This weekend, Bandai Namco is hosting its annual Tales of Festival event in Yokohama, Japan. The event is a fan celebration of the Tales JRPG series, which began with Tales of Phantasia in 1995 for the Super Famicom. During this weekend’s event, Namco announced a new Tales title: Tales of Berseria.
The sixteenth main entry in the Tales series, Tales of Berseria is following some trends from the more recent Tales games: it will be released for PlayStation 3, its cinematics are being done by animation studio Ufotable, and its characters are being designed by Tales veterans Kōsuke Fujishima and Mutsumi Inomata. Noteworthy, however, are two things: the game will be the first announced Tales game to also release for PlayStation 4, and the game’s main protagonist is a woman named Velvet. While the Tales series has seen many female protagonists, main characters have mostly been male, though 2011’s Tales of Xillia featured both male and female main protagonists.
A release date or English localization for Tales of Berseria have not yet been announced; however, the North American and European releases for the previous entry, Tales of Zestiria, are due later this year for PlayStation 3.
I really wish this was PS4 only. They already pushed PS3 beyond its limits with Zestiria (in a bad way–they didn’t tone down their goals to make it play well on the PS3 so it just ran like shit) and I can’t see them improving on that at all if they’re stuck catering to the PS3 crowd instead of focusing on the PS4 like they should with this release. So we’re probably getting the worst of both worlds–a toned down game because it’s stuck on PS3 alongside the team’s first attempt at a PS4 game which will probably look pretty questionable. Oh boy.
yay @ female protagonist tho. boo @ skimpy clothing for probably no good reason, again. 8/
[S]C’mon Sony, push harder for Japan to accept the PS4 so this shit stops happening. ;_;[/S]
I complain but I’m still going to play the hell out of this siiiggghh.
To be fair, I haven’t played very many Tales games. But, I don’t know if a female lead is really a big deal in a series known for ensemble casts? Moreso since, gameplay-wise, you can main whoever you want anyway.
I feel almost like the announcement was just a dig at the newly bro-centric Final Fantasy. Which would be entirely justified all the same XD Because Square’s reasoning is just absurd
Generally all the party characters get attention in the plot, but the main characters always get a lot more development/lines so it’s a pretty big deal to a lot of people in the fandom.
The only other time they’ve done a female lead was with Xillia where they did two main characters with “branching” plots, except that they didn’t do a very good job so although Milla was really the protagonist of the whole story, she wasn’t as much the “main character”. I’m interested to see what they do when they don’t try to split the attention this time.
Teaser trailer release
…what’s a “ufotable”?
The forest place looks nice
ufotable is the animation studio that’s been doing the anime cutscenes for Tales of since… I think Tales of Xillia? So a few years now. I think they did the Symphonia anime too.