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Video Game / Tales Series

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tales_of_series_2020_logo_image.png
The series logo, as of 2020

The Tales Series is a long-running fantasy action JRPG series by Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Earlier games in the series were developed by Wolf Team, once a subsidiary of Telenet Japan, which was reorganized as Namco Tales Studio in 2003. Namco Tales Studio was shut down in 2011 but absorbed into Bandai Namco, which continued the series.

The series is divided into two sections:

    open/close all folders 

    Original Titles 

    Crossover Titles 
  • Tales of Fandom:
    • Volume 1 (2002; Japan-only, PlayStation)
    • Volume 2 (2007; Japan-only, PlayStation 2)
      Compilation games with the Tales characters in various scenarios. The first features the cast of Phantasia, Destiny, and Eternia, while the second stars Phantasia, Symphonia, and Abyss.
  • Tales of the World
  • Tales of Versus (2009; Japan-only, PlayStation Portable)
    A four-player Platform Fighter featuring characters throughout the Tales series.
  • Tales of the Heroes: Twin Brave (2012; Japan-only, PlayStation Portable)
    A Dynasty Warriors-like hack 'n slash, featuring famous duos from the Tales series fighting together.
  • Tales of Link (2014-2018; iOS, Android)
    A crossover mobile game that has you summon Tales Series heroes to save the world of Liafyse from the "seeds of ruin". This 2D title utilizes a modified Match-Three Game engine for combat.
  • Tales of Asteria (2014-2023; Japan-only, iOS, Android)
    A crossover mobile game.
  • Tales Of The Rays (2017-present; Japan-onlynote  iOS, Android)
    A crossover mobile game that has you summon Tales Series heroes to save the world of Tir Na Nog from catastrophe. A fully-3D game, it utilizes the Linear Motion Battle System and comes with its own plot, characters, theme song and Japanese voice acting.
  • Tales of Crestoria (2020-2022; iOS, Android)note 

    Anime adaptations 
  • Tales of Phantasia
    A 4-episode OVA covering the events of the game
  • Tales of Eternia
    A 13-episode anime about a subplot unrelated to the actual game.
  • Tales of Symphonia: The Animation
    Two 4-episode and one 3-episode OVAs, each one covering a third of the game.
  • Tales of the Abyss: The Animation
    A 26-episode television anime covering the events of the game.
  • Tales of Vesperia: The First Strike
    A prequel movie adaptation.
  • Tales of Fandom Gaiden
    A humorous DVD extra released with Tales Of Fandom 2, featuring the heroes of the games arguing over who's the best.
  • Viva - Tales Of!
    A series of DVD extras given away with pre-orders for games in the series, featuring Zelos Wilder and Jade Curtiss as talk show hosts interviewing various characters. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Tales of Theatre
    A set of five anime shorts given away as a pre-order bonus for Tales Of The Heroes: Twin Brave, featuring the Twin Brave characters in chibi style.
  • Tales of Zestiria: Dawn of the Shepherd
    A 45 minute long OVA that covers the beginning of the game.
  • Tales of Zestiria the X
    Pronounced "The Cross," a two-cour TV series aired during Summer 2016 and Winter 2017. It is an anime of the game's story with lots of Adaptation Expansion (including a fully anime-original prologue episode). 2 episodes also serve as promotional material for Tales of Berseria, covering roughly the first hour of that game.
  • Tales of Crestoria - The Wake of Sin
    A 14-minute CG short released in October 2020 to promote the game and roughly covers the major plot beats of the prologue. Available with English subtitles on Bandai-Namco's official Youtube channel.

Not to be confused with the Trails Series.

Information and tropes pertaining to the individual titles are on their respective pages.

Tropes that appear in this franchise include:

