Shionne: Unsullied, fertile land, as far as the eye can see. It's beautiful.... Beat What? Alphen:(Staring directly at Shionne) Oh, nothing. Just... I was thinking the very same thing.
The description of Dohalim’s Rod Extension perk got a laugh out of many players.
Aluminum Christmas Trees: Kisara keeping her back unarmored is a reference to a real but little-known practice among medieval soldiers, under the idea that if an opponent got behind them they were in trouble regardless of armor, so it was better to reduce weight and improve mobility. When Shionne questions her on it, Kisara confirms this outright, saying that Elde Menancia's soldiers pride themselves on "never turning your back to the enemy".
Vholran Igniseri, despite being built up as the most dangerous Lord and Curbstomping the party in their first encounter, is generally regarded as the easiest of the major bosses. He's a Fragile Speedster who hits hard, moves around the arena quickly, and loves to combo when he attacks, but he also almost always focuses on whoever the player is controlling (especially Alphen), meaning it is easy to keep him in a mostly single spot while ranged characters throw attacks at him, and his attacks are easy to dodge. Plus he is somewhat easy to stagger with a long "Down" animation and since he is fast, the game pushes you to use Dohalim to immobilize him, giving you a good window to start attacking him without issue. Even in the second fight that follows right after, he is just slightly stronger, but still has many of the same issues previously mentioned, and both of his mystic artes are surprisingly easy to dodge compared to past characters like Ganabelt. The hardest part of his fight is waiting for Dohalim to have his binding ability ready since he often dodges your attacks without it, but even then it isn't really difficult to avoid him till then.
The Superboss, Chronos, is surprisingly easy despite being level 95 and being presented as a powerful foe. He only has three-four attacks he cycles through, each one being very easy to dodge and counter, including his Mystic Arte, and while he does have a Time Stands Still ability, if he uses it while you are dodging, you No-Sell the attack due to the way the game's dodging system works. He does hit hard and isn't easy to stun, but he tends to hyper focus on the player character, which makes it easy to just pelt him with spells until he dies. Notably, he's arguably easier here then he was in his home game due to lacking several of his attacks from said game, and the Dual Boss with Edna and Eizen is arguably harder because they have more attacks and hit hard.
Awesome Art: The menu screens feature gorgeous artwork of the party members.
Vholran Igniseri, the game's primary antagonist, has divided fans on how effective he is as an antagonist. For some he's a compelling threat because of his early game appearances establishing him as a threatening foe, and he remains that way even till the end of the game, plus the parallels to Alphen help make him a satisfying foe to defeat. Others feel that after his initial build up, he lacks anything unique as an antagonist due to being mostly a Flat Character who wants power, with the little depth he has only serves to explains why he is one without characterizing him more, which is more notable when compared to some of the other major antagonists in game who have some amount of characterization. Discussion of him pretty commonly boils down to saying he's a great antagonist or that he's awful as an antagonist.
While the main cast as a whole has been well-received, Rinwell is easily the most divisive, particularly in regards to her hatred of Renans. Some view her hatred as realistic and reasonable due to her young age as well as the fact that most Renans really are awful people, with even Shionne and Dohalim doing the bare minimum to help their cases as a Not Always Evil race. Her fans also point out that, having lived a very sheltered life among a single sub-race of people, she wouldn't have been raised with the understanding that race doesn't matter, and so would naturally judge all Renans based on the actions of just one of them. That she eventually grows out of it helps as well. Others are less forgiving, viewing her as a close-minded bigot who uses Insane Troll Logic to justify every seemingly benevolent thing Renans do, and feel that she should have outgrown her prejudices much sooner than she did. Her tendency to sic Hootle on Law is another point of contention; some view it as typical mean Tsundere behaviour, while others feel Law brings it upon himself due to his inability to think before he speaks.
After the absolutely brutal Boss Rush, and the Dual Boss fight with all four Lords as part of the "The Reminiscence Device" sidequest, the final fight after, Zephyr, is a lot easier by comparison, as while he is fast and hits hard, the chaotic fight beforehand against all four Lords at once is a lot more demanding and difficult.
Among the Lord fights, Dohalim stands out for following and preceding the two most difficult Lords in the game. This mainly comes down to the fact the fight is unwilling on Dohalim's end, as he's lashing out indiscriminately following an emotional meltdown. This is portrayed in-game as Dohalim pausing after every third combo to hold his head in agony and just take hits for a solid six seconds, and even between these obvious moments where the player is expected to pound him, ranged characters have a very easy time committing to attacks from the side. Additionally, his boss fight follows getting a character who excels in hard-countering him, as his weak-but-numerous combo strings are utterly walled by Kisara, and his charges are parry fodder for her. About the only difficulty in the fight comes from his final phase, and only because he strings his combos longer - he still has massive periods of inactivity where you're expected to beat him senseless, and even when he begins spamming his Mystic Arte, it's so easy to dodge that the player can just focus on beating his back into paste.
