A Sales Story | E13 | Tales of Series

[Fisico]

Brief introduction
The Tales series is a JRPG series owned, developed and published by Bandai-Namco that started in 1995 on SFC with Tales of Phantasia, its main feature was to support a real time battle system on a separate plane which also allows multiplayer, pretty similar to a fighting game, unlike other JRPG who mostly used turn based battle systems. It remained a series staple for a long time, called “Linear Motion Battle System” due to the characters sticking to a single linear line to move at first (almost all 2D titles up to Hearts), then evolving to multiple lines (Rebirth, Tempest), 3D with as many lines as there are enemies (Symphonia), enabling free movement but with limitations (Abyss, Vesperia, Graces), free movement without any limitation but still linear movement as default (Xillia, Zestiria) until Berseria where complete free movement became the default moveset, a design choice that was kept on… Tales of Arise.

Otherwise the series sticked to what made classical JRPG at the end of the XXth century

• Plenty of area and dungeons to explore
• A colourful cast of playable characters designed by famous mangaka (Kosuke Fujishima, Mutsumi Inomata mainly) featured in multiple animation cutscenes made by Studio IG first and then Ufotable
• An opening cinematic with a jpop song
• A lengthy scenario often dealing with religion, racism, ecology and various moral dilemma with notable amount of side quests
• Soundtrack composed by the renowned Motoi Sakuraba* (Valkyrie Profile, Golden Sun, Baten Kaitos, Dark Souls…)
• etc.

While there are around** 17 main titles released in approximately 25 years, almost each entry is entirely separate from the others as they all are different stories with different characters set up in different worlds, like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest they only share a common “backbone” described before and various common gimmicks such as items used, secondary NPC, the cooking system, victory quotes, skit dialogues, vague common mythology references, cameo battles, each character having one/multiple super attack, some gameplay systems like the signature move 魔神剣 / Majinken / Demon Fang, characters from different episodes do happen to meet on crossover titles up to this day (1 2 3 4)

As such every new entry is mostly a clean slate, recognizable by its name and strong visual identity that made it stand out amongst others titles released at the same period

Development process
Historically the development process at the inception of the series wasn’t a smooth affair at all, developed by Wolfteam, a subsidiary of Telenet Japan, Tales of Phantasia wasn’t intended to be the first episode of a series at all, it was also scheduled one year earlier than its original release and was to be named Tale Phantasia.
However due to strong disagreements between the developers and Telenet Japan, the game went through notable shifts in development and ended up pitched to different publishers, including Enix, before being picked up by Namco whose conditions ended up delaying the game release by a year as well as being the cause of the departure of a big part of the Wolfteam staff that left to create Tri-Ace (which went on to create Star Ocean, a brother game of sort to Tales of Phantasia).

From there on though, it’s a bit easier to follow :

1. Wolfteam became a dedicated team that made Tales of titles
2. Until 2003 where Namco became the majority owner of the studio and officially renamed it “Tales studio”
3. Namco then became the sole owner a few years later
4. And chose to merge the Tales Studio with its main Bandai Namco Studios in 2012 ending up nearly 15y of a rather strong independence for the team making Tales of games
5. Finally a last (recent) development that we learned about is how Bandai Namco Studios itself is structured in multiple sub studios with Tales of being the prerogative of Studio 3 (alongside IP such as Blue Protocol, Idolm@ster or Scarlet Nexus) how long that structure has been there is unclear but it likely emerged in the last few years and doesn’t necessary mean any developer from one Bandai Namco Studio wouldn’t be able to move to another one.

It should be also be noted that for a decade or so Namco tried to diversify the IP and studio output, making unofficially two Tales team within the Tales studio, one lead by historical figures and unofficially named “Team Destiny” (which made all 2D titles as well as Tales of Graces) and another called “Team Symphonia” lead by Namco game designers (which made Symphonia, Abyss and Vesperia), the two teams having their own identity :
Fujishima’s character design for Team Symphonia, Inomata’s for Team Destiny, 2D games for Team Destiny, 3D for Team Symphonia and having their own strong points (battle gameplay for Team Destiny, story and writing for team Symphonia***)
Two main titles were also made almost entirely outside the Tales studio : Tales of Legendia from an internal team at Namco and Tales of Innocence from regular external partner Alfa System.
It all ended up with Tales of Xillia in the late 2000's where only a single team remained to make Tales of titles once again.

