Context after Berseria
We touched the subject rather quickly in
the previous article but the Tales of series was left in a rather odd situation after the team wrapped up
Tales of Berseria development.
First the Tales of Studio was no more since 2012 and merged with Bandai Namco Studio, while it probably had minimal impact on
Tales of Xillia and
Xillia 2’s development, its effects began with
Tales of Zestiria which featured a bigger amount of outsourcing partners than usual.
Tales of Berseria proceeded to have an even larger share of external partners (including Tri-Crescendo, ironically², which also took care of Symphonia PS3 port before that) and the series sort of went into hiatus after that.
The official stance on the merge effects, coming from series general producer Makoto Yoshizumi a decade ago, was that “staff would now come and go, people from the former Tales studio would work on other Bandai-Namco projects and people from Bandai Namco Studios could now work on Tales of with each individual bringing his own experience to new projects they would join”
Second, at the time the Tales of team was left without a leader following Hideo Baba’s departure,
Yasuhiro Fukaya filled the Producer job for Tales of Berseria but he was apparently only a stopgap and for years it seemed like there was no one filling that role and championing the IP within Bandai-Namco.
Third, Bandai Namco Studio were at the time on a heavy restructuring plan regarding their technical staff, lead by freshly recruited CTO
Julien Merceron (Anvil, Crystal Engine, Luminous, Fox Engine…) which mainly enticed switching almost all of their internal projects to Unreal Engine 4 (Tekken, Soul Calibur, Ace Combat, Code Vein, Scarlet Nexus…), the Tales team until then had only used their own internal tools (which caused some messy development issues, but that’s another story) and even industry standard middlewares were barely used.
Fourth, there was at the time a sort of rejuvenated optimism towards the creation of new projects that were shooting for an audience not entirely dissimilar to the one Tales of was going for :
God Eater 3 (2018) was making the jump to home consoles on PS4,
Code Vein (2019) was an ambitious new action rpg anime IP and
Scarlet Nexus (2021) was being in development and lead by former Tales of developers.
While it’s not like the Tales of team went on to work on another project unrelated to Tales of entirely, it’s more accurate to say the “Tales of” team didn’t exist anymore and there was some overlap of staff allocation between all of these projects
In the midst of this turmoil we do know a small core team was probably prototyping a new project with Unreal Engine 4 that would end up being Tales of Arise, but it wasn’t a top priority at this moment and there was no direct continuation of staff between Tales of Berseria and Tales of Arise.
But things started getting clearer in late 2018 when
Yusuke Tomizawa was officially announced as the new series producer, he was already the God Eater producer before as well as involved with Code Vein (which basically looked like a God Eater X Dark Souls crossover of sort) but with God Eater 3 about to be released and Code Vein in the polishing phase it seemed clear that his main focus was shifted on the new Tales of entry that was teased
in Summer 2018 at the Tales of Festival. Something we got a confirmation later on when Tomizawa was “only” credited as “General IP Producer” and not producer anymore for the two previously mentioned games.
With Tales of Vesperia Remastered/Definitive Edition (2019) release date also coming fast (January 2019) the Tales of series was once again back in the spotlights at Bandai Namco Studio and it was only a matter of months before we would hear more about their next main project.
A convincing first reveal and a promise of a WW day 1 release
Tales of Arise was finally unveiled at Microsoft E3 2019 conference for Xbox One, PS4 and Steam : shiny new graphics, Unreal Engine 4, hollywood type of music (not from an ingame track) english narrator using keywords and giving a pretty different vibe than what the Tales games usually do… although the process wasn’t new by any mean (see
1 2 3) having it being the first reveal of the game, the first thing anyone would hear about when Tales of Arise came to their attention made a huge difference.