    A to G 
  • Amazing Technicolor Battlefield:
  • Apocalypse Maiden:
    • The Score in Tales of the Abyss prophesises the destruction of Akzeriuth that is supposed to kick off a series of events that results in The End of the World as We Know It. The plot starts because Van decided to make the world end on his terms and thus created the replica of the original Luke fon Fabre to take the original's place. This instead ends up kicking off events that result in preventing the end of the world and the choice to Screw Destiny by the main party.
    • Estelle in Tales of Vesperia. As a Child of the Full Moon she naturally disrupts the Aer flow of the planet, making her very existence a huge contributor to the decay of both the world and the seal on an ancient Eldritch Abomination.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The active party members are typically limited to four characters at once, with the actual party size ranging from five (the original version of Tales of Phantasia) to ten (the Updated Re Release of Destiny). What, if anything, the extra members are doing while the others are fighting is sometimes but not always justified:
    • Played straight and subverted in Tales of Symphonia when after defeating the Summon Spirit Gnome, he complains that the party took him "four against one", while his previous summoner Mithos took him one-on-one. This when your party consists of eight people, half of which apparently stood aside and let your main group fight him alone. Nearly every other plot fight acts like everyone jumped into the melee.
    • Justified in Tales of the Abyss, the only thing preventing your allies' fonic artes from doing just as much damage to you as to the monsters are marks laid on the team by your spellcasters, and they can't mark too many people at once. Essentially, up to two of your party members are getting left out because they can't be made Friendly Fire Proof.
    • Tempest, Innocence and Hearts, as well as Keroro RPG, made by the same people, have a limit of three. Narikiri Dungeon 3 for GBA also had four parties of three each, but since the actual party size was every character in the first five games…
    • Averted in Tales of Hearts by introducing the "Link Attack" system, by which characters in the back party can be summoned in to use attacks or spells. Since characters Linked in can't be damaged or interrupted, it's useful for calling out a Raise Dead or Last Disc Magic with a charge time of "eternity".
    • Lampshaded in Tales of Vesperia. If you go a long time without switching party members in, you may get a skit where the inactive members complain about being left out of the action. Yes, the others really are just sitting on the sidelines.
    • In Tales of Xillia, you can only have four party members onscreen during a battle... but you can swap an inactive party member with an active one mid-battle.
    • Justified most of the time in Tales of Xillia 2. There are nine party members, but the plot usually forces the team to split up in a way that only leaves Ludger and three other party members present for the battle. However, there are times when the other characters are visibly present with the party, yet aren't playable because Xillia 2 only allows for changing your party when you're inside a city.
    • Justified in Tales of Zestiria due to the unique nature of your party. Most of the characters are spirits (known as seraphim) who reside inside Sorey's body, and unless they're linked to Sorey or one of his Squires, they won't be able to fight the monsters in the game without risking harm to themselves from the malevolence generated by those monsters. Since there are only two playable humans max at any time, this means only two seraphim can be present in battle, adding up to a party of four, though the two remaining seraphim can be swapped in at any time. So technically, everyone is in battle at the same time, just not always actively participating.
    • Justified in Tales of Berseria: While only four of six party members appear in battle at once, the other two can be hot-swapped in mid fight (or even mid-combo), making it clear everyone is participating. Backup will even jump in to replace critical or KO'ed part members automatically, averting Lazy Backup. The only reason you're limited to four at all is the characters acknowledging that six at once would result in getting in each other's way, and having a back line allows injured members to recover, which is reflected in the gameplay, where characters will regenerate HP while benched.
    • Tales of Arise allows only four people on the battlefield, but the other two can use their special attacks, participate in Combination Attacks, and can be manually tagged in. No mid-combo switches this time, though.
    • Three now-inaccessible Tales of Mobile games (Breaker, Commons and Wahreit) actually had limit of two party members per battle, despite actual parties being four to six people. This time, all the blame goes to hardware limitations.
  • Archnemesis Dad: Occasionally, an major antagonist will have a direct familial connection to one of the protagonists, whether they know it or not.
    • Tales of Xillia 2: Bisley Bakur is hinted to be Ludger and Julius' father, though it's never explicitly revealed to Ludger himself and has no direct impact on the story. It doesn't stop him from raising Julius to be a Child Soldier, nor blackmailing Ludger into working for Spirius, nor trying to kill him once Ludger starts interfering with his plans.
    • Tales of Zestiria: It's very slightly implied in the game and confirmed in the supplementary material that Sorey, the game's hero, is the illegitimate son of the game's main villain, Georg Heldalf. Since neither of them are aware of the fact, it doesn't affect the story, and is only made explicit in the manga adaptation where just before Heldalf dies, he recognises Sorey's face as being similar to his mother's.
  • Armor-Piercing Question:
    • In Tales of Graces, the Final Boss is ranting about how humans are evil, and how he's going to kill them all. Asbel promptly turns this into an Armor-Piercing Question by asking "Okay, then what? If you kill everybody, you'll be totally alone, and you and everything in the entire world will die. You really want that?" The Big Bad is silent for a moment, then basically throws a tantrum and begins the final boss battle proper. After defeating him, Asbel shows Lambda that there's another way by proving that Humans Are Special.
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • Lloyd and the party confront Remiel on what it really means for Colette to become an angel, Lloyd protests about the angel transformation, Remiel has this to say (to which Lloyd doesn't have an answer):
        Remiel: The sacrifice of one single person, the Chosen, will bring salvation to world. Are you saying you would choose one soul over the entire world?
      • Mithos also drops one on the party after The Reveal of who he really is, Lloyd gives a speech about how everyone who has been born should be allowed to live and nobody should be made into a sacrifice. Mithos responds:
        Mithos: No life should be born for the sole purpose of dying? What do you think those exspheres are that you're using?
    • Tales of Xillia: During a Motive Rant, King Gaius reveals that his plan is to gather all the world's superweapons to protect the weak and to keep the weapons out of the hands of those who would abuse them. Milla's response can be summed up as "one day, you're going to die. How are you so sure the next guy who takes the throne will have the same ideals that you do?"
    • Tales of Vesperia.
      • Early on, Flynn asks Yuri if him quitting the knights changed anything. Yuri can't respond, simply leaving and admitting when he's alone that Flynn knows how to get to him, and that he's exactly right.
      • After witnessing Yuri kill Cumore, Flynn and him get into an argument over whether or not Yuri was justified in killing him. Near the end of the argument, Flynn tries asking him a question, but Yuri quickly defies this by giving him an answer that momentarily leaves him speechless.
        Flynn: So I’m supposed to sit by while you intend to dirty your hands?
        Yuri: Intend to? I already have!
      • Later on, at Nordipolica, as Yuri and Brave Vesperia flee the city after accidentally killing Belius, they get cornered by Flynn, who demands that they hand over Estelle, and Belius’ Cyano Ceil Crystal. Yuri calls him out on it, pointing out how he’s doing exactly what he was trying to prevent, by taking what they wanted by force, and asks him a question that Flynn is unable to answer.
        Yuri: How is this any different from what I’ve come to expect from the Empire?!
  • Betting Mini-Game: Some games feature a poker casino, where the suits feature the respective game's party members.
  • BFS:
    • All of Karol's swords are longer than he is tall. That's not saying much (he's 12 years old) but his first sword is so big that after Yuri cuts it in half he can use the base as a hammer. (Karol is the tank in the game and all his weapons are way too big for him)
    • In Symphonia, there are a couple of bosses that wield these, either in or out of battle. The Eternal Sword is used only in cutscenes until Lloyd gets it, anyway, but when you fight Yuan, he has a swallow blade that's about as long as he is tall.
    • Gaius from Tales of Xillia and Tales of Xillia 2 wields a nodachi that about equals his height in length, making it in the range of six feet or so.
    • Veigue Lungberg from Tales of Rebirth wields a great sword that makes him attack at a slower speed than most ''Tales'' swordfighters but deals more damage per strike.
  • Big Bad Wannabe:
    • Saleh from Tales of Rebirth is at first shown and described as a powerful enemy general, with a reasonless penchant for destruction and disgust on anything that is 'good'. Every time Veigue tried to approach him during the first half of the game, he spends his time outwitting and overwhelming Veigue... in cutscenes. However, he is never seen in battle on solo compared to his partner Tohma, he's usually fighting with a friend. Veigue defeats him rather easily, and following Tytree's "The Reason You Suck" Speech, he spends most of his time afterwards annoying Veigue with words on how he's going to crush their 'power of hearts', without actually kicking ass, and when he's actually fought the second time (with all his allies, nonetheless!), he's beaten just as easily. In other words, Saleh barks as if the power of evil will triumph all the time, but he couldn't back up with actual prowess.
    • Grand Maestro Mohs from Tales of the Abyss thinks that he has the God Generals of the Oracle Knights wrapped around his finger, under the belief that he can bring about salvation through Yulia’s Score. In reality, the God Generals were only using him for their own ends, mostly to keep the party at bay while they carried out their plan to destroy the world, and leave him to die when they no longer need him.
    • Barbos, the leader of the Blood Alliance, is the main antagonist in Act 1, of Tales of Vesperia. Act 2, reveals that Commandant Alexei had been using him to set up a node for his blastia network to resurrect Zaude, which he sought to use to recreate the world in his own image. However, Zaude turned out to be a seal to keep the Adephagos at bay, and Alexei dies admitting that he was a fool.
    • Tales of Graces: Cedric, Richard’s uncle, is the main antagonist of the first act of the game. He tries to have Richard assassinated to prevent him from reclaiming the throne of Windor, but due to Richard serving as the host body for the real Big Bad, Lambda, he fails, and is killed at the hands of his nephew.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: As of Vesperia, there are DLCs that will give you extra consumable healing items, automatically raise your levels, or skip the grind needed to unlock new artes.
  • The Cameo: Almost every mainline game except the original Phantasia, Rebirth, Abyss, Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, and Xillia features a previous Tales series character as an Optional Boss. More often than not, he gives you his weapon as a reward, which proceeds to be one of the Infinity Plus One Swords or close to it. Should I make a list of Cameos?
  • Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Equipment can be generally changed on the fly in the Tales of... series, even in the middle of battles. This is especially useful during the arena gauntlets, where your constantly changing opponents may warrant the use of equipment that's effective against certain enemies or provides resistance to certain elements and/or status ailments.
  • Combat Medic:
    • Pure medic characters are rare; characters that are proficient in healing will always have some degree of combat training to go with their spellcasting and healing abilities. Games from Abyss onwards typically have two healers in the main party instead. One focuses on single target healing, and the other focuses on healing multiple targets at the same time. The single target healer is usually a combat-oriented character by default, with healing a secondary but still prominent skill in their moveset.
    • Rutee in Tales of Destiny can slash enemies with her sword repeatedly in the air, perform damaging attacks that produce money from nowhere, use water spells, and heal, cure status ailments, and raise the dead.
    • Reala gets the most healing spells in Tales of Destiny 2, and since her TP regeneration is by far the best, she is suited to keep the party alive. However, she also possesses incredibly destructive spells based on the four elements, so you will be seeing her nuking half the screen during the second half of the game. Magic is very effective.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Raine's spell selection consists primarily of healing and buff spells, but eventually she can learn Photon and either Ray or Holy Lance to give her some offensive abilities as well. She also has access to Prism Stars and Gospel, two of the most powerful Unison Attacks in the game.
    • In the sequel, Marta even has a Mystic Arte that both whacks the enemies for heavy damage and heals everyone in the party!
    • Tales of the Abyss:
      • Tear has very potent healing spells that cover a wide area and can use Resurrection. However, her offensive spell pool is extremely powerful and she gains a unique accessory that easily makes her the best offensive spellcaster. Her melee artes are limited but have their uses, so she can easily go out on the offence.
      • Natalia lacks offensive spells, but her healing and buffing is on point. She's limited to single-target healing outside of FOF changes, but in exchange her spells are usually faster than Tear's and restore the same amount of HP. FOF changes like Angel's Breath only make her better since she can even resurrect multiple characters at once. However, she is also a very quick and potent archer, so she has no problem sniping at people from afar while healing her own party.
    • Tales of Innocence:
      • Ange may look and act like your typical White Magician Girl, but note that she prefers knives. And she is not shy about performing some awesome melee combos with them, either.
      • Iria also gets several healing artes, but is perfectly fine duking it out with her pistols. Innocence R buffed her healing by giving her Cure, while in the original game she never went above Heal.
    • Tales of Vesperia: Estelle is a healer who sports the highest defense scores in the game and a fast track to the protective skills. You could viably play her as the party tank and leave spot heals to your less proficient members, as she has an array of melee attacks to take advantage of. She's also no sap at supporting from the sidelines with her light based attack magic.
    • Tales of Hearts has two of them as the brother and sister duo of Hisui and Kohaku Hearts:
      • In the DS version, Hisui will be your only healer for quite a long time, so he gets First Aid, Cure (single-target) and Nurse (multi-target). He needs his sister in combat to access the more powerful area of effect healing in Fairy Circle, but is the only one who can use Resurrection.
      • Kohaku gets the more powerful Heal (single target), Healing Circle and Revitalize (multi target) but tends to be slower than her brother. Her Raise Will has a chance of failure and may not actually resurrect a fallen party member. Things went a bit differently in R, so both siblings got to have area of effect spells and Resurrection.
    • Tales of Graces:
      • Sophie's healing spells focus on single targets for more power and speed. She's also a martial artist who hits like a truck and has the most speed out of all the characters.
      • Cheria's healing focuses on multiple targets for less power and less speed. Offensively she throws away the staff to focus entirely on throwing knives and uses powerful offensive magic including Indignation.
    • Tales of Xillia has three:
      • Jude can heal HP and status ailments in his close vicinity, and can revive the person he is linked with automatically as part of his Link Skill. He's also an exceptionally powerful martial artist.
      • Leia heals single targets for greater power and can raise the party's stats. Her traditional healer's staff is actually a quarterstaff which she uses to charge into the frontlines alongside Jude, Milla, and Alvin.
      • Elize heals multiple targets for slightly less power and can Anti-Debuff. When she's not healing she serves as the party's primary dark-elemental nuker. Both girls can revive KO'd party members, and through the link-system can combine both their healing spells and offensive skills for far greater power than either is capable of alone.
    • Tales of Zestiria: All of seraphim are effective at fighting and have access to some manner of healing, though Mikleo and Edna are the better of the four, due to having a strong single target and area heal respectively. They also grant a powerful heal to Sorey and Rose while they're being used for Armatization.
    • Tales of Berseria has all of the characters that can cast magic fit this role.
      • Eleanor and Eizen are the more physically oriented of the magic users while also being the ones who have access to the revival spells Life and Resurrection respectively.
      • Magilou and Laphicet are more likely to be dedicated mages to fight but their physical attacks are nothing to disregard either. Magilou is the one who gets the area healing spells Healing Circle and Fairy Circle which is also capable of damaging enemies caught in the spell. Laphicet gets the single target healing spells First Aid and Elixir Vitae which also cures all status ailments.
  • Cool Ship:
    • The Van Eltia from Tales of Eternia is a massive boat with customizable rooms and looks to be made out of stained glass. It starts off as a simple boat, but later gets upgraded into a Cool Airship, and then a cool starship with mini-submarine pods.
    • The Van Eltia from Tales of Berseria is the ship sailed by Aifread's pirate crew. It's said to be the fastest ship in the world.
  • Co-Op Multiplayer: Most games also allow you to have your friends control any of the other characters instead of the AI. Co-op play wasn't introduced to the series until Tales of Phantasia's PlayStation 1 remake, which was released after the original Tales of Phantasia and Tales of Destiny,note , but ever since then, almost every game has allowed your friends to join in except the portable titles, Tales of Legendia, and Tales of Arise.
  • Crate Expectations: Crates are used to make paths, press buttons, destroy obstacles, etc. Typical video game stuff. There are also mini-game warehouses that have you re-arrange crates.
  • Crystal Dragon Jesus:
    • Tales of Phantasia has the ubiquitous Church of Martel, though it's really more background fluff than anything (though you do meet Martel herself a couple of times). However, the civilization of Fenrir built a huge cathedral to worship... well, Fenrir, complete with stained glass, a giant organ, and a heavy organ BGM called "Perverse Religion". By the time the game actually rolls around, the entire Fenrir civilization has risen and fallen and the cathedral's been abandoned for years, to the point where the door is heavily iced shut. This is given a Shout-Out in the prequel, Tales of Symphonia, with an offhand reference to a legend about Fenrir in the icy regions. Presumably, this later sprouted into a full-fledged religion.
    • Tales of Eternia has the Church of Seyfert, with churches dotting the countryside (and willing to let you rest for free) and a massive cathedral, stained glass and all, atop Mt. Farlos. When you get to Celestia, you find out that Seyfert (and Nereid) are real, and that there's more to the story than a simple creation myth.
