Tales of Arise review

 Tales of Arise is the 17th mothership title of the Tales of franchise and got released worldwide on September 10, 2021. As a long fan of the Tales of series I was eager to play it. Here is my opinion about the adventure of Alphen and his comrades!

Warning: The review is spoiler-"free", that means that you have to mark the black parts in order to read the spoilers.

Graphics

Bandai Namco used the same engine for their graphics a very long time, so that the graphics of older Tales of titles was often mocked and looked down upon. Especially Tales of Zestiria suffered in this regard. Now Bandai Namco used the unreal engine and Tales of Arise couldn't look any better than that! Everything is sparkling, great looking and simply WOW! Every fellow Tales of fan can nod in unisuno: Yes, that is what we were hoping for!

Skits

The popular skits, aka conversations between the characters, have gotten a brand-new look, too. They are something between a real scene and a comic strip and look pretty cool in the new, already mentioned graphics. But I have to be honest: I don't need to see Law scratching his head for 20 seconds when the skit is so boring that I notice this gesture.

Skits were my absolute highlights in older Tales of titles: They were fun, you got to know the characters better and you could dive in much deeper into the story and laugh alongside your team. But the skits in Arise are just... fancy-looking. The characters repead the exact same thing one just saw in a scene. And it doesn't just happen once, but every. time. It is superfluous, monononous and... why do these skits exist in the first place, anyway? The player didn't sleep in the scene just now, so there is no need to repead it just a couple of seconds afterwards!

Same goes for the interactions between the characters. There is little to no improvement between them for a really long time. And they simply keep on repeating the same things in slightly different words. It made me baffled, because these are not the skits I looked forward to and came to love in all other Tales of entries!

Combat system

Who played one Tales of title, they can play another one just the same: The combat system is similar in all Tales of entries and is easy to learn/ use for beginners and experts alike. Bandai Namco tried something new in Arise and it is faster paced than its former titles. The graphics do their job and everything looks fancy and sparkly. I like the new system, but personally I didn't like the combat time. For my opinion the fights dragged on, so that even normal fights felt like a chore.

Characters

Alphen, Shionne, Law, Rinwell, Dohalim and Kisara form the team in Tales of Arise. Six characters are a normal amount for a Tales of title, but somehow... this team "didn't click" for me. Their interactions seemed... wooden, out-of-place, badly paced and... artificial. Honestly, most of the time all interactions between the characters were exhausting. They weren't fun, they weren't exciting, they were just exhausting, because the characters are so superficial and even after getting "depth", they don't go deeper than a puddle.

Dohalim is the noble of the team and still can't undress himself by the end of the game.

Kisara is the mom in the worst sense of the word. She does everything - cooking, sewing and scolding. Of course she can fight like a lion, too. I love her design (except for her back...), but watching her was so 90y-style it already hurt.

Rinwell got such a bad schoolgirl-crush on Law that it's not even funny. I could just roll my eyes at every interaction between them. Otherwise, she takes like 9/10 of the game to NOT snarl at every Renan she comes across - be it teammates or foe.

Alphen has no edges. He starts out as the liberator of the world, but in the end he is just a "faceless" character.

Law is the "comic relief" of the team and since the rest of the team doesn't fit together, he stands out like a sore thumb, too.

Shionne is the firey tsundere and doesn't want to fit into the team. And let me tell you: She is good at it.

Story

Alphen wants to free Dahna of their opressors, the Renans. He starts as a slave until he comes across Shionne and he is able to wield the Blazing Sword, which he takes out of the Fire Core Shionne possesses. Shionne wants to kill all the ruling lords of the four domains (to get rid of her thorns which can kill people). Underway they meet the fist-fighter Law, the mage Rinwell, the soldier Kisara and a friendly lord named Dohalim to join their cause.

Despite the geographically nonsense of having two domains right besides each other with opposite climates (desert vs. snow plains), the story takes off good. The problem starts after the second lord: The player knows how the story will unfold and the game gets less fun real quick. New domain - killing lord - obtaining core - and on to the next one. Since only the graphics are engaging and motivating, it takes a lot of willpower to play forth. 