Release strategies and sales
While the series initially had its debut on Super Famicom in late 1995 in Japan only, the reception sales wise wasn’t anything special, selling somewhere above 200 000 copies. But like most other third parties in Japan back then, Namco commissioned a second entry for the series due to release on PS1 in late 1997 : Tales of Destiny which mostly followed in its predecessor footsteps by retaining what made the core identity of Tales of Phantasia.
And it was a resounding success as the game got close to 1M lifetime in Japan only which is still to this day the best selling title in the country, thanks to North American (1999) and Asian releases it also crossed the 1M threshold but worldwide sales were a footnote in the overall picture.
Following that PS1 and PS2 got almost all following entries : first a japanese exclusive extended port of Tales of Phantasia (1998) got near 700 000 copies, then Tales of Eternia (2000) ended up around there as well with a North American release (2001)**** pushing its numbers by 100-200k, Tales of Destiny 2 (2002) followed on PS2 selling around 800 000 copies in Japan and close to 1M with its Asian SKU (with full Korean localization) and then came Tales of Symphonia (2003).

By most accounts it was a peculiar title :

• First full 3D game in the series
• First Tales of title not being directed by Wolfteam veterans (but instead a former Tekken/Soulcalibur developer : Yoshito Higuchi)
• First time character designer Kosuke Fujishima returned after Tales of Phantasia
• And… a game planned as a GC exclusive.

The same way Nintendo lost a fair amount of third party support during the transition from SFC to N64, it tried to build back up a lot of it going from N64 to GC, this is an entirely different story (whose most famous episode is the Capcom Five) so we won’t go into too much details but Tales of Symphonia was really treated as well as a first party title could on the console and that involved a console bundle, most likely financial incentives and, above all, a full localization/publishing/marketing effort led by Nintendo outside Japan.

As Namco publishing arm was rather weak in NA and non existing in other regions it meant that for a good part of the world Tales of Symphonia was the first experience many would get of the series (a lingering effect that is still felt to this day… although getting smaller as time passed) and that’s what led to the foundations of the western audience of the IP.
The match between Tales of and the GC ended up as pretty mixed overall, while western sales exploded due to the strong push of Nintendo (somewhere between 600 000 and 700 000 copies), japanese sales turned out to be lackluster, barely surpassing 300 000 copies sold when at the same time, as we saw before, PS1 and PS2 titles were selling double to triple that amount.
Still, with more than 1M copies sold worldwide it was still remarkable numbers and it remained the best selling entry outside Japan, by far, for more than a decade after that.

Nevertheless Namco first concern was its home market, and Symphonia GC proved to be an anomaly that they quickly course corrected with a PS2 port (2004) that got around 400 000 copies followed by further games on the Sony console with Tales of Rebirth (2004) 600 000 copies, the weird experiment that was Tales of Legendia (2005) at 350 000 sales, Tales of the Abyss (2005) 700 000 copies too and finally Tales of Destiny Remake (2006) 400 000 copies.
Of all these games only Tales of Legendia & Tales of the Abyss left Japan and were released in North America (2006), both had negligible sales (<100 000) and the latter only at a budget price late into the PS2 lifecycle, 2D games back then being considered as unappealing for western audiences all 2D titles in the series stayed as Japan exclusive after Tales of Eternia on PS1 in 2001 (minus an EMEA only release for the PSP port of… Tales of Eternia (2006))

This is where things started getting confusing as far as support went for the Tales series.
First, due to a strong push for japanese support by Microsoft, the first HD title Tales of Vesperia (2008) ended up an Xbox 360 exclusive with near simultaneous JP+NA release (EMEA being left in a limbo for a year as Namco was in the process of buying Atari's publishing arm for these markets). It was one of the best selling title on the console in Japan***** but due to a limited install base it only meant somewhere above 200 000 copies which was nowhere near enough for the series especially as the western release fell short of Symphonia success only reaching around 300 000 sales.
At the same time spin off were still being released on PS2, PSP, while DS got main entries with Tales of Innocence (2007) / Tales of Hearts (2008), both selling 300 000 copies, and Wii was supported too with a spin-off sequel of Tales of Symphonia, Ratatroskr no Kishi/Dawn of the New World (2008), 250 000, and a completely original new title Tales of Graces (2009) at… 250 000 as well.

If you followed things well thus far (which isn’t an easy task by all means, so let me praise you if so) you would notice that almost all of those later numbers are clearly lower than what the series was used to on PS1 and PS2.
It was made worse by nearly all of them staying in Japan as well, except the Symphonia sequel which sold respectably in others markets, around 300 000, mostly riding on its predecessor popularity in western countries.
Namco then did the same thing that they did with Tales of Symphonia : recoup the costs by porting it to a more desirable hardware owned by their audience in Japan, that is to say the PS3.
Tales of Vesperia (2009) was first, it started stronger than on X360 and kept selling for years eventually surpassing 520 000 copies, it never left Japan.
Tales of Graces F (2010) came next, with the same outcome, ending up north of 400 000 copies, it had a, at first unplanned, rather late western release (2012) whose sales numbers are assumed to be in the usual 300 000 range

And came the turn of the first PS3 exclusive title, the grand return of Tales of in its home turf to celebrate the series 15th anniversary.
Featuring:

