Tales of Arise Guide | Get the Diligent Counterattacker Trophy

Here's how to get the Diligent Counterattacker Trophy in Tales of Arise

Game Guide by Imdeadfrfr on May 31, 2026

Tales of Arise’s vast universe marks a significant change in combat philosophy from its predecessors in the long-running role-playing series. This game differs from its older entries in that it focuses heavily on defensive precision, tactical movement and spatial awareness, as opposed to letting players win by mashing buttons and overwhelming enemies with constant combos.

To make it out alive from the brutal encounters scattered about Dahna and Rena, you need to learn to respect your enemies’ offensive turns instead of rushing blindly into battle.

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The Counter Edge system is the ultimate expression of aggressive retaliation of the various combat mechanics that reward defensive discipline. This mechanic is not only essential for slicing up high-level bosses in the harder difficulties, but it is also the sole requirement for unlocking one of the game's major silver achievements.

The Diligent Counterattacker trophy is awarded to players who manage to pull off one hundred Counter Edges on their journey. This requirement might seem like a tedious, long-term grind on the surface, but with some knowledge about the mechanics behind it and a few focused strategies, you can get this achievement in a matter of minutes.

On the Mechanics of a Counter Edge

To successfully chase down this combat milestone, you need to fully demystify what a Counter Edge is and how it is triggered in the game’s real-time battle system. This maneuver is entirely built upon the perfect execution of a dodge roll. Your controller's right trigger defaults to having your active character sprint quickly or roll in the direction you're currently tilting the analog stick, granting you a short burst of normal invincibility frames.

The perfect evasion is when you intentionally wait to dodge at the very last microsecond before the enemy attack can touch your character's hitbox. The entire battlefield will be affected by a sudden, dramatic, brief temporal distortion when your timing is perfectly synchronized with the enemy's attack frame. Time itself will slow down to a crawl, the screen will desaturate for a brief moment, and your character will be instantly surrounded by a very noticeable bright blue glowing aura.

This visual and mechanical slowing down is your unqualified signal to hit back. As soon as you see the slow-mo happening on your screen, you need to press your regular basic attack button right away. This will instantly cancel out of their dodge animation and perform a lightning-fast, tracking strike that teleports them right to the offending enemy to unleash a powerful counter-blow. This exact pattern of perfect evasion followed by a basic physical strike is what the game officially calls a single Counter Edge.

Unlocking Special Skills to Time Forgiveness

Trying to pull off a hundred perfect dodges with baseline character stats can feel like a herculean effort, especially in the frantic, particle-effect-laden skirmishes of early-game. Fortunately, the game has a healthy character progression system through individual Title Panels that can help make this mechanical requirement much more forgiving. All playable characters on your roster have distinct skill nodes that modify the behavioral properties of their evasive maneuvers.

As you earn Skill Points from completing main story quests and hunting optional giant zeugles, you should head right to your active party's skill trees and look for specific utility nodes. You want to buy skills that specifically say Increased Perfect Evasion Window. These passive boosts permanently increase the exact number of active frames that the game’s internal physics engine counts as a perfect dodge.

Putting these specific upgrades on your favorite characters expands the narrow timing window by a good margin, so you can still get the unique blue slow motion flash even if your reflexes are a tad early or late. You also want to watch for neighboring nodes like the Counter Edge Boost, which increases the physical damage and critical hit chance of your counterattacks. You will build up a solid foundation of counterattacks by investing heavily in these defensive nodes early in your campaign as you do standard world exploration.

The Perfection of the Viscint Training Grounds

It is quite possible to naturally rack up one hundred counterattacks over the course of a standard fifty-hour playthrough, but doing so by relying solely on random overworld encounters can be an incredibly slow and inconsistent process. Your AI buddies in the normal open world are often too aggressive as well, frequently casting large magical spells and executing cinematic boost attacks that stop enemies in their tracks or deplete their health bars before they can even try to attack you.

To avoid this crazy interference and farm the trophy in a perfectly controlled environment, you need to use the Training Grounds located in the majestic city of Viscint, the capital of the lush realm of Elde Menancia. This arena is fully accessible through natural story progression for the middle acts of the campaign. The Training Grounds are a gladiatorial arena, where characters may engage in isolated, specialized combat trials that remove the unpredictable variables of the outer wilderness.

