Characters always start at the beginning of the game, even if they’ve progressed far enough to unlock the hub towns.
The arena doesn’t load, getting stuck on the loading screen. The game itself doesn’t freeze, the loading screen animations continue and hiding the interface shows the character running in place in a solid brown limbo.
The transition to The End of Time at the end of chapter 1 seems to have issues with getting rid of the purple/pink vortex animation. I had to relaunch the game.