Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn Edition Hits Switch 2 — Five Years Later, It’s Still the JRPG That Knows How to Put on a Show

May 21, 2026 — Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn Edition has officially landed on the Nintendo Switch 2. This was Bandai Namco’s 25th-anniversary entry for the Tales series. When it first launched in 2021, it took home Best RPG at The Game Awards, scored an 87 on Metacritic, and was briefly hailed as a turning point for the JRPG genre.

Boot it up again five years later, and some parts hold up beautifully. Others, not so much. And the Switch 2 as a platform happens to amplify both sides of that equation.

What’s Actually in This Edition?

• The base game — exactly what launched on PS5, PS4, Xbox, and PC back in September 2021.
• The Beyond the Dawn DLC — a post-game epilogue set one year after the original ending, introducing a new character named Nazamil, clocking in at around 20 hours of additional story.
• All previously released costume DLC — every cosmetic pack bundled in from the start.
• Portable mode — the Switch 2’s headline feature. You can now grind side quests, fish, and watch skits while lying in bed.

The Story Still Hits the Same Way — and Still Stumbles in the Same Place

Tales of Arise opens with one of the most gripping hooks in recent JRPG memory.

Alphen is a Dahnan slave who has lost all sense of pain, a man in an iron mask who toils in the mines every day. Shionne is a Renan girl cursed with “thorns”—anyone who touches her feels searing pain. Two people who cannot physically connect are bound together by a flaming sword summoned out of thin air, and together they set out to tear down three centuries of Renan colonial rule.

The first half of the story doesn’t let up. Five Renan lords fall one after another. Each victory adds a new party member with a different past and a different set of loyalties. Oppression, rebellion, betrayal, reconciliation—the classic JRPG building blocks are arranged with real craft here, and the character arcs feel earned.

Then the second half arrives.

The game starts dumping exposition all at once. The truth about the Renans. The will of Dahna. The will of the planet. These ideas are thrown at the player in quick succession, and the tight pacing that made the early hours so gripping gets buried under long stretches of explanation and tedious traversal. Enemy HP starts ballooning at the same time, turning routine encounters into multi-minute slogs.

This is why the fan consensus is so consistently split: the first half is peak Tales, and the second half feels like a different team took over.

The Beyond the Dawn DLC follows the same structural template but adds some emotional closure. It picks up a year after the main ending. The two worlds are beginning to merge, and Alphen and Shionne’s relationship has entered a new chapter. The mystery surrounding Nazamil is the DLC’s narrative engine, but the roughly 20-hour runtime feels closer to a meaty side story than a standalone expansion. If you played the base game and genuinely cared about these characters, the DLC offers a reasonably satisfying send-off. If you were hoping it would fix everything the original got wrong, you’ll probably walk away wanting more.

The Combat System: Still Flashy, But the Spark Has Dimmed

Tales of Arise‘s combat has always been the thing people praise loudest.

The basic loop—normal attacks, artes, dodging—is fast and responsive. Ground and aerial combos can be strung together freely. Boost Attacks target specific enemy types, and stacking enough hits triggers dual-character Boost Strikes that clear the screen in a spectacle of particle effects. This system genuinely impressed in 2021. Even now, the Boost Strike animations have a kind of over-the-top anime excess that few JRPGs have matched since.

But five years later, the cracks are easier to see.

Late-game enemies have bloated HP pools and heavy super-armor, which means the return on elaborate combo strings plummets. The more time you spent early on perfecting air juggles and finisher setups, the more likely you were to end up spamming Alphen’s “Reigning Slash” just to get things over with. The combat ceiling is high, but the late-game enemy design doesn’t reward you for chasing it.

That said, the Switch 2’s handheld mode actually takes some of the edge off the late-game repetition. On PS5, Tales of Arise was a sit-down-and-lock-in kind of JRPG. On Switch 2, it becomes something you pick up to grind materials, fish, or watch skits while sprawled on the couch. When the rhythm shifts from “power through to the credits” to “chip away at it over weeks,” the back-half fatigue doesn’t sting quite as much.

What Still Works, and What Doesn’t

The things that hold up:

• The watercolor art direction: This was the series’ first outing on Unreal Engine 4, and the unique watercolor-style rendering still looks fresh half a decade later. The soft, painterly filter gives Dahna and Rena a distinct visual identity that feels especially good on the Switch 2’s handheld screen.
• The central relationship: Alphen and Shionne’s arc is what most players remember long after the credits roll. Two people trapped by their own circumstances, unable to touch, slowly finding their way toward each other—the emotional thread running through this relationship remains one of the genre’s finer achievements.
• The Switch 2 port quality: Switching between handheld and docked mode is seamless, load times are solid, and nothing about the technical execution raises red flags.

The things that are harder to forgive now:

• The back-half pacing: This is the scar Tales of Arise will carry forever. The higher the early-game highs, the harder the late-game crash.
• Dungeon design that barely qualifies: Most dungeons are a straight corridor connecting a few rooms. No puzzles. No meaningful exploration. No reason to care about the space you’re moving through.
• The late-game combat slog: High-HP enemies with persistent super-armor turn every fight into a war of attrition.

“The early game was so fun—figuring out air juggles, chaining into finishers—but by the end, all I wanted to do was spam Reigning Slash and get the hell out of there.” That line, pulled from a player review on Bangumi, still cuts as sharp as it did five years ago.

Is It Worth Buying Today?

If you’ve never played Tales of Arise, the Switch 2 version is the most complete and flexible way to experience it. Portable mode gives the game’s side content—fishing, cooking, skits—room to breathe. It’s no longer a title that demands you sit upright in front of a screen for 60-plus hours. It’s a game you can keep coming back to, a little at a time, over weeks or months.

If you’ve already beaten the base game, whether the DLC justifies a full repurchase depends entirely on how attached you are to these characters. Beyond the Dawn is a farewell gift to existing fans. It won’t change your opinion of the original, but if Alphen and Shionne’s story meant something to you, it gives you around twenty more hours to spend with them before saying goodbye.

Tales of Arise, circa 2021, stood for something JRPGs were still holding onto at the time. It believed in full-throttle heroism played completely straight—no irony, no self-deprecation. In a romance between two people who couldn’t even hold hands, told with genuine emotional commitment. In the idea that a well-timed cutscene ultimate could still land the way it did on the SNES or PS2. Five years later, JRPGs have grown more systematic, more live-service-driven, more templated—characters designed for gacha banners, worlds built around seasonal content drops, stories that never really end because the game needs you to stay subscribed. Arise‘s rough edges definitely show their age. But that kind of unguarded, all-in emotional energy? That’s getting harder to find.

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