There are some other problems that I stumbled across:

(Zephyr's death was unneccessary. I simply can't understand and accept the plotwriter for this meager reason to let Law join the fight. He hated his father because he left them and wasn't at her funeral. OK, but running away from home were your father wasn't anymore is so... strange? And don't get me started on all the cheesy, run-of-the-mill lines from Zephyr to Law via some dubios, odd sidequests in letters that I would have written better while being half asleep?

The plot about Alphen being asleep for a very long time can be seen from players a hundred miles away, but taking the reason of him killing lots of people during the ceremony while literally nobody besides him and Naori are visible in the scene is just... implausible.

Shionne wants to get rid of her thorns and wants the power of the Renas Alma - the "master core" which manifets itself when all other cores are gathered. She doesn't speak about her goal for a long time despite being a great chance for the team to connect to each other. Don't get me wrong: It's not Shionnes fault, but the plot-writer's.)

But sooner or later, the player beats all four lords and gather all the cores and frees the planet from their surpressors.

(An honest question: When I kill four lords and I notice the SAME red woman beside each one of them... WHY don't I talk about her with my team mates? This has been bugging me so much I lost sleep over it! And yes, I know that the Renans can't see her. But at least Kisara should SHOUT what the same red woman has to do with Vholran after seeing her with her lord Dohalim beforehand?)

It comes like most of you may have guessed: The team gets the opportunity to visit Rena! But unfortunately, the games feels so rushed and badly paced that you can't believe that Bandai Namco dared to present this to you.

The Renan city is so... empty and feels simply too big for its own good. The sidequest about the background-information of the lords is so badly inserted AND written that it feels like an insult. Seriously, I am still baffled that people got payed to write and program this!

The story takes an interesting twist, but it still feels rushed. The information about the new world/ lore are simply hidden in logs and while they are an interesting read, it feels badly inserted into the game itself. I would have wished to have gotten more time to process and to unfold its power and magic.

But the heroes wouldn't be heroes if they wouldn't safe the world - once or twice!

(After beating Vholran a second time, the team thought he was a goner for good. But no... it got worse.

Alphen & Co got a starship, that can literally fligh through space. And they know that they have to get into the center of a gigantic blue-glowing flower which sticks out into space. So the most logical consequence would be to take the starship (they are already on it and it works just fine) and just... fly over to the center of the flower, yes?

No. The team enters a freaking huge, confusing dungeon for no apparent reason and have to fight floor after floor for hours, just to get into the middle of the aforementioned flower and beat the big bad boss and get the Renas Alma back to unify the worlds. But no, we forgot Vholran, who got blown into pieces A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE AND HAS NO STARSHIP. But he just FLOWS WITH A STARSHIP TO THE MIDDLE OF THE FLOWER (what the team didn't do) and challenges Alphen AGAIN. So far, so unnerving. Just when Alphen beat the last drop of will out of him, the hero of Tales of Arise starts a moralizing lecture that every church would have gotten green with envy. Again this piece of dialogue is so badly written that I couldn't believe my own eyes. And it gets even worse when Vholran steals the Renas Alma from Alphens feet because he is so distracted of his own sermon! GETTING THIS THING TOOK ME OVER 40 HOURS AND ALPHEN JUST LET IT BE! Yes, Alphen nearly just shrugs his shoulders and saves the day without the almighty thing we learn the whole game is the only thing in the world(s) to rescue us all! Every beginner of a fanfiction writer would have written this so much better I had tears in my eyes because the ending was so bad, so cheesy, so chaotic, so illogical it made me angry! HOW AND WHY DID YOU DO THIS; BANDAI NAMCO? You are known for GOOD games and great, splendid endings! Did your trainee write this?! It was an insult!)

The ending wasn't quite what I expected.

Conclusion

The graphics are great, but the characters are superficial, the team doesn't fit together, the battles drag on too long and the story is to linear for my taste. The plot was gruesome and the ending was an insult. If this is the future of the Tales of games, I have to think long and hard if I can't invest my time in games that are actually fun and have a great, engaging story and character development.