Tales of Arise

great story. fights are repetitive sometimes but 100 PERCENT recommended

Immensely satisfied with the story and gameplay.
Definitely looking forward to the next title for this series

This game is extremely cheesy. The story is fine and the voice acting is good, but wow I can't help but laugh at half the cut scenes. It falls into every trope you would expect from a JRPG, and not it a good way.

The combat is fun, but very arcade like. I haven't beaten the game yet, but I'm not really sure if I will. I just can't take the game seriously. I don't think it's a horrible game, but so far I'd give it a 6/10. Good enough to play if you have nothing else, but there are way better options out there.

One of my all time favorite games. I loved the story&lore and the graphics are amazing. 10/10

9/10

MAIN PROS
Easy review to be honest, great writing with good story progress. Amazing voice acting and combat mechanics, easy to grasp and progressively engaging. Also it's fun, an integral part of games most ambitious devs seem to forget.

MAIN CONS
Bit of a grind, also the story is linear.

Solid story and characters
Satisfying amount of content
Party members have alot to say to eachother

I like how the story has fantasy and sci-fi aspects

Owls pretty cute too

pretty great tales game if your'e in it for the story. great visuals and compelling story. the combat is fun but not as satisfying as other tales games but its not bad. towards the end of the game it gets extremely cut-scene heavy. After you defeat the volcano boss prepare for 2 hours of movies and cut scenes that trigger every 3 steps. i literally forgot the combat controls before i fought anything after that damn volcano fire golem it took so long to progress the story to lenegis. the game is still fun and would recommend. also check out nexus for some good mods easy to install.

I tried with this game. I tried. Story was boring and forced, combat felt pretty bad, and characters were NOT memorable. The little interactions between characters were cool at first, but then it was just ONE AFTER ANOTHER and they were so often that I just started ignoring them.

Wasn't for me but a lot of people seem to enjoy the game. If I was to do it over, I would have tried the demo first and I would have waited for a sale before purchasing.

Another good game from Tales series. I still prefer Tales of Berseria, but this one is also good and fun to play.

story dense.
battle gameplay.

that sums up the game. it's really good. simple.

Very fun game! The combat system is fun and rewarding. Dialing your preferred attacks is great. The art style is A+. This is one of the prettier JRPGs I have played in a while

I wanted to like this game. I music, graphics, and gameplay have improved from their predecessors. HOWEVER, the characters and writing are absolutely AWFUL! I can't stand it. No one has any personality, everyone over explains everything they think and feel. It insults my intelligence. There's nothing interesting about any of the dialogue, it's all so hollow. It's so cringe I tone out most of the time. I tried to enjoy this but I just can't. It's such a shame. 3 out of 10. Wouldn't recommend unless you don't mind having being talked to by the game like you're 5 years old.

Great game,the end was satisfactory even tho the last bosses was a bit tpp easy(no i wanst overlevel but i had all the top weapons). I like the story and the romance between the main characters, but the last 2 that join the party for me dont add anything(or at least i dindt care about then). Dindt do the post game and took around 70 h doing everything on base game.

Great game. Iike the way you can forge weapons and a great battle system.

this has been a great time, im playing on 2nd hardest difficulty and progressing fine without grinding. Runs very solid with zero bugs. Combat is tough and my input is required on my difficulty but never impossible with creature near my level. ""the level 45 boss at the start of game is going to spank you, just come back later.""
Death does not lose progress but has a minor effect. overall this game is very worth it with a rich story.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME! Play Granblue Fantasy instead

When you start the game, you'll fight some random mob and the combat will feel amazing. The enemies can be staggered, you can throw them up and fight them in the air, the aerial attacks even have its own dedicated slot. You can do long combos, with your aerials, and you feel stylish. Then after attacking for a while, the boost strike meter will fill up, then you can use them for a burst of damage. It comes up pretty often, so you start to think you can use it in your attack rotation. Your party member will feel helpful. You can't cancel your animation, so it feels slower than previous Tales games, but you've played Monster Hunter so you know how to plan your attack.

