Anticlimax Boss: Woden, The Final Boss of Arc 2. The problem is not only he has the same fighting style as Ix (which mean he is just normal character with iron-stances throw in) you also had already fight him a few times during the main story and the last time he isn't any different beside having a better stats. Compare to Gefion from Arc 1, who has powerful AOE spells and wide party attack and is a unique boss on her own.
Base-Breaking Character: Ix, his pessimism and his confidence issues come across as whiny and annoying to some players. The problem is further aggravated with most of the Tales characters seemingly coddling Ix instead of calling him out and giving him constructive criticism. It also doesn’t help that he gets way more spotlight than Mileena, who seems to only exist to support Ix. However, other fans don’t mind his constant pessimism and point out he does get better with character development. This issue gets fixed altogether in Mirrage Prison when Ix gets trapped and Mileena becomes the protagonist.
Breather Level: In theory the Tower involved fighting through increasingly difficult waves of enemies. In practice they often give you easier waves after particularly hard stretches to give you a chance to replenish MG as well as to introduce new enemy types to get used to for later floors.
Character Tiers: With over 100 playable characters, this is bound to happen. While stats-wise, the characters are considered balanced as they are classified as a certain 'Class' similar to how the Radiant Mythology series worked. A character's Artes pool and its effect on the other hand can make certain characters much better than the others.
Generally mages and healers are useful all around, but the number of viable melee and ranged fighters tends to drop the higher level the enemies are. This is mainly due to enemy weight, Iron Stance requiring more hits to penetrate, and stagger times being reduced such that its nearly impossible to maintain a combo solo. Thus anyone with slow attacks and/or no Iron Stance breaking enhancements tend to become easy targets.
Continuity Lock-Out: Event characters are not restricted to their respective events when participating in cutscenes. Some of them even have prominent roles in the main story chapters. However, given their limited availability, newer players or people who haven't kept up with the game's releases may end up blindsided when they suddenly show up in cutscenes as if they've always been there.
Goddamned Bats: Both the literal type and other monsters with similar annoying characteristics. Most are usually found in the Tower of Progenitors, but some might find their way into an event's farming quests. Woe to you if they spawn in a group of six.
Good Bad Bugs: Lag can cause visual effects not attached to your character to load in later than they should. This is harmless, if not humorous, when it happens to melee artes where they only exist for visual flare, but when it comes to moves where the hitbox is tied to the effect instead of your character (like projectiles and spells), this means the move itself will come out delayed (though it doesn't stop you from acting as if the move already resolved, so it's ultimately minor). This bug becomes especially useful for Presea's Master Arte, however. The move is a 2 stage attack where she stuns the enemy and then causes spikes to shoot out of the ground. Despite swinging her axe down for the spike part, the axe has no hitbox on the second part of the move, being entirely tied to the spikes, which are a visual effect not tied to Presea, meaning it can take a while for the spikes to come out. How is this useful? It turns out, the first hit of the move keeps the enemy *completely* locked in place and vulnerable and the only release is the spikes, which not only means the rest of your party can get free hits in without worrying about how well moves combo, this also means Presea can either continue attacking before the spikes come out as if the move was done, or even stand still and regenerate all her CC if it's delayed enough!
Sometimes while upgrading weapons, if you hold down the add button for a material, it may eventually get so fast it'll overflow on the 300 material per upgrade limit. Helpful if a weapon requires more than 300 to be upgraded, though this bug only serves to save time since you can upgrade again anyway.
Zelos, even in the localized version, calls Lloyd Honey. To add to this, there are a bunch of fighting stages called Harem Match where you fight characters part of Zelos Harem. All the stages are against 4 female characters, except for the last and most difficult stage that is against only Lloyd and is called “vs. Honey”.
Yuri and Flynn get Ship Tease even before Flynn becomes playable with two out of three of Yuri’s Mirrage scenes involving Flynn and Yuri worrying about Flynn throughout Mirrage Prison. Yuri’s thoughts of Flynn are even the catalyst of his overray.
Baldr: And Mr. Flynn daringly accepted me in his body.
Junk Rare: Pink diamonds. The game classifies them as weapons and can even be upgraded, but they're not that good. The only reason they exist is because the game didn't have a system implemented for event currency at the time. Now they're impossible to obtain so the only ones left are in the possession of players who participated in the original event and didn't sell off their last copy yet. However, the update to the weapons system removed them by automatically selling them, making them an example of Temporary Online Content.
Just Here for Godzilla: Some players only play the game so that they can see their favorite Tales characters again. They don’t care too much about the main story or the Tales of the Rays original characters.
Les Yay: Mileena is vocal about her love for cute and strong girls and it shows when she interacts with them. She often gushes over the younger, talented female characters and has a clear infatuation for them.
Karia: Okay then, I guess we’re looking for two ladies who are freakishly buff. Everyone keep your eyes peeled for hideously rippling muscles!
Jude: No, no! It’s not like that at all! They’re strong yet beautiful in a classical feminine sense.
Mileena: Hmm... Strong AND beautiful? I think I’m in love.
Rita periodically gets flustered and teased over her relationship with Estelle. The crowning moment is in Bienfu’s Frenzied Wedding Plan where upon seeing Estelle walk out in a wedding dress, Yuri is noticeably disinterested while Rita, on the other hand, gets flustered over the dress.