• For the first time the collaboration of its two main character designers
• A switch to Ufotable for its animated cutscenes following the studio growing popularity and its lauded anime adaptation of Tales of Symphonia (coincidentally, Haruo Sotozaki’s directorial debut before he, and others, worked on… Demon’s Slayer)
• Dual protagonists with separate storylines (reminiscent of what was done with Tales of Destiny’s Director's Cut) and more…

Tales of Xillia (2011) had an explosive debut sales wise with ~500 000 copies sold first week****** before it petered off a bit, barely surpassing 700 000 copies in the end due to a middling reception, an overall lack of content, visually being unimpressive for a PS3 exclusive, the beginning of the end for the series multiplayer feature and a battle system that lacked “punch” coming after the super fast and stylish Tales of Graces.
Still, it was an incredible return to form for the series in Japan, back to where it was on PS2, the late (2013) worldwide localization didn’t set the charts on fire as much but sold in the same ballpark most previous attempts did, north of 400 000 copies, final shipment numbers seemingly ending up at 1.33M making it the best selling title worldwide to date.
Only one year later the game received a direct sequel, Tales of Xillia 2 (2012), an incredibly fast turnaround for a new entry due to its heavy reuse of assets and systems from its predecessor, it also featured a fair amount of new contents originally planned for the first game, plenty of improvements left and right and especially for the battle system (possibly due to the presence of Tales of Graces battle designer, Tatsuro Udo) but being a direct sequel to a slightly unpopular entry released so quickly meant that expectations and potential were lower, it ended up north of 450 000 copies in Japan and sales outside Japan (2014) were also lower, due to being a sequel but also the series hitting some kind of saturation with 3 titles in a 1 year span (Xillia, the Symphonia remasters and Xillia 2), data are getting less accurate but it sold notably less than Xillia, less than Graces F and WW shipment numbers didn’t reach 1M

It took a bit more than two years for a full new entry to come to PS3 once again, with Tales of Zestiria (2015) this time celebrating the series 20th anniversary.
It was pegged as the IP first foray into an “open world” design of sort with wider area and seamless transitions between exploration and battles. Due to fan requests, on top of the collaboration between multiple character designers continuing, the soundtrack also featured both Motooi Sakuraba and Go Shiina's works, the latter who was linked to Tales through Tales of Legendia mostly but who gained popularity due to its unusual sounding themes on God Eater and others Bandai-Namco IP featuring vocals like Idolm@ster.
Remember how things went a bit wrong between expectations and reality for Tales of Xillia? For Zestiria it was worse, much much worse.
While its opening week was decent, close to Xillia 2, for a title coming at the tail end of PS3 lifecycle, its sales absolutely cratered beyond anything the series ever knew before, merely selling 50 to 60 000 copies after a 340 000 opening week.
Why is that? A complete clash between ambition and execution:

• The “open worldish” aspect was oversold (and mostly consisted of wide empty area that took a while to traverse)
• The seamless transition lead to multiple technical and gameplay problems like framerate being cut to an unstable 30fps in battle, a first for the series whose main appeal was its dynamic battle system and a locked 60fps
• The camera was catastrophically bad frequently due to that seamless aspects and poorly adapted level design, sometimes being stuck into the wall or background elements with the player barely seeing a thing
• Multiplayer was even more an afterthought than before, its core gameplay mechanic, character fusion, entirely removing control from a potential player...

If you add a, japanese centric, huge controversy surrounding the identity of the main female protagonist and confusing marketing with the aforementioned characters which lead to a voice actress doing an extreme form of apology with a public dogeza in front of a crowd and, more likely than not, the series producer to leave Bandai-Namco*******, a “collaboration” of composers that was really about each one of them working on their end and Shiina providing 14 spectacular tracks in its own CD for the OST (the third that is) that didn’t blend with Sakuraba’s at all
You end up with an unfinished messy product that not only underperforms but also risks damaging your IP reputation long term.

The irony however is that Zestiria was a big moment for the series worldwide, not due to the game itself but due to timing and platform strategy as it was the first time Tales of adopted a day 1 multiplatform release of sort outside Japan.
The game debuted on PS3, as you’d expect, but also got a decent up port on PS4 and a satisfying Steam release for the series platform debut.
Following an often noticed pattern of “First game of a series on Steam getting explosive sales” it was a big performer in both Europe and North America, official Bandai-Namco sales numbers at the end of 2020 putting it as the best selling title for the former at 481 000 sales and best selling single release of the series for the latter at 600.000 sales bringing its total WW number somewhere between 1.5M and 1.7M mark in 2020 (including the 400 000 copies of the PS3 SKU in Japan and later 20 000 copies of PS4 SKU + every sales it got in Asia and other regions, making it for a time the best selling Tales of worldwide)