    • Tales of Symphonia, set four millennia before Phantasia, depicted a very different Church of Martel, based almost directly on Roman Catholicism, Pope and all.
      • One of Colette's hand gestures when casting spells looks exactly like the sign-of-the-cross. But then, so does Keele's in Tales of Eternia, and he's as close to atheist as you can get when your world is bursting at the seams with nature spirits and you base your entire career on asking them to do things for you.
      • Colette has, in the PS2 version, an ability called "Grand Cross" which would cause a large cross to descend upon the enemy. It is included in the sequel.
    • In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (which takes place 2 years after Tales of Symphonia), the Church of Martel still exists, but to a lesser extent since the whole Chosen of Regeneration thing doesn't exist anymore (most people went to church to pray for their world to be regenerated). Several scenes have the characters saying that they doubt that the church of Martel would last for much longer, though it remains 4000 years later in Phantasia.
    • Tales of the Abyss has the Order of Lorelei. Although it doesn't follow a god, it has a prophecy known as the Score, and the robes the Order members have highly resemble those of Catholic priests. The one from Mohs would be the biggest offender. It gets better- the official ordination of a Catholic priest is "presbyter," meaning "elder." Also, interestingly enough there is an actual Jesus Expy according to the physics and a (literal) word of god via Lorelei in the form of The Hero Luke; as a replica, with Lorelei's fonic signature, he's pure seventh fonons...just like Lorelei making him the Other Lorelei. He also does a Heroic Sacrifice to save the world and (maybe) even comes back to life some time after.
    • Tales of Hearts has the Church of Velleia, which worships the "Great Winged Whale", and yes, has a holy city and a cathedral. There's a church in each city and the main character can go into it and confess. It's really not a Path of Inspiration, though. They just have a near-monopoly on the magical weaponry, Soma, and on the curing of The Heartless-induced Despir Sickness. Also, All Myths Are True, and the bishop is the only one who knew what was really going on the entire time and just had some bad ideas on how to go about dealing with it. The Winged Whale in question, however, turns out to be the villains' base.
    • Tales of Berseria: Subverted. The church was a benign religion that existed before Artorius and the Abbey placed their deity Empyrean Innominat as the new being of worship at its center. Plus, most people in the Abbey aren't all that bad; some are actively shown trying to help the citizens of the world.
  • Cultural Cross-Reference:
    • Tales of Symphonia: In the beach sidequest of the first game, the names of the four girls you're supposed to find easily remind you of a certain book series that is beloved by the Japanese. Amy, Jo, Beth, and Meg make cameo appearances. Seriously. Bonus points to Jo apparently being a Bokukko here, and having Amy be blonde.
    • In Tales of Innocence, Iria's father comments that her siblings are called Monica, Ross and Gunther — characters from Friends. Some actually believed this to be an attempt at Woolseyism by the game's fan translator, but when questioned about it, he confirmed that yes, that's in the Japanese script too. He was as surprised as anyone else.
  • Dialog During Gameplay: Frequently, the beginning of a Boss Battle will have dialogue between the participants during the fight itself, especially when you eccounter an enemy for the first time or fight a boss. Party members may comment on the player's tactics, such as using the same technique repeatedly or running around the enemies and not attacking.
    Marta: You're using too many Artes!
    Emil: It's to win!
  • Doomed Hometown:
    • In Tales of Phantasia:
      • Cless' and Chester's initial motivations are revenge for the evil knight Mars burning down their hometown and killing their families, beginning the plot.
      • Dhaos orders to the destruction of the village of Hamel, due to the Scarlet family's Magitek research. Rhea Scarlet, Arche's friend, is killed, but asks to possess her friend Arche's body in order to seek vengeance, which Arche agrees to. It is specifically because Rhea's story mirrors Cress' own in losing his family and hometown that Cress is unable to turn her away.
    • In Tales of Symphonia, the hometown of Lloyd, Colette, Genis and Raine is partially burned down by Desians. Lloyd and Genis are banished for being partially to blame and forbidden from returning until Disc 2. But even after they're allowed to return, Genis decides to travel the world with Raine to help half-elves fit in, and Lloyd decides to set out with a companion of his choosing to destroy the Exspheres.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World: Emil's hometown, Palmacosta, is reportedly destroyed by Lloyd from the first game in an event known as the Blood Purge, though it's eventually revealed to have been an imposter seeking to tarnish Lloyd's reputation and undermine the Church of Martel. Emil flees to his aunt and uncle in Luin on his dying parents' orders and cements his desire for revenge against Lloyd.
    • Tales of Berseria: Velvet's hometown, Aball, suffers from an outbreak of daemonblight, a sickness that turns humans into monsters. Velvet turns into a daemon herself and ends up killing her friend, Niko, and her neighbours in a rage over the death of her brother, leaving no survivors. Double Subverted later in the story, where three years later, the party visits the village and it appears as though the town has rebuilt and everyone has survived, including Velvet's brother, now comatose, but this turns out to all be an illusion. In reality, Aball is now a ghost town and remained uninhabited.
  • Easy-Mode Mockery:
    • Barbatos, the Superboss of the PS2 version of Tales of Destiny, if fought on the Simple difficulty, will immediately start the fight off with an upgraded version of his Genocide Braver called Cheap Eliminate, his quote for the attack being something that roughly translates to "You aren't qualified to fight me!". It covers the entire length of the screen in front of him, and is instant death for anyone who gets hit by it, save for those using certain invulnerability granting moves. He'll then use it immediately after every single attack he performs, but can be defeated if one can get close to him, where dodging it becomes a simple matter of dashing past him when he starts firing it and countering accordingly. The battle generally ends up becoming a solo job due to the AI being incapable of dodging the move consistently, however.
      • In the Updated Re-release, he gains a new attack called Hell Heat that fires dozens of similarly powerful homing beams that he'll use in between every few Cheap Eliminates (And almost constantly at low HP). This will wipe out those who opted to dodge the former attack by simply jumping over it, but can still be negated by other means. His stats also got buffed so he doesn't go down nearly as quickly as in the original version.
    • Fighting on Easy in Tales of Vesperia will get you zero GRADE, meaning no treats for New Game Plus.
  • Elemental Powers: Frequent use of the four classic elements: Fire, Water, Wind, and Earth. The story will often center around these elements in some way, and each of the elements forms the bulk of magic Artes used by a lot of mage-type characters in the games. Sometimes, the elements will be represented by and/or controlled by powerful beings or deities, like Summon Spirits, Aggregate Sentiences, and Seraphim/Malakhim. Additionally, other elements are used to expand on the elemental system. These elements frequently include Lightning, Ice, Light, and Darkness. Sometimes, they're considered as separate elements of their own, while at other times, they're just extensions of the classic four.
  • Exact Words:
    • In Tales of the Abyss, the Score states that "The young scion of Lorelei's power shall bring his people to the miner's city." It said miner's city, not Akzeriuth. That part is actually subverted. Akzeriuth just wasn't possessed of a name two thousand years ago. The more accurate bit of Exact Words is the next part that says "There, the youth will turn power to calamity and be as a weapon of Kimlasca, destroying himself and the city." It just says "destroys" and that is exactly what not only happens to Luke, but would have happened to the original Luke since the "Light of the Sacred Flame" aka the "young scion of Lorelei's power" is mentioned on the Seventh Fonstone long after Akzeriuth's destruction. In all, the Score actually is very literal about everything it predicts, as Lorelei was attempting to be as precise as possible so humans wouldn't get confused. Unfortunately, the Score is taken as a mystical thing instead of just a long list of events in chronological order that has some Lost in Translation problems mixed in.
    • Tales of Destiny: Hugo never said he'd let Marian go, and he doesn't, even after Leon steals a dragon and the Eye of Atamoni, betrays his friends, and dies to buy him time.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • Much of the game involves racism against half-elves on the part of humans and elves. The majority of the half-elves in the game belong to the Desians, a faction representing The Devil in the Big Bad's made-up religion that subjugates each world in turn to encourage them to do the whole "world regeneration" thing, but it is eventually revealed that half-elves were already hated before the Big Bad set all this up.
      • There seems to be a level of distrust of people from Mizuho. Ozette too, because they oppose the Church of Martel. (Which is ironic, as that's the place that acts most racist towards half-elves. Pretty much anyone you talk to in Ozette makes a remark about how much they hate half-elves, even the children.)
    • Half-elf racism seems to be slowly fading away in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, but in its place is Tethe'alla and the Church of Martel oppressing Sylvarant, which is seen as a nation of technologically deficient barbarians.
    • Tales of the Abyss has this with the Replicas. They're considered freaks by most of the townspeople due to being clones (and many of the people they are clones of didn't survive the cloning process or were already dead to begin with, resulting in the replicas getting the blame for the deaths), and they generally feel like they have nowhere to live where they can be accepted. In the end, 10,000 replicas willingly sacrifice their lives in the hope that their sacrifice will mean replicas in the future will have a place in the world to live in without being condemned for simply being born.
    • In Tales of Eternia, the Inferian perception of Celestians is of warmongering, bloodthirsty monsters. A library book in Imen reveals that Celestians have only a slightly better view of the Inferians; it was the racist feelings of the Celestians that triggered most of the games events.
    • Tales of Innocence. A good slice of humanity is gaining powers from their status as reincarnations, and the government is kidnapping them for research purposes. Bonus points: the reincarnatees were having a race war with each other, which is bleeding into the awakened reincarnated humans. A real world war is being thrown into chaos because some of the soldiers have decided to fight the heaven war instead of the Earth war, and the divisions don't always match up.
    • Tales of Legendia has the Orerines (land dwellers) and the Ferines (sea dwellers).
    • This trope comes front and center in Tales of Rebirth with the humans versus the Gajumas (beast people). As always, they share a mutual hatred for the halves: hybrids between the two.
    • There's a degree of this in Tales of Phantasia, although it's less central to the plot. It's not surprising, because Tales of Symphonia is implied to be set in the distant past of the same world as Phantasia.
    • Tales of Xillia 2 has a little of this. Some citizens of Elympios are shown to be rather prejudiced towards foreigners from Rieze Maxia due to their ability to use spirit artes, calling them monsters or even attacking them. Gaius' character episodes revolve around trying to resolve this issue.
    • In Tales of Arise, the magic using Renans invaded the planet Dahna in order to rule over the Dahnans with an iron fist. So naturally within the protagonist group, the Dahnan Rinwell has issues with the two Renans within the party, which she later overcomes. Then it turns out the Renans weren't the original natives of Rena. They are descandents of rare magic-using Dahnans that were abducted by the true natives of Rena and then experimented on to create pawns for their plans.
  • Fighting Your Friend:
    • Tales of Eternia pits you up against Leon in two occasions, when you first meet him and when he gets brainwashed.
    • In Tales of Rebirth, you fight every single party member, including the hero at some point, including a fistfight between Veigue and Tytree as the result of an argument about Veigue not being open with his feelings. Pretty much the only character that is never fought is Mao, who is still fought in the training battle.
    • Done pretty well in Tales of Vesperia: After the latest argument between Flynn and Yuri about what Yuri's doing, Flynn seems to finally give up, until Yuri offers him a way to make his point: a swordfight.
      Yuri: You're not going to beat me in an argument. But you know what you can beat me in... (holding up his sword) This.
      • The two then proceed to trash-talk each other while beating each other up. They feel better afterwards, but Flynn still loses the argument.
        Flynn: I can't even win with a sword anymore.
        Yuri: (teasingly) Hahaha... Loser.
      • Yuri also fights a Brainwashed and Crazy Estelle in an "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight.
      • The PS3 version adds several more opportunities to fight your friends, most notably in the team battle mode in the coliseum, the final battle of which will pit all the party members you're not using against the party members you are using.
      • Also in the arena, Karol (in a poor disguise and loudly claiming not to be Karol) will fight alongside his Hunting Blades guildmates if he's not in your current party. In addition if Raven isn't with you he'll appear as Captain Schwann alongside the Schwann Brigade also claiming not be Raven, although he's aware he's fooling no one.
    • Tales of Xillia:
      • On Jude's side, he fights Alvin after the latter goes too far in trying to snap Jude out of a Heroic BSoD.
      • The EX arena will have either Jude or Milla face off against every other member of party in three pairs, then go one on one with the character you didn't pick.
    • Tales of Xillia 2:
      • Near the end of the game, either Jude or Milla will fight Ludger to snap him out of a Heroic BSoD.
      • The EX Tag Arena also pits you against one of your party members teamed with any of a number of different bosses for its last opponents.
      • Played for Drama in the game's Bad Ending, Ludger turns against his friends to prevent them from sacrificing his brother to save the world. This results in a boss battle where he fights solo against the other eight party members, four at a time, and his victory results in their deaths.
  • Final Boss Preview:
    • Tales of Symphonia: Yggdrassil. You get into two Hopeless Boss Fights with before you finally get a chance to fight him legitimately.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World does this in a strange way. The Final Boss turns out to be Richter Abend, a temporary party member from the beginning of the game. However, when the party learns that he's not actually on their side, there is a Hopeless Boss Fight against him, where he uses his own Mystic Arte to destroy the party in one fell swoop, and proves his having the annoying ability to counter Emil's Mystic Arte any time he uses it. And when the party finally does battle Richter in a proper battle, it turns out that the real Final Boss is Emil's Superpowered Evil Side 'Ratatosk'.
    • Tales of Xillia does this with Gaius and Muzet. Both of them are fought multiple times, but the final boss fight pits you against both of them simultaneously.
    • Tales of Berseria has the party's ill-fated first battle with Shepherd Artorius Collbrande, in which all your attacks (with the exception of Mystic Artes) will do zero points of damage and you're automatically KO'd when Artorius uses his own Mystic Arte.
  • Fission Mailed:
    • Tales of Phantasia: The game, at least in the PS version, has a puzzle in Moria Mine where using the Sorcerer's Ring on a certain candle will cause an arrow to fire from a wall and seemingly kill you, as the "Game Over" music starts playing. Cless, however, gets back up and mentions that (dying from an arrow) would never happen. In the SFC version, you just lost hitpoints.
    • In Tales of Symphonia, there are two Fission Mailed battles at the Tower of Salvation against Kratos and Yggdrasill. Both battles allow you to lose and still continue the game. The first battle can be beat with a bit of grinding; the second the most you get for your trouble is just staying alive a little longer (probably wasting a lot of healing items), as the battle ends automatically after a certain amount of time.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, the sequel, features a few of these as well. Under the Tower of Mana against Lloyd, who you can defeat, but the game will continue as if you lost anyway, Richter toward the end of Chapter 7 can be beaten, but losing to him changes nothing about the plot, and against Lloyd and Marta at the end of the game, only this time winning gets you the Bad Ending and losing will get you the true/normal ending.
  • Fortune Teller:
    • In Tales of Symphonia there is a fortune teller in Triet. The first time you visit her, she gives directions that help advance the plot. Subsequent visits are an optional thing to check on the game's Relationship Values.
    • Lailah in Tales of Zestiria will occasionally tell fortunes to the rest of the party using her origami paper, though it's ambiguous if she really can predict anything using them or if she's simply teasing everyone. When Zaveid is wondering if the rest of the party hates him for his prior antagonism, Lailah tells Zaveid's fortune in a skit and predicts that the party do consider Zaveid a friend.
  • Full-Boar Action: Boars' signature move is to lift you up with their tusks like a forklift and then throw you over their backs. (A real-world boar would run between your legs, slashing them with his tusks as he went.) A large boar was also featured in the beginning of Tales of Phantasia, where hunting one caused the heroes not to be in town when it was burned down. When you return to the future, you can hunt them freely, and they usually come with several children that, if you can catch them before they flee, drop large amounts of Pork.
  • Game Within a Game:
    • Tales of the Abyss had the classic first generation side-scroller Dragon Buster as an unlockable bonus.
    • In Tales of Vesperia, the player can engage in an arcade game on Nam Cobanda Isle called "Tales of Draspi."
  • Gameplay Grading: "Grade" is an extra unit of currency that can (for all intents and purposes) be treated as the player's "score". Grade is awarded after battle according to how well the player did, with Grade awarded for achieving long combos or blocking attacks, and Grade deducted for taking damage, using ineffective artes (such as a Fire-elemental arte on a Fire-resistant monster) or relying on recovery items. Grade awards bonus EXP in battle, but can also be used to purchase New Game Plus bonuses and occasionally in-game bonuses too.
  • Gender-Equal Ensemble:
    • Tales of Phantasia has Cress, Chester, and Claus on the male side of the team while Mint, Arche, and Suzu are on the female side, with Suzu being only recruitable in the remakes (and even then, she's optional). Narikiri Dungeon X tipped the balance onto the female side with the inclusion of Rondoline.
    • Tales of Destiny: Stahn/Leon/Woodrow/Johnny/Kongman and Rutee/Mary/Philia/Chelsea/Lilith. (Though Lilith was removed in the North American version)
    • Tales of Eternia: Reid/Keele/Max and Farah/Meredy/Chat. Oh, and Quickie
    • Tales of Destiny 2: Kyle/Loni/Judas and Reala/Nanaly/Harold.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Lloyd/Genis/Zelos (or Kratos if you prefer)/Regal and Colette/Presea/Sheena/Raine
    • Tales of Rebirth with Veigue/Eugene/Mao/Tytree for males and Annie/Hilda/Claire/Agarte for females, although Claire and Agarte are occasionally absent from the party.
