Tales of Arise Is the Fastest Selling Tales Game Ever, Hits 1 Million Copies in Less Than a Week

Amazing news for Tales fans! Ordering my copy now and will be my first experience with this series!

Seeing these numbers are incredible (Beseria & Vesperia too!). Feel like people always slept on Tales, but seem like they finally woke up. Definitely also helps with all the ads/commercials for the game.

Tomizawa and his entire team has done a phenomenal job pushing the franchise forward.

Wondering how many of these copies they've had to give away? I'm still waiting for my collectors edition to arrive, but to give them their credit, Bandai Namco provided me with a digitial key.
The game could do with some proof reading to correct the typos and a few QoL features added (would be nice to turn off your party members constant shouting during battles), but otherwise a solid entry in the series. Hope you're all having fun with it too ^_^

@sikthvash Honestly, I highly doubt the keys are included in the numbers, as they seem to be some special keys preview/review of sorts. They did have to give away a ton of keys however, no doubt about that. Lol

Hopefully you get your CE soon! I was lucky enough mine arrived 5 days late.

I started the tales series with xillia 2 and overall I've enjoyed them all, but some are definitely a lot better than others. Great to see that this one seems to be a stellar release not just as a Tales game but as a JRPG in general. Can't wait to pick this one up

Freaking impressive! Many great games never made it over 1m, so this is excellent news. Well deserved.

Anyone know how great the combos feel as you get more skills? With older games I really loved figuring out how to own bosses with insanely long combos on the highest difficulties. No boss spoilers please haha.

@rawzeku I probably worded that badly - basically, what I meant was I wonder how may keys they had to give away. I know it wouldn't of affected the sales figures, but I wondered what proportion of those figures relate to unfullfilled copies, resulting in keys being generated.
Glad you got yours ^_^ hopefully mine will arrive in the next week or two. thankfully, there's no rush.

it's a series that i unfortunately can't seem to get into. i can't pinpoint why that is. i usually like jrpgs but somehow it doesn't click. played the demo of arise as well. i don't know what it is about it because on paper everything about it seems awesome.

This is what happens when (a) it's not exclusively on a console with either awful sales (Symphonia on GameCube) or with typically few JRPG fans (Vesperia on 360) (b) you actually release it in the west initially and don't wait until the next decade to do so (Phantasia) or release it everywhere in the west initially and not just NA (Eternia) or release it in the west at all (Destiny 2) and (c) make it look modern and not like a budget PS3 title even though it's on PS4 (Berseria, Zestiria). And (d) Rinwell is cute.

Wow good for them! The demo didn't do for me but all the positive word of mouth might be enough for me to give the full game a whirl at some point.

Brilliant game! I'm still quite early into it and loving every minute of it. I've already added it as one of my favourite Tales of but will see where it's placed compared to others when I'm finished. The demo didn't impress me all that much (only played it for the bonus dlc) but it's a good way to get a taste what to expect out of it. The full game is so much better!

Fantastic... it is such a great game so far.

I have even started taking screen shots of some of the Story panels. Love how they did it this time.

Combat is rock solid and the world, characters, effects looks amazing!. Nicely done!

Not knocking it al all but this just shows how hungry people are for games! We’re in a dry spell right now!

The demo was amazing one of the best demos i ever play.the combat and graphics was amazing.glad its the best selling tales games ever.word up son

I bought it but haven’t tried it yet! I like seeing games like this do well. Congrats!

@playstation1995

"combat and graphics"

Yep, it is 2021... we should expect both for our money at this point. And Tales delivered!

How long until Twitter start making demands to change the game?

Absolutely deserved. Best JRPG I’ve played this year, SMT V has some stiff competition.

@Matroska Actually, when looking at sales, Symphonia is the best selling Tales game. Despite being released on GameCube, PS2 (Japan only), PS4, and PC, it still sold the most units on Gamecube. Then again, Nintendo actively marketed the game heavily. I think the real kicker here is "If you make a great game, also make sure people know it's coming out."

@Cloud7794 Well I just looked on VGchartz and the GC release of Symphonia sold a total of 0.95 million copies which means Arise has outsold Symphonia's lifetime sales in just 5 or 6 days. Each Tales game has had something holding it back from what I can remember. Like I said, the GC sold incredibly poorly so while that sales figure of 950,000 is very good given the install base, it's still not great in general. Others were Japan only, or didn't get a European release, a variety of things. In more recent years they were held back by looking like PS3 games - which they effectively were.

I'm not denying advertising helps, but like you said yourself, Nintendo also heavily advertised Symphonia and that's just been outsold after a few days. I think this is the first 'Tales of' with a simultaneous worldwide release, including on PC; that massively helps too.

