Tales of Arise

 PC
User Score
8.3

Generally favorable reviews- based on 245 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 186 out of 245
  2. Mixed: 40 out of 245
  3. Negative: 19 out of 245

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  1. VoxLuden
    Oct 7, 2021
    7
    One of the best, but most polarizing Tales games since Berseria, Arise is a mixture of familiar tropes, intermingled with a charming cast, and brilliant soundtrack, all culminating in one of the best JRPG experiences of the next generation. This instalment alone makes me excited for what comes next for the series, and frankly I have sincerely enjoyed my over 50 hours with this game andOne of the best, but most polarizing Tales games since Berseria, Arise is a mixture of familiar tropes, intermingled with a charming cast, and brilliant soundtrack, all culminating in one of the best JRPG experiences of the next generation. This instalment alone makes me excited for what comes next for the series, and frankly I have sincerely enjoyed my over 50 hours with this game and counting. The game falls short of a perfect 10 due to some questionable decisions with DLC content, prices and restrictions, alongside a dragging experience towards the end of the story which slightly overstays it's welcome. The second half of the game particularly falls somewhat short in how it overstays its welcome in classic RPG-padding fare, yet the subplot is filled with strange twists, lateral commentary to the real world, and enthralling characters which I personally enjoyed thoroughly.… Expand
  2. ergosato
    Sep 22, 2021
    7
    The story and characters are silly and fun enough, but the open world aspect of this game is so mind numbingly boring. Combat is super fun though. Its really just get from A to B that is just such a slog and side missions are not worth doing.
  3. Baronz
    Sep 26, 2021
    6
    The story is quite boring, tipical Japanese RPG cliché. A lot of boring cutscenes. Maybe ok if you're a teenager and never played jrpg before...
  4. Oldones
    Sep 30, 2021
    5
    Its a kidgame ; story already saw, and if u played to a tales games the last 10 years its litteraly the same thing with an graphic update.
  5. Thothistox
    Nov 14, 2021
    7
    It's meh. It seems like all jrpgs have the same flaws, and they're here in force:
    * shamelessly respawning enemies (it feels like most of my kills aren't "for real")
    * completely and utterly linear plot--not a single decision to be made anywhere * side quests that are mostly "go out and kill this because it's a problem for me", which is utterly ridiculous when the problem enemy is    It's meh. It seems like all jrpgs have the same flaws, and they're here in force:
    * shamelessly respawning enemies (it feels like most of my kills aren't "for real")
    * completely and utterly linear plot--not a single decision to be made anywhere
    * side quests that are mostly "go out and kill this because it's a problem for me", which is utterly ridiculous when the problem enemy is surrounded by other infinitely respawning enemies
    * overly convenient salesmen and crafting. How did those merchants just happen to be placed in the right spots on the map?
    * invisible walls galore
    * HP spongey enemies

    To compound all of this, you have a party of extremely chatty individuals who point out the obvious ad nauseam. Eighty percent of the dialogue could be removed without affecting the coherence of the story. Typical dialogue:
    "We're here, but we have to go over there."
    "I don't know how I feel like going over there. I'm finally going to discover something new about myself and this world."
    "I think we should go over there."
    "I'm not sure how I feel about going over there."
    They walk ten steps to over there.
    Same conversation. But now they're not sure how they feel about being over here and needing to go somewhere else. Meanwhile I'm screaming inside.

    The problem with this game's storytelling is that it spells out things that should be silently treated as mutually understood by the characters. In other words, it doesn't separate the latent message from the overt one. When depicting an exotic society, it is their social norms that make them interesting. In this case, where some enslaved people were rebelling against their oppressors, there was a lot of potential to develop the characters by showing them through their assumptions and misconceptions about their lives and world. But no. They spell everything out for the audience repeatedly, as if it has zero imagination and the attention span of a goldfish.

    But at least the story is coherent. I'll give it that. On the other hand, it uses the cliche crutch of magic soul crystals the properties of which it discusses ad nauseam too.

    The combat was just fun enough for me finish the game once. The enemies mostly feel the same and so do the fights. The average enemy requires some two hundred jabs and slashes to go down. It doesn't seem to feel the impact of those slashes, nor do your characters when they get hit. Often I only realized that I was being attacked when eyeing my HP bar. Maybe they had attack animations and maybe not. Fights are such a spinning cacophony I often couldn't tell what was going on. For example, I still don't know how to counter exactly, even though the game stats said I did it more than three hundred times.

