story was okay until the latter half of the game, where it just completely nosedives into oblivion. The characters all felt extremely flat, with little backstory. The main character was bearable, but not interesting, and I really just didn't like the rest of the cast. They were either annoying or boring. All the villains were written horribly, and the main villain's whole motivation for being evil was that he was strong, so he was gonna kill people because he's strong, and he can do that because he's strong.

The main boss dungeons are just not good. They consist of you having to go get a key for the elevator seventy-three thousand times to get to the next main evil guy to kill. And the hallways were narrow, with enemies just vomited everywhere, making it take forever to beat the dungeon. The final dungeon is the most diabolical thing I've ever seen. There is one warp point at the beginning of the dungeon, and that is it. And the dungeon is huge, and takes forever to traverse due to all the minibosses crammed into the hallways. If you need to leave the dungeon and get heals, weapons, etc, you have to run all the way back through the entire dungeon to get there. And if you aren't prepared enough you will have to go back, mostly because of the cure point system, which forces you to have to replenish your healing stuff via 9000 gold items, or just resting at an inn or campfire. And the final boss is underwhelming in my opinion.

While there are enjoyable things in the game, I personally feel like the bad outweighs the good. Some people might like the story better, but I personally thought it was sub-par, and only got worse as the game progressed.

4.5/10

Solid story that provides many hours of gameplay.

This game is way too long for how dogshit the combat is. I stopped having fun so many hours ago and the story won't end. I'm so fucking bored. I can't fucking do this anymore.

must try is one of the best the combat ,art style, music, story, cinematic all of it so good

I hate the combat. I hate the fact that in the last quarter of the game, you get cutscenes every two frigging steps...
But the characters are interesting enough. The story is good at times, and the game itself looks fine. It drags on, and even on the easiest difficulty, fights last way too long, even with auto-combat the game is super boring when you watch the HP bar very sloooowly go down.
I'd say, you need to invest a LOT of time into this game, since it's super heavy on dialogue. If you don't have the time, please, skip this one.
But if you DO have some extra 50+ hours and don't mind listening to 40+ hours of dialogue, then this is worth it. But only on a sale.

Friend recommended me this game and gave one word to describe it: Campy. I love it. Imagine playing an anime where every you watch as the characters develop and form bonds while you're just smiling and eating popcorn, this game is basically that. The combat system is kind of wonky in it's own way, but I think that's not the main point of this game. It's the dialogue and the development. Give it a shot!

An Epic Tale of Freedom and Unity

Story

Strengths

Weaknesses

Achievements

(Not) Recommended for

Final Verdict

Probably my worst RPG ever. Boring battle system, it is really all about having enough orange gels and repeatedly pressing two buttons. Grumpy female characters, too long and boring dialogues, sometimes an hour of reading without a fight! The story is stolen from Final Fantasy series but not told well. No single original idea. You see the main boss only a couple of times, he is like a side character. You get a disappointing and short ending with a ridiculous picture. Absolutely zero replay value. it was a big mistake to play it after Elden Ring.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

good story, good combat, CUTE SHIONNE OMG

the tales series that I finished for the first time and also Shion and Alphen's interactions made me smile to myself

Been so late to try the game, bu i'm grateful to try the game in 2024. Good story so far, a typical tale series

UNBEARABLE Levels Of Instability

Let me preface this review by saying that I did enjoy this game and I would recommend it, even more so when it is on sale. The first half of this game was really good in my opinion, but as soon as the second half begun it was pretty much just hours of boring cut scenes and dialogue. Ordinarily this would not bother me, but the shear amount of it compared to actual gameplay was actually insane. And most of the dialogue was just the characters repeating things that they had said about 20 times throughout the story already. But ignoring the majority of the second part of the game the combat was really fun and fluid and the graphics were really nice with a great art style.

First of all, I want to say that Tales of Arise is not a bad game by any means. This review is mostly going to be a rant about things I didn't like, but overall I did enjoy the game. It's probably the last Tales of game that I'd recommend that's on Stream, however.

