The Tales of series is notorious for having mechanics that are not kind to players.
General
- The notorious way of handling sidequests. Dozens of them have finicky timeframes to activate or complete them in, involve doing things the player would have no reason for doing without prior knowledge, and are very easy to miss because nothing indicates a sidequest has even become available. There are also games that have seemingly innocuous sidequests early on that, if the player has missed or not completed properly, will lock them out of getting a good reward later on. Fortunately, later installments made it easier on players by having sidequests marked on the map upon becoming available.
Tales of Phantasia
- The original version had the incredibly high encounter rate. This meant there wasn't much room for the player to move through any dungeon, before getting thrust into another battle against enemies. The Holy Bottle item helped in lowering the encounter rate a little bit, but the difference was not that big. While there was an item that the player could obtain to alter the encounter rate, said item was at the end of the very difficult Bonus Dungeon. Which didn't unlock until just before the Final Dungeon. And Holy Bottles didn't work there, meaning the player had to make it through the really high encounter rate. And several of the enemies in that dungeon were capable of wiping the party. Fortunately, the remakes significantly lowered the encounter rate.
Tales of Destiny
- The original version suffered from the same high encounter rate as Phantasia initially did. Just like with that game's remakes, Destiny's encounter rate was made more manageable in its PS2 version.
Tales of Symphonia
- The "spell queue": the game can only render two mid- or higher-level spells at a time, one for the player party and one for the enemies.note As a result, trying to cast two at once will cause one of them to be delayed until the first is completely finished. This was accepted as a technical limitation in the original GameCube release, but the fact that it's never been changed in any of the Updated Rereleases on more powerful systems has been frequently cited as a point against them.
Tales of Rebirth
- The typing puzzles. These required the player to input very specific answers, and accepted very few synonyms. It's the only game that has an example of You Can't Get Ye Flask in the series, and it made certain puzzles a lot more difficult than they needed to be, especially for non-native Japanese speakers. This might have played a part in why Rebirth was never localized.
Tales of the Abyss
- Character titles have effects. What kind of effects? The game doesn't tell you. Majority of those effects are passive, like healing certain Status Ailments if the player has the title equipped and stands still for several seconds. The worst offender, though, are Natalia's titles. Four of them affect which level of items the player will obtain from Search Points. And two of those are costume titles, which are the only costume titles that actually have an effect beyond altering the character's appearance.
- Search Points and Din's shop. The first need to be found and have items collected from them, so the player can give them to the second, for pitiful amounts of Gald, and end up giving points into certain categories, which can result in making the best equipment of the game. If the player knew how to properly use Din's shop. And the player also knew about Natalia's titles influencing what items are gotten from Search Points, mentioned above, making the process easier.
Tales of Legendia
- Puzzle Booths. They inexplicably show up out of nowhere, and nothing in the game hints that they even exist. Completing them without getting hints or skipping them gives the player a title for Senel, which doesn't even boost his parameters enough to be worth it, and is only available at the end of the game. Even if the player decides to play the puzzle booths, the puzzles often require long waiting times to push blocks or move things to the right spot, even requiring pixel-perfect accuracy with the Sorcerer Ring.
Tales of the Tempest
- The game was full of these, but the battle system was particularly bad. Terrible moving range on the battlefield, unfair attack range (for enemies, not the party), and the dumbest AI in the history of videogames. AI-controlled party members would run to the opposite side of the field for no reason, stay there for a few seconds, and then return to their original spot.
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
- The game automatically adjusts the party line-up, and which player controls which member, and that would be fine... if Marta didn't leave the party every-so-often.
- The Stun status became infuriatingly frequent, even more so than in any previous Tales of game. The player could be certain they would end up stunned at least once per battle, and even more times, if the battle lasted longer.
- The Monster Allies themselves.
- Including the Monster Capture mechanic. To catch a monster, the player needed to be able to manipulate the elemental wheel in the lower left corner, and needed at least three of the same element in it, to be offered to catch a monster at the end of the battle... and only if the player was fighting a monster, whose enemy was actually fitting the elemental wheel. After capturing a monster and using it as a party member, the player had to deal with the fact that monsters were incapable of using items in-battle.