Now fingers crossed they follow up on this with an anime series and other spin-offs, like certain games in the series have had before. That'd be great.

@Matroska I was pointing that Symphonia was a massive hit since I felt your comment implied that it somehow sold poorly. To be fair as well, Arise has sold 1mil copies across 5 platforms, so I feel just using the initial GameCube version for Symphonia is a bit inaccurate to say the least. About the equivalent of only counting Arise's PS4 sales I'd say.

Nonetheless I can just be overly pedantic. Arise is a MASSIVE win for the Tales franchise, and I hope they don't let that momentum dwindle. An anime series could be good, but I'd have to wait until I beat the game to see if I'd want a spinoff or sequel. I also can't stop imagining playing a Tales of Destiny remake on this engine, but that's a pipe dream lol

I've been playing it on Steam and it's been great.

Just arrived in the 3rd area (the grasslands), and had an optional dragon boss suddenly ambush me while I was fighting some other, basic enemies (...it kicked my butt, lol). Combat is smooth & feels great when everything chains together perfectly, and it certainly doesn't hurt that the game is drop dead gorgeous. Oh, and Hootle is absolutely the best.

Certainly the best Tales game in quite some time.

@Matroska you are only including one platforms sales figures for a game that was also released on PS2, PS3 and PC and early this year it was reported by BandaiNamco themselves it has sold about 2.4 million copies. So no it hasn't outsold its lifetime sales yet.

@Zenszulu Sure but in 5 days it's almost halfway there. The point is that only releasing Symphonia on one platform, and one that sold terribly at that, held back its success. That's my initial point, previously the games were only released in some regions, or only on one console, and sometimes consoles that sold like crap like the GC (limiting it to an audience of under 20 million when the PS2 had 150 million users or thereabouts.)

It's not surprising that when released on multiple consoles and PC, and simultaneous worldwide release, while looking like a current gen game, they end up with the fastest seller. You seem to be agreeing with me while phrasing it as a disagreement.

whoooaaah ohhh ohh - whoooaaah ooohhh!

i have a few nitpicks with the game, mostly minor. my two biggest gripes is gald and the bosses. the bosses are really kinda bad. they have completely predictable phases and are just meat grinds. throw bodies at them till they fall rather than any type of strategy, they don't stun - they always have one boost strike happen when at 50% hp threshold is hit. They basically have zero damage checks after that 50% and theres practically nothing you can do to prevent them, save for a few thats basically "use new characters boost attack or suffer life."

The game is beautiful but the combat is really rough around the edges if you look at it. Not surprising, being pretty much a revamp of the combat system but it really takes away the experience.

Great to hear, it's about time this series started posting decent sales numbers, they deserve a large amount of financial success and they've very successfully managed to make it more mainstream while still maintaining much of the original formula.

How come a game like this, with no downsides or negative critiques… gets a score of 9/10

However deathloop, that has peaks and troughs, is getting blind 10/10 scores

About 7 hours in so far and opened up the next section of the map and enjoying it so far. I wouldnt say its blown me away yet but its good. Think i need to start spending some CP points on some Arts to change up my combat a bit.

Hi there fellow gamers.
Congrats to the team behind the game. Well deserved.
I think this is probably my favourite Tales of game besides Vesperia and Xillia.
Already have full party members (all six of them) and the story is still pretty interesting.
Also, it´s been awhile since I like the entire cast of characters so far, especially the party members.
I´m enjoying their dinamic a lot. Man, did I miss good jrpgs.
Cheers, stay safe good people and happy gaming to us all

@CynicalGamer Hi there friend
The combos feel really good the more skills and ability points you get. I have already gotten the trophy for the 100 combo and depending on how you customize your party, that number can go even higher, with both high level enemies, Bosses and optional Bosses from side quests.
Characters like Alphen, Law and Dohalim can do very long combo strings for instance, while you have the others as suport.
I don´t know about playing the game in high difficulty settings, but by all means, go for it on new game plus.
Cheers, stay safe and have a good one

@RaZieLDaNtE Thanks. Got it a few hours ago now. Have a good weekend!

I’ll preface this with saying my experience with the tales games is limited to two hours of Zestiria before refunding it, so take that as you will.

I bought Arise because it looks awesome and I heard the story was good. Very dark themes going on here which is ok, and handled fairly well. BUT, the constant need to overly explain every little thing in cut scenes and skits, and the never ending lines of repetitive dialogue during fights just kills it for me.

Gameplay is awesome, dialogue is not. Glad it sold well. To each his own.