After the massive disappointment that was Tales of Zesteria, Berseria came along and fixed pretty much every single problem that that game had. It looked like the studio had listened to the feedback.

And then they apparently forgot a bunch of it again.

Arise is a very weird game. The combat feels slightly off, like it doesn't quite know what it's trying to do. When I first saw the ground/aerial combo system, I actually got quite interested. It reminded me of Judith from Vesperia. Except that it's almost never used in the entire game. Most enemies either can't be thrown consistently unless you have far outleveled them, at which point they die really quickly anyways, or, more likely, can't be thrown at all, making aerial moves useless unless they're really tall. A lot of the later enemies are absurd damage sponges who can take upwards of 10+ minutes to beat even when they're a lower level than the party.

One thing I can say that I thought was a good idea in the combat system was CP. It's a nice balance between being able to spam moves and not having infinite healing. Unfortunately, CP is pretty hard to come by in the early game without spamming items, and those items are extremely expensive. I don't remember ever having gald issues in a Tales of game like I did in this one before.

There is, once again, no world map, a bizarre decision that makes the entire thing feel like a tiny collection of loosely connected hallways, despite the fact that it's actually pretty big.

The story is far, far better than Zesteria's, especially sans-Berseria, but that's an extremely low bar to clear, and the last bit in particular feels kind of rushed. It's not bad, but it's just weird and disappointing.

The weirdest thing is how utterly atrocious the English translation is. I played with Japanese voices and English text and there were a bizarre number of places with either translations that completely changed the meanings of entire cutscenes or parts of the English version that were just completely wrong and resulted in garbled nonsense. I thought larger studios had figured out how not to translate games this badly back in the late 90s, but apparently not.

The artstyle is kind of bleh. Most things are just kind of dull. monotone blobs. Make sure you turn off TAA or the game will really look like an blurry mess so much that it's almost unplayable.

With all of that being said, once again, I am marking this review as "Recommended". It was overall a fun game and I had a good time. Just buy and play any other Tales of game on Steam first. I'd even recommend Zesteria first only because of how it ties into Berseria.

I'm in a really weird place with this game.

It has great presentation, and a great battle system that's very satisfying, with very compelling characters and an interesting story.

Despite all of that, I simply cannot bring myself to finish it. Something about this game becomes very exhausting very quickly to me, and I just dont think I like it very much, which is honestly a real shame, given that by all rights I should love it.

I’ve been playing RPGs for a long time, and I consider this the best entry in the “Tales of” series. While the story isn’t particularly groundbreaking, it’s still solid and engaging. The character development is top-notch, and the gameplay is superb. Its main weakness is a fairly linear structure without much to do outside the main story—though that’s a common trait of “Tales of” games. If you enjoy RPGs with strong character arcs and a blossoming romance between the protagonists, this title is definitely for you. I’ve had a great time with it overall.

As a longtime fan of the Tales series, I was pleasantly surprised by how visually stunning Tales of Arise is. While previous entries had their charm, the series’ signature cartoony art style often struggled to align with the tone of its more serious moments. Tales of Arise, however, strikes a perfect balance, delivering an impactful story about racial conflict alongside some of the most impressive 3D art I’ve seen in recent years.

The DLC is another standout feature, introducing a new character who feels integral to the story and worth investing in emotionally. I also appreciated the reflective moments in the narrative, where the hero party takes time to contemplate their goals and motivations. These introspective scenes added depth to the characters and made the journey even more rewarding.

Combat is another area where the game shines. Each party member plays an essential role in battles, and I enjoy rotating them in and out to keep combat engaging. Close-combat characters like Alphen, Law, and Kisara are especially fun to use—they excel at keeping monsters occupied while long-range characters provide support and deal damage. Speaking of long-range characters, Rinwell stands out as a particularly cool and effective fighter. Her combat style is dynamic and satisfying, making her a key part of my strategy.

