'Tales Of Arise' Guide: Combat Tips And Tricks

The combat system in “Tales of Arise” is arguably the best the series has ever had, but it’s very easy to miss a few critical pieces of information that can greatly help players win their battles more easily.

While fairly straightforward at first, the game’s combat system gets rather complicated by the middle part of the story where heavily armored enemies and other specialists come into play. At this point, dealing damage will become more difficult and enemies will feel spongier than usual as they start to absorb more damage.

Here’s a small collection of tips and tricks to help players deal the most damage possible in “Tales of Arise.”

Elemental Affinities

One aspect players may have glossed over is how elemental damage affects enemies with certain elemental affinities. Players may have noticed that some attacks are stronger against certain enemies. This is because different enemy types have specific elemental affinities tied to them.

Hit an enemy with an element that they’re weak against to knock them down and deal significantly more damage. Enemies will be weak to whatever element opposes their own, which is as follows:

• Fire/Water
• Earth/Wind
• Light/Dark

Toggle Party Member Artes

In order to take full advantage of elemental affinities, players should consider toggling the Artes of party members according to the enemy they’re fighting. The type of elemental damage that an ability uses is displayed on the Artes screen, while the type of elemental affinity that an opponent has can be spotted by pressing L1/LB/Alt then looking to the right of their name tags on the upper-left portion of the screen.

Toggling Artes attacks will make party members use only the abilities that directly counter an opponent.

Combos and Finishers

Players should aim toward getting their combo counter as high as possible in order to perform powerful finisher moves called Boost Strikes.

Hitting broken enemies with any combination of artes and basic attacks will fill up the diamond on the targeting reticle. Once this diamond turns completely blue, players can perform a Boost Strike to deal massive damage.

Extend combos by canceling basic attack recovery times with artes attacks. This will help keep combos going and targets broken for longer until Boost Strikes become available.