Tales of Arise Best Characters Tier List
This Tales of Arise Best Characters Tier List will help you make the best party in Tales of Arise so you can dominate every encounter.
If you’re playing Tales of Arise, you’re going to want to know who the Tales of Arise best characters are so that you know who to put on your team during all the difficult boss fights you encounter throughout the game. While you can always change your party, even during combat, this is often a last resort and something you’ll only do when you’ve completely exhausted your healing items.
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There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to forming the best party. The first is the double healer approach, where you use both Shionne and Dohalim in order to cut down on your need for revival items. The second is the damage mitigation approach where you use Kisara, one healer and one DPS so you don’t need to revive characters as often. Both of these approaches sacrifice damage potential for survivability.
When it comes to choose the Tales of Arise best characters, we’re going to be keeping these approaches in mind, because having a party made up of Alphen, Rinwell, Law and Shionne, which is probably your first instinct, isn’t going to be very effective in late game boss challenges when Law and Rinwell die every ten seconds.
As with all tier lists, this is subjective and is based on my experience with fully completing the game on Hard Difficulty, as well as someone who’s very experienced with jRPGs, who runs a website dedicated to RPGs and who plays them all. You may disagree with my thoughts here and that’s fine. It is, after all, ultimately just an opinion.
Also, for Tales of Arise, the tiers are pretty close together. There is not a huge difference between A Tier and S Tier, or even really S Tier and B Tier. This is not a game where some characters are far and away better than everyone else by leaps and miles.
Without further ado, let’s get into the Tales of Arise best characters tier list.
S Tier – Tales of Arise Best Characters
Alphen
Alphen is your classic Tales of main character. He wields a sword and gets most of the artes you typically associate with your sword wielding main character. While you can do plenty of combos with him, in my opinion oftentimes the best thing to do with Alphen is just repeatedly spam Double Demon Fang from a safe distance. It comes out quickly, it does decent damage and it can be cast safely in almost every fight.
Alphen’s Flaming Edge abilities deal a lot of damage but they’re extremely unsafe. They will leave you with 1 HP and require your healer to heal you to full after every cast, and your chance of dying in most late game boss fights while waiting for healing from items or healers is significant. However, Flaming Edge abilities, especially Incineration Wave, do a bonkers amount of damage. We’re talking chunking off half of endgame bosses’ on Chaos Difficulty with the right accessory. It’s wild.
Where Alphen gets a real advantage is the safety and spammable nature of his Demon Fang and Double Demon Fang abilities. Additionally, since he’s the main character, you’ll probably have the most practice controlling him and his stats are high across the board. He’s strong, he’s got good defense, and you tend to be able to avoid damage with him.
Finally, since he has a high critical chance and gets AG back when he crits, as long as you’re using multi-hit moves (like Double Demon Fang), he tends to be able to spam his moves constantly without running out of AG. If you do get close to running out, you can just activate an ally’s attack for 3 extra AG and keep going. You’re much more likely to get interrupted by an enemy than naturally run out of AG.
What ultimately puts him in S Tier when it comes to the Tales of Arise best characters is that he tends to hog all of the kills in the game and since the best weapons are all powered up by killing blows, his will be super strong while everyone else’s will be relatively weak, so he gets a huge boost in power just in time for the final challenge in the game.
Shionne
Shionne is your main healer when it comes to Tales of Arise best characters and she’s much better at it than your other option, Dohalim. She gets full party heals, she can revive party members, and even deals decent damage to boot. She’s a must have in almost every party formation from the beginning of the game to the very end.
Shionne is invaluable and once you get your hands on a nice Mystic Crest with 40% total cast time reduction, she becomes even more invaluable. The only problem with her is if you’re using Shionne alone without Dohalim and she dies, she’ll need to be revived via item, and you can only do that 15 times per fight.
Luckily, when it comes to the Tales of Arise best characters, Shionne is a long range character and tends to do a keep job keeping herself out of harm’s way.