18 months later came Tales of Berseria (2016) on PS3/PS4, its job was simple : fix everything that went wrong with Zestiria and build on what worked in its systems and lore. The extra development time it got compared to Xillia 2 allowed the game to feel much more “unique”, something necessary for what was story wise a distant 1000y prequel of Zestiria. It built back up some good will, had cross promotion with the currently airing Tales of Zestiria the X anime with a special Berseria episode and both game and anime featuring an opening by popular group Flow, they removed the seamless transition between exploration and battles, allowing 60fps gameplay once again, and featured an “anti hero” type of story that resonated well overall with the audience which meant that despite disappointing first week numbers in Japan, ~250 000, it was able to finish close to 400 000 copies sold in the end.
Its fate in others markets was similar to Zestiria, an added Steam SKU, better reviews (79 to 72 for Zestiria on metacritic) meant that it mirrored Zestiria sales outcome, only being slightly behind in total worldwide sales in 2020 before, thanks to digital discounts, reaching 2M in September 2021 (while no further data was given for Zestiria it’s unlikely that it didn’t reach 2M at some point too), officially the first single release of a Tales of to do so, a milestone that was soon gonna be surpassed but that's another story, another tales to write down about...

In blue the Original SKU sales in Japan, in red sales of late ports in Japan (not inc remasters), in yellow sales outside Japan

By order of appearance for each color besides yellow (sales outside Japan again) : SFC, PS1, PS2, GC, DS, X360, PS3, Wii, PS4

Despite some hiccups here and there you can clearly see the long term trend of sales in the country

The numbers mainly reflect which entry was localized and in which context, naturally Symphonia and Zestiria stand out


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Notes/Bibliography of sort

* Shinji Tamura/Hibiki Aoyama was co-composer for a few titles up to Tales of Vesperia, his works included famous battle themes such as Fighting of the Spirit, Fatalize or Fury Sparks, in Tales of the Abyss a couple tracks were also done by Motoo Fujiwara, leader of music group Bump of Chicken, like Meaning of Birth or Finish the Promise, finally Tales of Innocence soundtrack was made by Kazuhiro Nakamura and Tales of Legendia by Go Shiina.

** The exact number is up to debate, as it’s not clear whether the full blown remake of Tales of Destiny on PS2 should count, or whether Tales of the Tempest is a main title (it was, until it wasn’t, and recently was reconsidered as being one…) and the status of others various others games that used to be considered as escort titles before.
To be clear these 17 include, by order of release in Japan : Phantasia, Destiny, Eternia, Destiny 2, Symphonia, Rebirth, Legendia, Abyss, Innocence, Vesperia, Hearts, Graces, Xillia, Xillia 2, Zestiria, Berseria and Arise

*** Ironically though the scenario often had to be “protected” by her writer Takumi Miyajima and producer Makoto Yoshizumi against the will of a notable part of the development staff

**** The game was also called Tales of Destiny II in order to show clear continuity despite not being related to Tales of Destiny story wise at all

***** Only below Blue Dragon and marginally beaten afterwards by a long old rival : Star Ocean IV and long after by the MMO Monster Hunter Frontier as well as the long tail of Ace Combat 6 due to its budget reprints

****** At the time its FW was awfully close to another major JRPG released close to it two months later, Final Fantasy XIII-2, from a series considered to be clearly one or two steps above Tales of sales wise

******* Hideo Baba that is, he tried to bounce back at Square-Enix with his own studio that closed less than 2y after being established and, while never made official, he supposedly went on to work as executive producer of the rather unsuccessful Sakura Kakumei at Delightworks afterwards.
As for Tales of Zestiria it should be added that Alisha being “sidelined” of sort was even directly addressed and changed in the anime adaptation Tales of Zestiria the X by having Alisha and Rose being of equal importance (1 - 2 - 3)

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.
- Spin off titles (like the World subseries), remasters (Symphonia, Vesperia...), handheld late ports (Eternia, Destiny 2 & Rebirth PSP, Abyss 3DS) or... Reimagined entries (Innocence and Hearts on Vita) aren't discussed there because the focus was on the series main entries. Tales of Destiny Remake is a particular case as well but I chose not to mention it either, data for it is available so feel free to ask if curious
- Some of those numbers sometimes also contradict each other a bit so accuracy isn’t 100%, it’s still more than good enough and the margin of error is slim enough that nothing 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

Source for Studio 3 headcount https://www.bandainamcostudios.com/recruit/career/interview/12235

 

[Aostia82]

fantastic read, thank you so much for the insights!

 

[Semajer]

Tales of was one of my favourites series back in the day, but has had some atrocious management choices over the years that really hurt the quality of titles. Between the frequent cheapening out or absence of localisation and the constant release of clearly rushed titles that were either never fixed or only received enhanced (read finished) versions on Playstation hardware I'm sort of amazed it has survived for so long.

It doesn't help that increasing development costs reduced the total number of releases and Namco moving efforts from various spin-off tiles into the mobile gacha graveyard. I'm sure this has had a large impact on the mindshare and general profitability of the series, especially in Japan, where I understand that merchandising used to be pretty big.

