Tales of Zestiria announced for worldwide release.

Windstar

Windstar

[13] Hero
Not much known at this point, but here's a brief trailer that they always show when the reveal a Tales game.

The male hero's name is Slade (or Slay depending on how you read the kana) and the heroine's name is Alisha.

Zestiria will feature the works of four artists who've worked on the series in the past; Fujishima, Iwamoto, Inomata and Okumura.

The game takes place on the continent of Greenwood. Two kingdoms, the Lawrence Empire and the Highland Kingdom are at war. Caught in the middle are a number of towns and independent cities each with their own cultures and customs. Among all of them, however, is a reverence for the mysterious Sky Dwellers or People.

Dragons will play a big part in the story. Some are good, some are evil.

A new perspective in battle and apparently a new sidestep feature makes an appearance (might be Around Step from Graces or Xillia 2).

Fields appear to be larger, but nothing confirmed yet.

Ufotable will be doing the cutscenes and opening again.


My speculation:
The artists are probably in charge of each of the major factions revealed so far. Slade/Slay was drawn by Fujishima and Okumura designed Alisha. My guess is that Slade/Slay is a Sky Dweller/Person and Fujishima is designing that specific faction. Okumura likely designed the Highland or Lawrence Empire characters with Inomata designing the opposing while Iwamoto, whose history has been designing monsters for the Tales series will be doing the dragon faction.

Fields will probably be an illusion of open-ness. I doubt we'll see anything truly open world and something more like Xenoblade or DQ8.

The battle system may revisit Abyss' FOF system.

So anyone else interested in the recent Tales announcement? We'll be getting an official trailer and webpage opening on the 21st.
 
Abyss was a terrible game, and the FOF system was a joke.

The Tales series is one of my favorite RPG series. Tales of Phantastia is in my top 5 greatest RPGs of all time... but some of the more recent Tales games have been major let downs. Tales of Abyss and Symphonia were god awful. Tales of Xillia was good, but not great. Tales of Graces F probably had the best and most fun combat in the entire series; but the story was irrelevant.
 
I love Tales of Phantasia a lot too, although I disagree with Abyss and Symphonia being let downs and Graces F having the best combat system (fun would be subjective, but I don't think it was a very fun system). I can't say the stories of Tales games "wow" me, but I do enjoy the characters, the development and many of the combat system that focus on iteration, and balance.
 
I found it interesting that they specified INTERNATIONAL release. After the whole Vesperia PS3 - Xillia thing, they must be wanting fans to know NOW, that it is coming.

Symphonia was great, Symphonia 2 was trash. Abyss was whatever to me, i never even finished it. Graces F SUCKED. The combat was fine, but everything else was awful, AWFUL. AWFUL.......
Definitely not Legendia bad though, nothing is Legendia bad.
 
Animefreak6969 said:
I found it interesting that they specified INTERNATIONAL release. After the whole Vesperia PS3 - Xillia thing, they must be wanting fans to know NOW, that it is coming.

Symphonia was great, Symphonia 2 was trash. Abyss was whatever to me, i never even finished it. Graces F SUCKED. The combat was fine, but everything else was awful, AWFUL. AWFUL.......
Definitely not Legendia bad though, nothing is Legendia bad.
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You never know, they might finally be returning to the idea of simultaneous releases like they did with Vesperia. That was a good thing that Peter Garza and crew managed to do with Higuchi and Tales Studio. Of course, those guys are gone and we're now with large team of Tales guys who's main work was Tales of Hearts.

Garza now works with Tecmo Koei and Higuchi is busy with Smash Bros.
 
Windstar said:
You never know, they might finally be returning to the idea of simultaneous releases like they did with Vesperia. That was a good thing that Peter Garza and crew managed to do with Higuchi and Tales Studio. Of course, those guys are gone and we're now with large team of Tales guys who's main work was Tales of Hearts.

Garza now works with Tecmo Koei and Higuchi is busy with Smash Bros.
Click to expand...
I can't see the video due to a copyright claim?
 
Don't worry too much about it. The original video is of low quality and doesn't really reveal too much. An official trailer at Jump Festa should give us more information and perhaps some details on the rest of the cast.

Then again, since at least Graces, the Namco Tales team has always released these rather brief trailers without a whole lot of information. The last time we had a game actually reveal several cast members at once in a reveal trailer was... Vesperia actually. In that game, at least, we saw Yuri, Flynn, Estelle, Rita and Karol. Although Repede did feature, no one was quite certain he was playable yet.
 
Gracis F was my least favorite fighting system out of all the games. abyss was my favorite cause it required elements outside of just attacking. and positioning because really important. not to mention it was really fun. i really like tales of Xilia and found that it had an actual lead character that i really liked. i haven't seen a decent lead character to connect with since Symphonia. and i heard that they are re-releasing a special Tales of Symphonia 1&2 limited edition for a limited time only. i would actually like to get that. all because they have Collette and Lloyd. and i love Colette's voice actress.
 