    On the plus side, it's a long game. They actually resolve everything in the end.    … Expand
  6. Nekster
    Oct 8, 2021
    7
    Probable best combat in the series along with a bland story and characters. Overall an enjoyable experience.
  7. BeeSting1
    Nov 26, 2021
    6
    I've been a fan of the tales series ever since Tales of Symphonia. It felt like a group of friends going on an adventure to save the world. The dungeons, monsters, and traveling the party did made it all a great escape. Tales of Arise is similar, but the game has a darker approach and the characters are no longer chibi, making the visuals feel more mature. These are all things I welcome,I've been a fan of the tales series ever since Tales of Symphonia. It felt like a group of friends going on an adventure to save the world. The dungeons, monsters, and traveling the party did made it all a great escape. Tales of Arise is similar, but the game has a darker approach and the characters are no longer chibi, making the visuals feel more mature. These are all things I welcome, as I am well into adult hood now. However, the overworld is replaced by linear areas, with the main form of travel being fast travel. This took away a bit of the immersion. I understand the devs may have taken out the overworld because traveling did become a little tedious later in the old Tales games, but I felt the immersion was worth it.

    The combat system is one of the biggest changes. Arise has perfect dodging, which is a great addition. Timing and reflex was now a necessary skill to have. I love perfect dodging, parry, perfect shielding in any games. I'm a big fan of QTEs, as long as it isn't spammed too hard. The fighting animations, the visuals of the attacks all had an omph, and it felt good to cut down enemies.

    The huge issue however, is the party strategy management, and the enemy HP pool. Bosses specifically are the worst. They have massive HP pools, you can hardly see their HP dwindle unless you stared at ot every 5 mins. It's ridiculous. All those epic attacks you dish out, all those crazy animations mean jack all when after a really strong looking charged up boost attack ends up cutting down less than 0.01% of the bosses' HP bar. As the game progresses the bosses become more and more like damage sponges. It also doesn't help that my entire party are squishy af. A regular boss attack can take away half of a characters' HP. Meaning 2 or 3 regular hits, and my characters' gone. This means a lot of CP is needed to heal and revive. This CP gauge usually runs out about 10% way into the fight, which then I have to use CP recovery items, which cost a fortune. Buying 10 will wipe out all the currency you've collected. Clearly the devs did not intend for the players to use that much. so what to do? Well, there is the strategy modifier. This is where I could customize and change the party's strategy mid-fight. There defensive strats, and offensive strats. The problem is even the most defensive strats, my party eventually dies. There's no option to have my party run away, and dodge everything. Eventually, they're gonna be retarded and get hit by a couple attacks and die, or I'd have to waste precious CP on them. I blame this on poor AI design. There's also no option to have the AI heal ONLY ME. When I set it to heal, they bring back the idiot AI, and guess what, they'll die again in a few seconds. Absolute headache. Change strats was also not very intuitive. I'd have to pause the game and press a button a couple times to set the strat I want. This broke the pace, which I'd have to keep doing it every minute. FF13 is a game that relies on strategy change as well, but it could be done on the go without breaking any pace. That's how it should've been done!

    There is the option to have the AI use only long range spells. This meant I'd have to go through every single one of their spells and see which were long range and didn't have long charge times. This was way too tedious for me. I play a Tales game to hack and slash and have a blast. Not micro-manage AI behavior. I'd be playing an RTA or turn based RPG if I wanted to do that. This is real time combat for f*** sakes, akin to Kingdom Hearts, God of War and the like. I DON'T want to be micro-managing, especially mid-fight.

    Overall, this game is a huge disappointment, which is really unfortunate because I loved where the story was going. Shionne was also a really interesting character. The topics the story touched on were mature, like discrimination, and oppression. The dynamics between the characters were also kind of interesting.    … Expand
  8. JonsGone
    Oct 17, 2021
    7
    Kinda good.
    Very generic shonen anime plot.
    Doesn't fall flat on its face at the end which is surprising. No character really stands out and the party could have used a couple more. However, the amount of dialogue and interaction the game provides really fleshes them out. Kisara embodies the "Business in front and Party in the back" meme perfectly. Different playstyles for every    Kinda good.
    Very generic shonen anime plot.
    Doesn't fall flat on its face at the end which is surprising.
    No character really stands out and the party could have used a couple more.
    However, the amount of dialogue and interaction the game provides really fleshes them out.
    Kisara embodies the "Business in front and Party in the back" meme perfectly.
    Different playstyles for every character is a big plus, considering how spammy [Amnesiac generic shonen anime protag #155] 's gameplay feels.
    Hard mode is fun enough and doesn't really feel ****
    Visuals are meh.
    Fishing feels like an half-baked afterthought.
    Monster design is awful.
    Very long, doesn't really get boring or grindy.
    Outfits and skins available in game are essentially just recolors or terrible accessories.
    The good skins are locked away in the cash shop.
    **** cash shops.

