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My disappointment has no bounds in this game. I was really excited at first because we got to see our gang again and for some reason the trailers and promotions made it seem like it would be this big expansion and full new story. Unfortunately despite being like $20, in the end it really was just a small DLC.
Well to clarify, it FELT like a small DLC but actually took about 20 hours to get through. The reason though that it felt small was because the MSQ is quite short and most of the rest of the time was stuff like bear ass quests, figuring out the best glamours for the party, or manually redoing your skill trees all over again.
Ok let’s put the cost aside. The game takes place AFTER Alphen and Shionne kiss in space so we got our official couples kinda set in stone so this should be interesting right? No, let’s just introduce a completely random character, with the same voice as the antagonist of Endwalker and literally the exact same plotline. Surely nothing could go wrong! Well it went wrong all the way to the actual boss battle glitching on me, forcing me to restart the game and redo the battle 3 times until I could figure out that it was a glitch rather than me doing something wrong in the game.
The Nazamil fight bug not only broke us, but had that effect that stuff like Endless Eight have where it’s so bad that it makes you start to question how much you even liked this in the first place. We’d already established long ago that the combat in Tales games sucks, and that the combat in this Tales game often especially sucks, and that unwinable storyline boss fights suck, and that Nazamil as a character was a boring Endsinger knockoff, so then having a game breaking bug layered on top of all of that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We wasted like 40 minutes there between trying to kill her, then trying to figure out what to do to trigger the enrage, then restarting and putting it on hard mode assuming we needed to lose to her (which isn’t it), then finally doing it again on easy mode and crossing our fingers that this time the fight would proceed properly.
The game also tended to force me into watching the intro movie over and over until I restarted it, so needless to say, despite being a DLC for an already working game, it was glitchy AF. To add on to the misery, the dumb story aside, most of the DLC consisted of side quests featuring the main cast but some of them were just unbearably grindy?? So for example, a few of the quests required you to fight durdles to get an item. However, the durds wouldn’t drop this item unless you used a specific character doing a specific skill/limit break etc. WHy??? What is the point of this. Just let me chill and enjoy the dialogue, why are you making me grind in a freaking DLC? It was so bad that while I completed most of the side quests, the ones that required specific skills to grind out the item I just gave up on. I would have given up on even more if it wasn’t for the fact that a lot of the items I bought from the campfire store guy.
There’s also just really baffling design choices with regards to importing your game. Importing your game gives you some bonuses, plus whatever level your characters ended the game at (so you can potentially be higher than the level 65 baseline), but then the game takes away all your gear and makes you redo your skills (including skills that needed to be unlocked through use) all over again. Now in our case we put the game on auto mode and the difficulty to the easiest (that is, the bonus super easy mode that they added later on) so resetting all our skills didn’t really matter since we basically just clicked stuff at random, but if you were playing for real you’d have to remember two years later “wait what exactly did I have to pick again in order to use my build?” The level boosts also mess up some of the bear ass quests where you need to kill enemies in specific ways in order to get the items. The game might want you to fight enemies that you’re like 20 levels above so they might simply die before you can even do the combo or whatever it is in order to make them drop the item. We had to bump the difficulty up to hard mode in order to complete some of these!
And finally of course the biggest disappointment of all, WHY DIDN’T THEY DO A LIVE VERSION OF SHIONNE AND ALPHEN’S WEDDING. SERIOUSLY, WE KNOW IT’S GONNA HAPPEN FROM THE CREDITS OF THE FIRST GAME, JUST ADD A SCENE WHERE IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS WITH VOICES AND MOVEMENT AND SHIT. And even worse, the proposal, which we did NOT see in the first game, the scene where Alphen was about to propose not only got cockblocked until “later”…but when “later” finally happened THE SCREEN FADES TO WHITE ~ZE ENDO~.
THEY EVEN HAD A QUEST WHERE ALPHEN IS PLANNING THE WEDDING SECRETLY BEHIND SHIONNE’S BACK AND THEN THEY DID NOTHING WITH IT. Instead they focused on their stupid grindy bear ass quests no one gives a fuck about and on some stupid insert Endwalker character knockoff. ಠ_ಠ
Three different party member couples should’ve meant AT LEAST three different eroscenes but nope, forget getting to see Alphen and Shionne’s wedding night, we don’t even get to see their wedding day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Despite there being an entire questline about planning the wedding!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway, I am insanely disappointed and I honestly don’t think this DLC is worth it, at least not at full price. If there’s ever a sale on Steam or whatever and the DLC is like 50% off then maybe you can play it if you just want to see the gang back again (and you just want to see Rinwell’s cute new DLC outfit because it’s honestly the best one in the bunch imo.) Otherwise I think it’s best to just stick to the base game and pretend this doesn’t exist as it does very little in terms of story or character development for the game.
If you just want to see the very few Alphen x Shionne scenes from Beyond the Dawn, check out the highlights at the end of my Tales of Arise collection on twitch because I can’t even get the motivation to make a youtube video for this. (´・ω・`)
I do admit that I saw that the initial reviews for the game were not particularly good, but I mentally chalked this up to everyone just being haters that are mad that this game isn’t Tales of Symphonia (lol). Well…it was not good. It was the most unnecessary uh, sequel (I guess?) that I’ve come across in a while. The story didn’t really add anything new, the quests were as paint-by-numbers as you can get, and even the tedium felt more like it was the result of laziness or a lack of ideas rather than attempting to pad out the game.
Bread Master Lee 
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