Here you dive into a basic solo challenge and you’re getting a very predictable sandbox that is almost custom-made to grind out mechanical combat trophies. The arena keeps your selected character separate from the rest of the party so that no AI companions accidentally kill your targets or steal enemy aggression away from you. Plus, the arena lets you retry immediately and over and over again without costing your character’s main inventory or your precious communal Cure Point pool.

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Basic Solo Training Exploitation - Alphen

Once you touch down in Viscint and make your way to the arena facilities, unlock the challenge select menu by speaking to the receptionist behind the main stone desk. Scroll down the list of available listings and select Alphen's Basic Training trial. This particular novice-tier challenge is free to enter, with Alphen all on his lonesome in the middle of the ring against a small squad of low-level, highly predictable desert zeugles.

This particular enemy formation is by far the best way to quickly farm Counter Edges. These basic desert enemies have incredibly slow, highly telegraphed attack animations, compared to phantoms, which move quickly and erratically, or the late-game armored knights, which are found in the final dungeons. They will literally wind up their bodies, let out a loud growl, or raise their claws high into the air for several seconds before actually launching themselves forward. This gives you plenty of time to read their movements and get your fingers ready.

Step By Step Combat Execution Plan

Once the training match is officially underway and the virtual gates open up, you need to throw away your usual aggressive offensive mindset entirely. Don't rush in and start the fight with blazing sword artes, or lock the creatures into long, uncancelable aerial combos. Rather, deliberately fall back a few paces toward the stone outer wall of the arena, hold your ground, and assume a completely passive, defensive posture.

Let the pack of zeugles close the distance slowly, let them surround Alphen. Fix your gaze on one person in the group and observe his or her body posture closely. As soon as you see the creature begin its forward lunge animation, wait until the very last fraction of a second and tap your dodge trigger to roll into or through the upcoming attack vector.

If you do it right the screen will immediately freeze into the familiar blue slow-mo state. When you see the blue aura, just smash the button for your basic physical attack and you will do the Counter Edge strike. Alphen will instantly cut at the target and reset his stance. When the animation is over, reset your position, step back again, wait for the next creature to swipe with its claws and repeat this rhythm of defense over and over.

Save Enemy Health For Maximum Efficiency

One very important thing to keep in mind when doing this achievement in the novice training trial is the fact that your character's raw damage is quite high compared to the low-level arena monsters. Try this method near the end of the game when you have Alphen's ultimate end-game blades equipped. Your raw stats are so huge that a single Counter Edge will wipe out the enemy's entire health bar in one hit, ending the match prematurely after only a few successful counters.

To get the most out of every training session and maximize your efficiency, open your main equipment menu before speaking to the arena attendant and intentionally downgrade your loadout. Drop your high-tier weapons and equip Alphen’s weakest, most basic starting sword, or an early game joke weapon with absurdly low attack stats. By intentionally reducing your damage output, the low-level zeugles will easily be able to take dozens of consecutive Counter Edges before finally dying from their injuries.

In this simple equipment, you can comfortably farm 20 or 30 counterattacks in one single match, without stopping. If your foes do happen to die before you get to your grand total of one hundred, don’t worry about losing your hard-earned progress. The in-game tracker keeps a running total of every single match attempt, so just speak to the receptionist and the trial will instantly reset and you can pick up right where you left off.

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Follow the progress, and obtain the platinum piece

If you want to keep track of your exact status as you farm in real-time, the game has tracking systems that allow you to keep tabs on your stats easily. Whenever you are between arena rounds, pause the game, go over to the far right side of the main menu, and click on the Activity Records option in the System tab. This large logbook records just about every statistic you can think of from your journey, such as total play time, meals cooked, and fish caught.

Look for the line item labeled "Counter Edges" to see your current lifetime total. When the digital counter actually reaches one hundred, the silver Diligent Counterattacker trophy appears on your screen, signifying your successful completion of the trial. Getting this trophy puts you one massive step closer to completing the overall master roadmap of the game and earning the coveted platinum trophy.

More importantly, the mechanical discipline you develop while farming this achievement will fundamentally change the way you play the game, turning you into an incredibly elusive, reactive combatant capable of flawlessly dancing through the most devastating attack patterns the post-game content has to offer.

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