Tales of Arise

This review contains some small spoilers.

The Tales of series is marked by its character-driven stories, where their quirks and relationships receive much more attention than the actual plot itself. This is Tales of Arise saving grace, as it boasts a touching love story and a great cast of characters that do a lot of the heavy lifting that the messy plot requires.

The universe of Tales of Arise revolves around two twin worlds, Dahna and Rena, and the oppressive rule the Renans have over Dahna, having conquered its people many years ago. We play as “the man in the iron mask,” a mysterious Dahnan imprisoned by the Renan Sovereign. Iron Mask, as he is called by his fellow Dahnans, is an amnesiac slave who’s working tirelessly in the fiery mines of Calaglia when he witnesses an attack from a rebel group, the Crimson Crows, and is taken to their hideout alongside a mysterious Renan woman, Shionne Imeris. Despite her nationality, Shionne is on a personal mission to kill all five Renan Lords ruling over Dahna, so Iron Mask – his real name is soon revealed to be Alphen instead of Philippe, brother of Louis XIV – seeing that their interests align, teams up with Shionne and sets out to defeat the Lord of Calaglia, Balseph.

Alphen doesn’t make a great first impression, though, constantly overreacting to everything that happens around him. When Shionne – this strange woman he just met – is hit by an arrow in the opening act, he screams her name like they’re old lovers. When the Crimson Crows tell him that the Renans harvest astral energy from their Dahnan slaves, siphoning their lifeforce through senseless labor, he screams that this is absurd and cruel… as if everyone in the room didn’t already get that. When Shionne tells him that Balseph probably doesn’t feel threatened by the Crimson Crows, he gasps as if he were a long-standing member of the rebellion who just got offended by her remark. When he remembers his name, Alphen shouts it like he’s Leonidas kicking a guy down a well. When he sees Shionne charging against three monstrous bees – that we have been killing by the dozens – he reaches to her as if trying to stop the woman from making a heroic sacrifice. Calm down, man.

Alphen’s behavior, however, can be put as a consequence of his life as a slave, his amnesia – he has no memories of past social interactions –, and his special condition: he has congenital analgesia. Since he doesn’t feel physical pain, he overcompensates with his emotions. Shionne defends him, of course, saying that he’s not overdramatic, just full of “indignation and righteous passion,” but she loves him, so take her word with a grain of salt.

It’s Alphen’s relationship with Shionne that lies at the heart of the story in Tales of Arise. Just like Alphen, she’s shrouded in mystery for a while: we know that she wants to kill the Renan Lords, but we don’t know why. She also seems to suffer from a curse, being enveloped by some strange magical thorns each time someone tries to get near her – she can’t control the thorns, which sprout from thin air to punish any attempt of physical contact, hurting anyone who dares get too close. “My thorns made any contact a mistake no one would make twice. After they’d seen what could happen, fear would always linger behind their eyes. In my entire life, I never had someone willing reach out to me,” she says to Alphen.

Luckily for Shionne, Alphen can’t feel pain, which allows him to make physical contact with her. The first time he grabs hold of her hand, unaware of her condition, and doesn’t recoil, Shionne is simply bewildered, not knowing exactly how to react. Here’s someone who can finally connect with her, and he’s this handsome stranger who is a bit histrionic and over-the-top, yes, but seems to have his heart in the right place and has also agreed to help her with her mission. So, each subsequent time Alphen touches her shoulders or grabs hold of her hand, we can see the happiness in Shionne’s expression, but also a bit of melancholy, as if she couldn’t dare hope that it would last.

And, in a way, she’s right, for Alphen’s condition eventually goes away, which puts his relationship with Shionne to the test: now that he feels pain again, handling her is not easy anymore. On the contrary, being with Shionne has now become a daily struggle: loving her now is about enduring the pain she causes him; staying with her is a conscious choice made each time she lashes out – sometimes even willingly. The relationship has become a periodic sacrifice, where he has to give constantly knowing that he can’t pull away for a second, because the moment he does so she can be consumed by a destructive sense of self-pity and lose herself to depression. And Alphen wouldn’t have it any other way.

Their love story is a touching one – with hints of tragedy – precisely because of this: for Alphen, loving Shionne means embracing her condition without hesitation, it means being aware that staying with her will hurt every day and not care about it, because he knows that the secret is finding that she more than makes up for it – the good easily outweighs the bad. In other words, she’s worth it. Shionne has always thought that she would die alone, perfectly aware of how challenging being with her would be to a partner – her love is one that demands as much as it offers –, but Alphen, with his overemotional way, is more than willing to devote every part of himself to her.

