Tales of Arise (PlayStation 4) review "Hey guys! It's time to fight our eighth variation of the common wolf!"

My biggest gripe with Tales of Arise is one that’s been bugging me about virtually every modern JRPG with an action-oriented approach to battling that I’ve played. While it isn’t a new issue as far as these games are concerned, it’s one that hasn’t improved over the decades.

I remember when I first got into RPGs with the NES’ Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy games. Many of those cartridges would include a poster containing virtually all the monsters you’d encounter during the course of your quest, so you’d see there were many more monsters than monster designs, with each design being utilized a few times with minor alterations such as changing its color or having it hold a different weapon.

Over the ensuing decades, that has been a pretty consistent thing. Regardless of what system you’re talking about and how technologically advanced it is in comparison to the NES, you can count on RPGs routinely recycling their monster designs, even though it seems to me that, in theory, it should be possible for a creative designer to generate a large collection of adversaries that all have their own look.

Now, with so many of these games utilizing combat systems relying more on action than scrolling through menus and clicking on various commands, this problem has gotten worlds more annoying to me, which brings me to Tales of Arise. Now, I’m no dummy. I understand that when a team of designers is crafting a number of well-animated foes that all have their own attacks and moves, you’re not going to have as many original designs as you’d get if they were static images with (at most) a few frames of animation. But this…this just isn’t enough. Especially when you’re considering this is a modern, big-company RPG where a player is expected to devote dozens upon dozens of hours in order to beat it, get through its post-game content and do all its assorted side quests.

You’ll be thinking back to the wide variety of creatures in, say, those AD&D Monster Manuels and wondering why so many of your confrontations in this game have your party taking on generic wolves, birds, bees, slimes and whatever; while virtually anything with an actual interesting design is relegated to boss fights and mini-boss confrontations. You’ll possibly erupt in incredulous laughter when you enter the game’s second region, have a conversion about how a new part of the world means new kinds of monsters to fight and then immediately get into a battle with a stronger version of the wolves you fought with regularity throughout the introductory land. And, if you’re like me, you’ll be mentally checked out of things before you reach the final dungeon, just going through the motions by rote in order to see the damn thing through until the closing credits.

Which is a shame because Tales of Arise is a good game with fun combat. It just needed more variety in its opposition so every single dungeon didn’t devolve into a long, mostly linear, walk interrupted by several battles against tougher versions of the same foes I’d been fighting throughout all the other dungeons I’d meandered through.

You start out in control of a guy only known as Iron Mask and you are in hell. Maybe not literally, but as close to it as possible. You’re a slave in a region known for heat and fire; a place where slaves tend to get worked to death at the will of a tyrannical lord. Iron Mask wears a mysterious mask (duh!) that prevents him from feeling any pain, which is quite the double-edged sword. Sure, that means he can take on additional work to help out other slaves, but the community’s doctor also has to pay extra attention to him because it’s not like he’s going to realize he just got seriously wounded by that guard he just pissed off if he can’t feel the painful sensation naturally caused by the business end of a sword going through flesh.

One day, Iron Mask encounters a young woman running from guards and decides to protect her. This leads to all sorts of revelations. While Shionne belongs to the same Renan race as his country’s oppressors, she seeks to take down its five lords. She also contains a great deal of magical power that manifests itself in a burning sword that he can wield because of the whole “no pain” thing. And, most importantly, while Iron Mask might be Amnesiac Hero #4698460, he does know enough about his moral code to decide to join forces to help the people of the world’s five lands fight back against their lords, as well as powerful beings manipulating everyone from behind the scenes.

The Tales of series tends to have enjoyable combat and Arise is no exception. While you have a basic attack, it’s pretty weak and best used when you’re waiting for your stamina meter to recharge. You can program a number of skills to various buttons — some for when you’re on the ground and others for when you’re jumping — and they will provide the bulk of your offense. Controlling Iron Mask, you’ll get a variety of attacks, ranging from multiple sword swipes to moves that can damage foes from outside of melee range. Other characters have their own attacks, as well as both attack and healing spells. Inflict or receive enough damage and you’ll be able to enter a special mode where those skills temporarily won’t eat stamina and you’ll get access to a special Mystic Arte attack.

Fighting in this game is fast-paced and fun, with you dodging enemy attacks and striking back. Each member of your (eventually) six-person party also has a meter that gradually fills, allowing them the use of a special attack that can neutralize the strength of certain enemies, whether it be grounding flying enemies, interrupting the motion of charging foes or interrupting the spells of magic-users.

There is one flaw with fighting in Tales of Arise, though. Enemies tend to be damage sponges. Regular encounters aren’t that bad, but anything more formidable than those wolves and bees will likely take some time to bring down. Even your powerful Mystic Artes will only trim a small percentage of their health, which just doesn’t feel right. Why have an attack so awesome that it gets its own brief cutscene if the vast majority of your opposition can effortlessly absorb it? While there are a lot of tough confrontations in this game, it seemed that much of that challenge was due to it being a battle of attrition to whittle down massive life bars.

But that’s the thing about this game. It was a lot of fun to play through, but it also was pretty easy to find flaws keeping it from being a truly great experience. I enjoyed a lot of how the plot unfolded as Iron Mask, Shionne and their ever-growing party progressed from nation to nation in their bid to unseat the land’s lords. Each country’s lord took a different approach to his or her tyranny, causing each part of your journey to play out differently as you try to navigate a country run by secret police fomenting a culture in which no one trusts anyone else and then discover what happens when another location’s resistance faction becomes almost as tyrannical as the person they’re trying to overthrow.

And then you journey to the land those diabolical lords originated from and watch the pace slow to a crawl as you spend more time engaging in conversations than doing anything enjoyable. Let’s just say that I hope you LOVE listening to people encouraging others and convincing them to overcome their insecurities because, after the umpteenth such chat, I was really feeling Kefka’s rant about how Final Fantasy VI’s heroes sounded like a self-help book.

While I would say Tales of Arise is a good game that should provide a good amount of enjoyment for fans of the series, or JRPGs in general, it was hard to not be a little disappointed by how a few annoyances marred the overall experience. Fighting the same basic enemies over and over eventually led to combat feeling tedious, as did the enormous amount of health possessed by virtually every major foe. I mostly had fun, but by the time I finished it, I was more than ready for the quest to be over and felt no urge to dive into any of its post-game contest or challenge its high-level bonus bosses.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (March 19, 2025) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.