Broken Base: Beyond the Dawn is a controversial case gameplay-wise because your save doesn't carry over entirely; it's effectively a fresh start with late game gear and a pre-arranged party setup, with variable benefits and level carried over but having to redo your entire skill tree (though hidden arte progress is at least kept to cut down on relearning all of them). Combine that with enemies and bosses reused from the main game that have gotten massive buffs in damage and HP, and the DLC itself having a noticeably large amount of grinding and Padding to drag out its otherwise-short run time, and it left a lot of players sour for what many felt should've mostly been a straightforward Playable Epilogue otherwise. Others don't mind this because it allows returning players to reacclimate to the game properly, or that it helps make the DLC difficulty not imbalanced since a player could go in with a max level team otherwise, and the game does give some sidequests to offset some of it.
Captain Obvious Reveal: The reveal that Shionne is the modern incarnation of the Maiden was probably figured out by the player as soon as Naori and the concept of the Maiden are first introduced. However, the game itself does not reveal this until significantly later, and the characters are all shocked when they find out.
Most players will usually keep a party of Alphen, Shionne, Rinwell and Dohalim, as it covers most bases easily and offers enough survivability (not to mention Rinwell is almost mandatory if you’ve been keeping up with the Owl sidequest and have the relevant perk unlocked). It also helps Dohalim is a supplementary unit that can heal in a pinch and has high combo ability as well as dodging perks. Kisara is usually situational but can be switched into the party easily, and Law sadly gets the short end of the stick for not contributing much to the party except high damage. He is good when controlled by a player (Especially when they are good with dodging and counterattacking) but most people prefer Alphen since he can take more damage. The only time this party is usually changed is the final dungeon, on account of the amount of dark element enemies making Dohalim harder to use. Even then, he's still invaluable as the third mage of the party in boss-oriented setups.
A caveat to the above is if the player is not playing as Alphen. While Alphen's air juggles are excellent in the hands of the player, Alphen is critically held back by the nature of his Boost Arte and his gimmick, which cause him to damage himself. Though the AI is a marked step up over the danger-prone klutzes in Tales of Vesperia, they aren't quite as skilled at staying alive indefinitely as the AI from Tales of Berseria, which necessitates having Shionne or Dohalim around to heal them. Unless the player is actively using his gimmick and using it intelligently, Alphen can easily become a CP drain on the party that diverts healing artes that could be used for someone else. This especially holds true in the late game, where Alphen's Boost Arte is so easily spammed that he can actively see more effective use benchwarming, because otherwise the two healers will be patching him up constantly.
Another caveat comes up if the player is using Dohalim or Shionne - expect any party with a player-backed version of the above two to have the other right there with them. Dohalim and Shionne can both inflict a lot of damage in the player's hands, making it appealing to utilize Shionne's bombs and Dohalim's flashy combos, but that means the player isn't focusing on healing. Healing in an ARPG isn't exactly flashy or exiciting, so it's generally accepted the player will want to foist that duty on the AI, especially because the AI, with proper strategies in place, is far better about predicting when to heal than the player is.
Cooking wise, most players tend to stick to Kisara dish wise if possible. This is because she has the most practical cooking effect with no downsides at all, making food made by her more reliable than dishes of the other cast, especially compared to Law and Rinwell's effects.
Boar-derivative zeugles. Facing one isn't so bad, but fighting two or more is a nightmare. They're Lightning Bruiser enemies that have (relatively) little startup on their attacks, meaning they can catch the player in the middle of a combo effortlessly, and some Artes can take so long that boars can give the tell for their attack and then hit the player before control is returned to the player for the chance to dodge, forcing them to use a Boost Arte to prematurely Lag Cancel their combo to get to safety. The worst part about them, however, is that the game expects the player to track them with the camera when they're facing more than one - boars have such little wind-up on their attacks that they can easily rush down an unwary player that doesn't see them coming while attacking another one. Kisara and Alphen's Boost Artes do help keep them under control, but because boars are so tanky, they often aren't downed for long enough for the player to do anything substantial to a group of them. Woe betide a player fighting a group of four. What's worse, the late-game boars and several of the boars in the DLC evolve their tactics so they can drift into a second charge suddenly instead of completing their first, which can catch the player off-guard and makes finding any wiggle-room to get a hit in edgewise incredibly aggravating. Pretty much the only way to deal with boar zeugles without tearing one's hair out is to engage with Shionne and spam Luke Divisio from a very safe distance or get airborne and spam Tres Ventos until they're all dead.