I'm hopeful that this series of remastered titles and the apparent success of Arise will help somewhat to pull the series back to a higher level of quality.

I haven't played Arise, but how was it recieved? I've read a little on its sales, but barely anything about how it is as a game. From the few impressions I have read it seems that it was generally well regarded by new players but considered something of a disappointment by existing fans due to a rushed ending and repetitive combat. Is this accurate?

 

[Kresnik]

Fantastic read. One of my favourite series, although I haven't played Arise as removing local multiplayer has stopped one of the main reasons I played the games (playing through on the same screen with my partner).

I'm not sure any series has had quite as interesting sales journey as this one. I remember being around for when Xillia dropped and the sales just being massive, which was impressive as the series had floundered for so long.

It's quite impressive to see how the franchise has grown in the west too. The graphs really put that into perspective, particularly in comparison to the slowly decreasing Japanese sales post-Xillia.

Since we're on the Tales topic - my favourite entry is Xillia 2 (I know, blasphemous - combat was just perfect for me and Gaius is my favourite playable character in the whole franchise, while my partner's is Milla) while my least favourite is Zestiria (terrible armatisation that made even two-player co-op a chore, absent story etc.). So the whiplash between those two entries was quite something at the time.

 

[Rainy]

Tales of was one of my favourites series back in the day, but has had some atrocious management choices over the years that really hurt the quality of titles. Between the frequent cheapening out or absence of localisation and the constant release of clearly rushed titles that were either never fixed or only received enhanced (read finished) versions on Playstation hardware I'm sort of amazed it has survived for so long.

It doesn't help that increasing development costs reduced the total number of releases and Namco moving efforts from various spin-off tiles into the mobile gacha graveyard. I'm sure this has had a large impact on the mindshare and general profitability of the series, especially in Japan, where I understand that merchandising used to be pretty big.

I'm hopeful that this series of remastered titles and the apparent success of Arise will help somewhat to pull the series back to a higher level of quality.

I haven't played Arise, but how was it recieved? I've read a little on its sales, but barely anything about how it is as a game. From the few impressions I have read it seems that it was generally well regarded by new players but considered something of a disappointment by existing fans due to a rushed ending and repetitive combat. Is this accurate?

What you've heard of Arise is generally true, seems like newcomers generally liked it, but long-time fans see it as a middling entry with an average story and OK battle system.

I kinda share that perspective as a fan since 2004 but might like it a bit more than other series die-hards.

 

[Damage2]

Great text, are we going to get a Part 2 about Arise?

 

[Lelouch0612]

Great text, are we going to get a Part 2 about Arise?

 

[KR_EP]

Excellent sales primer, @Fisico put in a lot of work & clearly know your Tales of Onions…only for Switch 2 leaks to steal your Tales of Thunder! As for the overall points, I see three historic challenges for Bandai Namco to resolve, too many Japan only/partial WW releases, deluge of (mainline) releases the mid 2000s-2010s & *mild shock* platform choices plus one new issue.

The first can be addressed by unleashing the back catalogue kraken, see my Tales of Remastered - PROJECT - fan fiction from last month (pre Graces f Remastered powered by TOSE announcement) & make your own suggestions. Alternatively, taking a leaf out of the Nihon Falcom playbook with remakes of earlier titles (Tales of Phantasia by tri-Ace) or hell, hire Falcom!

Second is already resolved by virtue of extended development for modern games & veering away from spin offs while shutting down mobile titles mean it can now focus on a single title.

Which leads to the third historic challenge, the platform choices, Tales of Arise + DLC for next gen Nintendo hardware in 2025 for the 30th anniversary is something that could partially alleviate the issue. But the million dollar question is whether or not the Tales of game currently in development already includes Nintendo hardware or if BN will pivot to include it on day one.

Those are simple enough & historic issues that sales data & user feedback should be readily available to Bandai Namco. The last challenge I mentioned is the most important, which is what creative direction to adopt going forward. Tales of Arise was a soft reboot, but will it end up becoming the blueprint for all future titles or does it plan to revert back to prior entries or come up with something different? Depends on how far along development is & much weight Bandai Namco places on user feedback. Does it looks to mixed sales results for recent Final Fantasy entries to pause for thought. I'd hazard to say the muted response to its Beyond the Dawn expansion suggests that Arise is not maintaining positive word of mouth but that doesn't mean it has to reinvent the wheel. It could be a case of iterating on any follow up, addressing the development issues & taking on board feedback on how to improve without changing too much.

But I'd be interested to know what fans think. My view is that if the historic issues are resolved, the series can still grow but it has an upper limit due to the nature of the series (genre & stylistic influences). I'd argue availability & platform choices are the main obstacle over the past three decades, not the gameplay mechanics & the Remastered titles plus Nintendo console versions can help. However the biggest question is the unanswered one - what direction it takes post-Arise will determine if it can retain existing fans while trying to reach a new audience.