- And, in order to get a monster to evolve, the player needed to cook a specific dish for it, which would determine which evolution-branch the monster followed.
- The general nerfing of the Symphonia cast. This ties in with the Monster Allies, as the cast was likely nerfed to force the player to actually use monsters as party members, and not fill their party with the Symphonia cast instead. These characters pop into the party off and on, but they never gain experience from any battle. Fortunately, their levels are adjusted to fit around where the player should be at that point in the game. However, the cast is capped off at Level 50, meaning they are basically useless on higher difficulties or in the Bonus Dungeon.
- The Katz quests. While they are not required to beat the game, they can be helpful in giving some good equipment. The quests have no effort put into them, being a basic copy-and-paste quest over and over, and never take the Character Development of the party into consideration, which makes them feel very weird late in the game. The quests also demand the player to be at a higher level than necessary at that point, and the quests are lost at the end of each chapter, which can lock the player out of accessing the Twilight Palace.
- The one plot-mandated usage of the WiiMote. It involves a minigame, where the player is forced to move Emil towards a Garuda, but keeping an eye out for random bursts of whirlwinds the Garuda is sending its way, and getting hit by them will push Emil further back and lose the minigame. After managing to make it to the Garuda, the player needs to shake the WiiMote like crazy to subdue the Garuda long enough. An unnecessary, shoe-horned section for motion controls in a game that never used them again. Fortunately, said section is far less frustrating on the PS3.
Tales of Vesperia
- The player must equip skills, in order to gain extra power or additional abilities in-battle. That in itself is not bad, but the problem comes in that the player is required to use skill points to unlock abilities that the previous games' characters were able to do by default, such as back-stepping or using items on other party members.
- The Sorcerer's Ring. Shooting it at enemies can let you enter the battle with them stunned, giving you an Advantage Encounter. However, it's difficult to aim, only has a 1/3 chance of actually accomplishing this, and can't be used at all on the world map. Furthermore, the game doesn't explain any of that.
- The Updated Re-release of the game attempted to balance the games combo system that made many end game fights a joke (like Yuri's Duel Boss with Flynn) by introducing something called "Techouts" (basically the enemy has a set of skills or attacks they will use when their stuck in a combo). This mechanic is hated by fans of the original 360 version of the game because one of Vesperia's main appeals was that the player, through experimentation and learning, could create near infinite combos, but only by taking the time to learn how. Now even a basic 30 hit combo has a chance of being interrupted by the boss just randomly breaking free. Plus this addition doesn't provide a player benefit and comes across as the developers going "Stop Having Fun" Guys.
Tales of Hearts
- The DS version can be quite chuggy depending on how many characters are on the screen at once. This can get very annoying during some boss fights (Such as the Chalcedony Squad or some random encounters). Emulators could even aggravate this - or even softlock the game by trying to "fix" chuggy-framerates on the ROM.
Tales of Xillia
- The overall link-up battle system. In order to unlock Overlimit, and even use Mystic Artes, the characters must be linked-up. While there is eventually a skill that allows the player to start up their controlled character's Mystic Arte without a Link Arte, they still need to be linked with another character to achieve Overlimit. This is especially frustrating, and noticeable, in solo matches in the coliseum.
- The Felgana Mine has various shafts that need to be opened up with a pickaxe, as well as some minestones, which contain items that can help with shop building or are needed for sidequests. Downside, the player needs to button-mash one button repeatedly to charge up the pickaxe and break down the stonewalls. Absolutely pointless feature for all of one dungeon.
- Any party member that hasn't been used in-battle for a while will begin complaining about this while walking in the field. Same with not eating for a while, with the characters talking about how hungry they are. Except they often complain right after finishing a dish.