    • Tales of Legendia: Senel/Moses/Jay/Will and Shirley/Norma/Chloe/Grune.
    • Tales of the Abyss: Luke/Guy/Jade and Tear/Natalia/Anise.
    • Tales of Innocence has Ruca/Spada/Ricardo for males and Illia/Ange/Hermana for females. Updated Re-release adds Kongwai and QQ, but maintains the balance.
    • Tales of Vesperia:
      • In the original game, Yuri/Raven/Karol as the males and Estelle/Judith/Rita as the females. And a male dog, Repede.
      • As of the Updated Re-release, it's Yuri/Raven/Karol/Flynn for the guys and Estelle/Judith/Rita/Patty for the ladies. and Repede.
    • Tales of Hearts:
      • The original game has Shing/Hisui/Kunzite (male) and Kohaku/Innes/Beryl (female).
      • Averted in the Updated Re-release, however, by adding Chalcedony and Gall, who are both males.
    • Tales of Graces:
      • The original game gives us Asbel/Hubert/Malik on the male side and Sophie/Cheria/Pascal on the female side.
      • Averted in Graces f, tipping the balance by adding Richard, a man.
    • Tales of Xillia has Jude/Alvin/Rowen and Milla/Elize/Leia.
    • Tales of Xillia 2: Ludger/Jude/Alvin/Rowen/Gaius (male) and Elle/Leia/Elize/Milla (female).
    • Tales of Zestiria has Sorey/Mikleo/Zaveid for males and Rose/Lailah/Edna for females. There is also Guest-Star Party Member Alisha (female) and Dezel (male), who are temporary but are mutually exclusive with Rose and Zaveid respectively. In Alisha's DLC episode, however Alisha joins the party after Sorey has left, shifting the balance to two guys and four girls.
    • Tales of Berseria has Velvet/Magilou/Eleanor for females and Laphicet/Rokurou/Eizen for males.
    • Tales of Arise stars Alphen, Law and Dohalim, as well as Shionne, Rinwell and Kisara.
    • Each game from the Radiant Mythology subseries has Action Girl named Kanonno and a (canonically) male protagonist.
    • Each Narikiri Dungeon game has two Original Generation characters - boy and girl.
    • Tales Of The Rays has Ix and Mileena.
    • Tales of Breaker has Mika/Evelyn/Ruru and Yuteki/Saiber/Berger.
    • Tales of Commons has Alvin/Seiun and Sefina/You.
    • Tales of Wahrheit has Seltz/Blitz and Vila/Ray. It also has sort-of Team Pet Kalulu and Robot Buddy Gamut.
  • Genre Shift:
  • Giant Enemy Crab: A common enemy type in the 3D games. They're usually about the size of a small car.
    • Subverted in Tales of Phantasia, where you can fight an ordinary sized crab. The fact that the boss theme plays while you do so might give one the impression that it's actually dangerous, but it doesn't do anything other then run around at an absurd speed, which coupled with its sky high defense stat and tiny size, just makes it annoying for a lower leveled party to kill.
    • In Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon X, Mel and Dio can be giant ally crabs with a certain costume, that while lacking in attacks, possess the same ridiculous speed and defense as the aforementioned crab.
  • Gladiator Subquest: The Tales of... series has this as a typical sidequest in most of its games. The earlier games only let you use the main character in the arena, but later games let you use every party member, or even an entire party. This is where cameo characters often like to hang out.
  • Global Currency: All games use "Gald" as a unit of currency, even in games where the countries/worlds involved are at odds with each other, or not even aware the other exists.
  • Good Shepherd:
    • Ion from Tales of the Abyss is the figurehead of a rather Corrupt Church, so his power is limited. He is, however, very kind, willing to help the heroes at every turn, does not hold grudges, and believes that adhering to the Score religiously is not the only course of action.
    • Ange from Tales of Innocence has a reputation as a holy woman who will cure any malady or disability. She is able to make cripples walk, restore people's eyesight, and rescue people at the brink of death. She is also self-sacrificing, kind to children, and offers assistance to anyone in need. At the end of the game, she is seen taking care of orphans.
  • Greater-Scope Villain:
    • Tales of Destiny 2: Fortuna may be the ultimate superior of Barbatos Goetia, and is providing her priestess Elraine with her existence and power, but she herself spends most of the game sealed and completely indifferent to the actions of the heroes and only fights you at the very end. And before that, Fortuna actually serves as the Big Good, occasionally helping you on your journey, and only becomes a case of God Is Evil after Elraine is defeated.
    • Tales of Zestiria: Michael, the Shepherd prior to Sorey, long dead by the events of the game, was the one who brought Maotelus to Camlann and bound him to Heldalf after the great seraph fell to malevolence during the Hyland army's massacre of the village, which turned Heldalf into the Lord of Calamity and started the Age of Chaos.
    • Tales of Berseria: A subgroup of the seraphim themselves are revealed to have cursed their brethren to turn into dragons if they were touched by too much malevolence, which humans produce naturally. This caused the two races to drift apart in the first place. They have also made a promise that if the world descends into calamity, they will destroy it, necessitating Innominat's (or later Maotelus's) presence in the world.
  • Growling Gut:
    • In one of Tales of Berseria's many comedic skits, a hungry Magilou tries to avoid having to admit to wanting something to eat by asking Velvet about her own hunger in an insensitive, roundabout way. When the party admits to wanting to stop for food, she denies her hunger and smugly tries to make fun of them for getting fired up about food... only for her roaring stomach to give her away.
    • If you don't allow the party to eat anything for a while in Tales of Vesperia, several cutscenes will play hinting that it's a conscious choice on behalf of the party. The first indicates that it's due to dieting for Judith, Rita, and Estelle, whose growling stomachs startle the boys due to thinking they were taking their hunger in stride. It also happens to Karol in the second skit, who is furious about the party being forced to fast.
    • Milla's stomach rumbles twice in Tales of Xillia, but instead of it being a source of embarrassment it merely amuses her. Since she's a newly depowered spirit, she's never had to deal with hunger until now and views it as a fascinating aspect of the human condition.
    • This happens to Elle in Tales of Xillia 2, whose growling belly defuses the tension while the party is discussing threats they've encountered in the parallel worlds with Bisley Bakur at the end of Chapter 7. Fractured Milla and Bakur are amused, while the poor girl's just embarrassed.
  • Guest-Star Party Member:
    • Chester in Tales of Phantasia. He rejoins much later in the game, but at the same level he was at when he left (which makes sense, because most of the game actually takes place in the past, so what was weeks and weeks of adventuring for the rest of the party was just a few minutes to him). With some training it is possible to make him useful in that he becomes a long-ranged equivalent to Cless in terms of damage. The Playstation, Game Boy Advance and Playstation Portable remakes expanded his arsenal (as in not only more weapons but giving him artes) and contained added scenes which allowed Chester to get his levels back up to snuff relatively rapidly when the party slept at inns, making him even more Badass Normal.
    • Although she certainly isn't this in Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X, Rondoline E. Effenberg is this in the X update of the original game, joining the heroes at sporadic points in the story and providing her own rather useful set of artes and spells (including a Mystic Arte) before finally being permanently transported away through time just before the final battle.
    • Kratos in Tales of Symphonia. Twice. And then optionally again near the ending — in which case Zelos leaves the party. Which means that Zelos can become one as well, albeit a more long-lasting one.
    • In the sequel, Dawn of the New World, most of the party are partial examples in that they will leave and enter your party frequently (having up to four of them in your party at once until the later parts of the game; you finally get them all at once in the final chapter), albeit with limited abilities. Richter is a straight example.
    • Flynn in Tales of Vesperia, who joins for a grand total of one battle. In the PS3 version, as well as the PS4 Definitive Edition, however, he joins at four points throughout the story (the fourth being the aforementioned one battle). Shortly afterwards, right before The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, he joins the party permanently.
    • Richard in Tales of Graces. In the remake, he becomes a proper party member for the f arc with a greatly expanded moveset, and can be utilized in battle in the main story with a narikiri doll (Which transforms the user into him).
    • Tales of Zestiria:
      • Alisha is introduced and joins the party early in the game, but eventually leaves and only returns once. She becomes fully playable in her DLC Episode.
      • Dezel joins at the same as Rose does, but dies and is replaced by Zaveid.
    • In Tales of Berseria, Seres accompanies Velvet during the escape from Titania, but is not directly controlled by the player and dies just before the end of the level.
  • Guide Dang It!: Has its own page here.
    H to P 
  • He Knows About Timed Hits:
    • In Tales of the Abyss the hero's martial arts teacher, who has been teaching him for years, goes over how to use the controller and attack. The concept of teaching him the very basics after years of training and practice is strange enough, but him naming the controller buttons to push sounds even sillier than you might think.
    • Tales of Symphonia has Genis fulfilling that role towards Lloyd when a wild monster wanders into the village. Even sillier because Lloyd is a self-learned swordsman and should probably know these things already, whereas Genis is a wizard who's had no part whatsoever in Lloyd's training.
    • Tales of Phantasia has several NPCs who keep mentioning D-Pad combinations to use when a certain item has been found and much more general instructions on how use Rheiards.
  • Healing Potion: "Gels" heal HP by percentage (e.g. 30% of a total) rather than a fixed amount.
  • Heroic Mime:
    • The Descender in the Tales of the World Radiant Mythology Series does not speak but nevertheless interacts with the other cast, and is the first example of such a protagonist in the Tales series. They do occasionally speak when calling their attacks and Mystic Artes in battle. The Descender also has various dialogue choices to choose during story dialogue and skits.
    • Ludger, the protagonist of Tales of Xillia 2 is completely silent, save for some grunts, yells, and the usual calling of attacks in battle (though even in that case, he only ever says the attack's name, leaving out the usual Badass Creed from his solo Mystic Artes, and letting his partner say it for the dual Mystic Artes). The only actual lines you can hear from him are for the dialogue choices you pick in skits and cutscenes, and only in New Game Plus. On the few instances where Ludger runs into an Alternate Self, however, his counterparts do talk. No other mothership title uses this trope.
    • The Savior Allen from 'kmVideoGame/Tales Of Link'' doesn't speak until Chapter 5.
  • Hidden Elf Village:
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • Heimdall, where many of the main characters (including the Big Bad) come from. Entering this village requires a writ of passage from the King of Tethe'alla, and even with it in hand, guards at the front of the village ban the half-elf members of your party from entering the village.
      • Exire, the hidden half-elf village. It is kept floating in the sky by the power of Maxwell, Summon Spirit of Matter. It is so well hidden that it is unaffected by the turmoil on the ground and some of its residents never saw a human before the player's party visits. Talking to the NPCs also answers the question of how there can be so many half-elves when Heimdall is so isolated: a child with two half-elf parents is essentially the same as a child with one human parent and one elf parent. The half-elf population is self-sustaining. Somehow, four thousand years after Symphonia, in Tales of Phantasia, it's even better hidden, and now has another hidden village (specifically, a Ninja village) inside of it.
      • Mizuho, a Hidden Ninja Village. It is known for taking an interest in the outside world thanks to its intelligence network, though the village itself is still highly isolationist. At least until the hero's party arrives and makes an alliance with them, thanks to party member and Mizuho citizen Sheena and Reasonable Authority Figure Tiga.
    • Myorzo, home of Krityans, from Tales of Vesperia, which "hides" inside a floating jellyfish.
    • There's also Elysia from Tales of Zestiria, a mountain village of seraphim where two of the main characters grew up.
  • Hopeless Boss Fight:
    • In Tales of Destiny, Leon is nearly impossible to beat the first time you face him, which is quite early in the game. If you do manage to win, you get a special ending right then without playing through the rest of the game. In the PS2 remake, however, your efforts are rewarded by him suddenly unleashing his Limit Break and ending the battle regardless of whether everyone actually got KO'd or not.
    • Tales of Eternia: The first fight against Shizel. She'll give you the illusion that you're actually fighting her, and after a little while, she opens up a can of god-power that knocks everyone down to 1 HP before effectively flicking everyone to death. (Bonus points if, instead, the A.I. Roulette decides to finish you off with something powerful like Prism Flasher.) If you manage to pull yourself back from the brink of defeat, the game cuts away from the battle abruptly and pretends you lost anyway when she's reduced to half HP.
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • You have a normal boss fight against Remiel that you must win, immediately followed by a (very difficult) fight against Kratos which you may win or lose (story-wise it makes no difference which one, though you do get a different cutscene after the fight based on what happened) and an unwinnable fight against Yggdrasill that you lose. The second encounter with Yggdrasil (a standalone one in this case) is also unwinnable, although this time you are required to survive the battle until a cutscene is triggered. Defeat will result in a standard game over.
      • You can actually avoid losing the first fight against Yggdrasil (though that isn't likely because if you lose the scripted fight prior to that you will start the fight off with 1 HP), but it is virtually impossible to beat him because the fight will automatically end after a certain amount of time. However, using certain New Game Plus upgrades, you can win the fight and force him to flee. He then pulls out Cutscene Power to the Max, giving you a glimpse of his nifty Sword of Plot Advancement in the process, which justifies both the trope and the rescue cutscene immediately afterward.
      • The first battle with Vidarr has a feeling of this trope included as well. Although you still have to win, no matter how well you do, your team will get a cutscene with them about to be killed, only to be saved by Kratos.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World has so many of these, that the player may have trouble discerning whether a given boss battle is winnable or not.
      • The game also has two types of these: Fights that are just really, really hard to win, and fights that you can't win at all (because the boss' HP won't go down). This can become downright ridiculous, like the first fight against Commander Brute. Cue a long string of "Impressive !" as he flinches constantly under your attacks... without losing any HP. During the second encounter, he doesn't get any stat buff but loses that plot invincibility. Curb-Stomp Battle ensues.
      • Lloyd, the first boss of the game is normally unbeatable, but if you can carry your strongest monsters over to your second playthrough or know how to trap him in an infinite combo, he's beatable, thus netting you several levels of experience. But the story advances as if you lost.
      • Similarly, the post-final boss fight with Lloyd and Marta normally just outright deletes you to advance the plot, but NG+ makes this entirely beatable.... but do you really want to?
    • Tales of Legendia:
      • The first battle against Walter is interrupted by Moses kidnapping Shirley.
      • The Duel Boss between Senel and Melanie ends after a few minutes. The following cut-scene has Senel defeated.
      • The party's first battle against Vaclav. He only has about 8000 HP, but once you've worked him down to about 4000 he unleashes a massive spell that knocks your entire party unconscious.
    • Tales of Hearts features two boss fights you're "supposed" to lose, the one against Chalcedny early on for Kohak's Shy Spirune and the one against Sorceress Incarose about halfway into the game. Both of them are technically winnable, and in a subversion, if you beat Chalcedny, he actually does hand over the Spirune immediately (though the party finds another excuse to go through the area where you'd normally actually get it back).
    • Tales of the Abyss: Subverted with the first Luke vs. Asch fight, where you're expected to lose. You can win, but it requires you to be either very skillful with the battle system, level grind, be in New Game Plus, or have a lot of healing items. There is a slight variation in the cutscene after if you do manage to win, and you do get experience, so it's not all for nothing at least.
    • The original version of Tales of Vesperia didn't have one of these, but the PS3 version adds a one-on-one fight between Yuri and Don Whitehorse at the end of Keiv Moc. It is possible to defeat him, even on the first playthrough...but only if you've undergone some serious Level Grinding, set the difficulty to Easy, and are very, very dedicated - otherwise, you'd be best advised to try again the second time around. Nothing changes much if you do win except for acquiring an okay-but-not-great accessory (a Diamond).
    • In Tales of Graces, the first fight against Hubert in the adult arc is this. Even if you're either leveled enough to deal decent damage against him, or skilled enough with the game's combat system to dodge his very wide close-range attacks, he'll build up his eleth gauge incredibly quickly and then use his Mystic Arte to end the battle. Even if you get strong enough to deplete all of his HP, it'll simply display as ???? and he'll keep on fighting.
    • Tales of Xillia: When the party fight the real Maxwell it consists of 4 rounds with cutscenes in between, the first three you can't beat Maxwell no matter how hard you try, as he'll eventually fire off a party wiping attack each round (which ironically if the party is equipped well hardly does any damage) which leads to the next cutscene which they regain their feet and charge again. It isn't until Jude showcases his determination and punches Maxwell, triggering Milla's re-awakening and return from the spirit realm, bringing her back into the party that it becomes possible to defeat him.
    • Tales of Xillia 2: The game opens with the protagonist Ludger fighting against a nightmare version of his older brother Julius. It's impossible to defeat Julius, and if Ludger gets knocked down, Julius will unleash his Mystic Arte and end the fight. Due to an oversight, the fight can potentially never end in a New Game Plus, as if you have the Glory skill equipped, you'll never get knocked down.
    • Tales of Zestiria:
      • Near the start you fight a giant dragon, Eizen. His level depends on the difficulty but he will always dwarf yours and can kill you instantly if you try anything against it. You're supposed to run away and come back later to kill him.
      • A little later in the game, after his introduction, the Big Bad will occasionally block off routes specifically to prompt the player to continue the story elsewhere. You can fight him but you are heavily weakened and his attacks are all end game level so its nigh impossible to do so. If you somehow manage to beat him through New Game Plus or a lot of grinding, it actually unlocks the Bad Ending.
    • Tales of Berseria: The first fight against Artorius is one of these, both gameplay-wise and storywise. At a time when your party members might be around level 20, he's level 60, and your attacks only do Scratch Damage, if that. Eventually, Artorius unleashes his Mystic Arte on Velvet, causing a long cutscene to trigger where Velvet can't even hit him.