A Tier – Tales of Arise Best Characters
Rinwell
In terms of the Tales of Arise best characters, when it comes to pure DPS characters your main options are Alphen, Rinwell and Law. Unlike Alphen and Law, Rinwell outputs huge amounts of damage in a big AoE, especially if you make her one of the aforementioned 40% cast time reduction Mystic Crests.
She’s much better off controlled by the computer, as enemies tend to gun for whichever character you’re personally controlling and this means Rinwell’s spells often get interrupted when under player control. Still, as an AI controlled teammate, Rinwell dishes out a lot of damage and does a good job keeping herself out of harm’s way.
In addition to her damage output, Rinwell is also able to buff up your entire party, which definitely goes a long way in giving her extra combat value.
B Tier – Tales of Arise Best Characters
Kisara
Kisara is mainly good for two things: surviving, and constantly using her Mystic Artes. Her presence in your party does seem to dramatically cut incoming damage and prevent deaths. For this reason I think it’s better to have her on your team with Shionne than Dohalim, because you eat through your CP less quickly when she’s in your party and while you don’t have a backup healer, you need less reviving and healing in general.
Having Dohalim and Shionne in the same party, especially on harder modes, often results in them just constantly reviving one another and blowing through your CP extremely quickly. In my experience, having Kisara instead of Dohalim ends up preventing Shionne from dying as often and Shionne using CP much more efficiently.
For that reason, I put Kisara in B Tier when it comes to the Tales of Arise best characters.
C Tier – Tales of Arise Best Characters
Dohalim
Dohalim is your backup healer and in that respect he’s not bad. The main issue with him is that he’s a jack of all trades and outside of the utility of his healing, he’s a worse mage than Rinwell and a worse fighter than Law. His main usefulness is reviving Shionne without having to use items.
He’s a decent mage and a decent fighter, but not spectacular as either and if you’re not in a situation where Shionne is constantly dying, you’re much better off filling his slot with one of the other characters who can fulfill the role you actually need, whether that’s Law or Rinwell or both.
When it comes to the Tales of Arise best characters, I have a hard time ranking Dohalim any higher than C Tier, though there are certain fights where having two healers is almost necessary. Even in those cases, however, you can get in the habit of just swapping Dohalim in to revive or replace Shionne and then giving him the boot when he’s no longer needed.
D Tier – Tales of Arise Best Characters
Law
When it comes to the Tales of Arise best characters, Law does a lot of damage, mostly in the form of repeatedly activating his Mystic Artes. Unfortunately he also constantly dies and has bad defenses combined with wildly unsafe artes. In this game, Law just often doesn’t fit into your party unless you’re playing on easy modes.
You’re going to be using Shionne, you’ll probably be using Kisara or Dohalim, and then you have two spots to choose between Alphen, Rinwell and Law, and unfortunately for Law, he’s just the worst option to fill one of those two spots. You’re almost certainly going to use Alphen, one because he’s the main character, and two because he does a lot of damage and has high stats. That leaves one spot left for you to pick between Rinwell and Law. Rinwell deals equal or more damage and has a much safer playstyle.
There might be some personal preference to it. Law’s not horrible. He just tends to be the odd man out. Especially in late game boss fights, he also tends to spend most of his time dead and exists mostly to waste CP on as your healer constantly revives him over and over again.
There’s nothing terribly wrong with Law, and like I mentioned at the start of the guide, the difference between D Tier and C Tier is not huge when it comes to Tales of Arise best characters, but I think it’s hard to argue that Law’s not the worst character, even if it is by a relatively small margin. And since you only get 4 characters in your active party, that means he tends to not be too competitive for a slot, especially in difficult boss fights where you really need to maximize your chances for success.
RELATED POSTS:
– Tales of Arise Best Weapons for Every Character
– FULL Tales of Arise Artifacts Guide
That about covers it when it comes to the Tales of Arise Best Characters Tier List. Be sure to check the main page for more RPG game guides and click here for more Tales of Arise content.