Shellshocker-derivative zeugles. Normally, they'd only qualify for Goddamn Bats due to not being too much of a threat, but that only holds true for a player. The AI has no idea how to deal with shellshockers, and will gleefully rush into their lightning fields as if they were in a drunken stupor, wasting precious CP as Shionne and Dohalim desperately try to keep their allies alive. What's worse, the entire family has super armor that massively decreases penetration against them, making it a slog to break them so they can be comboed properly, and the only way to break their super armor is to have Law use his Boost Arte on them. And since they never travel alone, the player will be desperate to have Law take out the armor for the whole group in one fell swoop lest they be forced to wait for Law to recharge his Boost Arte or, worse, be forced into a long, drawn out fight with a monster that will gleefully down the player's allies.
Fan Nickname: Dohalim was quickly called Lancer Arjuna after he appeared, owing to their very similar designs.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game is far more popular outside of Japan as the game sold around 200,000 copies in the latter region. The most likely reason is because of the Playstation base declining in Japan.
Goddamned Bats: Armadillos from the DLC. Their health and durability got jacked up significantly, such that an entire party tearing into them barely scratches them. They love to appear in the Training Grounds, especially against Law, who has few safe ways to approach them given their rolling ability and thus even fewer ways to meaningfully damage them. Their rolling attack can be threatening when you don't see it coming and they're grouped up, but they're mostly just supremely annoying Damage Sponge enemies that refuse to die. The best hope a player has is to get a Boost Strike off on them, but that precludes dealing with them during Solo Training Grounds challenges, and even when the party is properly formed they have almost excessive tolerance to Boost Gauge buildup.
Harsher in Hindsight: In a skit, Rinwell and Alphen wonder why the Dahnan mages never use their powers to take over the world like what the the Renans did. It is later revealed that Renans are genetically modified Dahnans who can use Astral artes, which means not only did Dahnan mages actually take over the world, they did in a way that took revenge on those who oppressed them for their powers by oppressing their oppressors.
The revelation of Ray Chase as the voice of King Hootle in addition to voicing Alphen, considering that his last stint with the Tales series involved him repeatedly asking other characters why they think that birds fly. Some have even gone as far as to theorize that Artorius became a bird just to answer his own question.
When Dohalim was first revealed, he quickly gained the nickname Lancer Arjuna due to the similarities in their design. During the story, Dohalim goes berserk in a manner not too different from the Berserker class from said franchise, which, hilariously enough, has an Arjuna alt as well.
Ho Yay: One shirtlessNon-Player Character in Mosgul, known only as Dahnan Man, comments on seeing Alphen’s face for the first time, after half of it was destroyed during the battle with Balseph, calling him handsome.
Dedyme controls every scene he's in with his excellent voice acting and wild gesticulations. The way he mugs for the camera can only be described as 'overanimated,' and it's fun to see just how low he'll sink, from admitting without trepidation he bombed out his own people to get at Almeidrea and implying Alphen keeps Shionne around as a sex slave. It seems like there are no lines he won't cross, and the sheer charisma of his voice acting and his mugging for the camera make him fun to watch and leaves the player with a feeling of catharsis when you witness his fall.
Narm Charm: The Dahnan owls you find throughout the game are dubbed by the voice actors simply saying "hoo" in regular voices. It's rather charming in its silliness.
Obvious Judas: Meneck being The Mole in the Silver Swords is a rather obvious twist. He looks like a Smug Snake, talks like one, and the fact that almost right after you arrive and meet him, the Silver Sword's base gets raided makes it predictable that he'll be exposed as a traitor. Sure enough, he is, and is none other than the Arc Villain Ganabelt. Moreover, Ganabelt is seen in the first opening cinematic, and an observant player can notice that the "Ganabelt" we first meet doesn't look like him.
Preemptive Shipping: When the game was announced, people immediately began shipping Alphen with Shionne for the simple reason that Alphen could Feel No Pain, while Shionne was cursed to cause people pain whenever they touched her. Much to the shippers delight, Alphen and Shionne get married at the end of the game.
Special Effect Failure: Some people have this issue with this title's skits. They cite that the characters are almost always stiff and awkward, tend to have Hong Kong Dub moments where characters talk and their mouths move awkwardly, or the characters barely show any signs of movement.
Superlative Dubbing: While the translation has some rough spots in it, the voice acting in the western release is generally agreed to be top notch, and as good as its Japanese voice cast. In particular, Ray Chase as Alphen and Erica Lindbeck as Shionne are often lauded as being particularly stand out in their performances. Griffin Puatu as Dohalim also earned praise, since many were mostly unaware of him prior to his performance as Dohalim (with a few exceptionshere and there), and yet he managed to sell the character's personality with just his performance alone.
Tainted by the Preview: While the gameplay shown has been well received, several fans dislike the fact that the victory quotes that were a staple in the series were gone. Many also miss the anime artwork of the skits, as well as the lack of collaboration and fanservice DLC costumes for the male party members. The removal of multiplayer was also received negatively.