Tales of Arise is a standout RPG that successfully reinvigorates the Tales series while keeping the core elements that fans adore. Its dynamic combat, captivating story, and breathtaking visuals elevate it to one of the best action RPGs of recent years. While the main narrative isn’t particularly groundbreaking, the emotional connections you form with the characters and the thrill of combat more than make up for it.

If you’re a fan of the Tales series or action RPGs in general, Tales of Arise is a must-play. It combines a deep narrative with engaging combat mechanics and an expansive world, offering an unforgettable experience that will leave you eagerly anticipating whatever the series does next.

9.5/10

The Story, battle system, character all are high quality.

Battle controls are abit confusing but you'll get used to it the longer you grind. Great story like tales of Berseria.

Pretty good overall but that last stretch is miserable holy shit. Just purestrain dogwater. But if you ignore that last part it's quite a solid entry. I vaguely remember combat getting dumb with armoured enemies and such but I still enjoyed it
Main duo has good chemistry, the kids are fine even if their development is a bit rushed, the last two party members are eh IMO. I was playing Crestoria when this came out and the cast in that was stronger... Misella was such a cool heroine
I might be in the minority but I would gladly go back to lower fidelity graphics if it meant Tales of games came out more frequently
Padding the gaps with remasters is fine because 80% of the series (or more) is not playable on PC right now and there's really charming games in the lot, but iunno if that was a wise move overall. Probably felt like they had to but yeah it's reminiscent of the switch to HD in 7th gen just ushering the end of the JRPG golden age. Also I hope they don't just remaster the obvious ones, if they follow up Graces with Xillia it'll be a missed opportunity

The character designs look fantastic, and the Japanese voice acting is pretty solid. I'm playing on easy mode, though, because I'm terrible at action games in general. However, 13 hours in, I'm having a good time. So far, the game is totally worth it on sale, in my opinion.

I think the base game is 100/10 story,music,scenery wise and game play wise its a solid 7/10.

What is it with Tales Games and annoying female leads?
Velvet from the Predecessor Tales of Beseria was an absolute machine of one dimensional double depresso latte.
But also this game's Shionne already starts so f-ing unrelatable and annoying.
Makes me want to switch the games voices to japanese (which I do not understand) and turn off the subtitles AFTER ONLY 2 HOURS.
And it is a Tales game so I do not expect any character development.

Well I will edit this after finishing the game, lets see if my predictions turned out to be true.

Great JRPG for those getting into the genre. Pacing towards the end gets very slow, but it's otherwise very fun.

decent game overall, but the skills are mostly spamming and the story pacing is chaotic. i really lost interest in it and couldn't care to pick it back up. probably my least liked tales of game so far.

Excelent JRPG - With very good story and combat. I have a very little things to say against it.
IT is not the level of newest FF games, but in its own. its just so fun to play.

I am definitely recommending it.

This game was beautiful. Tons of likeable characters, tons of heartwrenching moments, and really fun combat! An amazing story too! please play this game!

The game has too much confidence in the core gameplay loop. It is fun but it's become a wall stoping you from making progress, rather than the vehicle you make progress with. In the previus games, the gamplay already became repetitive to me half way through the game. But now, I'm barily a 1/5 of the way and I don't care to engage with combat anymore. Enemies are just damage spunges that deal lots of damage. They are very very tanky. And lastly, the skill proficiency macanic drove me crazy. The number of usess to max it out are wayyyyy to high. This is not some multiplayer game with infinit replay value. Just play the previous tales games instead. Storys better ther anyways.

I love the combat. It's flashy enough for me to forgive the spongy enemies.

I'm meh about the story. The execution is clunky and the messages are heavy-handed as here, especially on the notion of acceptance and forgiveness. But I can accept that. But.

It completely went overboard in the ending.

Speaking of which, I utterly hate the ending. Not because of its nature, but how utterly stupid and unbelievable it was.