  • Hot Springs Episode:
    • The original bathing scenes in Tales of Phantasia had peeping on both sides: Chester on the male side, and Arche on the female. Chester also gained the title of Muscleman, Mint the title "Boin~chan".
    • One of the inns in Tales of Symphonia is also a hot spring, and going there with Zelos in the party results in a cutscene where Zelos tries to spy on the female party members while they're bathing. Lloyd shows up and chastises him, but the ladies hear him and Zelos runs off, leaving Lloyd to take the blame. The game even gives Lloyd the title of "Peeping Tom".
    • The same kind of situation happens in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. If the party goes to the hot spring at one point and have the ladies go in, Zelos tries to spy on the females (while Emil and Lloyd give him crap for it), and Lloyd gets blamed again as he's the only one who didn't run. When the males take their turn, Marta tricked everyone but Emil into not coming in so she could spend time with him. When Emil finds out he ends up calling everyone else attention. Naturally, everyone but Lloyd decides that Emil must have planned this even though both claim otherwise (and them all knowing how openly affectionate Marta is towards Emil), and Emil also gets the title "Peeping Tom".
    • Tales of the Abyss had two scenes: one gives you new outfits and another gives Guy the title Naughty Devil due to him groping both Tear and Natalia after being shoved by Luke and Jade for an experiment.
    • Tales of Eternia had no wall-watching, although Reid did have to smuggle Chat into the men's dressing room to get one of her skills, which leads to a rather unfortunate scene between her and Keele. Also on a separate occasion, Meredy decided to bath near the man's side instead, and Hilarity Ensues.
    • They're at it again in Tales of Vesperia. There are three different scenes. The first scene costs 300,000 gald, the second 600,000, and the third is free. The first time, Raven keeps trying to peek at the woman's side of the spring, with little success. The second time, Raven manages to see Judith completely nude, and coerces Karol into being his accomplice. Judith appears to be aware of this, but utterly nonchalant. In the third scene, the party winds up working there and at the end, they all get costume titles. The PS3 version adds a few scenes to accommodate Flynn and Patty being in the party.
    • After the series' staple scene was cut from the first game for time constraints, Tales of Xillia 2 made up for it by making the hot springs event an animated cutscene. The party gets treated to it as a reward for paying off Ludger's 20 million gald debt. However, the hot spring they go to ends up lacking a partition, forcing them to improvise by having the guys cram themselves into a water-filled, super-sized Tipo while the girls get to bathe comfortably. Hilarity and fanservice ensue.
    • Present in Tales of Berseria, with the added effect of a "Freaky Friday" Flip.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Cooking food heals a portion of HP and TP depending on the dish and the skill of the cook, but this can only be done outside of battle, and once you've cooked, you can't do it again until you've been through a fight or slept ("Come on, we just ate!").
  • Implied Love Interest:
    • Harold and Judas in Tales of Destiny 2. While the other party members are paired up in quite obvious fashions, these two get Ship Tease moments (including a scene where Judas is specifically called out on only insulting Harold because he misses her) but no romantic resolution either way... Not helped by Harold getting sent back to the past with no memory of their journey and Judas possibly getting erased from time.
    • Jude and Milla from Tales of Xillia and its sequel. Jude's stubborn kindness despite the risks inspires Milla to care more about the people around her than simply her mission, and Jude is inspired by Milla's bravery and perseverance to do what's right. Both of them end up being key to each other's character development through the game and they're closer to each other than anyone else in the party, but part ways amicably in order to pursue their respective paths in the human and spirit worlds respectively. Although they reunite briefly in the sequel and have a lot more traditional Ship Tease moments, like falling over each other and blushing a lot, they're still forced to separate again at the end of the game for the sake of their worlds. While it's apparent their feelings are mutual, they're never explicitly seen confessing to each other or referring to each other as a romantic partner.
  • Improbable Weapon User:
    • A running gag in the Tales Series is for the player to find extremely powerful but unlikely weapons for the characters late in the game. In Tales of Symphonia, for example, Lloyd can buy a pair of giant paper fans and Presea (who usually uses an axe) can buy a giant toy hammer.
    • The best one, though, would probably be Sheena, from Symphonia; she uses cards with shinto wards inscribed on them. Her gag weapon is even more ridiculous; she beats enemies up with an envelope of coins.
    • Tales of Symphonia also has Genis, who uses a kendama, a child's toy. Presumably, he plays with it to help improve his focus and rhythm while he has free time. He also claims to have knocked Lloyd out with it accidentally the first time he used it, and Lloyd knocks himself out with it when he plays with it in a skit. Presea and Zelos can randomly start a fight wielding a giant plush bunny or a bouquet of flowers, respectively, if they have their formal outfits on.
    • Anise in Tales of the Abyss quite sensibly uses maces and magic scepters as weaponry... But she never actually attacks with them. Instead, she attacks by animating her stuffed bear with magic and turning it into a seven foot tall engine of destruction. She's the game's Cute Bruiser, incidentally.
    • Most of the weapons used by the heroes in Tales of Vesperia tend to sit within the realm of probability—swords, maces, hammers, knives, polearms, bows, etc. That is, except for Rita, who uses sashes (Long pieces of cloth), along with the aforementioned kendama. She also gets some more practical chains and whips, though.
    • Tales of Eternia's Meredy uses a whistle to command her actual attacking weapon, her Team Pet Quickie. Chat uses handbags full of infinite cannonballs, which she throws.
    • Tales of Hearts carries on the tradition. Kohak's Soma Elrond's weapon half takes the form of a baton, and Beryl's Thiers produces a paintbrush as tall as she is. The baton can be used as a blunt object, like a pipe or something though. The Elrond seems to be useful as a weapon with the balls at each end, and she sometimes uses magic to reinforce them in her melee moves
    • Tales of Legendia has more then its fair share of improbable weapon users, as well. Shirley summons her Teriques through a pen and uses it to attack, Grune uses urns, and Norma uses straws to blow bubbles at enemies. Granted, none of the spellcasters can learn any physical attacks, besides Shirley, but they're still odd weapon choices.
    • Tales of Zestiria has a unique twist on it; while Lailah uses paper (that she sets on fire), Edna uses a parasol, and Dezel and Zaveid use pendulums, this is actually normal for seraphim. Their weapons represent the element they are strong over (wind, water, and earth respectively), which means Mikleo is unusual for using a Magic Staff instead of something representing fire. He's doing it the hard way compared to the rest... and it's apparently because he's short compared to his Childhood Friend Sorey.
    • Tales of Berseria has Magilou with her shikigami, which are essentially pieces of paper, typically inscribed with some manner of facial design. Rather then enchant them with elemental magic, she alters their size, shape, and density to make them suitable for use as blunt weapons. There's also Laphicet, who wields paper tags in a manner similar to Lailah, but doesn't favor any particular element when it comes to enchanting them.
    • Tales Of The Rays has Mileena, who uses mirrrors.
  • Infinity +1 Sword:
    • Tales of Symphonia has three brands of these.
      • The Devil's Arms have variable attack power based on how many enemies the character in question has killed throughout the course of the game, and you could even save the kill-count for New Game Plus for truly insane power. However, this power was only unlocked after beating the game's toughest boss (although there's a Brutal Bonus Dungeon that's unrelated, so they're not pointless). If a given character hasn't killed enough enemies, however, these weapons won't be your strongest.
      • The Meltokio Coliseum has several tournaments available in the player's choice of group fights or Duel Bosses. Clearing the highest-level solo tournaments would give each character a high-level weapon, and for most, this is their best. Because Lloyd has individual "slash" and "thrust" stats for his weapons, the weapon he gets from the Coliseum is his highest-level thrust weapon.
      • Five characters have individually better weapons that they can get from alternative sources. Presea and Regal need to speak to certain NPCs once they've reached level 80 to obtain their best weapons. Genis gets his best as the prize from a minigame. Zelos gets his by defeating his sister in a unique event at Meltokio Coliseum. Lloyd's best slash weapon is obtained by defeating a recurring optional boss for the third time.
    • Tales of the Abyss had the Catalyst Weapons, which worked roughly the same way as Symphonia's Devil's Arms: weak as hell when first acquired, attack-power-based-on-kills after beating the most powerful boss in the game. Additionally, said boss also holds the best Capacity Core in the game; you can only acquire this by stealing it from her, and you can only steal from her when she's staggered, which, as you might guess, does not happen often.
    • Tales of Vesperia: The Fell Arms work the same way. After you defeat the True Final Boss, the Fell Arms' strength increases by the number of kills that the character has acquired. Combine this with the cape you receive from defeating Dhaos in the 200 man melee that transforms Destruction Field into a massive attack known as Dhaos Blast and Yuri becomes an absolute monster in battle. The difference here is you can keep the activated weapons on a New Game Plus and they remain activated. Fortunately the ability to save the kill-count was removed, or they'd be the mother of all Game Breakers. As it is, it still takes a good while to grind enough kills to make them the best weapons again in a new game. The PS3 version added the ability to save the kill count to the grade shop, and isn't particularly expensive either. To compensate (though barely), if you power up all the Fell Arms, the final boss gets a new third form. Also, even with the extreme attack power they can rack up, it'll barely be enough to fight the Spiral Draco.
    • In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Emil has the Nether Traitor, which, in addition to the highest attack power of all of his weapons, has the incredibly broken Accelerate trait that allows him to lock an enemy into a permanent combo. The Regenerate 3 trait, which restores a sizable chunk of his HP periodically, is just gravy. Marta's Kismet has the highest physical and magical attack of any of her weapons, and will automatically revive her once per battle if she gets knocked out. Good luck getting it.
      • Though not a weapon, the "Star Breaker" Gauntlets and the "Healer's Ribbon" errr...Ribbon, give you the Technical 3 skill, which means ALL ARTES cost just 1 TP. Couple that with Marta's broken speed casting late game, and you've got an infinite photon/prism sword/divine saber combo, which can trap the final boss, making sure he never TOUCHES YOU.
    • Tales of Xillia has the Fell Arms, as well. They all drop from separate optional bosses that can be found wandering around specific field and dungeon maps, and the full potential of the weapons is only unlocked after beating the Golden Mage Knight in the bonus dungeon. However, they're practically required if you want the later boss fights on Unknown difficulty to conclude in a reasonable amount of time due to the sheer amount of HP and defense they have.
    • Tales of Xillia 2 continues the tradition; however, they're instead obtained by beating the postgame EX Tag Arena with the corresponding party members. The damage is now based on the number of times the character has performed a link attack, which makes it take longer to increase their damage up to the max, but unlike the prequel, getting them to this point will make you destroy absolutely everything in seconds regardless of the difficulty setting.
    • Tales of Phantasia has Excalibur, a sword better than the game's purported Infinity +1 Sword, the Eternal Sword. To get it, you need to visit the secret dungeon below the Morlia Mineshaft (which has the most powerful enemies in the game, The Very Definitely Final Dungeon notwithstanding). Conveniently, you also get the spear version of this, a weapon you've had once before but had it confiscated, the most powerful offensive magic spell, and the most powerful summon in the game — four Infinity Plus One Swords for the price of one dungeon.
    • In later games (except for Tales of Symphonia, the prequel of Phantasia), the Eternal Sword itself was the Infinity +1 Sword, generally won by defeating Cless, the protagonist of Phantasia, in some kind of arena. He's generally a lot stronger and faster than he was back then. For extra fun, turning the difficulty up adds in either Phantasia's White Mage or witch. (Keep in mind, the White Mage can stop time.)
    • In Tales of Eternia, the Eternal Sword was only the ultimate weapon in terms of sheer power, sacrificing other stats for it. Not to mention its Time element weakens it against certain enemies. The game had a few other weapons like it too. The true Infinity +1 Sword was the Last Fencer. While not as strong in terms of sheer strength, it had no element, and the advantage of raising all stats at once. It also may or may not be named after one of the titles Cless gets in Tales of Phantasia.
  • Just Eat Him:
  • Kicking Ass in All Her Finery:
    • A staple of the Tales Series, and not just for the ladies. Games with alternate costumes will often include fancy high-class outfits that the character(s) will not only walk around in but continue to wear while kicking ass in battle. Examples include Symphonia and Legendia, both of which provide this option for almost every playable character (the latter only has the outfits in battle though; they wear their normal outfits on the field for some reason).
    • Special mention goes to Philia; the Good Shepherd Smart Girl who wears a giant poofy dress and who can throw out hundreds of home-made bombs and wields a BFS that can summon bolts of divine retribution the moment it hits a foe... and that's not even beginning to get into her arsenal of magic.
  • Lethal Chef: A recurring theme in the series is using cooking as a way to heal after battles. Inevitably, one party member will be a danger to themselves and their teammates the moment they get anywhere near cookware. The fun thing is that every Lethal Chef is lethal for a different reason:
    • Tales of Phantasia: Arche is just plain bad. In a skit in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, it knocked out Kratos, Lloyd, and Mormo. The protagonist chokes it all in to avoid the taste. Reid was practically immune to the taste of the food, since he finished his plate fine.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Raine has a tendency towards bizarrely experimental food combinations ("Spicy cake would be a breakthrough!"). Each character also has a "signature" ingredient that they favor using when they cook, though it's usually an optional thing... Raine's is lemons. Raine's younger brother Genis is a Supreme Chef by contrast, since he says he'd never have survived if he had to eat Raine's cooking all the time.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World:
      • Marta only ever cooked for her father, who said her cooking was wonderful no matter what. (Though in a break from the normal way this trope works, Marta acknowledges her lack of skill after it's pointed out and makes a sincere effort to get better, becoming a decent cook in the end.)
      • In contrast, Emil makes incredibly delicious food. In his normal state, he tends to put extreme effort into presentation. In Ratatosk Mode, he puts zero effort into presentation, but somehow the food is just as tasty.
      • Finally, Richter is quite bad because he's never cooked anything in his life. His first dish was for Emil, which caused the latter to pass out from the horrible taste.
    • Tales of Vesperia:
      • Flynn is a fantastic cook... except he tends to deviate from the exact recipe and lacks the instincts and sense of taste to compensate, resulting in a Russian Roulette of either extreme tastiness or extreme vileness because no matter what it tastes like, it always looks fantastic. It's worth noting that Flynn's cooking is often beaten out by a dog. A One Note Chef dog who only makes dog food.
      • Before Flynn was made playable in the PS3 release, Rita held the title of "worst team chef" because she considers food more complex than "open a banana" to be a needless extravagance and a waste of time.
    • Tales of Rebirth: Tytree becomes one accidentally when he makes a delicious mushroom stew... With poisonous mushrooms. Usually he's quite good, but needs to be careful about what he adds to the food as he's too dumb to notice when ingredients are poisonous or rotten.
    • Tales of the Abyss: Both Luke and Natalia had pampered lifestyles, and never had to cook for themselves before. Natalia misunderstands basic cooking instructions to the point that a stew she tried to make catches fire, and her solution is to use healing magic on the pot. Luke isn't quite as bad, but is still a close second because he's an incredibly picky eaternote . Guy could only comment that Luke's cooking was 'avant-grade'.
    • Tales of Berseria: Eizen is a terrible cook not due to a lack of skill but because of his Reaper's curse sabotaging him.
    • Tales of Arise: Alphen's cooking is initially lethal thanks to his tendency to go overboard on spices. One skit even has Alphen overcook a chicken to the point that it created a bunch of smoke which convinced everyone that they were under enemy attack. He eventually grows out of this by the time he cooks the Mabo Curry recipe, with his friends coming to enjoy the meal much to his delight.
    • Tales Of The Rays: Given the Crisis Crossover nature of the game, the appearance of several Lethal Chefs at once was inevitable. In one skit, the combined efforts of Arche and Natalia somehow turned a tomato purple. In another skit Marta, Arche, Natalia and Raine are trying to make a barbecue, using combat magic, and Yuri has to explain why this is a bad idea.
  • Limit Break: Called a "Mystic Arte" (or "Hi-Ougi", lit. Hidden Secret Skill, in Japanese). Frequently involves a Super Move Portrait Attack. The requirement for activating a Mystic Arte varies from game to game.
    • In Tales of Symphonia there's also has a second Limit Break system in the form of Unison Attacks. Once the Unison Attack gauge is full (it fills up for every hit the player lands on an opponent, so techs that land a lot of blows fill up the meter faster), the player can start a Unison Attack, in which all the characters do a single attack on the enemy (chosen from their pool of techs beforehand.) If certain characters do certain attacks (like if Lloyd and Kratos/Zelos both do a Sonic Thrust-type attack,) two of them will even team up to do a follow-up at the end of the attack (in the aforementioned case, Cross Thrust, where both characters do a second, simultaneous Sonic Thrust).
    • The Mystic Artes Tales of Graces work somewhat differently. The player first needs to enter Eleth Burst, either by scoring or taking many hits. They then need to build up a meter by scoring hits, with more filling when using Artes that have been used more. Later upgrades allow a character to activate each of their Mystic Artes once per battle if there are enough hits in the current combo. F added Accel Finalities, which are used by activating Accel Mode with a full meter.
  • Lost World: The series frequently involves plots to save two worlds or peoples, ones that are usually antagonistic towards each other, though neither will be painted as outright evil. Fighting over a common resource is a popular trope. At least one world will be significantly more technologically-advanced than the other, and the most technologically-advanced world will also be the most antagonistic. More often than not, the plot will involve the heroes finding a way to Save Both Worlds.