    Doesn't stand out among other, better JRPGs.
    Buy on sale maybe.    … Expand
  9. Olkadan
    Oct 12, 2021
    5
    Jrpg with a bad story is a bad jrpg!
    They keep making them and players rate them 10/10. So strange.
  10. mugaro4201
    Sep 12, 2021
    5
    нельзя играть за других персонажей и это большая проблема так что 5/10
  11. Sepherim
    Nov 27, 2021
    6
    Tales of Arise es un juego entretenido pero nada especial tampoco. La historia, como suele ocurrir en estos juegos, es predecible y llena de tópicos, pero cumple lo suficientemente bien como para tener algo de interés y unos personajes algo decentes. Aunque a menudo se siente un poco como un libro de autoayuda y tiene todo el topicazo clásico sobre la amistad, el amor y demás. Los combatesTales of Arise es un juego entretenido pero nada especial tampoco. La historia, como suele ocurrir en estos juegos, es predecible y llena de tópicos, pero cumple lo suficientemente bien como para tener algo de interés y unos personajes algo decentes. Aunque a menudo se siente un poco como un libro de autoayuda y tiene todo el topicazo clásico sobre la amistad, el amor y demás. Los combates son entretenidos, especialmente al principio, pero son demasiado simplones. Y cuentan con algunos problemas, primero que el juego está hecho para jugar con pad, lo cual hace que no se saque partido a las posibilidades del teclado y ratón como sistema de control; la forma más obvia en que esto se manifiesta en que el personaje activo solo puede tener 3 habilidades "disponibles" lo cual hace que bien pronto dejes de comprar otras habilidades activas porque no las vas a usar, y siendo unas mejores que otras, el combate se vuelve más repetitivo. Luego falta variedad de enemigos para un juego de esta duración, lo cual encaja con que, en general, la segunda mitad del juego se siente apresurada y falta de contenido. Finalmente, como suele ocurrir en los JRPG, el desarrollo del personaje es más bien limitado, la subida de nivel o equipo simplemente mejora los stats sin ningún tipo de elección, y a partir de cierto punto las habilidades desbloqueables ya las irás teniendo en cantidad, desapareciendo también de ahí las posibilidades de priorizar un estilo de juego u otro. Unido a que, en general, no hay ninguna razón real para jugar con distintos personajes o cambiar la alineación más que en momentos muy puntuales, hace que el juego se vuelva crecientemente repetitivo a medida que pasan las horas.

    Gráficamente Tales of Arise es un juego que está bien. No es impresionante ni nada así, pero cumple, con un diseño agradable y algunas situaciones con encanto. El sonido cumple muy bien, eso hay que reconocerlo, aunque hay momentos en que las canciones se hacen algo repetitivas por escucharlas una y otra vez en bucle. Y me he encontrado algunos bugs, como alguna salida a escritorio, nada terrible pero sin duda molesto; lo cual se une a unos fallos de control que no tienen mucho sentido, como indicarle a un personaje que se cambie con uno de los que está fuera y que no lo hagan, y cosas por el estilo; y es que la IA de nuestros acompañantes es, en el mejor de los casos, discreta, cuando no directamente tonta.

