Tales of Arise - 2 Million Copies sold

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It's okay to have a poor taste in videogames. One does not go to jail for that.

You can also like worse games like Pathfinder, or Goldbox crap.

In fact, you're even allowed to post here about it, despite the fact that it matters nothing and the games that are so bad and sell so bad won't be having more sequels,
while good games keep being great and selling great, and there will be more like it coming from their successful studios.

Praise Natural Selection.

I had a similar problem when I used to post on a horror movie forum.

I kept telling them how good Pixar films were. Great music, wonderful production values, superb voice acting, interesting plots.

But the morons kept ignoring my plaintive laments about their taste. They kept watching low budget schlock with bad actors, silly plots and dodgy editing.

They kept saying that they simply weren't scared by films like Toy Story 4, even though Pixar films have lots of scenes of peril. They just wanted blood spurts and impaled young lovers.

You'd sometimes get a good successful high production horror film that seemed to do everything right, but it still wasn't a patch on Cars 2 IMO.
 
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Back to specifically 'Tales of Arise - 2 million copies sold.'
Anything else will be removed.
 
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Deleted a post for ignoring moderator's warning to stay on topic. Next one will get a red card too.
 
Well, I gave the demo a go.
The production levels have really gone up. Much nicer art direction and graphical fidelity than the last one I tried. But the demo starts with you and 5 other characters at 25th level, so you never really get the sense of development that you'd get if the demo started from the... start.
Even more so than the other "Tales of" games I've tried, I found the combat flashy but messy. Most of the time random button mashing saw me through, and I was unsure whether any decisions I made had any effect on anything. Then I got to the first boss in the demo (some giant mantis thing?) and kept dying. Conclusion: there is a strategy to this and my brain hasn't keyed into it.
Juries still out. It does seem like an improvement on the others I've looked at, though.
 
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One thing I really like about the Tales games is that they keep evolving with the times, as all good things should. They have made the transition to new-gen pretty smoothly and adapted beautifully to it, rather than just repeating 20-year-old formulas with 20 years old technology and assets, that worked for the audience of 20 years ago.

Berseria was a surprisingly welcome step up from the previous tales game, and Arise has managed to once again rise a bar that was incredibly high, and that is always welcome.

I'm quite looking forward to whatever they come up with next, it's always a delight to put my money in the hands of studios that like to give new experiences to their fans, and thankfully, with over 2 million copies sold, that is guaranteed to keep happening.
 
The total sales numbers in Japan since release are pretty average when compared to moderately successful series. I wonder if it will make 3 million sales?
 
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In the month of its release, it sold more copies than releases like Diablo II Resurrected and Deathloop only in the US. It's also the best selling "Tales of" game in history in the same post release window. To put it in numbers that most users of RPGWatch can digest, so far it has sold roughly 5x the number of units as Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which I was going to say it's part of a moderately successful series, but I guess it's just 1/5th of the way to being a moderately successful series.
 
I was specifically talking about Japan. But I am interested, where are you getting the sales of WoR from?

Not that I think this WoR is a mainstream series, it is niche and would of cost a fraction of what a bigger game would cost. Kingmaker has sold over a million copies (exluding kickstarter backers). I'd be surprised if WoR ends up much below that once it actually gets properly finished. Solid for such a niche game that would of cost a fraction of what Tales of Arise did.

edit: Actually I see the confusion. I shouldn't of used the word "moderate". What I meant was a middle (AA) tier type game not AAA i.e. Final Fantasy or a big global franchise like CoD, Sims, Madden etc. WoR is effectively an indie/A type production.

edit2: I quoted an incorrect sales number for Kingmaker.
 
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No, WotR will sell similarly to Kingmaker, or probably slightly more. But I was talking about games with the same age - It took 3 years for Kingmaker to reach one million copies sold, obviously after the game was pretty much freeware and you could get it for $5 in bundles and stuff, so Wrath of the Righteous will follow suit, seeing it has the same audience and the same score as the first one.

The number of sales from Wrath of the Righteous I estimated is not official, it's just an extrapolation from the fact that it sold roughly 200k copies in the first week and Tales of Arise sold roughly 1 million in that same period. It may be a few thousand copies up and down, but everything follows a trend.

"Tales of" games do fit the "AA" I guess? In the same way that most well known RPG farnchises do anyway, save very few exceptions (like recently Elder Ring). It's still one of the best selling games amongst its peers, especially compared to recently released western RPGs - so if the point was to compare it to FIFA or Madden, sure, but then the only arguments to belittle the game's success I read are

1) Insulting people who like the game
2) Comparing it to non-RPGs

I don't mind either, we are here to discuss things. But it also makes for a poor argument, as after all has been said, Tales of Arise remains being an objectively better game than most other RPGs, selling better, and being more successful.
 
