Tales studio facing financial problems?

[Raze]

That's the best part about tales games. I wouldn't the characters are exactly original, but they're likable and actually interact with each other regularly. That interaction is such a simple thing that pretty much nobody else ever does. Characters actually just talking to each other beyond sitting at a invisible table, never addressing each other and only talking to the main character and briefing him on the immediate plot at hand. And if one character does ask another how they're doing, it's flashback time.

Exaggerating a bit. But only a bit.

[Sagacious-T]

Great point Raze. Character interaction is really important, especially when its constant and interesting. A lot of games have a long dungeon period where the characters dont interact at all.. it's kind of unengaging when they throw nothing but gameplay at you in a story based game.

What are some other RPGs that are character-interaction driven?

[Aeolus]

I've never understood the appeal of this franchise.

Never understood the appeal of Dragon Quest; but that doesn't seem to stop it from ALWAYS hitting number one on sales charts. ...what a shitty ass series.

I played DQ IV for the first time on the DS, and it was fun, and had an interesting story.

Tales games, on the other hand, have never had an interesting story.

I'd argue that.  

The characters are interesting and diverse.  The story takes you on your classical RPG fare around the world, there's a crap load of extras and greater challenges, the stories have gotten somewhat political as well (saving the "end of the world" schemes for later on, handling the "politics" first), and the characters are usually given backstories that can be loved even if you didn't love the character.  I don't really wanna say more; that's my two cents, and even with a rebuttle - I hate exposing bias unless I state "IM GUHNA BEE BYE-ASS!!"

But, I can always put story aside, say whenthe gameplay plays out better.  I like the real-time action of Tales' games too.  Thank god.  Personally, I feel that unless turn-base offers some innovation, it's become quite a bore.

And I'll argue that.

DQ characters can be just as interesting as Tales of characters at times, and moreover the NPCs in the DQ series are easily more interesting and involved compared to Tales of NPCs. I can tell you of the sad tale of Clayman who after leaving his home for supplies comes back to find his home in shambles and his friends and neighbors turned to stone leaving the old man alone to spend his remaining days wasting away until hope is renewed when your party shows up to try against all odds to find someone who might have survived against the elements, or I can tell you of the sad kingdom of Ascantha who's king has his subjects in perpetual mourning over his late wife, and the adventure your party has to go through journeying to a lone hilltop to await a portal at night to gain entrance to the realm of the Elves, or even the tale of a child's adventure through the secluded realm of the faeries to stop the witch of winter and bring spring back to the realm, and so on...

Tell me can you go into such detail when describing events from any of the Tales of Games without looking them up? Do they stick out in your mind enough to be considered memorable? How much do those plots focus more on your own party members than just the world at large?

That to me is the DQ series' greatest strength. And though I'm certain that the Tales of Series' plots has there own strengths, especially when confronting racial segregation like in ToS and ToP, but nothing from those games really sticks out to me unless one of your own characters is directly involved otherwise its just a straight up fetch quest.

Also many of the DQ games also allow you to interact with your party members with Party Talk (provided it doesn't get exorcised in the localization), not that you get to see as many sweat drops as Tales of Skits, but its something.

And yes the Tales of Fighting is much more interesting than DQ's first (or recently third) person view of enemies lined up to take you down, but at least most DQ battles take almost no time at all with the proper set up.

[deathsaber]

I'd like to think the problems have more to do with console disparity than anything else.

Basiaclly Namco finally successfully broke the series out in the states on the gamecube with Tales of Symphonia where it was THE jprg to play on the cube.  The game sold well, and was well received for the remainder of that systems life. 

The problem is, they follow it up with Legendia (an arguably weaker entry) and then later, the superior Abyss, on the PS2 where it could sit anonymously amoungst the dozens of other rpgs availalbe and needless to say, the games didn't sell well.  The gamecube fan base for the series that was built, needless to say, was either ignorant of the ps2 release of Abyss, or just angry they couldn't buy the followup on their system and were left behind. 

Imagine if they instead put Abyss together for the Gamecube exclusively and marketed it heavility as the successor to Symphonia, and the Series probably woudl have exploded in the states, to carry over to the Wii. 

Now the current Gen, we get Vesperia on the 360 (a whole new userbase again unfamiliar with the series, and while we did get a Symphonia "sequel" on the Wii- everyone agrees that it is just a low budget "side stoy' effort and not a true flagship followup which few buy into. 

Then we just plain don't get any of the DS entries (where JRPGS have florished here), and they are dissing us altother from releasing the latest flagship title on wii, probably based off poor sales of the half-assed Symphonia sequel. 

This inconsistency and inability in building a console fanbase for the series has really hurt them in my eyes.  I lot of us hardcore people kept buying their games across the systems, but you gotta get a bit more sales than just the hardcore to make these games float.

[dalucifer0]

The reason why Legendia and the Abyss were on the PS2 because it equaled sales in Japan. Tales games sell for shit in the U.S. I doubt Namco Bandai have conference meetings to see which system they can sell 25K units on in the U.S.