Being described as someone with “no pain, no face, and no memories,” the warrior is the perfect match for Shionne. His initial resistance to pain means he can get to be with her before making the romantic plunge. With no face and memories, he can accept her unwillingness to talk about her past, as he lacks one of his own. Even being “over-the-top” helps him interact with her, serving as a counterpoint to her introspection and cold demeanor.

After all, although she has a kind heart, Shionne seems to be almost ashamed of it: she has hardened herself and become reluctant to show others that she cares for them, because she has learned to expect rejection. So, each time her good deeds are seen and recognized by the people around her, she recoils and tries to brush it off, stating that she only did it because it aided her cause in some way – it’s clearly insincere, but she’s always making a point of disguising her kindness as accidental. Her magical thorns, then, besides being a plot point also serve as a clear metaphor for her personality: she’s afraid of people getting close to her and so hurts them to push them away. “I only helped because it was in my interest as well,” she says, not fooling anyone, especially Alphen.

So, while Shionne refuses to admit to her growing affection toward the warrior, too repressed to display her love for him openly, Alphen – true to form – constantly goes overboard with his romantic gestures and sacrifices. Their interactions usually follow this adorable pattern: she worries about him and tries to make sure he’s fine, but in a way that doesn’t draw attention to the gesture, he screams her name in desperation when she tries to murder some bees alone, she recoils at the show of affection and badly manages to disguise her feelings, he gets confused by the rejection but doesn’t give up. They’re simply too cute together.

The third member to enter the party is the young Rinwell, a Dahnan mage who understandably harbors a huge grudge against all Renans, such as Shionne. Renans have been the oppressors for years in Dahna and their cruelty is well-known. In Calaglia, for example, we see a Renan warrior saying to the burning sacs of slave corpses, “Every last one of you embeddeds will die and then we can do whatever we want with you. Now burn.”

Evil in Tales of Arise is always one-dimensional. The main villains – the Renan Lords Alphen and Shionne have set out to kill – are always presented as unredeemable monsters. In Calaglia, Lord Balseph is a genocidal brute. In Cyslodia, the second realm we visit, Lord Ganabelt is insidious, fomenting discord and distrust among his people to better control them. The fifth Lord – and main antagonist – is the worst offender: Volhran is a poor man’s Sephiroth, being presented as a destructive force of nature but without the narrative ever committing to the bit: Tales of Arise’s narrative is too safe to offer something akin to Aerith’ fate in Final Fantasy VII. So, we’re left with a force of nature that is hardly destructive, a character whose edginess is never warranted, with a menacing aura that we can’t buy.

Another problem is that we spend little time with the Lords: with the exception of Volhran, we usually meet them right before they’re dispatched in a boss fight, which means that the game never attempts to properly develop them. Throughout the first half of Tales of Arise, when we meet these Lords, they are all cartoonish villains, acting like cruel, selfish, violent, merciless monsters. As antagonists, they are not that interesting: they’re just there to be dispatched without a second thought, for there’s no doubt that the world will be a better place without them.

It’s just when we visit their homeland, late in the game, that we see another side of them and learn about how Balseph cared deeply about his family or how Ganabelt’s plan to control Dahna was to better help his people. This is great because it shows how racism is directed cruelty: among their own, these Lords are seen as great, altruistic individuals, they’re revered, loved even. To those at the wrong end of the stick, however…

The problem is that this is too little, too late. After all, for the most part of the game, these Lords are as shallow in their villainy as most real-life CEOs. They aren’t able to keep the narrative engaging, being too boring – and predictable – in their over-the-top greed and cruelty. And when we finally visit their homeland, we get just a few notes and testimonies from random NPCs to offer some semblance of complexity.

The only element about the Renan Lords that work is the way Tales of Arise frames how they came to be. Their country is built around the concept of meritocracy, where the most powerful deservedly rule. But merit doesn’t go hand in hand with morality: on the contrary, since it’s after results and results only, it’s a system that pushes people to forego moral values if that means achieving more. So, when a Renan man praises one of the Lords for being a prime example of Renan’s meritocracy – and we already know the horrors they’re capable of – we can’t but understand how this is a system primed for failure.

The only exception to all of this is, of course, Dohalim, the third Lord we meet in the land of Menancia, who is a nice curveball that the game throws at us. Rimwell can’t deal with a Renan – especially a Lord – who seems to be good and kind. His realm seems just, with Dahnans and Renans working together, coexisting. Rimwell, despite her sweet demeanor and cute design – she even has her best friend Hootle, an adorable owl, always following her around – can’t have any of that: for her, a good Renan is a dead Renan.