Reason being that Tales of games were always revealed for the japanese audience first and foremost before that, it often entailed some “quirky” details that may put off a wider audience outside Japan : flashy character designs, cute mascot, jpop songs, japanese voice acting… while all of these have their fans in and outside Japan there is no doubt it could cut off part of a broader audience the game could reach if it didn't put such a huge emphasis on these aspects (see the 3 previous E3 trailers as examples), when questioned about it the producer basically said as much and that most of what made the Tales of games would come back but that they would talk about it “at a later date”
Tales of western releases also coming as long as 2 years after the game was made available in Japan (if they came at all) meant that western branch/marketing potential was hampered as the japanese market focused all attentions and required a different approach than WW (a rather predictable marketing entry after entry, progressively revealing playable characters and their voice actors, theme song, opening sequence, a story trailer and a gameplay trailer at the yearly Tales of Festival etc)
What was fine in a pre internet era where info was hard to get, media/marketing was mostly a physical affair (paper, vhs/dvd, store ads..) and Japan a distant country with a cryptical impossible to understand language… suddenly became a burden if the plan was to sell the title differently : by the time promotion would kick off outside Japan, the game would’ve been out for months, all characters revealed long ago, all gameplay system thoroughly dissected, all cutscenes available on youtube (or nico nico douga), and any potential surprises known since long ago : to make it short it’s harder to create excitement and control the marketing narrative for what is an already available project out there, even if not in your preferred language, and especially if marketing costs have to be split between regions.
And this is where Tales of Arise differed since a day 1 worldwide release in 2020 was promised from the get go, practically a first for the series²² and while
it’s a bit of a struggle and entailed changes in development practice (arguably it probably meant that the game could have ship earlier in Japan) allowing a global worldwide marketing budget meant a more concentrated effort could be done towards where the biggest bulk of the Tales of audience now was : outside Japan
As we saw previously, while for nearly 20 years the bulk of each entry's sales came from Japan, a major shift, years in the making, happened with Zestiria with western markets accounting for around 75% of the game sales, making higher up at Bandai-Namco see the
(white) light
Every step taken for Tales of Arise discussed so far were taking that into account, it also encompassed skipping entirely historical character designers Inomata and Fujishima (though for the latter it could be for
another reason) and having Minoru Iwamoto (Radiant Mythology, Zestiria, Berseria) doing all character designs as well as being the overall art director for the game, a position he already occupied on Tales of Vesperia, allowing for a more unified look for the whole game universe
Seemingly the very first concept for some characters went as far as using Dark Souls for inspiration, a giant leap in style from what the series used to do (
1 2) and even Iwamoto himself (
1 2)
Another huge emphasis was put early in development into researching what would make Tales of stand out amongst the many Unreal Engine games out there since, while the engine allowed for some ease of development and use of an incredible variety of middlewares, without proper care and customization the game visual identity would vanish, and with Tales having
dropped 2D a decade ago, cel shading, sd models and fixed camera angles being a non starter
the series also left in the past there was no quick method to devise an unique visual flair that would immediately makes you think “ok this is different and definitely and Tales of game”
This is where the
Atmos shader was born in an attempt to harmonize the game visuals in a slight watercolor style and lay the foundations for Tales of Arise
as well as any future title, and while this is
the outcome it was to keep evolving in the future to redefine what is now the visual benchmark of Tales identity
1y delay to add XS/PS5 SKU and polish the title
But somehow all promotion grinded to a halt rather quickly a few months later after
a quick trailer at Tokyo Games Show 2019 that showed briefly the back of a third playable character as well as the game mascot (because there had to be one).
It’s only after long months of silence that
in June 2020 an official delay to 2021 was given and while COVID-19 was mentioned it wasn’t exactly being blamed as the sole and unique reason and the wording was rather vague which is a bit… odd as the pandemics was an easy, and legitimate, way out for many publishers/developers struggling with it worldwide.
It took half a year again to hear a
few more words in Winter 2020, only alluding to more concrete news happening in the coming months as well as reiterating that development of the game was nearly done. The
March 2021 Tales of Festival trailer wasn’t any better, made of old footages and committing this time to more news “this spring”.
The drought finally ended in late April with
the game release date trailer (whose style and cuts were similar to the E3 2019 footage), September 2021, that also contained the third and fourth playable characters as well as confirming the existence of PS5 and Xbox Series SKU (
JP version, notice the title difference), in-game visuals effects were also a bit toned down compared to its reveal trailer, not a shocking process by any mean considering how it helped building a first strong impression whose lingering effects were still being felt to this day.