  • Love Triangle:
    • Up until Chester joins your party, this happens among Cress, Mint, and Arche. Though its more like "Cress X Mint with Arche having an unrequited crush on Cress" then an actual triangle. Must be way she gave up the hopeless pursuit once Chester became an option.
    • Subverted for Max, Lyla and Aifread in Symphonia. Max is in love with Lyla, who only ever talks about tracking down Aifread. But she's not actually in love with him at all- Lyla's a Loan Shark and Aifread, a pirate, owes her quite a bit of Gald...
    • Legendia: Chloe and Shirley both love Senel... except Senel loves Stella.
    • Tales of the Abyss just after the one-tenth mark or so through the game gives the players Asch/Natalia/Luke, with Natalia being attracted to both Asch and Luke (Asch reciprocates, but his clone Luke simply can't like her that way). By the time Natalia has stopped being attracted to Luke (finally able to keep them separate in her memories and cheering on Luke's crush on Tear), there's hints she might be attracted to Nice Guy Guy as well as the emotionally distant Asch.
    • Anise, Arietta and Ion, despite the fact that none of them can spit it out. This game makes a kinda cruel variation: Arietta was in love with the original Ion, since it was him who protected her and taught her everything when she was separated from her monsters family. Anise, on the other hand, falls for the replica Ion, who is the only one she got to know. Of course, neither of the girls know about this.
    • In a skit, it is implied that, if Asch had not appeared, Luke, Tear and Natalia most probably would have ended up in the same situation.
  • Magitek:
    • A critical plot point in Tales of Phantasia, and, consequentially, the prequel Tales of Symphonia. Between those two games and their respective backstories, mankind manages to shoot itself in the metaphorical foot fairly often with a magitech Wave-Motion Gun, causing no less then at least four And Man Grew Proud moments over the course of an 8000 year period.
    • In Tales of Eternia, the entire land of Celestia is run by captured Craymels or minor spirits. In fact, the only reason Inferia, the starting world, is still in a Middle Ages setting is because of their moral refusal to capture Craymels (although they view it more as desecration).
    • Both vehicles in Tales of Symphonia, the Elemental Cargo and the Rheaird, are powered by mana. The former is a cargo ship that uses water mana to surf on the water. The latter is a jet ski-like thing that uses electric mana to fly. The ancient technology that was lost in the Kharlan war is actually called "Magitechnology."
    • Tales of Vesperia has technology known as Blastia that does everything from control drinking water to power lights to create gigantic barriers that keep monsters at bay. Unfortunately, it's also a form of Lost Technology that has to be excavated, rare enough that it can't be freely distributed despite the high demand, and powered by a type of energy that's very toxic when concentrated. Then there's the whole overuse-summons-a-world-eating-Eldritch Abomination issue...
    • In Tales of Xillia and its sequel Tales of Xillia 2 we have Spyrix and Spyrite, both powered by the elemental spirits that compose that world. One of the main problems in the first game is that the former technology kills said spirits, which would eventually cause them to die out entirely, and all life on the planet with them. This is why the latter is developed at the end of the first game, which accomplishes the same thing without killing the spirits.
  • Mana Meter:
    • The Team Symphonia style uses Technical Points (TP), a traditional Mana Meter.
    • The Team Destiny style uses Chain Capacity (CC) or Special Points (SP), where characters possess a constantly-regenerating pool of CC[/]SP, and can chain special moves for as long as they have points remaining.
      • Xillia uses a combination of both, with the Assault Counter (AC) system: Artes only cost one AC, but cost traditional amounts of TP, allowing you to, again, chain Artes until they run out of AC or TP, whichever comes first.
  • Medicinal Cuisine: In some games, cooking will restore HP/TP after every battle, or otherwise generate items to do the same. Cooking can bestow multiple effects and vary in potency, depending on which character you choose to be the cook. It is also trained as a skill, with characters improving their skills the more they practice a recipe.
  • Metal Slime:
    • Tales of Eternia combines this with a Chest Monster in form of Fakes, which are, as the name suggests, fake treasure chests. They're extremely resistant to all attacks but they start off the battle poisoned, meaning that if you survive long enough, you can eventually kill them even if you're underleveled. While they themselves don't give that much experience per kill, they're the only refightable enemy (a conveyer belt in a specific dungeon spawns an unlimited number of them when you flip a switch) in the game that're durable enough to survive a full set of Maxwell extensions, which awards the party 100,000 experience whenever you successfully pull one off.
    • Tales of Hearts have Apple, Peach, and Grape Gela. Found on one island in the game. Their HP is paltry, but they have 9999 defense and tech defense. They drop perfectly normal Apple, Peach, and Grape Gels, but their steal items are stat-boosting herbs.
    • Tales of Symphonia has the Bacura. "Hey, you can't fight the block thing in the mines!" Well, no, you can't fight it... in the mines. Instead, you have to fight it on the path by the SE Abbey, and due to their low spawn rate it helps to have a Dark Bottle active. It takes 1 damage from every single attack and runs away after a set amount of time. For defeating it, you get 11 to 35 Grade (depending on various things). For comparison, most enemies give you no Grade for merely defeating them (as the name implies, Grade is awarded for fighting well), most bosses give you 10, and beating the game gives you a whopping 1000.
    • Bacuras reappear in Tales of Xillia in normal, bronze, silver, and golden varieties. They can take the place of seemingly any enemy in certain areas starting early on in the game, and give a healthy sum of EXP. They only attempt to flee prior to engaging them in battle, but they have sky high defense, resist every element, and are surprisingly capable fighters for featureless blocks.
  • Mirror Monster:
    • In Tales of Destiny, one of the dungeons in Dycroft is full of mirrors. Stepping in front of any of these mirrors to where you see Stahn's reflection causes a battle between him and a duplicate called a "Shadow". Presumably, the reflection comes to life and emerges from the mirror to attack him.
    • In Tales of Vesperia, when the group explores the Ghost Ship, the Atherum, the ghosts themselves are only visible on the mirrors of the walls.
    • In Tales of Zestiria, Sorey at one point asks if Seraphs (who are normally invisible to humans) can be reflected in mirrors, Lailah answers that only if they focus really hard they can only make themselves visible for a short moment, which is usually enough for them to groom themselves in it; Rose then wonders if people have been freaked out upon seeing a Seraph's image alongside theirs in the mirror, and thinks that maybe that's the origin for the stories of ghosts that appear in the mirrors.
  • The Mole:
    • Leon Magnus in Tales of Destiny is technically a mole, but since he was officially put in the group to keep an eye on them, it's not a secret to anyone.
    • In Tales of Symphonia, there are no less than three people spying from within the party at various points. First you have Kratos, who betrays you in the fake ending. Next, you have the Big Bad himself, who uses his true form as a young boy to appear innocent and gain the party's trust, although at least he isn't an official party member. And finally, you have Zelos, who was spying on your party for both the Big Bad and La Résistance.
    • Subverted with Raine early in the game as well. Early on she laughs maniacally when exploring a ruin and even drools over an Exsphere complete with flat, psychotic eyes. It's revealed quite quickly (and Played for Laughs) that she's not evil, just really into ancient ruins.
    • We also have Raven from Tales of Vesperia, although he switches sides shortly after this is revealed.
    • Anise from Tales of the Abyss. However, after it is revealed that she is leaking information on the party's actions to the enemy, it is never brought up again.
    • Innes from Tales of Hearts, though like Raven, she quickly pulls a Heel–Face Turn in the same scene she's revealed to be this.
    • There's also Ricardo from Tales of Innocence. To be fair, he does have his own reasons, and doesn't take it well upon finding out what the Grigoris are about to do to the party. Man, the Tales series just loves this trope.
    • Alvin from Tales of Xillia. Unlike some of the other examples, he keeps playing both sides long after he's found out for the first time, only giving up on his ways towards the end of the game.
    • The Tales Series loves this trope so much, along with party member betrayal, that fans were legitimately shocked that Tales of Zestiria never had anyone turncoat on you or be revealed to be working for the Big Bad. Its prequel, Tales of Berseria, makes it seem like Magilou will be the traitor due to her suspicious behavior and an early game incident where she sold out Velvet to avoid interrogation. The real traitor turns out to be her Malak, Bienfu, who was forced to leak info on the party due to Melchior's Geas.
  • Monster Compendium:
    • Tales of Symphonia gives Raine a title if you fill in 100% of all enemies, which are automatically logged when encountered. It's still a good idea to scan them, though, as it will give you information that simply seeing them won't (Health, Weaknesses, etc). However, to truly complete the book, you need to use Raine to scan them. Otherwise, you'll lack their location info.
    • Tales of Vesperia: Building a compendium is one of the game's major sidequests for one of your characters who is a monster hunter.
  • More Despicable Minion: If the Big Bad is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, the game will include at least one utterly vile minor villain to act as a Hate Sink. More often than not, they'll be The Unfought, quickly dispatched in a cutscene, or uncommonly like a final boss, just before the major plot kicks in. In the English dubs, this character is nearly always voiced by Liam O'Brien.
  • Multiple Endings:
    • Tales of Symphonia: The ending changes depending on whoever is at the top of your Relationship Values. The primary thrust of the plot remains the same, but the character chosen gets the main focus in several plot scenes, and joins Lloyd in his quest to collect and destroy all the Exspheres in the world after defeating the Final Boss. One notable deviation from that formula is choosing Kratos results in a slightly modified version of the Colette path, in which Zelos decides to get himself killed at your hands after his apparent betrayal, and Kratos replaces him as a playable party member. The sequel, however, cuts off that branch, by specifying that Zelos lives.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World has 3 endings: The Best Ending, The Good Ending, and the Bad Ending. You get the Best Ending by getting both Ignus' and Tonitrus' Cores and losing to Lloyd and Marta, and it involves Emil splitting from Ratatosk and returning to Earth to live a normal life. You get the Good Ending by losing Ignus and/or Tonitrus to Lloyd, and it involves Emil/Ratatosk and Richter staying in the Ginnungagap. You get the Bad Ending by winning the fight against Lloyd and Marta, and it involves Emil killing himself because he injured Marta. The Bad Ending is pretty much a Nonstandard Game Over.
    • Tales of Xillia 2:
      • The Bad Ending, also called the Julius Ending: Ludger chooses to sacrifice the world to save his brother, resulting in him killing the rest of the party and giving up any chance of saving Elle.
      • The Ludger Ending, the world is saved, but Elle has to sacrifice herself in the process. Humanity technically passes Origin's trial, but on a bittersweet note because of Elle's sacrifice, and Ludger eventually lives to meet her mother, Lara.
      • The Elle Ending, the world is saved, but Ludger sacrifices himself in place of Elle so that she can live. Humanity technically fails Origin's trial, but Origin allows them to pass anyway because Ludger's selflessness proves the point the trial was meant to test. Elle grows up with peace between Elympios and Reize Maxia, and nature is healing with help Jude's spyrite research.
      • If you choose to pay off your debt in its entirety, you unlock a Hot Springs Episode.
      • Completing the cameo boss fights and job requests nets you a joke ending where the cameo characters use the Eternal Sword to go up to Canaan, beat up the Final Boss and rescue Elle for you.
    • Tales of Zestiria: If you manage to defeat Heldalf before Zaveid is recruited, it unlocks the Bad Ending where because the party never finds out about the corrupted Maotelus until he becomes too powerful to be stopped the world is destroyed.
  • Mythology Gag: Has its own page here.
  • Noob Cave:
    • Tales of Phantasia's first "dungeon" is a small forest with non-threatening enemies. The first proper dungeon thereafter is bigger but also relatively non-threatening.
    • Tales of Symphonia has the Temple of Martel, a small dungeon with no boss (unless you count Vidarr, who actually comes before you enter) and a small block-pushing puzzle.
  • Optional Boss: A common optional Recurring Boss known as the Sword Dancer, who is a giant skeleton wielding multiple swords, will also show up in some games. He's usually fought a total of three times throughout the game, and managing to beat him in all three fights will usually reward the main character with an exceptionally rare but powerful sword.
  • Optional Character Scene: "Skits" are short conversations between party members outside of the main story, though some are mandatory story events, in place of overworld cutscenes, most are optional and triggered by selecting pop-ups. They serve to flesh out party interactions or add to the general plot.
  • Panacea: The "Bottle" items are used to heal status effects.
  • Penultimate Weapon:
    • The Eternal Sword in Tales of Phantasia is outclassed by some Bonus Dungeon weapons. It doesn't stop other Tales games from using it as a proper Infinity Plus One Sword. Tales of Eternia reverses this, as it's the Excalibur that serves as the Penultimate Weapon to the Eternal Sword.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Lloyd's Material Blade is outclassed quickly by the Ninja Sword found in the last dungeon (to add insult to to injury, the Final Boss is also weak to it) and two sidequest rewards (the Valkyrie Saber and the Kusanagi). Lloyd's Devil Arm should outclass all of them unless you have been running from most of the fights. Even sadder, the paper fans you can buy in Luin are at least as good as, if not better than, the Material Blade. Funnily enough, the scene where Lloyd gets the Material Blade is accompanied by this quote: "I doubt you have a blade in your possession that can match it." Guess what? You can get one of these sword sets before that point.
    • Tales of Vesperia: Yuri is temporarily lent the Dein Nomos around halfway through the game. Most players probably didn't think they'd to get to keep it, but given how much the sword had been built up and the awesome power it commands in cutscenes, you might expect this to be A Taste of Power where you get to wield the Infinity +1 Sword. It's actually an incredibly average weapon. Though it will probably be the strongest sword in your inventory when you first get it (assuming you aren't on a New Game Plus with endgame equipment) you'll find better ones long before you're required to give it up. The only really noteworthy thing about it is that it teaches Yuri the Special skill, but it's not even the only weapon in the game that can do that. The real Infinity +1 Sword later turns out to be a different weapon, though it's part of the same set as Dein Nomos.
    • In Tales of Eternia, the Eternal Sword might also still count depending on when you get it. As it was only the ultimate weapon in terms of sheer power, sacrificing other stats for it. Not to mention its Time element weakens it against certain enemies. The game had a few other weapons like it too. The true Infinity +1 Sword was the Last Fencer. While not as strong in terms of sheer strength, it had no element, and the advantage of raising all stats at once. It also may or may not be named after one of the titles Cless gets in Tales Of Phantasia. So um... Take That!?
    • In Tales of Xillia, the Devil's Arms are supposedly the most powerful weapons in the world, each embedded in the body of a powerful Superboss. By the time you're strong enough to actually defeat these bosses, the Devil's Arms you get from them will probably be outclassed by weapons you already have. (Elize's is heavily outclassed by a toy princess staff she gets from a couple of pink-obsessed valley-girls) There's a sidequest you can do to unlock their true power, but it can only be done after beating the game, and it involves beating the game's strongest Superboss, so even then they're more of a Bragging Rights Reward.
  • Player Nudge: The games sometimes use the skits to give hints either on what the player should do next (or outright tell you) or about any sidequest they have the opportunity to do at that moment. In Tales of the Abyss, if you die on a boss, you get an extra option on the Game Over screen that lets them view a skit where the characters lament over their failure and then try to think of a strategy for when the player tries again. You don't need to fight the boss this way, but it helps a lot.
  • Playing Possum: Karol from Tales of Vesperia can do this with one of his skills in order to regain HP/TP and escape enemy notice after he's been knocked down. He's a bit cowardly, so it fits. It returns as a skill usable by multiple party members in Tales of Xillia, cowardly or not.
  • Point of No Return:
    • Tales of Phantasia involves Time Travel, which happens as part of the plot when called for, and the trips are one way, locking off absolutely everything that came before. While the first one (going from the present to the past after beating The Catacombs) isn't too big of an issue (you lose one party member for a very long time, but he does eventually rejoin), the second trip (Past to Future via Thor and the events that follow) is massive and world changing.
    • Tales of Symphonia has an odd one- after completing the fire seal, the player has the option to follow the intended route and take a boat to Palmacosta and head towards the water seal, or go across a bridge far to the north and head towards the light seal, which is intended to be the final seal of Sylvarant. The story accommodates whatever route the player chooses, but the enemy levels don't, and once you cross the sea, whether it's by boat or by bridge, you're locked into the route. For an exploration-minded first-time player who wasn't aware of this and finds themselves getting destroyed by enemies twice their level, this means either a lot of tedious grinding in old areas or restarting the game. There's a second, minor but more traditional one later on, at the end of GCN version's first disc, that destroys one town and a handful of dungeons.
  • Poor Communication Kills:
    • Tales of the Abyss has the information about what Van is planning and the fact that Luke is a replica of Asch being kept hidden despite all logic. At one point, Deadpan Snarker Jade doesn't tell the party something because he "didn't feel like it." Played for Drama later on when Jade actually recognises that his uncaring attitude has led to a lot of problems in the world.
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • The game dances around the issue of what's going to happen to Colette until it's too late to do anything about it. Colette does herself no favors by even telling her teammates to keep quiet, or just trying to pretend there isn't a problem. That never ends well; the party always has to stop trying to save the world to help cure what ails Colette. Thankfully, she recognizes this and grows out of it.
