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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Shortly before the start of Tales of Festival 2024 this weekend, series producer Yuusuke Tomizawa posted a slight update tweet from his own Twitter account. Tomizawa became the series’ producer around 2018.

Tomizawa acknowledged the passing of Tales of franchise illustrator Mutsumi Inomata and the upcoming shutdown of Tales of the Rays. However, even while facing these challenges, Tomizawa said the “development team is working hard every day toward the future.”

He then mentioned the then-about-to-start Tales of Festival 2024, asking fans to enjoy it. Thanks to the Tales of fansite Abyssal Chronicle for sharing this tweet.

Of course, this year’s festival had no new game announcements. Still, the Tales of Festival 2025 was officially announced for June 7 and June 8, 2025, at the Yokohama Arena.

Sadly, many Tales of games, including Tales of Xillia 2, were recently delisted from PSN. Bandai Namco has not communicated regarding these delistings, prompting increasing concern over preservation for this franchise, which hasn’t been great for a long while. So, hopefully, Bandai Namco will soon announce re-releases for all of those delisted titles and plenty of neglected older ones.

With Tales of the Rays’ incoming shutdown, no mobile entries remain, making the franchise’s status increasingly worrying.

Tales Of Development Team Is "Working Hard Every Day Toward The Future," Says Series Producer - Noisy Pixel

Shortly before the start of Tales of Festival 2024 this weekend, series producer Yuusuke Tomizawa posted a slight update.

noisypixel.net

 

[IFireflyl]

I hope they don't screw up the next game with some twist that makes the whole game feel stupid like they did with Tales of Arise.

 

[Celcius]

I want:
1. A modern 60 fps release of Tales of Symphonia
2. Tales of Xillia 1 and 2 on modern platforms
3. A new Tales of game (hopefully this time on Unreal Engine 5)

 

[Yoshichan]

I hope they don't screw up the next game with some twist that makes the whole game feel stupid like they did with Tales of Arise.

Spoiler tag and reveal it to me please

 

[Hudo]

This might be sacrilege for some but I think it's finally time to throw away battle stages / battle screen and just have the fights on the map itself. Just go all the way already.

 

[Doom85]

Hopefully they use that time to make well-developed characters, have the story feel like it has stakes as opposed to antagonists that are set up as threatening but are taken out relatively easily, bring back the original style of skits (and have them be fun and interesting again, instead of just repeating exposition or showcasing a character’s primary AKA only character trait), have a proper map again, etc.

Like, Berseria was a wonderful surprise after the past few Tales preceding it were just okay/somewhat good, but Arise was a massive letdown, with greatly improved graphics but fumbling everything else. It would be my biggest RPG letdown of the last few years, but then FF XVI reared its ugly head (and funny enough, one of my criticisms is a lot of Clive’s character story is just an inferior copy of Velvet’s character story from Berseria).

 

[SantaC]

Arise DLC was such a shitshow. For 30 dollars you didnt get anything of substance. No new artes, no new skills, no new characters wtf.

 

[The Cockatrice]

I hope they don't screw up the next game with some twist that makes the whole game feel stupid like they did with Tales of Arise.

Game starts so good and then just shits the bed lmao. Tho im noticing a trend cuz ff16 was exactly the same. Starts awesome strory wise then just becomes generically boring af. I think some jap writters just want to bait us and then they dont even bother.

 

[SantaC]

Game starts so good and then just shits the bed lmao.

I am thinking Covid really scewed it up

 

[Doom85]

Arise DLC was such a shitshow. For 30 dollars you didnt get anything of substance. No new artes, no new skills, no new characters wtf.

What % of the areas were just reused exactly from the base game, and what % were new areas? Xillia 2 is still the worst Tales game I’ve played, for other reasons as well, but primarily for reusing locations from Xillia 1 for 90% of the locations in 2. They had some nerve charging full price for that game given that stunt. Like, yeah, I know it’s the same world, but they could take use to new areas within that world.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

they’re working very hard, the next Tales of game will have 4x as many skits as Tales of Arise. Over 60 hours of skits alone.

There will be a cutscene, then a skit where the characters talk about what you just saw in the cutscene, then another skit where they react to what happened in the previous skit, then one more totally hilarious and wacky skit where we find out that the silent badass guy doesn’t enjoy broccoli.