Adding new generation consoles SKU was undoubtedly a wise move, although it arguably came a bit late in the first place, japanese developers usually being slow to make transitions (Tales of Zestiria was originally a PS3 exclusive, in 2015 more than two years after PS4 release)
The
complete removal of multiplayer, although not entirely unexpected as it was more and more of an afterthought, was also made official following a decade of game design choices culminating with complete camera control and the disappearance of the LMBS in Arise, at this point the feature was probably deemed to not have enough appeal anymore and Bandai Namco most likely had plenty of data to support that view, it certainly left some players saddened but as far as a wider audience is concerned it's likely the impact was fairly minimal.
Starting this point everything went rather smoothly as far as marketing and development is concerned, most likely because the bulk of the development was already wrapped up for some time (probably holding the release date for multiple reasons like adding next-gen SKU, accommodating the worldwide release and possibly targeting a strategic release date), the western audience was again the primary target and the fifth and sixth playable characters were announced rather unceremoniously in
a new trailer in June, days after the press had access to an early demo of the game containing all playable characters, ramping up the marketing with positive previews from gaming outlets being published worldwide.
A second preview shared with the press in midsummer featured this time the whole first part of the game, so a few hours within a 40h game, it included the
first cinematic movie done by Ufotable showed this far, confirmed the absence of individual character portraits (only a, literally,
obscured group one) but also unveiling, as is worded in the official trailer, “
lifestyle features” which were made of a fishing mini-game, some basic animal ranch management, cooking and the skits which the series was known in a completely revamped presentation that used in-game 3D models and was more akin to a comic panel oddly reminding a sort of more advanced version of
what Valkyria Chronicles did in 2008.
The banter of victory poses was replaced by less interactive short dialogues at the bottom left of the screen, allowing for quicker gameplay transitions between battle and exploration, also despite allowing free camera control the game had
a relatively simple and restricted level design (mostly corridors to be blunt) some camera angles were obviously tinkered with to focus on
the surrounding sceneries using a day/night cycle, it ended up giving the impression of playing a third person action game with behind the shoulder camera at times and not exactly a typical JRPG anymore, to keep up with current standards a bunch of quality of life features also made their way in including fast travel, auto save, quick retry/reload.
But most of all the first chapter was both narratively and in terms of pacing a rather strong hook, with a
boss battle that was intended to be
as climactic as a final boss fight, including multiple QTE cinematics in the middle of the fight (a trend of setpieces you’ll find in more boss battles), the motive was clear and it grabbed a lot of people early on instead of an, often criticised, approach of slow ramp up that the genra was known for.
Overall it followed the general “inheritance and evolution” mantra that was set early on during development, keeping what was deemed essential to the series and evolving what seemed necessary to keep up with evolving standards in the videogame industry (although arguably how many of the design choices were bold evolutions and how many were just
the consequences of lost knowledge due to staff departure is up in the air)
A final note on the more “traditional” approach to marketing/game design the series was known for because, you know, it’s still a Tales of, the game featured the usual :
While most of it was kept under wraps for a long time to accommodate western marketing, it was still in there and ended up being slowly and carefully introduced only rather close to release once the time came to comfort long time fans.
And despite not being directly confronted to it as part of the western audience (me and most of the readers who got this far) the approach to commercials aired in Japan was also completely different : putting a bigger emphasis on characters, the romance between its two protagonists while using what was one of the most popular song of the 90’s (
1 2 3)
The final nail in the coffin in a very classical approach to building up anticipation ended up being
the release of the first demo the press had access to months ago, merely 3 weeks before release, long enough to let interested people get a taste of what’s to come but late enough to allow for a quick turnaround between demo and full game availability.