*Spoilers ahead*

Preaching forgiveness is one thing. Preaching forgiveness to a complete psychopath like Ted Bundy while your beloved one is dying is divine level of stupid.

Being all sad when you couldn't save her when you vowed to save her, all because your stupid head thought it magnanimous to play the benevolent Buddha? When you could have averted the damn situation by cutting the enemy down because some. People. Are. Beyond. Saving.

And then when all is lost, borrow the power of deus ex machina?

Excuse me, but what the flying fark.

*Spoilers End*

Never had a game ending spoil the whole thing experience so much before. I was prepared to give this game a solid 7. The ending nearly soured it to a failing mark.

That's how bad it was.

I'll still recommend it, with the caveat that you skip through the ending cutscenes and imagined that the final boss repented and cried and prayed and the world became unicorns and flowers.

Trust me, it's better that way.

This is my 3rd Tales game after Berseria and Zestiria. Played the game start to finish. The game is technically great but I almost couldn't recommend it after finishing it.

The pros:
+ Fighting mobs is fun. Executing Boost Strikes is always flashy and feels good.
+ They nailed that adventuring feel with camping and cooking.
+ Characters are nowhere near Berseria level of good but they're still mostly good. Alphen and Shionne takes the cake here.
+ I like the Cure Points mechanic being a resource you have to refill by camping.

The cons:
- The dumbest AI I have ever seen in any video game. It doesn't matter what kind of strategy you set for them, they will keep dying to some boss attacks. They're fine at the start but as the game's combat grows more complex with group fights and AoEs they'll struggle to keep up.
- For some reason someone at Bamco thought Tales should play like a Souls game and everyone can only dodge (and one character can only block, not dodge). Everything now hits like a freight train, combine that with the AI stupidity earlier and everyone's gonna keep dying, draining your resources.
- Fighting mobs is fun, but fighting bosses feels like playing a different game. The large monsters are cancer. They can't be staggered outside of Boost Attacks AND they spam big attacks halfway through their health bar and you have to awkwardly wait for your Boosts to refill and counter. The human bosses are fine though, they're fun.
- Toward the end of the game basically everything that made it fun gets dropped. No camping, no cooking, plot expositions everywhere and you're walking in these generic sci-fi hallways. The party became so straight-laced and boring, I found myself rooting for Vholran the peak hater. At least the ending's pretty.

6/10, It's a decently polished game but it just has a lot of sore points you see every now and then. I got this on a sale in a bundle with Scarlet Nexus and that one ended up surprisingly being the funner experience. Just get it on a sale, or get Berseria instead if you haven't played that one.

Pretty good so far.

-Don't play with a nintendo controller, as most games will confuse your a,b,x,y buttons regardless of steam input.

i love this game a lil too much, every single character. the journey and the friendship. truly peak JRPG

I really enjoyed this game at the start. But the combat gets really old and it feels like they just made the same enemies but they look a little different and add more HP to make the fights longer as the game goes on. I really liked the story as well but it really started to feel padded out towards the end. I ended up going on youtube to look up a video to see what happened because I felt like I was forcing myself to finish the game. I think I got to about 90% before I gave up. I really wanted to like it but I just couldn't do it. Maybe others might like it but it was just not for me.

My biggest problem with this games is the combat, Either don't full understand it is shallow. With the way I see it, you get four attacks to chain and the chain doesn't feel satisfying, in part, the damage just seems to fall off to much. I do find the story interesting, to recommend a story game that is more fun to play, get a Neir game.

TLDR: Story is kind of interesting, bad combat ruins game for me, go buy a Neir game if you like story.

This game is suitable for someone who love jrpg games. The plot is amazing n also the story. I just bought it and I already have 32 hours of playtime. I really recommend this games. 🤌

Tales games never seem to change, even though this one does change the combat and art style quite a bit. The plot doesn't matter, come for the characters. This cast is pretty fun (Rinwell my beloved) and you get lots of dialogue. Other reviewers saying the cast is one-dimensional or has no character development... I mean yes lol it's a valid criticism. But Tales games aren't known for their depth. Sit in on a couple winter nights and hang out with the gang.

