The Tales series turned thirty in 2025. Thirty years of action RPG combat, anime melodrama, skits that run longer than some movies, and a naming convention that makes absolutely no sense. Tales of Symphonia. Tales of Vesperia. Tales of Berseria. The franchise picks words that sound vaguely magical, slaps them after “Tales of,” and somehow each one becomes somebody’s favorite game of all time. I’ve played fourteen of them. I have opinions about all fourteen. And I’ve learned that defending your Tales ranking in public requires the same courage as defending your political beliefs at Thanksgiving dinner.
What makes ranking the Tales series uniquely difficult is that each entry prioritizes different things. Symphonia has the most iconic story but clunky combat by modern standards. Vesperia has the most charismatic protagonist but a plot that loses direction in its second half. Berseria has the strongest ensemble cast but recycled dungeon designs. Arise has the most polished combat but a tonal split that divides players cleanly down the middle. No single game does everything at the highest level, which means your ranking says more about what you value in a JRPG than it says about the games themselves.
The combat evolution that defines the franchise
The Linear Motion Battle System is the common thread connecting every Tales entry, but calling it “one system” is like calling every car “one vehicle.” The LMBS of Phantasia in 1995 and the LMBS of Arise in 2021 share a name and approximately nothing else.
Phantasia gave you a 2D plane where your character moved left and right, executing attacks through directional inputs combined with button presses. It was essentially a fighting game with RPG stats layered on top. Simple, immediate, satisfying. Destiny expanded the 2D system with aerial attacks and more complex combo chains. Eternia added elemental collaboration between party members. Each entry iterated on the foundation without breaking it.
Symphonia made the jump to 3D, and the growing pains were real. Combat felt floaty compared to the 2D entries. The camera struggled with multiple characters in three-dimensional space. But the core philosophy survived: real-time combat where positioning, timing, and combo construction matter more than raw stats. Abyss refined the 3D system significantly, and by Vesperia, the franchise had figured out how to make 3D action combat feel as precise as the 2D originals.
The modern era. Graces, Xillia, Berseria, Arise, pushed the system toward full action game territory. Graces introduced style-shifting combat that felt almost like a character action game. Berseria added the Soul Gauge, which made resource management a real-time decision rather than a menu-based one. Arise brought boost attacks and cinematic finishers that made every encounter feel like a choreographed sequence.
A thorough ranking of every entry that accounts for these mechanical differences is available at https://icicledisaster.com/every-tales-of-game-ranked/; it’s one of the more balanced takes I’ve found, treating combat system quality as equally important to story and characters.
The protagonist problem
Tales protagonists fall into roughly three categories: the idealistic hero (Lloyd, Luke post-development, Sorey), the reluctant warrior (Yuri, Velvet, Alphen), and the kid who gets dragged into things (Jude, Ludger, Emil). The franchise’s writing quality correlates almost perfectly with how interesting the protagonist is, which shouldn’t be surprising but somehow keeps surprising developers who think they can carry a hundred-hour game on the shoulders of a bland lead.
Yuri Lowell from Vesperia remains the franchise’s strongest protagonist because he does something almost no JRPG protagonist does: he makes morally questionable decisions and the game doesn’t punish him for it. He executes a corrupt politician who’s beyond the reach of justice. The game presents this as a complex moral choice rather than a heroic triumph or a villainous act. That moral ambiguity gives Yuri depth that idealistic protagonists like Sorey (from Zestiria) simply cannot achieve. Sorey wants to save the world because saving the world is good. Yuri wants to protect specific people and is willing to break laws to do it. One of these is a character. The other is a mission statement.
Velvet Crowe from Berseria solved the protagonist’s problem differently; she started as a villain. Her motivation is revenge, pure and uncut. She tears through the world with a demonic arm and a burning hatred for the man who sacrificed her brother. The game lets her be angry, violent, and selfish for twenty hours before gradually revealing the complexity behind the rage. By the end, she’s one of the most fully realized characters in the franchise. But it only works because the game was willing to let her be unlikeable first.
Why the skits matter more than people realize
The skit system, optional conversational vignettes between party members, is arguably the Tales franchise’s most important contribution to the JRPG genre. These aren’t cutscenes. They’re not plot-critical. You can skip every single one and still understand the story. But they’re where the characters actually live.
Main story scenes handle plot mechanics: who needs to go where, what needs to happen, what the villain is planning. Skits handle everything else: how characters feel about each other, what they argue about at dinner, who snores, who’s afraid of bugs, who secretly reads romance novels. This casual characterization makes Tales parties feel like actual groups of people rather than collections of combat archetypes with anime hairstyles.
Vesperia has 410 skits. Four hundred and ten. That’s roughly eight hours of optional character content, more than many games’ entire stories. The volume matters because it creates a density of characterization that structured narrative can’t achieve. You don’t learn about Raven’s past through a dramatic flashback sequence. You learn about it through forty small moments scattered across sixty hours, each one adding a detail that shifts your understanding slightly. The cumulative effect is a character who feels fully known by the time credits roll, even though no single scene “explained” him.