Then you start fighting the bosses. You can't stagger him, so you don't have time to build up long combos. You can't throw him, so all your aerials are useless. You star to notice that the boost strike meter isn't filling up. The enemy will telegraph a big attack, and as a player you can read it and anticipate it. But your party AI can't. They will use their attacks with the longest animation, got animation locked while the enemy is doing their big attacks, and got one-shotted. The other party member will try to revive the dead party member, but the healing points are shared between all the party members, so you'll run out healing points during battle. And its not even your fault, and you can't do anything about it.

At some point, you might find the tactics menu. It seems powerful, feels like the gambit system from FF12 and Unicorn Overlord. You start tweaking it, and you then find the "do nothing" tactic. It sound useless, until you try it and you notice that your party members now have superhuman reflex and perfectly dodge all of the attacks. Then you can concentrate on killing the boss without needing to take care your party members.

If you still decides to continue playing this game, at some point near the ending, all the overworld enemies turns into minibosses with all the boss related issue. And now you're frustrated, and you can't even return the game because its already outside the return window. Oops

Was a struggle to complete this game during the later chapters, when the amount of grind and cringe anime style story telling , virtue signaling and philosophies becomes unbearable through countless cutscenes, which is a shame because the first half of the game is really quite good

I cannot finish the game. the characters and story are just horrible. It is insanely predictable and somehow manages to make no sense. It sucks because they made so many good choices combat wise and graphically to move the series forward, but yeah I just absolutely cannot stand this games and writing.

I dunno what I expected going into this game, but it to this day one of the most exhausting, grating and draining video game experience I've ever had. There are nuggets of good in here - I liked a few of the characters and the story had decent weight to it - but you'd never even realize with your ears ringing from all the constant battle chirps your party repeat. It also doesn't help that it's padding all the way down, I swear this game ends 3 times and there are entire classic Mario and Sonic levels you could finish before beating some of the end game enemy encounters. This game feels like a parody of JRPGS, and lives up to every bad stereotype people associate with the genre.

Good for a JRPG on sale, they milked the whales a bit too much for its actual value imo and sadly games that do that get a bad mark from me. You can spend the entire game pretty much spamming reigning slash or whatever. on sale

Overall a fairly standard "Tales of" game, not much new in the way of mechanics. up until the mid point in the game its not super difficult but once you hit that point the difficulty goes up drasticly so be pre aired for a serious spike. if you were just spamming basic attacks by the mid point that will stop working for you.

Great story, a little bit repetitive at the start (going to a new city, defeat the city leader, repeat). The story start getting interesting in the middle. The gameplay is great with okay-ish graphic. Not enough end-game content.

Tales of Arise has a beautiful world. The combat is fun. You can play as whatever character you want and its viable. Overall this game is a definite play. The only problems I found was the pacing. I got burned out a couple of times and had to really push through to finish the game. It is worth it to push through till the end.

its a great game i love the tales games this one has a great story

A great / satisfying ending is worth a lot in an RPG. This is what I want in games. That alone puts this game high on my rankings.

This game and Tales of Berseria are my two favorites! Great story, vast open & interesting world, dialogue is well done, good replay value, post main game DLC content is great. I highly recommend!

My first experience with a Tales series game. Great story and characters. Interesting combat. Pleasing anime-like presentation. No complaints, well worth the money and time investment.

This is my second playthrough (originally played on XBOX). If you are a fan of the "Tales of" series you will absolutely love it IMO and you can find it on sale alot these days if I remember rite. Visually is the best looking game to date from the series, gameplay is super buttery on PC (A+) and you don't need a beast of a PC to play it if your still running a potatoe. I have a 7600x paired with a 3070 TI and I'm getting 120 on the busier maps and in dungeons almost 240. Don't miss out on this one!

Now my type of game, way to many tropes and way to anime. Maybe I'm just to old but I cant stand this type of story anymore. Graphics look decent and combat is sup-par. Overall a waste of money in my opinion. Might come back to this some day to see what more this game has to offer.

