Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn Review: A New Dawn
It isn’t often that you see a single player RPG get a major story expansion more than two years after its initial release. Even among such games, Tales of Arise seemed like a strange fit for such content. I enjoyed Tales of Arise back in 2021, but that enjoyment came with caveats. The game went on far too long. Bosses in the second half mostly became damage sponges that didn’t know when to die. The main story became nonsensical even if the excellent cast was still engaging.
Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn shares almost every one of the issues the original game featured. While this new expansion is absolutely interesting at times and shares most of the original game’s strengths as well as its weaknesses, it hasn’t spent the last two years improving on the overall package in ways that would make this a stronger title.
Where We Left Off
Beyond the Dawn picks up a year after the ending of the main game. Please note that the rest of this review will contain spoilers for Tales of Arise; there’s no way to talk about it without doing so, as the story is a direct continuation of that game’s ending. Your victory in the main game caused the twin planets of Dahna and Rena to merge into one planet. This means these two very different groups of people are now living side by side, sharing towns and communities. While there was one region in the main game already living this way, for most of this world, a group that was enslaved for many years is now living alongside the people who enslaved them. While communities are trying to move forward and build a new world together, people haven’t forgotten the past, and many cities feel like powder kegs on the verge of exploding.
Alphen and Shionne have spent the last year traveling the world, searching out mausoleums that need to be destroyed to allow the planets to fully merge. Just as they’re about to rejoin the rest of the group from the main game, they come across a young girl being hunted by locals. It turns out this girl, Nazamil, is the daughter of a former Renan lord and a Dahnan woman. Being from neither world, she hasn’t been able to find anywhere she fits in. This is a crew that knows something about not being accepted, and soon, she’s pulled into the group. Despite her joy at finding friends, however, her history twists how she sees these new bonds.
For a good chunk of my time with Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn, I really appreciated how it felt somewhat low stakes compared to the world-ending dangers of the main game. This felt right; we’d already saved the world after all. Now, we had a chance to explore what peace could look like in a world that still had a lot of issues. I really enjoyed revisiting towns from the main game and seeing how they were getting on, even if it would have been nice to have more new areas to explore as well outside of a few dungeons. The latter half of the game, however seems to feel that without world-ending stakes, players won’t want to keep going. For an expansion that can be finished in under ten hours, this just ends up feeling like too much in too little time. It weakens the overall story considerably, even if there are some excellent character moments along the way.
A Brief Return
While the story can certainly be completed in under ten hours, there is more to do here than just explore that main story. Unfortunately, most of it consists of side quests that have the same weaknesses as the side quests in the main game featured. Kill this monster in this spot. Get me these cooking ingredients. They’re almost entirely made up of fetch quests with no interesting story moments. I felt little compulsion to keep doing these missions after the first few. I’d grab them when I saw them, and if I happened to find what I needed while exploring, I’d finish the quest, but they just didn’t feel worth going out of my way for.
The fantastic combat from the original game is still here, but it’s also completely unchanged. You have no new skills, few new enemies, and no new playable characters. Considering Tales of Arise featured some of my favorite combat in any RPG over the last few years, I can’t be too down on this, but I do wonder if I’d have felt less charitably towards this being such a retread if it hadn’t been two years since I last visited it.
In one of this expansion’s strangest choices, you don’t even get to carry on your save data from the original game. You start Beyond the Dawn from an entirely separate menu. Completion, or even playing, of the main game is not required, though I can’t imagine this story working at all if you haven’t done so. Beyond the Dawn does let you import your save data and provides you with some starting bonuses based on how much of the original game you played, but I’d have much preferred just to import my party. You do start at a high level with good equipment, so it isn’t like you’re starting from scratch. I’m sure there were balance concerns this worked around. It all just makes this feel like it should have been a stand-alone release, though, even if perhaps the developers didn’t find it substantial enough to release that way.
Conclusion
I enjoyed revisiting the world and characters of Tales of Arise. Seeing how they’re doing a year later and how this world is finding a way to come together is interesting, and the early hours of Beyond the Dawn are mostly a good experience. Once again, though, the further things go, the less satisfying the overall experience is, and some strange design choices make this content feel strangely isolated. Big fans of Tales of Arise should certainly give this a shot, but it’s far from mandatory even for them.
Final Verdict: 3/5
Available on: PC (Reviewed), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One; Publisher: Bandai Namco; Developer: Bandai Namco; Players: 1; Released: November 8th, 2023; ESRB: T for Teen; MSRP: $29.99
Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn provided by the publisher.