It's a B, like every Tales game

You spend the first half of the game not progressing the plot by slowly killing a handful of slave lords. You spend the second half of the game being blasted with plot that should have been sprinkled throughout the game and fighting the same dozen or so enemy types you found in the first half of the game. The finale is fairly nonsensical.

The characters are pretty shallow and spend most of the game learning basic emotion and morality, which is fine for one to two but not the entire cast. Nearly all of the villains are comically evil (why does she have to laugh so much?) and ultimately meaningless except the main human baddie who somehow shows up at the end despite impossible odds.

In battle the camera is fairly zoomed in behind the character you control, which leaves you unable to see enemy attacks from outside your field of view. This gets worse the more enemies are in the battle or if they can cast magic. There is no visual indication whether magic is cast by an enemy or an ally (if it doesn't kill you when you touch it, it's from an ally). Some of the arts (skills) chain together nicely and feel good, but not every art is a winner.

The game has a cool paintbrush art style that holds up pretty well. The character animation and voice acting is well done (even when someone needs to scream for 10 seconds straight). Character design is varied and colorful, with lots of costumes/colors (the only exception that Dohalim's beach outfit needs more bulge).

I didn't mean for the review to be so long but when you spend 80 hours not enjoying yourself, eh.

The premise hits right at home for me in a good way. And with characters as lovable as these seven (including our beloved Hootle, of course), every story bit is enjoyable. This is a game where I never know for sure who my favorite character is because everyone is dear to me. Gameplay is easy in the way that every command introduced comes with a mini tutorial (which you can return to, in case you forget these things (I certainly do at times)). Plot weakens around the third quarter of the game, but the ending makes everything worth it. I love this game a whole lot!

I've been a big fan of the Tales of series and this one has an amazing storyline and amazing combat system with the main characters being a mixture of emotions similar to how tales of symphonia was. I had this game on backlog for a long time and during thanksgiving weekend I decided to just playthrough a lot of the game and I was hooked after completing the first zone. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys Xenoblade chronicles and other open world jrpg games.

I don't really play games like this but this game's art style and story are great. The game play though not perfect is very satisfying as well.

Works rather well on the Steam Deck OLED (45 FPS cap).
Quite playable, enjoyable combat system. However, the story is kind of meh overall compared to the previous installment. The enemies towards the end esp are in full damage sponge mode, going through the last dungeon really felt like a chore. So not bad overall on sale for fans of the series, but not enough to make me consider new game +.

If you're a tales fan, loves JPRGs, interested in an engaging story and fast-paced combat, you owe it to yourself to grab this! Not perfect by any means, but well worth it. Looking forward to more tales of series games launching in the future!

A JRPG with action elements. Reminds me a lot of Valkyrie Profile 2 and the same guy did the music. Plot is...exactly what you'd expect of a JRPG. So if you don't like constant "I AM STATING THE OBVIOUS" cutscenes slapped in your face every 30 sec, it may be some trouble for you.

Otherwise it's fun for a playthrough.

Seeing how the last "Tales of" game I played was Symphonia (haven't finished it yet) I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the story, characters and mechanics of this game (so far, anyway).
The story is the tried and true "us vs. them" that works so well in media like Star Wars, Avatar (with the blue lanky people), etc.
I genuinely enjoyed both Alphen and Shionne, from what I've seen of them at the point I'm in, cause they are interesting characters that really show growth throughout the story and that helps me in getting invested in the plot and the eventual (hopeful) liberation of Dahnah.
So far, it's an absolute 8.5/10

I've played it four times on playstation! I bought it on steam for when I want to play it and don't have access to the playstation!
The characters are absolutely lovely, I adore them all! The story is griping and bittersweet and dark, and it's very well written!

Excellent game. Characters are likable. Story is simple, but great. Runs like butter on the Deck.

Kizara best girl.