      • Midway through Symphonia, Kratos, having realized that the Key Crest Lloyd gave to Colette is failing to contain the Cruxis Crystal, warns Collette that she must remove the "worthless Key Crest" if she values her life. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't explain why Colette's life is in danger from the necklace (which was a late birthday gift from Lloyd), so Colette doesn't listen to him. It doesn't help that Kratos had betrayed the group by this point, so the group had even less reason to trust him.
      • Kratos also warns the party not to make pacts with all eight Summon Spirits in order to separate the worlds in order to end the cycle of prosperity and dearth. Again, since Kratos doesn't specify the consequences and is working for the villains (who don't want that to happen, either) at this point, the party doesn't realize the real reason why he's warning them until it's too late.
    • Also shows up in the game that Symphonia is a prequel to, Tales of Phantasia, in which the entirety of the plot, with all its casualties, was the result of Dhaos not having bothered to explain that he needed a mana seed and the humans were currently using too much mana for the tree to produce one, and instead going directly to "attack humans until their mana usage drops", which proves counterproductive in starting a war meant to get humans to use less mana (without actually telling them to use less mana) he provokes them into firing the mana canon at his monster army, burning away a RIDICULOUS amount of mana. The OVA fixes this by actually including a scene where Dhaos warns people about what will happen if they rely too much on mana, but they end up rejecting him.
    • Tales of Destiny: Had Leon bothered to tell someone that his father was holding Marian hostage, he wouldn't have gotten himself killed. In the remake, Chaltier even chews him out for not asking Stahn for help dealing with the situation when it's clear he can't deal with it alone.
    • Tales of Destiny 2 has a lot of this. An entire subplot (albeit a short one with a lot of character development) and a bunch of suspicion could have been solved if Judas had just told someone he was Leon Magnus and that Elraine's plan involved messing with the past. Also applies to Reala, she knew a lot more than she was letting on about Elraine and her motives but just wouldn't say anything about it until absolutely necessary, including dropping a huge plot twist near the end of the game. Loni and Rutee also held back very important information to Kyle about his father.
    • Tales of Vesperia: Several characters know what the nature of Estelle's healing power is. One even comments that her power is a "poison" to her. None of them explain it to her, as everybody agrees she's too nice and they don't want to trouble her. Naturally, this leads to her using it on somebody to whom it actually is poison, leading to their easily avoided death.
    • Tales of Xillia: If Alvin had just told the party there was another world he wanted to get back to, the party could have been spared the ordeal of half a dozen betrayals at least and Milla's death. Though it is debatable whether Milla would have allowed him to before the Schism was damaged.
    • Tales of Zestiria:
      • Lailah traveled with the previous Shepherd and was an eyewitness to the incident that began the Age of Chaos and caused Heldalf's Start of Darkness, but in order to gain the power to purify hellions, she took an oath to never speak about it to anyone. About 3/4 of the plot could have been avoided if Lailah had been able to share her knowledge with the others, but at the cost of leaving the remaining 1/4 insurmountable because no one had the power of purification.
      • Dezel's death probably could have been prevented if he had been willing to tell the rest of the party, especially Rose, about what his goals were and why he was traveling with them.
    • Tales of Berseria:
      • Velvet's entire revenge is based on seeing Artorius having killed her little brother, using him during the Advent and as the needed vessel to house Innominat. It isn't until two-thirds through the game that it turns out that Laphicet willingly sacrificed himself because he knew his death would make a better world for his sister, and that he was going to die soon, anyway. He even made Artorius promise to not tell Velvet about his planned death. The news sends Velvet into a Heroic BSoD, realizing that everything she has done so far, which included several people's deaths, was for naught. In a subversion, she eventually decides that this explanation is bullshit and doesn't matter; summoning Innominat was a horrible idea from the very start, whether the sacrifice was willing or not.
      • Most of the party has secrets, but they're not particularly important and no one really cares. Most of the party isn't aware that Artorius was married to Velvet's sister, for example, but that's just because Velvet didn't think it was worth mentioning; when the others find out, they're surprised, but admit that Velvet was right, it doesn't change anything. The biggest secret is probably Magilou's status as the Lost Legate of the Abbey. Once it actually becomes relevant, she immediately tells everyone, at which point they just shrug and accept it.
  • Purple Is the New Black:
    • Tales of Symphonia does have a black Shadow, but the logo of his power is purple, though still represented with pitch black half the time.
    • Yuri Lowell from Tales of Vesperia has purple hair, but it's described in the game as "raven black". It looks black in some of his promo art.
    R to Z 
  • Recurring Element:
    • Some Mystic Artes are used by multiple characters across games:
    • The Sorcerer's Ring is an item that shoots small energy bolts and is used to solve puzzles, that recurs across games. Its functions are usually upgraded as the story proceeds.
    • A broadly-shared list of artes and spells. It's possible to tell how nostalgic a game is attempting to be by how closely it sticks to that list. Games such as Destiny 2, Rebirth, and Hearts tried to break out completely. Very common moves include "Demon Fang" and "Tiger Blade" as the first moves the sword-wielder and "Photon", one of the early Light magic spells, for the magic user. There are also a few games where one character doesn't use the "Traditional" artes used by most Tales series main characters...but another character does. Examples include Chloe in Tales of Legendia (And even then, some of their artes overlap with each other or the classic Tales series heroes), Guy in Tales of the Abyss, or Spada in Tales of Innocence.
    • The Dark Wings, a trio of quirky thieves whose role is usually as comic relief. (In Tales of Rebirth, Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Arise, they play a bigger role than usual.) Since the games usually take place in different worlds, it's generally a different group in each game, almost always composed of two males and a female (The notable exception would be the Schwann Brigade in Tales of Vesperia, which is composed of three guys, all of them Lawful Stupid knights... most of the time, which plays the comic relief role). note 
    • A famous, but in most of the games never seen, pirate named Aifread (like the Dark Wings, it's probably not the same Aifread in each game). He usually only plays a role in sidequests (which often involve finding his buried treasure), or is only mentioned as part of the lore (such as in item descriptions or NPC dialogue).
      • Main cast members Chat from Eternia and Patty from the Updated Re Release of Vesperia are said to be descendants of the original Aifread.
      • He plays a larger role than usual in Berseria, as his gang of pirates are important allies, and the search for him is a part of the main plot. That said, he still only shows up in a handful of scenes.
      • He also makes an actual on-screen appearance in Symphonia, but only as part of a sidequest.
    • An interesting case with recurring plot point: almost every game has a traitor. Their identity and causes varies — it can be The Lancer, Guest-Star Party Member, The Big Guy, Combat Medic, Team Pet, and even The Hero himself. Party may or may not have to fight them, and they may or may not survive. If they do, "Welcome Back, Traitor" reaction is inevitable.
    • Cameo boss fights. The final battle in the coliseum would almost always be a party, made up of party members from previous games. If there is no coliseum, they'll show up in the sidequest. It's almost never explained, how did they get here in first place, since games has no single continuity, but it doesn't matter, since fights tend to be absolutely awesome.
  • Required Party Member:
    • In Tales of Symphonia, Colette is required in all of the boss fights at the end of Sylvarant's temples (which are seals she must open for her journey of regeneration as The Chosen One), while Sheena is required for all summon seals. Also, in order to get the location information for monsters into your Monster Book, you need to use the Magic Lens with Raine, not any of the other characters. Raine is also required for the Windmaster boss fight, because she is participating in the ritual, and Lloyd is required for the third battle with Yggdrasill, the third battle with Kratos and the battle with Origin.
    • This happens extremely often in Tales of Xillia 2, forcing an entire party formation on you for every story chapter but the last one, and requiring one or two specific members for the character episodes. Naturally, they end up making you have to fight That One Boss using a formation that doesn't have any of the party's primary healers.
  • Rock Theme Naming:
    • Tales of Hearts has its main characters named after minerals: Shing (last name Meteoryte), Kohak, Hisui, Innes Lorenz(inite), Beryl Benito, and Kunzite. For those of you who missed it, Kohak and Hisui are sister and brother, and their names are Amber and Jade respectively in Japanese. Supporting characters are named Chalcedny, Peridot, Byrocks, Paraiba... and the old party contains names like Iola, Tekta, and Labrado(rite)... and the Big Bad is Creed Graphite. Early-game villains are named Grossular and Kornerupine, while the Big Bad's posse consists of Corundum, Clinoseraph, Chlorseraph, Geo Strigau, and Incarose. Look them all up. The only one not to follow this theme is Gall Gruner, added in Hearts R. This is a hint that he is not from this world.
    • In Tales of the Abyss, we have Jade, his sister Nephry (Nephrite), and childhood friend Saphir (Sapphire). In a manga bonus chapter, Jade and Saphir are seen going to school with a young man named Jasper, all of which suggests that these kind of names may be somewhat traditional in Malkuth.
    • Tales of Berseria: Eleanor shares her name with a precious gemstone also called "Eleanor" that her Doomed Hometown had previously passed down and guarded for generations.
  • Scary Shiny Glasses:
    • It is implied that Jade Curtiss from Tales of the Abyss literally wears his glasses to protect the environment from his eyes. Needless to say, they flash often, especially in the anime adaptation. In both the game and anime, the only time you ever see both of Dist's eyes is when he's not wearing his glasses.
    • Julius from Tales of Xillia 2 has glasses that turn an opaque white and hides his eyes, sometimes for comedy but more often for horror or drama when his expression is unreadable. The equippable accessory description for his glasses say that he enjoys how they hide his true emotions.
  • Someone Has to Die:
    • In Tales of Symphonia, that's the entire purpose of the Chosen. Also, at one point, Botta and two nameless Renegades trap themselves in a flooding room in order to stop the self-destruct sequence of an underwater Desian Base. Yuan doesn't seem surprised, hinting that at least someone was expecting this.
      • And later on, all supporting characters left in the cast do this as a part of the sequence of false Heroic Sacrifices that reduces the party to Lloyd alone, while climbing the Tower of Salvation. Only in the cases of Raine and Genis does it seem a knowing choice of unavoidable death, the other cases looking more like accidents with a possibility of survival ("I'll get out of this mess on my own, you hurry on, you can't afford to lose any time!"), but a Z-skit springing up right before the first "sacrifice" shows Regal and Raine calmly discussing this, acknowledging the fact that they're more expendable than Lloyd. Right before that whole sequence, Zelos invokes this if you follow Kratos' path.
    • A particularly poignant part of Tales of the Abyss invokes this trope: the only surefire way to neutralize the poisonous miasma covering the world is to cause a "hyperresonance" so powerful that it would take the user's life and the lives of thousands of willing sacrifices. The thousands of sacrifices are supplied by eventually-all-too-willing replicas, and Luke and Asch argue for a while over who should be the one to instigate the hyperresonance. It eventually ends with Luke trying to do so, but Asch needing to contribute a bit of his power anyway because Luke isn't strong enough on his own. Possibly for this reason, though it's never quite explained, both of them survive.
  • Sorry I'm Late:
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • Early on, Lloyd is captured while he and Genis are looking for Colette and the others. After a short dungeon on his own, Lloyd runs into the base's leader. Before they come to blows, the rest of the party shows up.
      • This also happens later in the game, going through the base of the world tree, the other party members stay behind one after the other to allow the others to continue. Just as Lloyd gets to the end, they all show up again to help.
      • Kratos actually says "Sorry I'm late" when he turns up to fight off the "Desians" attacking Colette in the OVA.
    • In Tales of Vesperia, when you fight Gusios for the first time, Yuri will start off alone due to a cave-in Gusios caused, separating him from the rest of the party. As the battle progresses, Repede, Estelle, and Rita will join in. Rita even says "Sorry I'm late."
    • In the final battle of Tales of Xillia, each party member catches up to the main protagonist in the order of how much time they spent Linked with them in battle, and unleashes their Mystic Arte as they arrive.
  • Squad Controls: Tales games allow you to give each character orders on what to do, but sometimes they'll just do whatever. Most of them include preset orders for defensive and aggressive behaviors, which can then be further customized in the strategy menus. You can also choose to enable and disable certain of your party members' abilities, and most entries allow you to choose how often they use special techniques, and in some cases what kind (for example, you might be able to set the healer to focus on conserving mana, healing everyone, or casting a lot of support spells). You can also set their default distance from the enemy when they enter battle, how closely they choose to engage the enemy when actually in combat, and sometimes what kind of enemies they focus on attacking (same as the player, different from the player, flying enemies, etc).
    • Tales of the Abyss introduce the ability to switch the controlled character in the middle of battle after gaining a particular item.
    • Tales of Vesperia also allows you to set the behavior of AI controlled party members. However, it gives the player far more options to work with, from selecting formations, setting the distance AI team mates should maintain between the Player Character and the enemy, and whether to allow them to use items (and how often).
    • Tales of Phantasia uses a simple method of AI customisation where you can switch the abilities you want them to use on and off.
  • Summon Magic:
    • In Phantasia, Claus F. Lester is a human studying summoning, as only those of elven blood can use magic. Summoning is a plot point established for the initial arc of the Past segment of the game, with Cress and Mint attempting to help Claus make summoning pacts so that, in a way, a human CAN use something akin to magic. However, after Claus makes a pact with Sylph and the team adds Arche, this side-plot is dropped.
    • Tales of Eternia, the second game to use Summons, ratcheted up the pace of the battle in every way, including making all spells take place in real time...except summoning the Greater Craymels. But then, it also switched the summons from being just another kind of spells (as Klarth used) to being a sort of magical Limit Break charged up by repeatedly using the proper element of spells. (Anyone who's played the game enough knows how often you get to summon Undine, whose domain contains both water and healing spells.)
    • Tales of Vesperia (360) has the basic four Spirits from the series, but doesn't let you summon them in-game. Tales of Vesperia (PS3) totally makes up for it by giving Estelle a Mystic Arte that summons all four of them at once.
    • Pascal in Tales of Graces can summon the spirits Grim Sylphie (wind), Cyan Deem (water) and Blood Flamme (fire).
    • Sheena from Tales of Symphonia is a Ninja who can form pacts with each of the 8 elemental spirits, (Fire, Water, Ice, Earth, Light, Darkness, Wind, Lightning), and 2 other extremely powerful non-elemental ones after defeating them in battle. While these summons are incredibly powerful, they are somewhat impractical since Sheena can only summon while in Overlimit mode.
    • In Tales of Destiny 2, Summon Magic serves as Reala and Harold's limit breaks. They share Efreet and Undine between them, while Reala also summons Gnome and Sylph while Harold has Rem and Shadow. There is also a Good Bad Bug in the original PS2 version that allows Nanaly to summon Efreet.
  • Supreme Chef:
    • In Tales of Destiny 2, everyone loves Nanaly's cooking, even picky eater Judas.
    • In Tales of Symphonia, Genis has a reputation as a Supreme Chef in Iselia, and has several scenes in the beginning of the game with characters praising his cooking. Though considering his older sister Raine is a Lethal Chef extraordinaire, it's almost a necessity for him. Genis is not the altogether best chef in the game, however: That would be Regal, who earns the special title "God of the Kitchen" in a late-game sidequest.
      • An interesting twist on this trope and One Note Chef is that all the characters (save Raine and Presea) have themes to the recipes they are best at, even outperforming the Supreme Chefs of the party with certain recipes. Lloyd is better at foods with meat in them, Colette is good with desserts and recipes where a major component is fruit, and Sheena excels with Asian-themed foods like Udon Noodles. Even Genis and Regal have their specific wheelhouses where they outperform the other. Genis works best with everyday recipes like omelets, and Regal has the highest skill with the most complex recipes.
      • In the sequel Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Emil reveals himself to be a Supreme Chef in skits, though in the actual cooking mini-game he lags behind Regal and Genis, the previous game's Supreme Chefs. He also shows a penchant for preparation, cutting fruit and vegetables into animal shapes and such. In Ratatosk Mode, he has zero care for preparation, and Tenebrae compares the visuals to Marta's cooking... but to his and Marta's surprise, the taste is just as supreme as ever.
    • For Tales of the Abyss; in the short time you have him, Asch is shown to be a great chef via skit, in contrast to Natalia and Luke who are his fiance and replica, respectively, both of whom are no good in a kitchen.
      • Otherwise your recommended chef is Anise, she is the character who can create better than normal recipes and can gain a title that makes it impossible to ruin dishes.
    • Tales of Vesperia has their protagonist Yuri Lowell. When he says his secret ingredient was "love", Hilarity Ensues. Of course, it turns out he didn't really do anything special; he just follows the recipes to the letter.
    • Ludger from Tales of Xillia 2 is considered a really good chef by most of the characters in the game, having learned to cook on his own when he was seven years old, and were it not for the events of the plot, could have ended up with a job as a cook.
    • Tales of Berseria: Velvet frequently cooked for her family growing up, and even when she loses the ability to taste, her food is still good enough to eat, and once she finds a taste tester to taste for her, she goes back to being an excellent cook.
    • Games with Cooking will frequently include the Wonder Chef, a mysterious individual who disguises himself as various objects around the world and—if unmasked—will teach you new recipes.
  • Symmetric Effect:
    • The "All-Divide", a rare item that cuts all damage taken by friend and foe by half.
    • In certain games, one can spend Grade points to start New Game Plus with all damages multiplied by a certain amount for both allies and opponents.
  • Take Care of the Kids:
    • Tales of Xillia 2:
      • In Chapter 11, if you refuse to let go of Fractured Milla when she is being sucked into the summoning portal, and her Relationship Values with Ludger are high enough, then she tells Ludger to let her go so he can save Elle from Rideaux. If Ludger continues to hold on, she lets go herself and her last words plead to him to take care of Elle.
      • In Chapter 12, after Ludger reluctantly kills his Alternate Self, Victor, to retrieve the final Waymarker, Victor asks him to take care of his daughter, Elle.
    • Tales of Berseria: Shortly before the final battle, Velvet asks Eleanor to look after Laphicet if something should happen to her. Part of this is because they're going up against a god so survival is unlikely, but Velvet has also begun to suspect that her life is tied to the Big Bad, so if he dies she might too. Velvet ends up sealing him in a duel, while Laphicet becomes a god and takes his place. Eleanor decides the best way to fulfill her promise to Velvet is to turn the Abbey into a force of good that will support their new god.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: The series loves this; typically there will be cutscene exposition before a plot-important fight and then the characters will banter during it, apparently not even needing to breathe.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World has some quite lengthy dialogue between the party and some bosses, while running round shouting out arte names and casting spells that require incantations. It's Played for Laughs when the party is running from Alice and Decus in the Ice Temple. When they try to hold a conversation in a skit like they always do, Tenebrae reminds them that they're supposed to be running like hell and declares a ban on speaking. It doesn't take long for the party to turn this on him and prevent him from speaking as well.
    • Tales of Vesperia takes a jab at talking during fights when Yuri and Flynn work together to defend a village of refugees from monsters. Yuri can't concentrate if he isn't talking and Flynn can't concentrate when someone is talking. And then they fight each other and trash-talk each other while they're kicking each other's ass.
    • Tales of Xillia introduces "Chats", which are conversations but instead occur during battles automatically. In some of these battles, they can be between the character the party is fighting against, if they also have a voice actor.
  • Thanks for the Mammary:
    • In Tales of the Abyss, this happened to Guy after Luke (under orders from Jade) kicked him into the girl's area of the spa (it should be noted that Guy is very gynophobic). The girls were angry at first, but then realize that he was the least likely guy to grope them. Then Anise asked him who was bigger: Natalia or Tear. After he said Tear, they got angry and called him a pervert again, netting him the new title "Naughty Devil".
    • In Tales of Xillia 2, Fractured Milla trips while walking on a rather treacherous path near some lava, at which point Ludger is given the choice of catching her fall or doing nothing. The former option results in the trope and earns him a punch (And some affinity), though she apologizes for it quickly. She ends up being fine in the latter option, but she gets mad at him for letting her crash into the ground instead.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
    • Several enemies in Tales of the Abyss screw the rules on numerous occasions. You have to be in overlimit to use a mystic arte. Several bosses that have them can use it randomly. They may also not only go into overlimit numerous times in a row. The final boss does both - when you take out half his health and get a cutscene mid-way through the boss battle, he may use Celestial Elegy without even going into overlimit or immediately go into overlimit twice in a row. The player can not do this themselves.
    • The major antagonist of Tales of Vesperia , Alexei is famous for ripping out his Mystic Arte, Brilliant Cataclysm, multiple times in a battle and he can do it up to 10 times on higher difficulties. Brilliant Cataclysm has a huge area of effect and does enormous amounts of damage. He cheats in multiple ways. First, he can use a skill that is a powerful attack and a healing spell at the same time without consuming TP, often spamming it to a point at which he heals faster than you can damage him. If you set your AI to stay away from the enemy, they will move in on him before he uses Brilliant Cataclysm to ensure that they are within the area of effect. If you get close to actually winning the battle, he can activate Brilliant Cataclysm without having to go into Over Limit, and it will override an All-Divide (that is supposed to halve all the damage dealt by both you and the enemy), usually killing your entire party in a single blow.
    • In both Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Vesperia, the traditional climactic Duel Boss ( Asch in Abyss and Flynn in Vesperia) can actually interrupt your Mystic Arte and counter with their own, which is downright absurd. Getting Luke's Radiant Howl off on Asch is made damn near impossible for this reason; he interrupts you every time.
      • In Vesperia it is literally impossible, as the player will lose control while the boss overlimits and uses his Arte even if he was stunned or on the ground, he would immediately recover. In Abyss it's possible though if the boss isn't in a position to attack by being stunned or in the air. Simply chain the MA from a full connection of Luke's Light Spear Cannon and the boss will still be in the air for the final hit and unable to counter.
    • Your allies cheat like rotten bastards in Tales of Xillia when you link with them. AI link partners will position themselves flawlessly behind your target, time their attacks to the frame to help with your juggles, use free abilities they otherwise don't have access to, and will move to defend your back the femtosecond a hostile decides to go for it. In fact, the system relies so much on AI omniscience and hidden abilities you can't link with player-controlled allies.
  • These Hands Have Killed:
    • Tales of the Abyss: Luke is utterly horrified the first time he ends up killing another human. Later on in the game, Jade notes that Luke has nightmares each time he kills another human, even if it was a bandit or Oracle Knight.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Regal killed Presea's sister Alicia in the past and so keeps himself handcuffed as penance. He switched to killing things (monsters) with his legs.
  • Title Theme Drop:
    • In Tales of Phantasia the title theme plays when you heal the dying tree Yggdrasil in the past, preventing it from being dead in the present/future and allowing you to use magic in the rest of the game.
    • In the final chapter, when Ludger saves Elle and unlocks his full Chromatus, a remix of the opening theme "Song 4 U" plays through the ensuing cutscene and boss fight.
  • Token Mini-Moe:
  • 20 Bear Asses:
    • In Tales of Phantasia, the innkeeper in Olive village asks the player to bring him at least five Basilisk scales (dropped from Basilisks, of course) while they are waiting for Edward Morrison to show up. Thankfully, the drop rate of scales is frequent and the Basilisks can be met even more frequently with Dark Bottles, but the Basilisks are pretty dangerous nonetheless.
    • In Tales of Destiny 2, there is a quest requiring you to get a certain species of wolf pelts to burn down overgrowth blocking the path through a forest. While the pelts are an 100% drop, capturing the wolves so you can fight them in the first place is an almost painfully tedious task.
    • In order to get all the girls' "sexy outfits" in Tales of Vesperia, you must collect several randomly dropped items from monsters, including from a type of monster that only appears in the very center of a deserted island at night. To make matters worse, they are still a rare encounter and the item drop rate is not very high.
  • Welcome to Corneria:
    • In the game Tales of Symphonia, although he only has one line, if you talk to a certain NPC enough (something like 50 times) then he gives you an item (and says something different).
    • In the sequel, most NPCs have about 3 lines of dialogue that reset every time you enter the area. They also tend to change dialogue depending on the events of the story. Even so, it follows this trope fairly faithfully.
      • Lampshaded in Tales of Symphonia when you talk to one of the king's bodyguards and he will say "Stop making me say the same thing over and over again!"
    • Tales of Berseria subverts this by having each NPC highlighted with smiley face chat icons, which turn dark gray and into normal face icons to let the player know the NPC is done with his/her dialogue. NPCs will also shuffle in-between events, so with the exception of some key NPCs related to the plot, there will be a fresh batch of new NPCs to talk to each time you clear an event, etc. in each town. In addition, there are also special voice chats which are only said once and are highlighted with exclamation marks instead of smiley faces.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Most of the Big Bad villains have sympathetic goals:
    • Tales of Phantasia: Dhaos wanted mana from the planet's world tree to save his own home planet, and was only blowing stuff up because the rapid advancements in magitech were consuming all the mana and slowly killing the world. Upon discovering his true motivations, the party sympathizes with his desire to protect his world.
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • Yggdrasill wanted to end discrimination and war, and resurrect his beloved sister (who had died as a result of said discrimination and war). He intended to do this by transforming everyone into the same soulless lifeform, powered by crystals that are created from human suffering.
      • Although Yuan is acting against Yggdrasill's plan whose end result would be turning people into organic robots for eternity while allowing the world to rot from mana deprivation, he counters it by killing anyone and everyone who could potentially allow the plan to come to fruition. To be precise, he and the resistance group, the Renegades, have most likely been killing the Chosens of Sylvarant for several centuries, so as to avoid the creation of a vessel for Martel.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World had two: Richter wanted to resurrect his dead friend and take revenge on Ratatosk for killing him; however, this would involve killing the innocent main character and turning the world into a demonic realm (though, secretly, he planned to use a Heroic Sacrifice to stop that last part from happening). Ratatosk himself was the second example, wishing to restore the world's flow of mana by killing everyone who had distorted it: namely, all the humans, elves, and half-elves in the world.
    • Tales of the Abyss: Van wanted to free humanity from the chains of the prophecy of Yulia Jue's Score: an understandable sentiment, considering that the major leaders were willing to actively plunge the world into war simply because it was predicted, and, unknown to everyone but Van, the Score ends with humanity being destroyed. His plan was to destroy the current world and substitute Replacement Goldfishes for everything and everyone, because he believed that the aforementioned Goldfishes were not predicted by, and thus not bound by, the Score. He is fully aware of the irony in the fact that his plan to overturn the Score would make it a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
    • Tales of Vesperia:
      • Duke wanted to destroy the Adephagos as much as anybody. Having lost faith in humanity, though — they turned on him and killed his best friend even after they both fought on humanity's side in the war — his plan was to sacrifice them all to fuel his strike against it. He is unique in that the party actually talks him out of it by the end of the game.
      • Alexei, who Goes Mad From The Revelation that there was nothing he could do to save a world that was slowly killing itself... except for using a Weapon of Mass Destruction to destroy and recreate it with less self-destructive natural laws.
    • Tales of Xillia:
      • Exodus, a mysterious faction that terrorizes both Auj Oule and Rashugal with the goal of killing Milla, and with which Alvin is allied to, are the remains of civilians who were stranded in this world in a freak accident twenty years ago. Their attempts on Milla's lives are due to the belief that killing Maxwell would destroy the Schism and allow them to return home. While Gilland, their leader, is not entirely altruistic, intending on using the people of Auj Oule and Rashugal as a power source for his own country, Elympios, as well as using this to become head of the Svent family back in Elympios, even the party acknowledges that Gilland and modern Elympios can't be held responsible for their dependency on the spirit-killing spyrix.
      • Gaius wants to gather all of the world's weapons to ensure no one will misuse them, because he feels that the strong should protect the weak, and have a duty to do so. The rest of the party calls him out on this several times, notably Milla asking Gaius if the next king of Auj Oule will have the same idea, and note that he's going to have to kill a lot of people to get what he wants. Notably, Gaius considers Jude a Worthy Opponent, and the two come to develop a mutual respect for each other, to the point where after the party defeats him, Gaius backs down, and lets the party do things their way.
    • Tales of Berseria: Artorius knows full well how strong negative emotions turn humans into Daemons and in fact lost his wife because of it. As such, all he wants is to prevent people from turning into Daemons at all, which would allow the world of Desolation to be freed from the sins of man. His way of going about realizing this ambition ultimately means eliminating all semblance of emotion from people, turning them into human automatons lacking will, and by the start of the game, he already has forced many, many malakhim to become brainwashed slaves for the Abbey. Not to mention, his plan also requires allowing Innominat to feed off the strong negative emotions of a number of unlucky Daemons called 'Therions' and required him to turn a few malakhim into dragons, which is a thoroughly painful process that also requires the malak in question to mentally break.
  • World Tree:
    • In Tales of Phantasia, the protagonists have to revive a dying world tree called Yggdrasil, which supplies the world with Mana.
    • The Opening Monologue of Tales of Symphonia describes a tree which was once a source of ever-flowing mana, until it was killed in a Great Offscreen War, after which the modern world is suffering from constant mana shortages. While it's believed to be a myth when the game starts, it soon becomes clear that the Giant Kharlan Tree was real, and its seed is still around, so the ultimate goal of the game is to grow a new one. Not coincidentally, the Big Bad of this game is named Yggdrasill, and the ending cutscene involves giving the new tree a Meaningful Rename. Careful investigation makes clear that Symphonia is a Stealth Prequel to Phantasia, and the tree that grows at the end of this game is the same one that had to be revived in the other game.
    • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World: The plot revolves heavily around the Summon Spirit of the Giant Kharlan Tree, the previous World Tree, who awakens immediately after Symphonia. It's interesting that he's named Ratatosk, which connects to Norse mythology, which the game takes many ideas from.
    • Tales of the Abyss has the Sephiroth Trees, which support the Floating Continent and produces fonons.
    • Tales of the World Radiant Mythology, where the player's goal is to revive the World Tree (again).
  • Very Definitely Final Dungeon:
    • The final dungeon of Tales of Phantasia is Dhaos's Castle. Not the same Dhaos Castle that was the Disc-One Final Dungeon; this one has a totally new layout and it's hidden in a different time period. The heroes have to bend space-time to their will to even make it to the front door.
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • The game has Derris-Kharlan, which is a purple, gaseous planet that is just a bit too close to the planet where most of the game takes place. Inside you've got really powerful undead monsters, evil angels, and it ends with a busted up castle with what appears to be a black hole behind it. Yeah, Amazing Technicolor Battlefield. Oh, when Derris-Kharlan appears, it is started with the Big Bad hijacking the body of The Hero's closest friend (who may be his lover) then causing the Tower Of Salvation to EXPLODE, sending chunks of it raining down as meteors. If that's not enough, when the dungeon does appear, it is seen with it so close that bolts of space lightning are raining down from it and its gravity is causing huge storms on the planet. And it turns the sky purple.
      • The sequel sets the final battle at the Ginnungagap, the gateway in between the heroes' world and Niflheim, the realm of the demons. Failure means the heroes' world will become one with Niflheim. But seriously, no pressure.
    • Due to it having 2 mostly independent stories, Tales of Legendia has 2 of these. First is the Wings of Light, which is ridiculously obscenely long and has 3 distinctive sections, each of which could qualify as a full dungeon on its own. The second, the Cradle of Time, isn't so impressive length-wise, but it's a place that exists outside of time, and is made of small floors that on each one is a boss fight.
    • Tales of the Abyss ends at the Absorption Gate, a castle located at the North Pole where all the world's energy returns to the Core. Then the game pulls a Your Princess Is in Another Castle! on you and it turns out that the real Final Dungeon is Eldrant, a replica of an entire island, which is now capable of flight (until it crashes by way of your party), and resting place of the Crystal Dragon Jesus.
    • Tales of Vesperia has the Tower of Tarqaron, a floating city which has been converted to a Magitek weapon of enough power to annihilate an Eldritch Abomination... by sacrificing the life force of every human on the planet for its power source.
    • Tales of Graces has the Lastalia, the core of the planet Ephinea and the source of all eleth that gives life to the planet. It was about to be corrupted by Lambda until Asbel and co. put a stop to his plans. The final dungeon for the Lineage and Legacies storyline is another Lastalia, but this time, of the dead planet Fodra.
    • Tales of Xillia has as its final dungeon the Temporal Crossroads. It is located somewhere between the worlds of Rieze Maxia and Elympios, but is not normally accessed except via dimensional scars. You visit it twice — first, when Jude and Milla unite to confront the real Maxwell; and second, when the united party faces the final bosses of the game, Gaius and Muzét.
    • Tales of Xillia 2 ends at the Land of Canaan, where some say that it leads its travelers to the "Promised Land".
    • Tales of Zestiria has Artorius' Throne, an enormous ruined temple, where Lord of Calamity lurks. The skies here has blood-red color, and the sun is turned black. Curiously, it's actually the Disc-One Final Dungeon of the prequel. What appears to be a random final dungeon in the first game suddenly makes a lot more sense, given what happened in the epilogue of the second one.
    • Tales of Berseria has Innominat's Domain, a huge palace in the sky where the party confronts Artorius and Innominat.
    • Tales of Arise has Del Fharis Castle in Ganath Haros, where it's built up to be the Final Dungeon as it is the residence of Big Bad Vholran, the last Renan lord to be fought against. As per Tales series tradition though, it is actually a Disc-One Final Dungeon, with the real one taking place in the decimated planet of Rena..

 
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Inside Velvet Crowe's Mind

In "Tales of Berseria," the scenes that take place inside Velvet Crowe's mind (or perhaps her soul?) are set within a featureless white room, the only furniture being a table and chairs that she and whoever she's speaking with sits at, and windows that don't show the outside.

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Tales of Berser...

Tales of Berseria

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Inside Velvet Crowe's Mind

In "Tales of Berseria," the scenes that take place inside Velvet Crowe's mind (or perhaps her soul?) are set within a featureless white room, the only furniture being a table and chairs that she and whoever she's speaking with sits at, and windows that don't show the outside.

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Inside Velvet C...

Tales of Berser...

Tales of Berseria