Four New Tales Games Announced

During its press conference in Japan, Namco Bandai announced four new games in its popular Tales RPG series.

For portable systems, Namco revealed that Tales of Innocence will be heading to the Nintendo DS, whereas the PSP will get Tales of Rebirth, a remake of the original PS2 game. The PS2 is poised to get a Director's Cut version of Tales of Destiny, and Tales of Symphonia: Knight of Ratatosk is heading to the Wii. Aside from Tales of Innocence, which is planned for a Winter 2007 release, the rest of the Tales games are due out in 2008.

Additionally, Namco declared Nintendo DS as the "lead platform" for the Tales series. No word yet on whether any of the announced titles will be released in North America.

各タイトルの詳細はこちら！　テイルズオブ発表会 [Gemaga1985]

OMG. Please Namco Bandai! Localizations! A PSP version of Tales of Rebirth wouldn't be as risky as the PS2 version would have been. Sprites are still more widely accepted on portable platforms than consoles.

A localization of the Tales of Destiny director's cut would also be less risky now, as well, since Stahn has a role in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology.

As for Tales of Innocence and the DS being the perfect platform for the Tales series, I'm not so sure about that.

Tales of the Tempest was a great RPG for DS. In fact, one of the best. But it's no wonder I had to import the game in japanese. As a Tales game it just lacked plot and substance. The 3D graphics were great, but they made them SO great that they had to cut the worldmap into 'sections', making it feel like you were walking through rooms full of outdoor scenery. If they made the worldmap one large area, it would have melted the DS under the strain.

Here's hoping Tales of Innocence isn't another Tempest.

Yeah, I LOVE the Tales games, I pray for localizations, for my Japanese=:crying:. I've just picked up Tales of the World: RM for PSP the other day and I've been playin' it for about 4 hours a day since I got it. Great game, so's Destiny, Phantasia, Eternia and Abyss. I, personally, didn't dig Symphonia- IMO the battle system was lacking compared to others, and I just didn't get into the story, too many Anime Stereotypes. I haven't played Legendia, or any others not mentioned that have come to the US (although I think Legendia IS the only other one).

Symphonia's battle system was fine for me. It was their first foray into fully 3D and they didn't want to make it entirely like Star Ocean's battle system.

The story was great too. It was just damned depressing. More depressing than Abyss, actually.

If you liked the earlier Tales games, you'll probably like Legendia as well. The battle system is back to the classic side-scrolling, even though the landscape and character/enemy models are 3D polygons. But my main qualm with Legendia, is that the entire second half of the game is undubbed. After you beat the main quest, which is the first half of the game, the character quests begin, consisting of a single chapter each character. Combined, they're as long, if not longer than the main quest, and continue the story. Namco Japan told Namco USA that the character quests were entirely optional sidequests, so Namco USA didn't include the character quests in the voice actors' contracts. BIG Oops. Up until that point, Legendia has the most voice acting for a localized Tales game. Nearly every story-important scene is dubbed. After the main quest, that all goes to hell.

Tenshigami said:

Symphonia's battle system was fine for me. It was their first foray into fully 3D and they didn't want to make it entirely like Star Ocean's battle system.

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Yeah, I can understand not wanting to copy Squeenix's SO, but, eh, I dunno, it was just a little to simple for my tastes- I found alot more substance in Phantasia and Eternia (which were the only ones I'd played before I played Symphonia), and then more in the rest. I dunno, it just felt like alot of 'press A', which I find isn't the case with the rest of them, IMO. I'll also admit, I didn't completely finish ToS, I got somewhat bored of it, so I didn't finish the story.

Tenshigami said:

If you liked the earlier Tales games, you'll probably like Legendia as well. The battle system is back to the classic side-scrolling, even though the landscape and character/enemy models are 3D polygons. But my main qualm with Legendia, is that the entire second half of the game is undubbed. After you beat the main quest, which is the first half of the game, the character quests begin, consisting of a single chapter each character. Combined, they're as long, if not longer than the main quest, and continue the story. Namco Japan told Namco USA that the character quests were entirely optional sidequests, so Namco USA didn't include the character quests in the voice actors' contracts. BIG Oops. Up until that point, Legendia has the most voice acting for a localized Tales game. Nearly every story-important scene is dubbed. After the main quest, that all goes to hell.

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That sounds like a pretty neat thing, having alot to do after the main quest, I'll have to try it out- I'm not a huge stickler for the side-scrolling, I just think Symphonia did a piss-piddle job with it. About the dubbing, wow, that sounds like a big ordeal, but wait- does that mean it's just silence, or does it have the Jap voices in the 2nd half? Because I could easily deal with Jap, but if it's silence that'd get on my nerves.:mellow:

On a sidenote- I'm still waiting for the fan translation of Tales of Destiny 2 (the real one), there's been a group workin' on it for a while, I hope they didn't quit.

It's complete silence. Except for the skits (face chats), because they included the skits in the voice actor's contracts this time around due to not including the character quests.

And yeah, up until Abyss, the battle system was ALWAYS "mash attack and spam skill combos". The one bit of strategy in the Tales games that has stuck so far, is remembering when and where to set each character's AI certain ways so that they don't use spells on enemies of the spell's element. Also how much TP to conserve. If you just spam skills, your TP drains rather quickly.

Actually, Symphonia introduced Grade--At least for the western audience. And what actually added challenge to that is, unlike Legendia and Abyss, there was no way to get a rundown on how your grade was calculated. It wasn't until I played Legendia that I figured out why the hell my grade in Symphonia always sucked so horribly.

Free Run wasn't introduced until Abyss, and that actually added some more strategy into it. While annoyingly you can't attack until you stop using free run, you can actually use free run to use your controlled character as bait to lure the enemy around while your CPU controlled allies attack it.

This was actually an important strategy for getting that one special weapon from that one enemy...what was it? Sword Dancer? You had to do certain events/battles with the sword dancer between certain key storyline triggers, meaning you couldn't really come back later at a much higher level.