- Shop Building. New equipment is not automatically unlocked by progressing through the game. It's now based on this mechanic, where the player inputs resources found in the field or dropped by monsters to increase each shop type's level. This means the player needs to grind for resources or be prepared to be stuck with sub-par equipment against bosses. The shop building also has a bonus of doubling or tripling experience points earned from resources for a certain type of shop, and with a certain type of resource. Nothing in the game explains what affects this bonus or if there's even a way for the player to influence this, so the only hope is that the game is being nice and giving a triple experience points bonus to the wanted shop.
- The mechanic of bosses automatically breaking out of combos and counterattacking after a certain amount of damage is done in the combo. It seems like an understandable countermeasure to prevent skilled players from simply stun-locking bosses, but the damage limit is so easily reached that it basically makes it impossible to perform combos against them, which goes against the series' appeal of combos and keeping enemies stunned as long as possible.
- At the very least, the damage limit is a set value, and once you figure it out you can knock a boss down to prevent them from counter attacking and easily start a new combo. This makes it easy to deal with and not a problem, but it still runs counter to the design of the rest of the series and makes combo enabling abilities feel useless. This is fixed in Xillia 2, thankfully.
- Choosing between the paths of Milla and Jude. While this could have added replay value, the vast majority of the game both protagonists spend together, have access to the same sidequests, areas, and skits. Most moments the player gets to only see on 1 path are a few short scenes and brief sections of the game that Milla and Jude aren't together. There simply isn't anywhere near enough content between each path to justify the system. What's more, it wouldn't have been difficult at all to simply just switch perspectives between Milla and Jude as needed to experience the content of both paths on 1 playthrough.
Tales of Xillia 2
- The Debt system. To break it down, it requires the player to pay a specific amount of Gald whenever they reach that amount over and over, throughout the game, or they'll be unable to travel to new areas and proceed with the plot. What makes it annoying is the travel restrictions seem to exist as a very poor excuse to prevent the player from going to areas they aren't supposed to be at yet. Ostensibly, this is because Player Character Ludger will be able to use an above-ground subway system to travel to new areas, but even if Ludger and company could just walk to wherever they need to be, you can't go until part of the debt is paid. It also means that the player is constantly strapped for cash.
- The changed mechanic of only allowing four members in the party while outside of towns. Especially strange because Xillia had a mechanic that allowed the player to change party members mid-battle!
Tales of Zestiria
- While the open world and instant battle transitions gave the game a more 'real time' atmosphere, the camera has been an issue for many players. This is especially common in places with a lot of trees and obstacles, and places with narrow halls. There is no 'battlefield' to transition to, so the party is fighting in the current area, with all those obstacles and walls still being around. The open fields are okay enough with this, but battles in cities (like the second encounter with Lunarre) are notorious for camera issues.
- The leveling-up system for equipment. Like Vesperia, each piece of equipment has an ability. But unlike Vesperia, those abilities are all passive things, like increasing stun time or increased damage against Dragon-type enemies. Weapons have randomized passives, so forging the best weapon at the game's current time is useless, since a weapon with higher parameters easily outranks them. Loads of players choose to ignore this system for a first playthrough, since it's really only necessary to know what they're doing for bonus content.
- The Arte system having a setup of Martial Artes (normal attacks), Hidden Artes (special attacks), and Seraphic Artes (spells) being strong against one, but weak to another. The problem is that bosses can outright ignore this. Even if the player uses the correct counter, some bosses have super armor that negates it. To say this mechanic was disliked is an understatement.
Tales of Berseria
- Hit-Stun. Instead of having a set hit-stun per move — like previous Tales of games or any other Action-RPG game, in general — Berseria uses complicated, counter-intuitive factors for the hit-stun a move can inflict. Like less hit-stun the more the Arte was used in-battle, but more hit-stun the more said Arte has been used across the entire game... The end result is that the player has no actual idea how much hit-stun a move will actually inflict, and there's no way of knowing if a combo will possibly work, even if it worked mere moments before! While this is intended to force players to space out repeated artes, it's not always feasible to do so if an enemy has too many resistances. Not to mention that bosses have very short stagger duration by default.