The release
A convincing metacritic/opencritic score and explosive start
Following multiple good showings, a well round up coordinated marketing plan, an overall well polished product, a day 1 worldwide multi platform release on nearly every single hardware it’s no surprise that the game ended up extremely well received, scoring a
87 on metacritic with nearly non existing negative reviews (
99% recommended on opencritic) and unanimous praising
Words cloud for the game review, see methodology in annex²²²²
Some reviews did have complaints, mostly minor and related to the scale of the game, its last act that seemingly didn’t deliver as much as the reviewers expected it to and its very nature as a Tales that was bound to being unable to satisfy equally both newcomers and long times fan alike
“some rough edges” ‘missteps and a few bumps” “not an all time classic”
“not [...] innovative in any way” “far more style over substance” “outdated ideas and conventions”
“Tales flavour both good and bad” “bad old habits” “storytelling tends to be inconsistent” “takes a while to get going” “lot of technical problems” “some problems in character creation and story logic”
“Bland side quests” “side content isn’t always quite as interesting” “we can blame it for his clipping, its talkative side, or its redundant bestiary” “combat [...] comes at the cost of losing some depth” “narrative [...] not all beats hit their mark” “switch from game graphics to anime cutscenes is actually rather jarring” “excessive linearity and the removal of multiplayer” “game isn’t able to skirt around the issues that often plague JRPGs” “awkward pauses and stiff cutscene animations threatened to break immersion” “lacklustre finale”
^ but all of this is just complete cherry picking from the overall tones of the reviews that is better associated with the word cloud picture you can see above. By doing cherry picking on the opposite spectrum we would probably get 5 to 10 times more quotes and in the end this is what mattered when
Tales of Arise won best roleplaying game at The Game Awards two months later, it wasn’t the busiest year for the genre (it’s unlikely it would’ve won against any of
the three previous and
two following winners) but it still got the award against the likes of Monster Hunter Rise, Shin Megami Tensei V, Cyberpunk 2077 and Scarlet Nexus by being the right game at the right time, something
multiple other media outlets agreed on to some degree
Sales obviously immediately followed suit with
the game first reaching 1M less than a week after release then
1.5M after less than two months and
2M in approximately 7 months.
Funnily enough it’s easy to speculate that the publisher expected to reach 2M sooner or latter as each one of these milestone was associated with one of the three duo of playable characters the game has to offer (Alphen/Shionne, Law/Rinwell and Kisara/Dohalim respectively) and there was no further update for some time (notably missing 2.5M).
Further confirmed by legs and average price staying high
Further milestones were shared later on, notably
2.7M in November 2023 and
3M in February 2024, a bit more than two years after release and giving the confirmation that, while the game had great sales, it obviously slowed down a bit after an explosive start (by series standards).
Rough platform/region split
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What was also important though was that it reached these numbers while keeping a relatively high average price especially compared to its direct predecessor Tales of Berseria (2M LTD)
PSN historical price for Tales of Arise up to the 3M milestone (NA/EU pricing are identical, JP is only slightly different)
Tales of Berseria price on a similar timescale, the game only reached 2M in 09/21, it was sold at single digit prices at times by then
The same thing applied for the Steam keys lowest price as could be checked
there for Arise or
there for Berseria, Arise keys below 20€/$ only happening after 1y and 2 months against 9 months for Berseria and a similar pattern for reaching lower price milestones, even on the official Steam store.
But sales were slightly rejuvenated by
the announcement of a DLC sequel of sort :
Tales of Arise : Beyond the Dawn, scheduled to release in November 2023 a bit more than 2y after the game's original release.
The length of the DLC, its lateness, its limited retail release as well as its relatively small scope coupled with a high price (30$/30€) overall lead to
slightly disappointed reviews and, most likely, muted sales which made you wonder what lead to the inception of it and what were its underlying motives²²²²²
The last "bounce" making an upward trend in week 113 is due to the release of the DLC Beyond the Dawn
The future
For Arise
With the game joining
Gamepass and then
PlayStation+ consecutively in February 2024, there is no doubt Bandai Namco has put on hold any expectation of extra sales for now. The reach of the game has probably been made wider by allowing free access to it to the subscribers of the aforementienned services, it also likely came with an interesting financial incentive that is making the project an even more profitable venture than it already was.
Its only remaining area of growth could be an eventual port on a Nintendo hardware, whether that is the Switch (which recently received another incredibly late port of a Bandai Namco Studio games :
Ace Combat 7) or its successor that is expected to release sometimes in 2025, remains to be seen but things might be a little crowded however because...