Some players are disappointed that co-op multiplayer was removed, which has been a staple of the series since Tales of Destiny.
The change to the "TP" system has mixed reception. Unlike previous Tales games that used either HP&TP or HP&Chain Capacity, this one uses "CP" which is a resource shared amongst the entire party, and affects only healing artes and field actions. This means that running out of CP is a very real option if you're not careful. The game hands out health recovery items and camping sites like candy, but CP recovering items are worth their weight in gald. They cost even more than Life Bottles.
Bosses in Tales of Arise cannot enter Break status, and thus cannot be hit-stunned and comboed safely for any period of time. While some feel that this is a needed change to prevent bosses from just being punching bags like in other Tales games, others feel they went too far in the other direction, and making it so that bosses never hit a hit stun state at all is too much. They can be Downed (which is different from Break) with Burst Artes or breaking their cores, but this only lasts for a couple of seconds each time.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many players believe the story could have done more with Vholran, since his backstory is barely touched on compared to other Tales villains and he doesn't get a lot of interactions with the party.
A recurring plot point made by the cast is the issues the Dahnans will have once the world is liberated, with it being discussed often that not only will there be issues with what kind of society will form, but also the Cycle of Revenge that would follow with the Dahnans treating the Renans as badly as they were treated. Many characters, like Alphen, Zephyr, Dohalim, and Kisara discuss this in game and each province freed brings up new points about the topic, such as Cyslodia having to learn to trust people again, or Niez needing to recover and develop a healthier society. Sadly the game ends with no resolution of this topic, with the latter third of the game having new, bigger issues at play (leaving the matter to fade from their minds, for the time being), with the ending giving no mention or suggestions of what precisely is to follow. At best, we do see NPCs traveling abroad to help other regions, and the Menancian Renans improve the other regions' opinion of coexistence, but the party isn't directly involved in that effort. The story expansion DLC, Beyond the Dawn, runs into the same issues, as despite initially focusing on the divide between Dahnans and Renans, the story ends up focusing on other things in a manner not to different from the base game, leaving some to feel the game as a whole didn't explore the plot point very effectively. At best, the Lingering Social Tensions are relegated to sidequest content where the party solves small individual issues.
A late-game sidequest suggests that the Renan Lords Balseph and Ganabelt have some sympathetic motives despite their cruelty towards the Dahnans. Balseph cared deeply for the men under his command and became a lord for their sake, while Ganabelt was a visionary who sought prosperity for all of Rena. Alphen even realizes that they were people with their own complex lives, not just two-dimensional monsters (though what they did was universally agreed to be horrible). Yet, both of them are merely Arc Villains disposed of fairly early on - by the time the sidequest comes up, the party have far more pressing things to worry about. And since the two lords spend almost all of their screentime interacting with the Dahnan characters, they don't get a chance to actually display any of these sympathetic qualities (aside from Ganabelt's dying words being of concern for what will become of his people on Lenegis).
The Helganquil are going extinct, but in a sidequest, a Daeq Faezol scientist creates an artificial Helganquil by using DNA from Hevrekt and other beings. The game never brings up the possibility of repopulating the Helganquil through this method.
Underused Game Mechanic: Each party member has a field ability that allows them to interact with the environment in some waynote Alphen's is using the Blazing Sword to absorb firewalls or destroy ice walls/thorn walls. Shionne's is healing injured NPCs. Rinwell's is absorbing Astral Energy barriers. Law's is breaking down rock/boulders. Kisara's is using her shield to push away poison clouds. Dohalim's is conjuring vines to create pathways or climbing spots.. Of them, the only one you'll regularly use is Shionne's, with Alphen and Law only having a few chances to use theirs over the course of the game. The other three party members only get to use them in the dungeon they're introduced in (Dohalim uses his once outside the late game area he gets it), and never get used really anywhere else despite the potentially fun ways of interacting with the environment, and allowing for the player to explore previously unexplored areas in previous zones.
You can raise horses for meat on your ranch. It's perfectly normal in the game's home country of Japan, as well as many other parts in the world, but in many countries eating horse meat is very taboo, with sale of horse meat being outright illegal in the United States.
Later in the story, Law stops Rinwell from killing Almeidrea out of revenge, not because he feels Almeidrea deserves mercy, but because he doesn't want Rinwell to kill her "with hatred in her heart". This sort of sentiment sounds a lot more natural in Japan, where doing things "with a proper mindset" is a more common belief. In the West, people generally put a lot more onus on the outcome, and Westerners are likewise big on retributive justice. This is one of the reasons why some players were confused about why it even mattered who killed a Complete Monster like her or why.
Visual Effects of Awesome: This game looks gorgeous, with the creators making great first use of Unreal Engine 4 to create one of the most stunning looking Tales games ever.
have even gone as far as to theorize that Artorius became a bird just to answer his own question.