 

[SantaC]

they’re working very hard, the next Tales of game will have 4x as many skits as Tales of Arise. Over 60 hours of skits alone.

There will be a cutscene, then a skit where the characters talk about what you just saw in the cutscene, then another skit where they react to what happened in the previous skit, then one more totally hilarious and wacky skit where we find out that the silent badass guy doesn’t enjoy broccoli.

the skits were so awful. In past games there were mostly for jokes and laughs. Arise was too serious.

 

[Mr Hyde]

Why did they delist Xillia 2? Delisting fucking sucks.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

the skits were so awful. In past games there were mostly for jokes and laughs. Arise was too serious.

I swear JRPGs have this gift for making every dialog scene stretch for 3x as long as it should be. They’ll just yap on and on talking in circles, pointing out obvious things, laboring every point. And sometimes they’ll have these scenes where it’s just each character 1 at a time giving their reaction to something that just happened (and it’s always predictable because it’s 100% in line with whatever trope that character conforms to).

It’s fucking torture and Arise took it to a new extreme.

 

[YukiOnna]

>Tomizawa is still Producer
Ehh, then I'm not so confident. Go back to God Eater team and give me a 4th entry

 

[Astral Dog]

The 'franchise status worrying'? I find that hyperbolic, Tales of Arise (imo among the best games in the series, among the highest reviews as well) broke 3Million making it the highest selling title, and the old games being removed from PS3 doesn't mean you will never play them, they are candidates for a cheap remaster like they have been doing.

I just expect the announcement of the next main title to take more time since development is a lot more complex these days, they don't have multiple teams working on Tales games like other companies, but they will be fine

 

[MagiusNecros]

Still waiting for Tales of BARBATIA: NO ITEMS EVER

 

[Mister Wolf]

I enjoyed Arise. Don't bother with its expansion though. It's awful.

 

[Paltheos]

This might be sacrilege for some but I think it's finally time to throw away battle stages / battle screen and just have the fights on the map itself. Just go all the way already.

They did this already, in Tales of Zestiria. As big of a proponent as I am of that game (most people hate it), battles taking places in the open fields created a couple problems: 1) The camera struggled to comfortably capture everything going on in a fight inside a labyrinth; 2) Terrain with moderate rises in elevation often led to arte routes whiffing against targets that were at a different height from you at the start of your combo. The latter could be programmed around I'm sure but the former would prohibit certain kinds of level design unless there's some solution that I don't see. Not that modern Tales games are known for great dungeons but it does create an obstacle. I've never had an issue with the instanced areas for battles either.

Game starts so good and then just shits the bed lmao. Tho im noticing a trend cuz ff16 was exactly the same. Starts awesome strory wise then just becomes generically boring af. I think some jap writters just want to bait us and then they dont even bother.

Yeah. I like the start of the game allot, and there's tons the game overall does well, but the general experience does trend downward after a strong start.

 

[Hudo]

They did this already, in Tales of Zestiria. As big of a proponent as I am of that game (most people hate it), battles taking places in the open fields created a couple problems: 1) The camera struggled to comfortably capture everything going on in a fight inside a labyrinth; 2) Terrain with moderate rises in elevation often led to arte routes whiffing against targets that were at a different height from you at the start of your combo. The latter could be programmed around I'm sure but the former would prohibit certain kinds of level design unless there's some solution that I don't see. Not that modern Tales games are known for great dungeons but it does create an obstacle. I've never had an issue with the instanced areas for battles either.



Yeah. I like the start of the game allot, and there's tons the game overall does well, but the general experience does trend downward after a strong start.

Ngl, I forgot about Zestiria, even though I remember liking it. I mean the environment issues and interference with mechanics can be solved by clever design.

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

Wasn't Arise turned into a bit of a mess by the microtransactions or something along those lines? I didn't play that one, but it doesn't inspire a lot of optimism about future entries.

 

[Saiyan-Rox]

Just "remaster" older titles to hold everyone over.

And when I say remaster I actually mean fucking remaster.

Not this "slap a current gen logo on the box" and ship it shite like you did with Symphonia!