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.

The writing was so very tired. I went into this with the highest of hopes, but the dialogue is so bad. The action also had a weird power fantasy from the start, and it was kind of exhausting being this protagonist, who is obviously so powerful at the START of the game, plunder over seemingly petty frustrations and overlooking giant red flags. I enjoyed the game play, and perhaps if I've never played another RPG or seen any anime, I would feel different, but the story is just so worn out.

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

Tales of Arise is a captivating JRPG that combines classic series traditions with modern innovations. From an emotional storyline to dynamic gameplay, it offers an engaging journey that appeals to both veterans of the series and newcomers alike. It’s not necessary to have played previous Tales of games to understand the story or characters.

Story

In a world where the people of Dahna suffer under the tyranny of the neighboring planet Rena, an unnamed masked hero rises to fight for freedom. Alongside a mysterious woman cursed by her powers, the group stands against their oppressors, uncovering a larger threat that endangers both worlds.

Strengths

✔️ Compelling Storyline:
Tales of Arise delivers a powerful tale of oppression, rebellion, and unity. The themes of freedom and understanding are emotionally gripping and keep players invested until the end.

✔️ Impressive Visuals:
The anime-inspired art style, detailed environments, and vibrant character designs create an immersive and breathtaking experience.

✔️ Dynamic Combat System:
The action-packed and fluid combat system is both challenging and rewarding, allowing for creative use of Artes and Boost Strikes.

✔️ Memorable Characters:
Each character has a unique personality, intriguing backstory, and crucial role in the narrative, making the journey feel personal and meaningful.

✔️ Outstanding Soundtrack:
The music perfectly enhances every moment, from epic battles to emotional story beats, and stays with you long after playing.

Weaknesses

❌ Repetitive Environments:
Some areas feel less inspired and can become repetitive, especially during extended exploration.

❌ Difficulty Spikes:
The first major boss fight can be exceptionally challenging, even on the lowest difficulty setting.

❌ Grindy Endgame:
Completing optional content or preparing for tougher challenges involves repetitive tasks, which might deter casual players.

Achievements

There are 58 achievements available here. To unlock all of them, you’ll need the Tales of Arise - Beyond the Dawn expansion. The achievements span the main story, optional bosses, and various gameplay-specific challenges. These include finding all the owls, unlocking all recipes, and mastering the training grounds. While none of the achievements are missable, the endgame can require significant time and patience, particularly for the tougher challenges.

(Not) Recommended for

✔️ Recommended for
• Fans of story-driven RPGs with emotional depth.
• Players who enjoy action-packed combat with strategic elements.
• Fans of beautifully animated cutscenes and exceptional voice acting.

❌ Not Recommended for
• Players expecting a fully open-world sandbox experience.
• Those who dislike grind-heavy or highly challenging content.

Final Verdict

Tales of Arise is a shining example of what a modern JRPG can achieve. It blends the classic charm of the series with contemporary gameplay innovations and is a must-play for both fans and newcomers. Despite the difficulty spikes, the overall experience remains unforgettable. 😊

Note: My playtime does not reflect the actual duration of the game. For a realistic estimate, I recommend checking HowLongToBeat.

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

This is the most unstable game I've ever owned on Steam, and there's only been a handful. The game constantly crashes no matter what you do, and now I am unable to defeat the final boss as the game cannot make it through the 4 consecutive battles without crashing. I've been getting by saving extremely often but I can't take it anymore. It's BAD. And take a lot of these good reviews with a grain of salt as according to the Achievements, only around 30% of players have actually even gotten to last quarter of the game. Go over to Reddit, it's not even a PC thing. The game has been hard crashing across consoles as well since the start and to this day it's still happening. As a massive Tales fan, I can't recommend this game in its current state, and I will be FAR more cautious of Tales games moving forward out of fear of lighting my hard earned money ablaze. Berseria was the last stable Tales release.

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.