 

[Dolgan]

Great read, thank you for the detailed analysis and giving an overview of the history of the series and the developers.

Like many western people I became aware of the series with the release of Tales of Symphonia and even bought an extra PS2 with the ability to play US games to play Tales of the Abyss (I'm from Europe so no release for us). Also, Tales of Vesperia was the biggest reason for me to finally buy a Xbox 360 when it released in Europe. Personally, starting with Tales of Xillia I started enjoying the games less and less, mostly because of the (in my opinion) increasingly large and boring maps. Funnily, I'm one the few people in the world who really enjoyed Tales of Zestiria (favorite game in the series since Graces) and I was shocked to find out about its reputation online. I thought Arise was decent. I really hated some decisions they made, but there was some great stuff as well. Obviously, Arise was a big moment for the series so I'm really curious how they will continue.

 

[Fisico]

I haven't played Arise, but how was it recieved? I've read a little on its sales, but barely anything about how it is as a game. From the few impressions I have read it seems that it was generally well regarded by new players but considered something of a disappointment by existing fans due to a rushed ending and repetitive combat. Is this accurate?

I generally avoid to talk about my subjective opinion on most games these days but as you and @Rainy said this is the general feeling I got as well, the complete shipping of the two protagonists was satisfying for some fans as well but as far as gameplay is concerned this is really where the bulk of the changes happened but I'll touch more on it later on

Great text, are we going to get a Part 2 about Arise?

This article wasn't even supposed to exist, it's an introduction that spiraled out of control and was made into its own article instead (had I intended an article about the series sales overall from the beginning I think it could have been twice as long, the more I reread it the more I feel like I skipped past many things)

Excellent sales primer, @Fisico put in a lot of work & clearly know your Tales of Onions…only for Switch 2 leaks to steal your Tales of Thunder! As for the overall points, I see three historic challenges for Bandai Namco to resolve, too many Japan only/partial WW releases, deluge of (mainline) releases the mid 2000s-2010s & *mild shock* platform choices plus one new issue.

The first can be addressed by unleashing the back catalogue kraken, see my Tales of Remastered - PROJECT - fan fiction from last month (pre Graces f Remastered powered by TOSE announcement) & make your own suggestions. Alternatively, taking a leaf out of the Nihon Falcom playbook with remakes of earlier titles (Tales of Phantasia by tri-Ace) or hell, hire Falcom!

Second is already resolved by virtue of extended development for modern games & veering away from spin offs while shutting down mobile titles mean it can now focus on a single title.

Which leads to the third historic challenge, the platform choices, Tales of Arise + DLC for next gen Nintendo hardware in 2025 for the 30th anniversary is something that could partially alleviate the issue. But the million dollar question is whether or not the Tales of game currently in development already includes Nintendo hardware or if BN will pivot to include it on day one.

Those are simple enough & historic issues that sales data & user feedback should be readily available to Bandai Namco. The last challenge I mentioned is the most important, which is what creative direction to adopt going forward.

I feel like WW the platform problem is mostly solved, now the question is whether they want to do something for Japan or not.
As far as ports/remasters/remakes are concerned it feels like Bamco is overprotecting their IP, it's either what they want to do and feel like they can afford (which is rarely much, typical Bandai Namco), 15y ago it's pretty clear they didn't want to localize Tales of Graces nor have anyone else doing it, it feels like nothing changed for remasters/ports but with the renewed interest in the series following Arise success things should be moving towards the right direction at least a little bit.

Tales of Arise was a soft reboot, but will it end up becoming the blueprint for all future titles or does it plan to revert back to prior entries or come up with something different? Depends on how far along development is & much weight Bandai Namco places on user feedback. Does it looks to mixed sales results for recent Final Fantasy entries to pause for thought. I'd hazard to say the muted response to its Beyond the Dawn expansion suggests that Arise is not maintaining positive word of mouth but that doesn't mean it has to reinvent the wheel. It could be a case of iterating on any follow up, addressing the development issues & taking on board feedback on how to improve without changing too much.

But I'd be interested to know what fans think. My view is that if the historic issues are resolved, the series can still grow but it has an upper limit due to the nature of the series (genre & stylistic influences). I'd argue availability & platform choices are the main obstacle over the past three decades, not the gameplay mechanics & the Remastered titles plus Nintendo console versions can help. However the biggest question is the unanswered one - what direction it takes post-Arise will determine if it can retain existing fans while trying to reach a new audience.

(To be elaborated next time !)
I wouldn't read too much into Beyond the Dawn, it's a too late, too half hassed too pricey DLC with limited retail presence, sales wise it didn't make much sense and I don't think that's why it exists in the first place.
Sales ceiling seems pretty obvious, I don't see a Tales as is reaching much more than what Arise did, higher quality and complete full multiplatform can help a bit, I don't consider Arise success to be necessary something that will make the Tales name have a lasting appeal from now, they can still mess this and "more of the same" wouldn't work as well.