[deathsaber]

Yeah, but they can choose which console they want to port and localize over to. 

In the US, they built the Nintendo audience back in the early 2000's on the cube but then left them hanging.

Tales of Symphona 2 on Wii several years later = too little, too late

Had they capitalized on Symphonias success and brought Abyss right on over to the cube, and ADVERTISED it to that audience as the followup to Symphonia, we might have actually have a localized Graces, Hearts, among others today. 

Now they are just a bankrupt company from whom we probably won't see any more games from in the states.

[Eusis]

Their primary audience is on the PS2 in Japan, and by the time Abyss came out the Wii was right around the corner, and the only time a succeeding console doesn't immediately displace the older one is when said older one was dominating the prior generation. Admittedly they probably could've just made it multiplatform and brought both versions over, thus increasing the user base, but that's only starting to become semi-frequent with Japanese developers.

[insertnamehere]

Yeah, but they can choose which console they want to port and localize over to. 

In the US, they built the Nintendo audience back in the early 2000's on the cube but then left them hanging.

Tales of Symphona 2 on Wii several years later = too little, too late

Had they capitalized on Symphonias success and brought Abyss right on over to the cube, and ADVERTISED it to that audience as the followup to Symphonia, we might have actually have a localized Graces, Hearts, among others today. 

Now they are just a bankrupt company from whom we probably won't see any more games from in the states.

calling abyss a followup to symphonia would be false advertisement
it isn't bankrupt yet, but it's obviously close to it
square had "one last game" that exploded worldwide even though it was almost bankrupt
it still has a chance to make a game like that
edit: ironically, symphonia was put on a console that was losing to xbox and ps2 but did really well
abyss and legendia failed even though it was on a console that had massive success
and yeah, making a multiplatform game would be smarter than making it exclusive to only one

[omanga42]

The sad thing is tales of graces,innocence, hearts, tempest are all better than that wii sequel piece of shit.

[Ashtrot]

Tempest? Hell no.

Tempest was so shitty it was the reason they split the series into 'mothership' (the main series) and 'escort' (spin off) titles. Any titles that sucked were classified as escort titles (such as all Tales of the World games, Tempest, Symphonia 2, etc).

[Aeolus]

Yeah, but they can choose which console they want to port and localize over to. 

In the US, they built the Nintendo audience back in the early 2000's on the cube but then left them hanging.

Tales of Symphona 2 on Wii several years later = too little, too late

Had they capitalized on Symphonias success and brought Abyss right on over to the cube, and ADVERTISED it to that audience as the followup to Symphonia, we might have actually have a localized Graces, Hearts, among others today. 

Now they are just a bankrupt company from whom we probably won't see any more games from in the states.

Bwahahahaha!!! This post is too ridiculously wrong to be anything but fake.

All joking aside though, the real reason why they don't port games onto more popular systems in the west is because that would involve effort. The US branch of Namdaico is awful when it comes to localizing anything. Riddddddggggeeee Racccceeeeerrrrr!!!!!, the Dead or Alive series, the Soul Caliber and a few other action titles aren't too big of a deal since they are games with low amounts of text in them, thus making it harder for Namdaico to fuck up the localization. RPGs on the other hand contain massive amounts of text, thus making it impossible to not fuck up (since Babelfish is only so accurate and even after running the script through it they still need their one guy to proofread it but he's typically a busy guy since all those Gundam model kits needs instructions on the side translated as well since models don't build themselves)

Now this is the important part, Tales of Symphonia was NOT localized by Namdaico. The actual localization, marketing, and distribution was handled by Nintendo. Symphonia 1 would have been just as much of a disaster as all of the other Tales of Games thus far had Namdaico bothered to localize it even on the RPG starved GameCube.

You can see the difference in quality between Symphonia versus Phantasia. You can also see just how badly they mishandled other RPGs like the other Legend of Heroes trilogy, and...unh...well lets be thankful that they almost never localize an RPG.

The tl;dr of this post is that its a dead heat between NISA and Namdaico as to which is the absolute worst RPG localizer. On the one hand NISA attempts at localization typically ends in shoddy inconsistent work, unaltered Japanese dialogue, and a few additional fatal bugs not present in the original product. On the other hand, at least NISA tries.

[Aeolus]

Something else I always find hilarious whenever I see it are non Japanese Tales of Fans. Much like Sonic they too have a loop that they will inevitably repeat every time a new Tales of Game is announced.

1. Namdaico announces a new Tales of Game. Fans expect the game to be released outside of Japan.
2. Namdaico releases new Tales of Game. Fans start begging for the game to be localized by anyone.
3. New Tales of Game vanishes into the mists. Fans resign to their fate and the game is quickly forgotten because....
4. Namdaico announces a new Tales of Game. Fans once again expect the game to be release outside of Japan.
5. Years later some underground fan translator group will attempt to localize Tales of Game. And it will be many more years of on again off again effort before they complete their task or die trying.