Tales of Arise is the latest entry in the long-running Bandai Namco ‘Tales of’ JRPG series, pedalling the same “power of friendship” rhetoric and sporting the same ludicrous plot escalation as its predecessors. As someone who was locked-in as a fan back in the GameCube era with Tales of Symphonia, it’s been fascinating for me to see how the series has evolved (and remained the same) over the years.
The story at the centre of Arise is standard JRPG fayre in a lot of ways. It sees our party slowly but surely come together and travel through a number of element-themed realms, in order to defeat a cast of eccentric ne’er-do-wells and acquire their magical MacGuffins for some ill-defined purpose. And true to form it packs more twists and turns than a quest to find something in Lidl.
Tales games have generally excelled at focusing the action around a strong group of characters though, and that remains true here. Our party of loveable rascals play off each other very well, making for some entertaining — and even sympathetic — interactions, even if there isn’t too much depth below the surface.
After a cursory dabble in a demo or having watched a couple of cutscenes, one might be tempted to label this “a game of the times”. This is because it places the theme of discrimination front and centre in its story. So front and centre, in fact, that it feels like it’s reaching out of the screen to claw at your eyeballs in case you missed it. That is to say that its delivery of the message about discrimination — that it’s bad, actually — is so heavy-handed and lacking in nuance that it actually feels like a game from a decade ago. In fact quite a lot of this messaging (as well as several of its other plot beats) are ripped wholesale from previous Tales games, so it feels like something of a backwards step. Especially in a time when games are finding novel ways to convey powerful, complex stories about discrimination, it really stands out when you’ve got nothing new to bring to the table.
Of course that’s not to say it’s not a story worth telling. One can certainly argue that bluntly stuffing lines like “we’re all the same actually” into every single character interaction could be a good introduction to these themes for a younger audience. A personal favourite moment is when our comically evil villain proclaims “I don’t care about Renan and Dahnan,” [the two races in conflict] “I only care about ME and EVERYONE ELSE!”. Upon which our astute heroes reflect: “He doesn’t see Renan and Dahnan” “But not in a good way like us!” That being said, I wouldn’t be giving my young children Tales of Arise to play with. After all this is a game in which towns full of innocent civilians are literally melted alive and used as resources, so there’s a bit of a contrast in tone.
Human soup aside, the game is beautiful to behold. The time, talent and technology brought to bear on its visuals are the surest signs that this is a 2021 release after all. Each of Arise’s lavish environments has a skybox that could captivate you for whole minutes, and brightly coloured flora and fauna that really pop out. In your brief moments of respite it makes you wish you could just wander the world, without all the hassle of having to save it. Which brings us on to the combat…
Unlike its story formula, the combat system of the Tales series has been evolving and advancing with each entry. Every new game has introduced its own unique quirks and generally made the action more fast and furious as the engine has been able to keep up. In Arise you bring a party of 4 to the fight with 2 friends on the sidelines, and hack away at your foes in real time using standard and special attacks. One of the key features new to this game is the ‘Boost attack’ that can be used as an interrupt, with each of your party members’ attacks being effective against different enemy types such as spell-casters or charging adversaries. As well as looking visually impressive, these attacks allow you to make full use of your party and their specialisms, including those who are outside of the combat proper, without having to clumsily switch people in and out as per previous games.
However despite the spectacle and the frenzied pace of combat in Arise, I found it much more of a chore than in prior Tales entries. There is rarely any strategy to encounters, even against bosses, so you’re unthinkingly cycling through the same set of moves and hoping you defeat the enemy before your healing runs dry. Couple this with a misjudged difficulty curve — meaning you’re either constantly up against the ropes or just button-mashing against a gargantuan health bar — quite a small pool of enemies, and a very slow trickle of new moves for each character, and things get disappointingly repetitive quite quickly. And that’s not what you want when the combat is the backbone of your game that took me just shy of 60 hours to complete.
There are of course plenty of sidequests and post-game missions to complete, to increase your ‘bang for buck’ in terms of hours played. Some of which contain really fun bits of banter between your companions, though most consist of “go to X place, kill Y big monster and come back”. As the core loop’s appeal had waned long ago, I didn’t particularly fancy running a gamut of combat challenges to unlock a couple more costumes changes for my squad.
Whilst the above reads largely as doom and gloom, Tales of Arise is not without points to recommend it. Crank the difficulty all the way down and you’ll have fewer points of friction to deal with while you take in its majestic landscapes and chuckle at its nonsensical rollercoaster of a plot. You’ll even get the same visceral satisfaction of landing the flashy new team-up kills against staggered opponents. But with only a few of those animations to see, it’s just another element that it’s easy to tire of before you’re halfway through this classic JRPG saga.