From past experience it seems JRPGs sell a lot more copies outside Japan. I just wish they would translate and localize the international versions faster then a snail pace.

Final Fantasy sale numbers - https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy

As for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous I know it sold 250,000 copies just in it's first week. That's more then enough to recoup development costs after EA and kickstarter.

As for a term for studios like Owlcat I personally call them B-grade developers.
 
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2 million in this relatively short period is really good I would have thought.
Especially when compared to its peers.
This list of JRPG franchises on Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know) puts it favourably by itself against the likes of the Ni no Kuni or God Eater series (I thought they'd be higher) etc etc.
I had no idea the Tales franchise as a whole was as high up the chart as that (7th). It's not fair to compare with the giants like FF or DQ, but to be up near Dark Souls or Megami Tensei is pretty good.

For all that, I'd rather play one of my niche shitty RPGs any day :p
 
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I have played at least major parts of:
Tales of Symphonia
Tales of Destiny
Tales of the Abyss
Tales of Vesperia
Tales of Berseria
Tales of Legendia

They're all pretty similar. And so is Tales of Arise. It's not innovative, narratively or mechanically. Does that make it a bad game? Of course not. But championing it as a beacon of modernity is kinda funny.
 
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however, which is why in my original post said that this is the best RPG of 2021, and not of the decade, or the century.

Errr, by that logic Tales of Arise would be not be the best RPG of 2021.

Pick any of:
Assassins Creed: Valhalla
Monster Hunter Rise
Pokemon Brilliant Diamond (outsold Tales of Arise by more than 10:1)

They all outsold Tales by a very large factor. This of course makes them vastly better cRPGs. I really don't know why anyone would ever play anything apart from AC: Valhalla, it sold over 12 million copies in it's first 2 months!!
 
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Tales of Arise won the Game Awards 2021 against all those big names.
It is IGNs RPG of the Year 2021.
It sold pretty well - see above.
Some Watchers like it - it is on our Curator List and was clicked by more Steam users than for example ELEX II, Wyldermyth or Expeditions: Rome…
The Metacritic score is 84, which is a good value.

Quintessence:

The game found its target audience and quite a few people in this world like it.
Did it revolutionize the genre? - no. It's just an evolution of the Tales series.
 
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Personally I dont see strong relation between sales/popularity and quality. Its probably really good indicator if I dont know much about object of interest. With more information this indication becomes less and less important. And using it to relativize all other arguments is just a fallacy.
 
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That's not his point. The point is that sales figures are not direct indications of quality.

Sales figures can be high if
a) buyers like the product and tell others to buy it too (In this case the qualtity requirements of the original buyers were met)

b) the publisher is really good at marketing and trick buyers into buying something and not all of their quality requirements were met, but then the metacritic rating will sink over time.

So sales figures can be indicator for quality requirements of the buyers who bought the product. Your personal quality requirements can of course be totally different.

The original news-post did not make the conclusion:
High sales figures -> good quality

I bought the Tales of Arise on release day and my personal quality requirements for action-RPGs are met to 80%-85%, regardless how many units were sold.
 
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From past experience it seems JRPGs sell a lot more copies outside Japan. I just wish they would translate and localize the international versions faster then a snail pace.

Final Fantasy sale numbers - https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy

As for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous I know it sold 250,000 copies just in it's first week. That's more then enough to recoup development costs after EA and kickstarter.

As for a term for studios like Owlcat I personally call them B-grade developers.

I think sales have to be put in perspective with budget and genre too.

JRPGs tape into a proven concept, so do they have some merit, is there something original? I honestly can't judge since I'm not into JRPG. Tales of Arise is Bandai Namco, they have the means and I think the game is considered AAA grade (with a high budget) and very good. In these conditions, is 2 million such a success (as you said)?

In comparison, the Pathfinder games are not for everyone, they're very well made but they're also more complex and many people prefer something easier to play or more action-oriented. I don't know how many copies they've sold so far, I see 1 million for Kingmaker so they may double that with Wrath. I'd find that a better achievement with a comparatively smaller budget and team, for a game that is arguably more in a niche market in the RPG genre.

Not that "merit" is a goal in itself. If people like a game in the genre they're looking for (which is obviously the case for both those companies), the goal is achieved IMO.

PS: There was no EA for Pathfinder. ;)
 
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