Great read, thank you for the detailed analysis and giving an overview of the history of the series and the developers.

Like many western people I became aware of the series with the release of Tales of Symphonia and even bought an extra PS2 with the ability to play US games to play Tales of the Abyss (I'm from Europe so no release for us). Also, Tales of Vesperia was the biggest reason for me to finally buy a Xbox 360 when it released in Europe. Personally, starting with Tales of Xillia I started enjoying the games less and less, mostly because of the (in my opinion) increasingly large and boring maps. Funnily, I'm one the few people in the world who really enjoyed Tales of Zestiria (favorite game in the series since Graces) and I was shocked to find out about its reputation online. I thought Arise was decent. I really hated some decisions they made, but there was some great stuff as well. Obviously, Arise was a big moment for the series so I'm really curious how they will continue.

Magic Swap owner there, cheaper than an entirely second console (but those plastic stuff to keep the player opened were fragile as hell), I borrowed an Xbox just to play Vesperia back then too (and got bored by all the bloom a couple hours in in Star Ocean 4 afterwards)
Oddly enough I also found some enjoyment in Zestiria as well despite disliking (and not finishing) Xillia too, all critics on it are valid but it was really about the expectations, I was able to circumvent the japanese drama by playing it on the day of release in Japan and going media blackout as I always do in a game I'm invested in narratively speaking, the game still has some highs, incredible Shiina tracks, and a G Gundam callout in its final fight so it left a good impression for the last 5-10h or so.
Baba probably deserves all the shit he got in the face of the project though, it really looked like a complete mess and when you think about it the fabled "downtime" of the series was when Tales Studio was fully dissolved and Baba had full control over most of the things regarding the games development (and to have a high profil person soft fired from a company is an event so rare that something really had to go south for it to happen)

 

[Bruno MB]

Coinciding with the recent release of Tales of Graces F Remastered I started to look for the sales of the original one in Spain and in the end I collected the sales of all entries to compile a sales rank. And instead of posting this in the latest Spanish sales thread I thought this would be a better place.

TALES OF (SERIES) RETAIL CUMULATIVE UNIT SALES RANK IN SPAIN

01. TALES OF VESPERIA: DEFINITIVE EDITION (2019) NINTENDO SWITCH, PLAYSTATION 4, XBOX ONE
02. TALES OF ARISE (2021) PLAYSTATION 4, PLAYSTATION 5, XBOX SERIES, PC
03. TALES OF SYMPHONIA (2004) GAMECUBE
04. TALES OF XILLIA (2013) PLAYSTATION 3
05. TALES OF ZESTIRIA (2015) PLAYSTATION 3, PLAYSTATION 4
06. TALES OF XILLIA 2 (2014) PLAYSTATION 3
07. TALES OF BERSERIA (2017) PLAYSTATION 4
08. TALES OF SYMPHONIA REMASTERED (2023) NINTENDO SWITCH, PLAYSTATION 4, XBOX SERIES
09. TALES OF GRACES F (2012) PLAYSTATION 3
10. TALES OF PHANTASIA (2006) GAME BOY ADVANCE
11. TALES OF SYMPHONIA CHRONICLES (2014) PLAYSTATION 3
12. TALES OF SYMPHONIA: DAWN OF THE NEW WORLD (2009) NINTENDO WII
13. TALES OF ETERNIA (2006) PLAYSTATION PORTABLE
14. TALES OF VESPERIA (2009) XBOX 360
15. TALES OF THE WORLD: RADIANT MYTHOLOGY (2007) PLAYSTATION PORTABLE
16. TALES OF HEARTS R (2014) PLAYSTATION VITA
17. TALES OF THE ABYSS (2011) NINTENDO 3DS

 

[Kresnik]

Just a small thing Bruno - I think entry #6 is supposed to be Xillia 2 rather than 1?

Some interesting stuff in there, thanks for sharing.

 

[Smoothie King]

Edit: I’m a goober. I didn’t realize that was Spain only. Nevermind the peanut gallery (me).

 

[RPG_Fanatic]

Fascinating read. Thanks for making this topic.

 

[Fisico]

Coinciding with the recent release of Tales of Graces F Remastered I started to look for the sales of the original one in Spain and in the end I collected the sales of all entries to compile a sales rank. And instead of posting this in the latest Spanish sales thread I thought this would be a better place.