Crying Girl Mirrors; Starting with Cheria, many female characters added to the game had their Mirrage artwork depict them crying. It started to become a recurring joke that when a female character is announced to be playable in Rays, many would guess that their Mirrage artwork would depict them crying, since they typically depict a meaningful scene for a character. Characters that followed this trend include Marta, Estelle, Anise, Pasca Kanonno, Pascal, Chloe and Hilda.
"Do you know Around Step?"note The phrase is used by Asbel in the animated short instantly become fan-favorite quote.
Misblamed: There have been reports of fans harassing Takumi Miyajima, the main scenario writer, for not introducing their favorite characters and accusing her of favoring Symphonia and Abyss because she was also behind those games' stories as well. It doesn't help that both have the largest amount of representatives in the game while other entries still have more than half their casts MIA. In reality, Miyajima has little control on who becomes playable. There's obviously a general outline she's laid out, but she's primarily filling in the blanks with whatever the producers mandate.
Narm: There are a few instances where the game flat out uses stills of a few bosses' 3D models as Character Portraits for the dialogue cutscenes, such as Balseph and Demetrius' final form. It is kind of impossible to keep taking the story seriously when you see some expressive and perfectly drawn portraits talking to a lifeless 3D model picture.
Play the Game, Skip the Story: Some simply enjoy the game for being a chance to have Tales-style combat on their mobile devices. Of course, since the english version has gone down, this is almost a necessity for fans who don't speak japanese.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Also because the english servers have gone down, some fans don't play it at all, and wait for fan translations/subtitles since it'd be too much trouble to play in a different language. Both camps feed into each other.
That One Boss: Magnadeus (from Tales of Destiny 2) made an appearance in one of the raid event and is considered to be the SNK Boss of the game. His Lightning Bruiser status aside, his gimmick also restricts player to use certain types of artes depending on the difficulty. In higher difficulties, he also opens up the fight with a powerful quick casting spell that reduces all party members' HP to 1. His fight was so difficult, that achieving the global score took significantly longer than any other raid event in the entire game.
Unexpected Character: In a game that pumps out new characters on a semi-weekly basis from a known pool of characters, this trope tends to be invoked to keep things interesting. Generally, this applies to characters who are almost never featured in Tales crossovers, especially if they join the party before others who tend to receive higher billing. Specific examples include...
By popular demand, Kanonno Earhart joined the cast before other Tales protagonists despite there being no indication that games outside the mothership titles, Dawn of the New World, and Tempest'' would be featured. This one is a particularly unique case where it's the first time Kanonno interacts with everyone's canon selves rather than the Alternate Universe counterparts she meets in her other appearances.
Marian makes her first appearance in almost a decade.
Mithos appears in his true form and is playable to boot.
Kongwai Tao. While it's generally expected that every main Tales character will be added eventually, Kongwai—a character exclusive to the remake—joined months before the original Innocence cast.
For those who generally see mobile spinoffs as, well, spinoffs and not generally important, it's a pleasant surprise to see Sara and the rest of the Link cast show up here as well.
The Barbatos event not only having the man himself join the party but also teasing the Swordians regaining their human forms in a future chapter or event.
Fractured Milla & Victor appear with no ill effects of sharing the same space as their prime counterparts.
Every antagonist or final boss from the mothership titles was eligible to become playable if players gave them the most votes in the villain poll. Yes, even people like Fortuna and the Fodra Queen, who don't even appear until the very end of their respective games.
The candidates for the 3rd character poll featured Julio & Caro from Narikiri Dungeon 2 & 3 and Ruru & Mika from the Tales of Mobile series, entries that Namco has rarely, if ever, acknowledged since their releases.
October 2019 added Eugene. While he would have gotten in eventually, many were worried about his fate due to the death of his voice actor. In a meta sense, this trope applies to the voice actor as well, as Rays reuses archival audio out of respect for the original voice actor rather than recasting him or not putting him in.
That same month we would also get a story chapter with two characters from Tales of Hearts: Kunzite, who was expected...and Lithia Spodumene, who was completely unexpected; Not only was she not playable in Hearts, she wasn't a boss either and had no indication she could fight at all! It was expected that she remain a story important NPC rather than a playable party member.
Collaboration characters tend to fall here:
Despite not even being from an RPG, Haruka Amami and other idols from The Idolmaster join the fray as playable characters.
Lenneth from Valkyrie Profile is not only not a Tales character, she's not even owned by Namco!
For the GUILTY GEAR STRIVE Collab, they gave Collab Costumes to eight characters alongside Sol Badguy and Ramlethal. Some of them make sense (Patty as May, Dist as Faust, Magilou as Jack-O'), others are a little more surprising (Alice as I-No, Bruiser Khang as Potemkin, Muzét as Millia Rage, Jay as Chipp Zanuff) but not by too much...but then there's Shizel as Zato-1, when she's not even one of Tales's more popular villians!
While he isn't playable and hasn't been seen visually yet, it's quite a surprise that a minor character like Astor (not to be confused with Aster) appears at all, signifying that even supporting cast can make it, even if they keep their status as a minor character.
Miktran, quite possibly the most ignored of the earliest main antagonists of the series, returns as a playable character. The man almost never showed up in crossover games, such as Narikiri Dungeon, Radiant Mythology, and Tales of Link (which brought back a lot of villains and even made a few of them playable). It's a surprise to see him make an appearance in a big crossover game like this one, and Promoted to Playable to top it all!
◊ Mirrage Arte of Velvet and Eleanor.
