Review: Tales of Arise Winds Through Rich Moral Terrain, But Only Up to a Point

The game’s incredibly refined, real-time combat is complemented by the social lessons and warnings imparted by the story.

Tales of Arise
Photo: Bandai Namco Entertainment

Duality runs through Tales of Arise, the 17th main entry in the Tales series. It is, after all, the tale of twin planets—Dahna and Rena—on which, 300 years after the subjugation of the former by the latter, rebellion is on the rise. The game’s first part relies on a healthy mix of politics and fantasy to put an admirably fresh spin on a few JRPG tropes, focusing on the many different and insidious ways in which people can be enslaved. For a while, Tales of Arise’s incredibly refined, real-time combat is complemented by the social lessons and warnings imparted by the story. Sadly, its second half, which steers into cold science-fiction terrain and needlessly draws out the combat, doesn’t sustain that balance.

Tales of Arise is initially powerful at the level of characterization, setting Alphen both among and apart from his fellow Dahnians by dint of the self-erasing iron mask that he cannot remove and his inability to feel pain. The horrors of Dahna’s five realms speak for themselves, and it’s properly frustrating not to be able to solve people’s woes with your blazing blade alone. (It’s telling that Alphen’s first act isn’t to stop a malicious guard from hitting an exhausted child, but to step in and take that blow for him.) Tales of Arise is compelling in its depiction of rebellion and how Alphen fits into it, but the game loses itself once it launches into outer space, to Rena, and its characters face a mystical extinction-level event, in the process rendering all the moral questions about Dahnan-Renan relations essentially moot.

Tales of Arise is at its strongest when lingering on the lives of the people of Dahna and their questioning of those lives. There’s a vividness and thematic cogency to the depiction of how the despicable Lord of Cyslodia maintains control of that realm’s populace with his secret police, rewarding desperate Dahnan informants with scraps of a better life at the expense (and trust) of their fellows. And as Alphen travels through each realm, he and his companions, among them a young Dahnan martial artist named Law and a member of Cyslodia’s resistance force named Rinwell, constantly take breaks not only to heal, fish, farm, and cook status-enhancing meals, but also to discuss the moral ramifications of their actions.

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For one, they talk about what’s to be done in the cathedral-like city of Ganath Haros, where the Water Lord rules with a mind-controlling religion that deprives people of their free will, and of the threat posed by a power-starved Dahnan liberator so unconcerned with collateral damage that he may be an even worse despot than his Renan predecessor. Tales of Arise stresses that there’s more to a successful rebellion than battling through an austere cave-turned-castle or resplendent yacht en route to a climactic showdown with each region’s lord. After the fighting is done, peace must be forged between both sides of the rebellion.

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It’s a shame, then, that Tales of Arise relegates many of its conversations about morality into the franchise’s optional skits: fully voice-acted but otherwise storyboarded scenes that can be viewed upon entering a new area. But at least those conversations are being had, and to the extent that otherwise standard (however pretty) grotto, prison, and cave dungeons acquire layers of meaning. The same can’t be said for the overly expository skits in the spacefaring second half of the game, during which the characters have nothing of particular profundity to say about the structures they visit, like an artificial island shot down from Rena to siphon up Dahna’s energy. Like the combat, these scenes start to grow exhaustingly repetitive, something that’s even more noticeable once the dungeons abandon the pretense of exploration and turn into drab, enemy-packed corridors that funnel players from one encounter to the next.

Tales of Arise’s length exacerbates some of this frustration. Thirty hours in, you’ll have encountered just about every type of standard foe, as well as learned most of the combat skills, healing abilities, and magic spells that the game has to offer. By this halfway point, you’ll essentially be recycling the same techniques against enemies who are also reskinned versions of earlier ones. And yet, mindless as these repetitive, random battles are, you can’t effectively button-mash your way through them, because Tales of Arise’s “boost gauge” system—which allows players to interrupt and disable enemy attacks—requires your undivided attention.

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As you chain together combos of your regular moves, each of your six party members fill up their boost meter, allowing you to, say, have Earth-channeling warrior Dohalim summon vines to slow down speedy foes or to swap in motherly knight Kisara to repel charging enemies with her massive shield. This is a good and rewarding system, especially during boss fights, but it’s wearisome to have to pay that much attention to every fight, given that the worse you are at chaining and countering foes, the more protracted the already overlong battles get.

Thanks to the game’s rich writing, rarely does it feel that you’re just wandering through one luscious environment after another—like the canopy-level walkways of the Gianne Woodland or steep ivied cliffs of the Aureum Falls—so much as you’re being given glimpses of a land well worth fighting for. Even the variety of your party serves a deeper function, suggesting that one person alone, however strong, cannot break down every obstacle. At least when you’re on Dahnan. Once you land on Renan, Tales from Arise suddenly feels as if it’s no longer interested in the connections between people, ultimately playing out as a one-on-one battle fought in the drab ruins of an alien civilization, all for the sake of the player’s purported entertainment.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by fortyseven communications.

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Score: 
 Developer: Bandai Namco Studios  Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment  Platform: Xbox Series X  Release Date: September 10, 2021  ESRB: E10+  ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence, Language, Use of Alcohol

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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