DIVINE SKILL

TALES OF ETERNIA

ETERNIA'S VERSION OF THE LEGENDARY ATTACK

Tales of Eternia was the first game to include what we know of today as Mystic Artes, known in the game as Divine Skills. Some of them were implemented as battle finishers, while others could be easily activated in battle once the player learned how to activate them successfully.

Only For a Few

Technically, only Reid Hershel and Farah Oersted are able to use Divine Skills --- Meredy and Keele Zeibel have access to a extension of the spell Indignation, while Max and Chat have attacks that look like Divine Skills but are merely regular attacks.

The Birth of the Cut-in

Tales of Eternia's implementation of the Divine Skill set the path for future Tales titles, with the addition of cut-ins, which would appear on the screen before the attack was used.

Since then, every main series game in the franchise had include cut-ins for their variation of the attack. Some of the games have taken this concept further by having full-body cut-ins that cover the screen and sometimes even animate slightly.

Not The Easiest To Use

Reid and Farah's Divine Skills are notorious for being hard to use, either due to either requiring a specific chain of attacks to be used beforehand or needing to fulfill specific conditions before such as using certain attacks a set number of times.

Furthermore, these conditions are rarely stated in the game, so the chances of players coming across them is very unlikely.

Only This Attack Can Defeat You!

Tales of Eternia also started the trend of either requiring or allowing specific skills to be used against the final boss to defeat it or retaliate against their attacks.

This comes into play in Tales of Eternia where Reid needs to use his Aurora Wall Divine Skill to reflect the final boss's Dark Aurora Arte.