For the series
... with the latest announcement of multiple future remasters (starting with
Tales of Graces F) to celebrate the series 30th anniversary, current platforms are bound to receive multiple Tales of starting from early next year not leaving much space for yet another late port.
All PS3 titles are likely candidates (which means both Xillia games and potentially Zestiria and Berseria) but the "
Remastered Project" wording mean any game they deem fit could be a candidate, Bandai Namco Studio 3 lead Yoshito Higuchi was potentially
teasing something related to Tales of the Abyss on Twitter these last couple weeks (which will celebrate its 20th anniversary... in 2025 as well) for example.
For new main entries however, the former Tales of Arise's team lead by Hirokazu Kagawa (Director) and Minoru Iwamoto (Art Director/Character Designer) was
looking for new employees back in April 2022, indicating they were probably about to enter full production for their next Tales of project that ran independantly of the Beyond the Dawn DLC (
as neither of these two were credited in their respective role there).
Considering this and how development usually go, the likelihood of hearing something about a Tales of Arise successor in 2025 is fairly high as it would be 3+ years since the recruitment page went up and 5+ years since Tales of Arise's release itself, as for its release date things can still change but anything beyond 2026 would be unusually long unless something went wrong in the process.
I should also mention that the turnaround between Arise successor and another new entry will probably be much faster due to the probability of the return of a "two teams system" for the Tales of IP being fairly high.
That's what the whole interview with Kenji Anabuki (Scarlet Nexus Director) alludes to, as he's seemingly been brought back to work on Tales of for a project he's leading, project than can't be Arise successor as Kagawa is reprising his role as Director there, Anabuki, as well as a few others BNS staff that worked on Scarlet Nexus were also credited on Beyond the Dawn probably cementing their positions and inserting themselves within the new Tales of staff while getting familiar with the pipeline and tools put in place during Tales of Arise development.
Speculated timeline for next entry(.es), even if true today it's obviously approximative and could still change
------------------------------------------------
Notes/Bibliography of sort
² Using “ironically” since Tri-Crescendo is a studio which was born spinning off from Tri-Ace which itself was born spinning off from Wolfteam which… was Tales studio former name. Basically they’ve come full circle
²² “Practically” because Tales of Vesperia on X360 nearly achieved it with a 3 weeks difference between JP and NA, EMEA being a distant 1y span due to the Atari’s buyout in these markets by Bandai Namco
²²²
4Gamer:
キサラの後ろ姿は最高ですよ。私は操作キャラクターをずっとキサラにしていました(笑)。
岩本氏:
本当ですか? 美しい体にしたいと思ってデザインしたので,それは嬉しいです。
4Gamer:
キサラは3Dモデルも美人ですし,あの鎧は後ろから眺めていたくなります。
²²²² generated on
wordclouds from every excerpt of the 78 reviews on metacritic, curated words list removing terms that don’t add anything like “tales” “bandai” “namco” “just” “much” etc. fonts used Amarante and Helvetica
²²²²² Lookings at
the DLC credits more than half of the original staff weren’t involved but a few veteran who went to make Scarlet Nexus were back in lead positions for this DLC, it’s possible that the DLC existence was also there as a sort of “training ground” for people coming (back) to make new Tales of games with the new engine/middleware environments that was set up for Arise
Disclaimer : All sales numbers are rounded up, for simplicity sake but also because some of them aren’t as accurate on top of never being made public. Still all of them were retrieved through trackers (Famitsu, Media Create in Japan, NPD GFK for other markets) official shipment numbers from the publisher (10M milestone of the series from Namco that detailed every SKU, milestones for a couple titles) or CESA. Some of these sometimes also contradict each other a bit so accuracy isn’t always the best, it’s still more than good enough and nothing that would change the tone or analysis made towards the series sales numbers
https://blog.tales-ch.jp/?_ga=2.9430581.1644708003.1560127813-96726022.1544788796&paged=10 Tales of blog
Interviews to read
https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/interview/221221a
https://www.bandainamcostudios.com/en/behind-the-game/673
https://www.bandainamcostudios.com/en/behind-the-game/675
https://joshinweb.jp/game/cmt_191.html