TALES OF (SERIES) RETAIL CUMULATIVE UNIT SALES RANK IN SPAIN

01. TALES OF VESPERIA: DEFINITIVE EDITION (2019) NINTENDO SWITCH, PLAYSTATION 4, XBOX ONE
02. TALES OF ARISE (2021) PLAYSTATION 4, PLAYSTATION 5, XBOX SERIES, PC
03. TALES OF SYMPHONIA (2004) GAMECUBE
04. TALES OF XILLIA (2013) PLAYSTATION 3
05. TALES OF ZESTIRIA (2015) PLAYSTATION 3, PLAYSTATION 4
06. TALES OF XILLIA 2 (2014) PLAYSTATION 3
07. TALES OF BERSERIA (2017) PLAYSTATION 4
08. TALES OF SYMPHONIA REMASTERED (2023) NINTENDO SWITCH, PLAYSTATION 4, XBOX SERIES
09. TALES OF GRACES F (2012) PLAYSTATION 3
10. TALES OF PHANTASIA (2006) GAME BOY ADVANCE
11. TALES OF SYMPHONIA CHRONICLES (2014) PLAYSTATION 3
12. TALES OF SYMPHONIA: DAWN OF THE NEW WORLD (2009) NINTENDO WII
13. TALES OF ETERNIA (2006) PLAYSTATION PORTABLE
14. TALES OF VESPERIA (2009) XBOX 360
15. TALES OF THE WORLD: RADIANT MYTHOLOGY (2007) PLAYSTATION PORTABLE
16. TALES OF HEARTS R (2014) PLAYSTATION VITA
17. TALES OF THE ABYSS (2011) NINTENDO 3DS

*** Hidden text: cannot be quoted. ***

Things moved since then but official WW ranking in early 2021 was this

01. Tales of Symphonia (2.4M)
02. Tales of Vesperia (2.37M)
03. Tales of Destiny (1.72M)
04. Tales of Zestiria
05. Tales of Berseria
06. Tales of Phantasia
07. Tales of the Abyss
08. Tales of Eternia
09. Tales of Xillia
10. Tales of Destiny 2

And the threshold to make the top 10 was more or less 1M, also when they communicated the number they specifically mentionned than Vesperia probably already overtook Symphonia but they didn't have updated data yet.
Of course these numbers completely changed for titles available on modern platforms, Bamco ,like many other publishers, has been pretty agressive with sales and it inflated shipment notably for more recent titles.
We learned recently Berseria is at 2.5M, Zestiria is bound to be pretty close, Vesperia was already close to 3M at the end of 2021, Symphonia moved up a bit with the Remastered release...

The top 10 with their way of combining everything probably looks like this right now

01. Tales of Vesperia (>3M)
02. Tales of Arise (>3M)
03. Tales of Symphonia (<3M)
04. Tales of Berseria (~2.5M)
05. Tales of Zestiria (<2.5M)
06. Tales of Destiny (1.72M)
07. Tales of Phantasia
08. Tales of the Abyss
09. Tales of Eternia
10. Tales of Xillia

And with Graces F I have 0 doubt it'll reach 6th position easily (it was already somewhere above 1M with Graces on Wii and Graces F on PS3)


In Europe specifically

01. Tales of Zestiria (0.481M)
02. Tales of Symphonia (0.48M)
03. Tales of Vesperia (0.41M)
04. Tales of Berseria
05. Tales of Xillia
06. Tales of Symphonia : Ratatoskr no Kishi
07. Tales of Graces
08. Tales of Xillia 2
09. Tales of Eternia
10. Tales of the Abyss

The threshold is a bit harder to guess here, Abyss 3DS (PS2 SKU never released in Europe) is probably low, it likely sold sub 10k in all major European markets (the game was english only) minus the UK maybe so I don't think it reached 100k, certainly above 50k and if I was to bet closer to that than 100k

The top 5 are very likely pretty close to each other Vesperia likely took the first spot from Zestiria and should be somewhere around 600k with Berseria Zestiria and Symphonia close behind, these 4 are probably close enough that you could swap them around
Vesperia WW sales grew by >30% and that was driven by markets outside Japan
Berseria also had very surprising legs, Zestiria is bit of an unknown since they didn't talk about it unlike Berseria and obviously Symphonia had extra SKU
And of course Arise is north of 600k, so that's pretty much the ballpark for all of them really

 

[Damage2]

The word of mouth helping Tales of Berseria its so nice to see, Zestiria really hurt it a lot.

Btw @Fisico, shouldnt Arise be close to 3.5M? Its been almost a year since the 3M update

 

[ESCK Swiss]

Thank you for this topic. It's wild to see so many games released in such a short span of time.

So Tales of Graces never reached 1M sales? Hopefully with the remake it will get there.

 

[Fisico]

The word of mouth helping Tales of Berseria its so nice to see, Zestiria really hurt it a lot.

Btw @Fisico, shouldnt Arise be close to 3.5M? Its been almost a year since the 3M update

The game was given for free on Gamepass and PS+ shortly after reaching 3M

Thank you for this topic. It's wild to see so many games released in such a short span of time.

So Tales of Graces never reached 1M sales? Hopefully with the remake it will get there.

Tales Of Graces on Wii + Graces F on PS3 did around that +/- 100k, around 250k on Wii, 450k on PS3 in Japan and 300-400k for RotW