Rimwell’s narrative arc revolves around how hatred against the oppressor can be weaponized by them, binding rebellious people to a destructive path where there’s no endgame, no plan for an after, there’s only the immediate need for revenge: and so, there’s little chance of success in the rebellion. Rinwell can’t fathom the possibility that a Renan can be a good person – even though spending some time with Shionne has softened her up a little. We can see that in Menancia, where she remains always alert, seeing the prospect of coexistence with Renans as a trap: how could Dahnans simply forgive their old oppressors? She can’t have that; the cycle of violence must continue. Rinwell, then, doesn’t eat when Dohalim offers them dinner, fearing poisoning, and gets upset when Alphen trusts the man with their mission. Hatred turns a person’s line of reasoning one-dimensional: in a climactic scene, when Alphen’s party tries to stop Rinwell from executing a Renan, she asks them if they would rather her hug the murderers of her family instead. There’s no room for nuance in hatred – such as imprisoning that person and making them publicly answer for what they’ve done –, there are only extreme options.

Tales of Arise’s story is about fighting imperialism and killing racists, but it’s also about the realization that evil is the sin of an individual instead of an element intrinsic to a group: Renans aren’t all cruel, they aren’t all evil. The complexity arises (pun definitely intended) from the fact that there is indeed a collective responsibility, as that cruelty is encouraged and enforced collectively even though, at the end of the day, it’s still an individual choice.

It’s just a pity that the plot moves away from these discussions in the last act to build up a fight against a “darkness that will consume all existence” even though it never “had evil intent.”  Tales of Arise’s last hours feel thematically disconnected from what came before: instead of dealing with the evil that lies in human greed, we are now fighting a random godlike monster that destroys planets.

This final part also suffers from long periods of exposition, with the main characters talking in length about the twists that have just happened, first in lengthy cutscenes, then in post-cutscene dialogue, then in skits, then in individual cutscenes with each character, then with one more cutscene with the whole group, and it’s… tiresome.

Skits are usually the Tales of games’ trump card and here it’s no different. They are brief cutscenes where party members can just be themselves and talk about food, tell jokes, relax, comfort each other, or even get in little confrontations – Rinwell’s owl, Hootle, is always ready to peck the face of anyone who dares annoy the girl, for example. Because there are many of them – Arise has more than 300 skits –, they give the cast room to breathe, allowing them to become fully-realized characters that go beyond their core traits. We learn, for example, that Alphen makes for a terrible cook, as his resistance to pain makes him often misjudge how spicy a meal should be (the answer to “how spicy” should always be “yes” but I digress) while Shionne is revealed to have an almost endless appetite, never playing around when it comes to food. Arise should only have spaced a bit more these skits, as sometimes it hands us three at the same time, disrupting the pacing of the game.

Tales of Arise’s combat system also follows the series’ tradition. When we come across an enemy on the field, we are transported to an arena where we can attack and use different arts in real time to build a combo and damage enemies. Here, combos are usually rewarded with Boost Strikes, powerful finishers that obliterate the target and damage nearby enemies. Each character in Arise has their own style, too: Alphen can sacrifice his health to deal more damage, functioning as a high-risk/reward character, while Rimwell casts magic slowly on the background and can charge a spell instead of casting it, so the next one is more powerful – we have to constantly assess if the wait to charge a spell is worth the time. It’s a simple combat system that survives the game’s long runtime through sheer variety, offering us six distinct characters to play and dozens of skills for each one to use. But it’s a missed opportunity that Shionne’s thorns are completely ignored in battle, since they could have damaged enemies that get near her.

Finally, presentation-wise, Tales of Arise boasts a great watercolor art style that is simply beautiful to look at, but its soundtrack is a bit of a letdown, lacking a unique personality with dozens of tracks that all sound the same. They all go for the same “epic vibe” despite the setting, so the track that plays when we’re on a coastal beach has the same gravitas as the one that plays when we’re invading an imposing palace. The only exception is Menancia’s capital theme, which sounds more playful, like something out of a Dragon Quest game. Being bland and generic, few people will choose to hear Arise’s soundtrack outside the game, but at least it does some things correctly: the first town we visit, for example, is a slave settlement under Renan rule, and so its theme reflects that oppression, being urgent and tense, like something we would hear in a dungeon. So, when we free Calaglia from the Renans, the music changes and becomes hopeful and peaceful.

Tales of Arise is a JRPG that survives on its great cast of characters and their memorable arcs and relationships. It’s far from being the best in its series, but it’s still a good game in its own right.

December 20, 2024.