- Skill Mastery. Each piece of equipment has a passive bonus called a Mastery Skill that it grants you. If you win enough battles with the item equipped, you get to permanently keep the effects of its Mastery Skill. The problem is, the rate of the acquired experience points is based off of Grade the player has won at the end of a battle. On average, weapons have a requirement from 100 to 700 Grade needed, but the average Grade is usually a paltry 2 to 4 in total. Unless you dedicate lots of time specifically to mastering your equipment, you are bound to find new types of equipment by the time you've mastered one, which then raises the question: do you use the newer weapon and skip on the other ones' Mastery Skills, or do you keep using outdated equipment so you'll get their Mastery Skills?
- The power of healing spells is affected by SG and a few other factors that the game simply doesn't bother telling the player. As such, healing spells come off as pathetically weak, unless the player knows what they're doing. And it forces a very defensive play to keep those spells effective. It gets especially annoying when Grade is factored in, as using items in-battle lowers Grade. While the game likely intended for the player to primarily heal through Break Souls instead, this is still easier said than done if the player has trouble accumulating souls or fulfilling specific Break Soul conditions.
- For some players, the mandatory skits. While this game has optional skits like the past titles, this is the first game in the series to include mandatory skits in the main story, which triggers automatically while you're in a town, in the field or in a dungeon. However, the game triggers several of these skits in a row, constantly breaking the game's pacing. It also doesn't help that these skits are three minutes long on average, which can be aggravating if you want to see the whole story. Finally, if you want to use a Denore Bottle to warp to another location, you can't use it until you've seen the story skits. This makes it especially aggravating if you want to Play the Game, Skip the Story for whatever reason, since the game arbitrarily prevents you from going any further until you see them.
- The Dire Foe mechanic is useful for grade and gald farming if the player is able to kill the region's Dire Foe consistently, but if the Dire Foe is too strong, the player will have no choice but to run away, costing them the rewards of the preceding normal battle. Simple mode is the only way to prevent them from spawning, but this also means less grade and gald from normal encounters. Fortunately, the Dire Foe mechanic is removed in the Heavenly Steppes in favor of letting the player manually rechallenge any of the bosses in the dungeon.
- Mystic Artes can be chained together by holding the Mystic Arte button and the D-Pad to switch control to another character. Unfortunately, Mystic Arte animations hide the character HUDs, meaning the player can't immediately tell which character they're switching to or how much BG everyone has.
- The Chain system is designed so that if all of an enemy's weaknesses is hit in one combo, every subsequent hit in the combo gets a damage multiplier regardless of elemental affinities. However, the damage multiplier can reset if the enemy is knocked down and picked up. There is a window of opportunity to continue the chain just a few frames after the enemy is downed, but it practically requires the enemy to already be trapped in an ally's combo to begin with.
Tales of Arise
- Kisara's Boost Arte is awkward to use. While all the others automatically down a certain type of enemy on use, hers is meant to block charging enemies and stop them in their tracks. This means means hers is the only one that needs to be timed to an enemy's attacks (Rinwell's just needs to be used while an enemy's casting meter is visible), will be wasted if your timing is off, and if it's not ready when an enemy charges you're out of luck. Charging enemies also tend to charge frequently, so burning her entire meter to cancel one charge isn't likely to make much of a difference to a fight. The first few bosses after she joins are designed around this mechanic, which is even more frustrating, with the rest of the game basically never really having attacks that make using it helpful. Tellingly, it often sees more use as a method of extending a combo given the AG recharge it confers, or as a means to quickly reset Kisara's position when she's the playable character to arte-cancel, get some breathing room, and parry an attack that would otherwise strike her due to being locked into a combo. Outside of being used to activate some battle cinematics, it's often advised to simply rely on Kisara's parry maneuver if the player wants to indulge in the counter-focused gameplay the Boost Arte is supposed to inspire, since it doesn't have an awkward charging time and can be chained against enemies that hit multiple times in quick succession.
Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 1 + 2 + 3
- Gaining Mystic Artes. Specifically, getting the Descender to learn the Mystic Arte of their class. To learn the Mystic Arte, the player must have mastered every skill that class can learn. Not too difficult, just tedious and MP-expensive. But some classes don't learn their final skill until Level 66! To compare, most first playthroughs have the player face the Final Boss with a Descender at Level 55. And that's with minor grinding, and without changing classes at all. Fortunately, this was only an issue in Radiant Mythology. The next two games changed the requirement for the Descender getting their class' Mystic Arte to be identical to the Tales of characters getting theirs, which required getting to Level 45.
- RM1 required Tales of characters to have a certain amount of affinity with the Descender to agree to join their party outside of plot-mandated battles. This meant the player had to use other Descender-class Mercenaries, and really slowed down the work on getting the Tales of characters leveled up. Fortunately, the next two games removed this mechanic entirely.
Tales of Crestoria
- Having to play forty arena matches to claim arena rewards each week. The player is given five arena tickets at a time to use, and they refill very slowly — the player only gets an arena ticket back once every two hours. Furthermore, rewards reset each week, meaning the player will have to do more than five matches a day every day for a week to get the rewards in the first place. This was especially bad in the Western version of the game, where the developers forgot to include this detail, leading to players not getting rewards until they found out about the feature by looking at the Japanese version. It's widely hated for all these reasons, and seen as a mode designed to draw money from a player because of the fact that you can pay gleamstones to refill the gauge instantly, which can be purchased with real-world money.
- Auto-Battle is disliked due to the Artificial Stupidity it runs on. Characters engage in silly behavior when Auto-Battle is on, ranging from wasting Mystic Artes on enemies that could easily be killed with a normal attack, to healing a near-full HP character over someone lower on HP, to the game having characters attack the leftmost target unless manually diverted. It's helpful for farming on weak enemies, but for anything else, it's not very useful.
- This is a reason why Arena battles that a player should lose on paper are winnable, since the enemy party runs on similar AI during Arena matches. The issues with healing and Mystic Artes remain, and the AI just attacks the player's characters without regard for HP or type-advantages, seemingly picking random targets for each move.
- Raid battle lock out. If a player fails to complete a raid they opened within the time limit, the game automatically marks it as a failure and requires the player to go in and accept the loss. While its easy to do so, because of a borderline Game-Breaking Bug many players experienced that prevents raid battles from launching but still count as having done so, it means players can't even close it out, meaning they have to wait three days to be able to initiate raid battles themselves, and not because they made a mistake but because of the game's programming flaws. In events, where raid battles are the best way to get the event currency, this means players have to either join other players to even get more reward currency and points, or they have to grind the normal quests which drop barely any points or currencies.
- You can't have more than one of the same-named character in the party, which is something of a frustrating restriction. For instance, you can't have Asbel from Tales of Graces and the Halloween-exclusive Count Asbel in the party at the same time; you can have one or the other, but not both. This seems like an arbitrary restriction to many players, especially since you can have the same-named character (or even the same character, period) by selecting them as a Guest-Star Party Member before a quest starts. Why you're allowed to do this with someone else's characters but not your own is generally seen as a confusing and needlessly-frustrating restriction.
- Required Guest characters, especially for quests with Bosses in them. While it makes sense in a Story perspective, in practice it can lead to loads of otherwise avoidable deaths. This is especially true if the guest characters in particular are weak to the boss' element, as it makes getting all three missions completed on that quest all the harder to get. Worse yet? They stay even when you complete the mission (though thankfully, only on Normal difficulty), so if you want to fight the boss again to get the gleamstones you missed, you'll have to find a way to work around them.
- You can only select ten Memoria Stones each time you want to convert them, upgrade them, or adorn a character with them. It becomes a slog to do this only ten at a time, particularly when grinding materials in story levels as you accumulate Rare stones, which do little more than take up space. One of the biggest requests from players is increasing the max number of stones that can be selected or the ability to auto-convert Rare stones in these instances, but there's been no plans to change it.