The entries nobody talks about
Every Tales ranking focuses on the heavy hitters: Symphonia, Vesperia, Abyss, Berseria, Arise. But the franchise has thirteen other entries that range from underrated gems to fascinating failures.
Tales of Rebirth, never localized in English, has one of the strongest combat systems in the series: a three-lane system where party positioning determines attack effectiveness. The racial conflict narrative is more politically charged than anything the localized entries attempt. It’s the game that Tales fans who read Japanese consistently rank higher than Western fans expect.
Legendia is the franchise’s greatest missed opportunity. Its first half is a solid but unremarkable Tales game. Its second half: a series of character-specific story arcs that explore each party member’s backstory, is some of the strongest writing the franchise has produced. But you have to endure thirty hours of mediocrity to reach it, and most players give up long before that point.
Hearts R, the Vita remake of the DS original, is the most charming Tales game nobody played. The Soma system: a progression mechanic tied to emotional growth rather than combat experience, is thematically brilliant. Characters literally become stronger by processing their emotions, and the mechanical reinforcement of that theme gives the narrative a weight that more technically impressive entries lack.
Where the franchise goes after Arise
Arise sold three million copies and proved the franchise could compete commercially at the highest tier. That success creates pressure, pressure to replicate the formula, to play it safe, to sand off the edges that made previous entries distinctive in favor of broad accessibility. The next Tales game will tell us whether Bandai Namco learned the right lesson from Arise (polish and ambition can coexist) or the wrong one (accessibility means simplification).
The franchise’s history suggests optimism. Every time a Tales game has played it safe. Zestiria’s bland protagonist, Xillia 2’s silent lead experiment: the next entry has course-corrected aggressively. Berseria followed Zestiria with one of the series’ darkest, most character-driven narratives. The pattern of overcorrection is itself a kind of quality control: the franchise swings between safe and ambitious, and the ambitious entries are almost always the ones people remember.
Thirty years is a long time for any creative franchise to stay relevant. Most don’t make it past ten before repetition kills interest. The Tales series survives because it changes enough between entries to stay interesting while keeping enough consistent: the real-time combat, the party banter, the emphasis on relationships over raw plot, to maintain its identity. That balance is harder to achieve than it looks, and the franchise has earned its spot in the genre’s upper tier by maintaining it across three decades.
The localization gap
A ranking of the Tales franchise necessarily comes with an asterisk: Western fans have never played all of it. Rebirth, Destiny 2, Innocence, these entries exist only in Japanese and have never received official English localizations. Rating the franchise without playing these entries is like rating the MCU without watching three random movies in the middle. You can do it, but your ranking is inherently incomplete.
Fan translations exist for some of these titles. Destiny Director’s Cut has a complete English patch. Innocence R on Vita has a partial translation. But fan translations exist in a legal gray area and require hardware modification or emulation, which limits their audience to the most dedicated fans. The result is a franchise where English-speaking fans and Japanese-speaking fans have fundamentally different canvases to work with when assembling their rankings.
Bamco has shown willingness to re-release older titles: the Symphonia remaster and the Vesperia Definitive Edition both reached modern platforms. But neither Rebirth nor Destiny 2 have received the same treatment, and the commercial case for localizing fifteen-to-twenty-year-old games that never had an English audience is difficult to make. These games may remain permanently locked behind a language barrier, which means the definitive Tales ranking may never exist in English. That’s a loss the genre hasn’t fully acknowledged.
The emotional case for your number one
At the end of every ranking exercise, logic runs out and emotion takes over. My number one Tales game isn’t my number one because I can construct a bulletproof analytical case for it. It’s my number one because of a specific moment: a skit, a boss fight, a plot twist, that hit me at exactly the right time in my life and burrowed into my memory so deeply that nothing else in the franchise has dislodged it.
That’s how it works for everyone. Your number one Tales game is the one that meant the most to you personally, and no ranking can challenge that because rankings operate on different criteria than emotional resonance. The analytical ranking tells you which game is “objectively” strongest across defined metrics. The personal ranking tells you which game changed how you think about stories, combat, friendship, or morality. Both rankings are valid. Only one of them matters to you at 2 AM when you’re deciding what to replay.
The Tales franchise earns these attachments by being consistently vulnerable. Every entry swings for emotional fences that it doesn’t always clear. Sometimes the melodrama lands badly. Sometimes the villain’s motivation is laughable. Sometimes a skit goes on for three minutes too long. But the willingness to aim for emotional impact — to risk being cheesy, to risk making players cry over anime characters, to risk sentimentality in a medium that increasingly values ironic detachment — is what makes these games stick. They care about making you feel things, and that care, across thirty years and thirty entries, is the franchise’s real legacy.
About the author: [Icicle Disaster] has played every Tales game at launch since Symphonia and ranks them differently each year depending on which battle system he’s been replaying. He considers Berseria the series’ narrative peak and Arise its mechanical peak, and he’s aware these are fighting words in certain corners of the internet.