    El resultado de ello es un juego entretenido que tiene una buena cantidad de horas de contenido y que, si bien no dará nada memorable a nadie, puede valer la pena a quienes busquen un entretenimiento ligero. Un 6.    … Expand
  12. 0xInternal
    Jan 8, 2023
    7
    The plot starts off good but the writing for the characters are horrible and annoying and the quality of life is signifcantlly downgraded from characters and skits compare to their previous game "Tales of berseria" the only thing this game improved on from their previous game was combat and thats about it, the characters are horribly written especially rinwell and it just so damn annoyingThe plot starts off good but the writing for the characters are horrible and annoying and the quality of life is signifcantlly downgraded from characters and skits compare to their previous game "Tales of berseria" the only thing this game improved on from their previous game was combat and thats about it, the characters are horribly written especially rinwell and it just so damn annoying and makes it hard to progress through the game and there was a ton of plot holes going towards end of the story. I hope their next tales game is well written like berseria but have combat from arise… Expand
  13. spreyz
    May 10, 2022
    6
    godawful combat balance, i just cant recommend this game for its price. If you like spamming the same button and relying on healing items then this game is for you. I need games where i need to use my brain.
  14. CompleteIdiot
    Jul 17, 2022
    7
    Very solid start to the game. Beautiful aesthetic, relatively fun combat and nice story concepts. But as the game unravels the world starts to feel smaller and smaller. The characters are rather generic and the will they/won't they shtick here is multiplied by 3. Main issue is that once you learn the most powerful move relatively early on, to save time you start spamming it constantly.Very solid start to the game. Beautiful aesthetic, relatively fun combat and nice story concepts. But as the game unravels the world starts to feel smaller and smaller. The characters are rather generic and the will they/won't they shtick here is multiplied by 3. Main issue is that once you learn the most powerful move relatively early on, to save time you start spamming it constantly. There is not much incentive to vary things up as that single move is most powerful by far. By the end of it I turned the difficulty down to very easy to not waste time grinding and be done with it. There are some interesting mechanics for future games here, so I'll look out for the next instalment! Chemistry between the main leads was cute though.… Expand
  15. 2random
    Jun 24, 2022
    7
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The game was fun in the beginning, when there was just you and the girl doing funny quests like in borderlands. But then, your generic anime party of 10 forgettable characters came in.… Expand
  16. YamatoHayabusa2
    Jun 13, 2022
    7
    Tales of Arise est un excellent jeu, un jeu qui fera le plus grand bien a la licence. Le jeu possède un univers très riche et complexe, mais également un lot de personnages très attachant et réussie. Le jeu arrive à nous fournir une aventure marquante avec de nombreux rebondissement.
  17. kinsang
    Sep 10, 2022
    7
    ภาพสวย ตัวละครปฏิสัมพันธ์กันได้น่าสนใจ การต่อสู้สนุกแต่ก็ซ้ำซากไปบ้าง เนื้อเรื่องน่าสนใจแต่เขียนบทมาไม่ค่อยดีซักเท่าไหร่
  18. PenetratorGod
    Aug 20, 2023
    6
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Tales of Arise is the next game in a popular Japanese RPG series launched by Tales of Phantasia, which was released on console named SNES in 1995. The game is developed by a subsidiary studio of Bandai Namco Entertainment. It takes place in a universe that combines action, fantasy and science fiction elements. The plot of the game revolves around two planets, Dahna and Rena. The inhabitants of the latter have been plundering the precious resources of the former for the past several hundred years. The game tells the story of a group of heroes from different sides of these two conflicts. Tales of Arise is a continuation of ideas from previous games. The game world can be freely explored and fulfilled numerous missions. The world has a partially open structure and is completely three-dimensional. The game mechanics are highly arcade combat based. Players have access to a wide variety of attacks and special techniques, and can improve their reflexes from their heroes' abilities through the outcome of battles. Improvement of character stats and better equipment collection system also play an important role in this process. Tales of Arise offers three-dimensional visuals designed in a highly cartoon-like style. The game is developed with Unreal Engine 4. It is enriched with animated cutscenes developed by the famous anime studio Ufotable. The game has a size that can vary between 50-100 hours in terms of content.… Expand
  19. imalynxcat
    May 29, 2023
    6
    15 saat sonunda sıkıntıdan bıraktım. Yan görevler ve haritayı keşfetmek hem zevkli değil hem de ödüllendirici değil. Kombat çok sıkıcı.
  20. Tintler
    Jun 25, 2023
    7
    Dünya, karakterler ve bu karakterlerin gelişimi güzel işlenmiş, hikaye ilk başlarda çok jenerik olsa da sonlara doğru güzel açılıyor.
    Grafik olarak 4k'da görsel şölen oluyor, animasyonlar, parçacık efektleri, karakter modellemeleri iyi olmuş. Optimizasyon da çok iyi oyun boyunca 4k 60 fps'nin altına düşmedim, stutter yaşamadım. Oyun sürem boyunca herhangi bugla karşılaşmadım.    Dünya, karakterler ve bu karakterlerin gelişimi güzel işlenmiş, hikaye ilk başlarda çok jenerik olsa da sonlara doğru güzel açılıyor.
    Grafik olarak 4k'da görsel şölen oluyor, animasyonlar, parçacık efektleri, karakter modellemeleri iyi olmuş. Optimizasyon da çok iyi oyun boyunca 4k 60 fps'nin altına düşmedim, stutter yaşamadım. Oyun sürem boyunca herhangi bugla karşılaşmadım.

Awards & Rankings

27
#27 Best PC Game of 2021
34
#34 Most Discussed PC Game of 2021

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
84

Generally favorable reviews - based on 15 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 15 out of 15
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 15
  3. Negative: 0 out of 15
  1. GameCritics
    Feb 23, 2022
    75
    It’s not an absolute slam dunk for the return of the Tales series, but it’s a solidly-crafted JRPG with a great battle system and fabulous environments to adventure through. It’s a shame the dialogue and story don’t match the stellar work done elsewhere, but on the whole it’s still a trip well worth taking.
    Read full review
  2. Game World Navigator Magazine
    Nov 30, 2021
    77
    If you don’t mind the cliché story, you’ll probably enjoy Tales of Arise – it has good graphics, good pacing and fluid (if a bit too easy) combat. [Issue#256, p.64]
  3. PCMag
    Sep 29, 2021
    80
    The Tales series makes a triumphant return with Arise, a game that delivers excellent, highly polished RPG action that stands above its predecessors. Despite being a RPG, Tales of Arise features a rich combat system that makes the title contend with some of the best action games released this year.
    Read full review
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