76 hours of gameplay later, I completed Tales of Arise last Winter and I enjoyed playing the game for what it’s worth. For a series that has always caught my attention since Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Arise had a lot to live up to. I already knew most of the series from amazing titles such as Xillia, Berseria, Zestiria and Symphonia, of course.
The game has a lot of potential and was a great introduction into playing the series. While the good and bad have already been said, I want to share a few thoughts of what it was like playing Tales of Arise.
GAMEPLAY
Compared to RPGs like Dark Cloud, Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Dragon Age and Persona, Tales of Arise’s gameplay is strikingly familiar yet requires more strategy as enemies are always a few levels higher, can be faster at hitting you and your teammates may distract you constantly by shouting about what more they are going to do next.
Levelling up is rigged. Upon the mission, Farewell, Mage, I saved Torin from level 66 flying Zeugles at level 36 and I didn’t go up any levels on normal difficulty and any food I ate beforehand didn’t boost me enough EXP to level up faster. Alphen is the saving grace of the party as I prefer characters with spears and swords. The other characters like Dohalim and Rinwell are slower to react to button combos than Alphen so he is still the best player for every battle.
PLOT
The start was very gripping, and went in a different route for me. I’m used to games starting off in a grass, ice or water area but it was refreshing to be in a fire region like Calaglia first. For me, defeating the first two Renan lords and exploring the regions of Calaglia and Cyslodia was where it really showcased the essence of what a Tales series is — an enticing quest through the perils of identity, racism and prejudice. I playing hours into the beginning wanting to know more to free the people from their restricted fates.
There’s a lot of reasons to hate the Renan’s. They colonised the Dahna’s world for over three centuries over a contest for the throne, enslaved the Dahna’s and stripped them of their culture and surnames. Like many JRPGs, there’s no real obvious difference between the two races physically in my opinion, they are all mostly White or Asian except for characters like Dohalim.
Despite Shionne’s story and the origin of Rena and Dahna, I wasn’t a fan of the true story of her thorns. In fact, none of the characters stories were appealing after the third kingdom. There was a very obvious platonic romantic connection between Shionne and Alphen, Rinwell and Law and a somewhat growing appreciation between Kisara and Dohalim throughout the story that did not even interest me in the slightest.
I do love Alphen as a character for the fact he puts a lot of spice on his food, as a spicy connoisseur myself. I don’t know whether he throws it in like a Caribbean like me or whether Shionne and Kisara is just preventing him from putting in too much because people in Dahna have the same bland taste buds as the English. Now if we got in the plot and regions, I have a bit to say.
But the excitement to play stopped after fighting Dohalim for the fourth time who was really tricky to beat. For me, Dohalim and Kisara didn’t feel like a great addition to the team but more like a leeway to get through other places and people e.g. Rena, Ganath Haros
The plot did leave me with questions very early on:
Who is the red-haired woman NPC who is standing next to every Renan lord? Where did Kelzailks go after Dohalim kicked him out of Menancia? And apart from helping the citizens of Pelegion/Del Fharis, what else did they do in that month?
Some of these questions were thankfully answered towards the end or after completing the game but the pacing from the fourth to the fifth world is a bit tedious as you are at a linear point of the story unable to explore which is annoying and makes you feel trapped. I was grateful once the team gets to Rena, as it truly felt like this was the time to go back and revisit areas and side missions before fighting the Great Spirit.
The fifth Renan leader was not even mysterious and intriguing but more jarring and didn’t have as much as big of a role as I thought. In fact, even I was more interested in the red-haired woman that no-one noticed apart from Alphen, since games like NieR and Persona have reminded me to focus on background characters more.
CUSTOMISATION AND THE OWLS WAS THE BEST PART
After a while of getting to the third and fourth kingdom, I found myself not entertained anymore by the plot and rather finding the owls and customisation outfits for my characters. The Owl Forest was adorable and collecting them in order to get new outfits for the characters was definitely more enjoyable than fishing. I wish Hootle had more side-quests to do with the other owls other than find more of his breed.
What I really like is the different colour palettes for the outfits you get in the main story, the owls and eventually the training grounds. I went through a phrase where everyone was wearing red, white and black. Towards the end, it was red, white and blue but it’s Law and Dohalim’s outfits that didn’t match with everyone else’s frustratingly.
On another note, several points in the story reminded me of other games or TV shows such as the Great Spirit during the Subsumer battle looked like Sin, or this scene of Alphen that reminded me of He-Man.
Overall, it’s a brilliant game with a few pacing problems in its stories (Vholran became a menace as annoying as Seymour in FFX). The gameplay is great with outstanding visuals and voice acting in both English and Japanese and is a nice change to usual turn-based RPGs as mentioned above.