HQ Trailer from Official source. Nothing new from the original footage I posted.

0VincentRayne0 said:
Gracis F was my least favorite fighting system out of all the games. abyss was my favorite cause it required elements outside of just attacking. and positioning because really important. not to mention it was really fun. i really like tales of Xilia and found that it had an actual lead character that i really liked. i haven't seen a decent lead character to connect with since Symphonia. and i heard that they are re-releasing a special Tales of Symphonia 1&2 limited edition for a limited time only. i would actually like to get that. all because they have Collette and Lloyd. and i love Colette's voice actress.
Click to expand...

I can't say I liked Graces F that much either, but it some quirks which I could appreciate. Abyss is definitely a fun system with FOFs but it did have its rather broken Free Run system that saw some fixes in Vesperia. Overall I think I prefer Vesperia's polished battle system over anything else from Tales.
 
one thing i look for in the other games are speed. Vesperia just seemed so slow to me. Xillia is a bit faster so i like that. also the AI in Xillia finally do what i've been doing with other players for years. so i think the battles are a bit easier now on single player.
 
Forgot to mention one thing.

The cast listing in the trailer reveals that the composers are Motoi Sakuraba and Go Shiina.

Go Shiina, if you don't know, composed the soundtrack for Tales of Legendia. Legendia's OST is widely considered to be one of the finer Tales soundtracks.

Although there's no guarantee we'll get anything that good, as Sakuraba mentions, Tales teams tend to notify him to compose a soundtrack under an incredibly tight schedule.
 
Lots of new information has come out in the past six months, but yesterday, there was the annual Tales festival which revealed a new character (Zavida, humorously being misspelled as Zabeeda or Zabiida) , the new battle system and several new trailers.

Here's a few




I knew the Fusionic chain system would merge characters into one elementally charged super character. Can't wait to see their Mystic Arts in that form. Should be fun.
 
So I've just platinumed Tales of Zestiria, and I'm ready to give my opinion of the game. Those of you who know me, know I am very critical of the Tales series. This is my favorite JRPG series, with Tales of Phantasia being my all time favorite JRPG. I've been very sour on the 3D Tales games, so keep that in mind. I have met Hideo Baba, and he gave me a limited run mug that sits on my desk right now (http://s1.tsuki-board.net/pics/figure/large/172608.jpg?r=1399040554)

First... jeez... where do I start? Tales of Zestiria is a CATASTROPHE of a game. It reeks of lazy game design, and the idea of "yearly refresh" we see so often in games such as Call of Duty or Madden, etc. Rather than taking the time to make a good game, they are just focused on releasing a new game every year to keep the money rolling in. I'm not really going to talk about the lackluster story, which is basically "collect the 4 elements, kill the bad guy, roll credits", or the awful camera system that makes multiplayer impossible; because everyone already knows about this stuff... but there are other major problems.

Firstly, the combat. Its clearly based a bit on Graces' CC system that allowed you to continue doing moves until your CC ran out. Zestiria has a similar system with SC; but it doesn't let you continue doing moves, even if you have more SC. Basically, without lots of Exceed, there is no real advantage of having more SC; you still only get 4 attacks. The odd thing about it, is so much in the game talks about "restores SC"; but why bother, when you can just hold guard for 2 seconds and SC restores automatically. As if they simply cut-and-pasted resources from previous games, without thinking about how it actually affects the game. Lazy game design.

Its clear they tried to do some sort of "rock-paper-scissors" system with the Martial, Hidden and Seraphic Artes system. But it ends up being both confusing and restrictive. Especially since doing a Hidden Arte in the middle of a Martial Arte combo doesn't allow you to extend beyond the 4 attacks, but simply replaces one of the 4 attacks. On paper, this system sounds like it adds a lot of skill to play the game, making it more in-depth, but in reality it doesn't. Just more example of the designers just doing stuff and hoping it works out for the best; more lazy game design. Not to mention, when a weakness for an enemy says "Weak to Artes"; it has you scatching your head thinking "but aren't all attacks called artes?" They clearly mean "spells", but they didn't proofread; more cut-and-paste.

I can understand stories not being as good as previous games, but generally, gameplay in a series is supposed to get better as a series progresses. Graces probably has the best combat of all the 3D Tales games, with Xillia 2 a close second... but Zestiria takes a huge step backwards. All these combat options are irrelevant when you can just beat the game on the hardest difficulty doing nothing but spamming Ancient Nova. Enemy is resistant to fire? Who cares, someone else in your party will break open the defense and Ancient Nova will still do more damage than everything else anyways.

The sad part is, the game has small inklings of genius throughout. The 50-skill Normin system is very smart. The idea of micromanaging your weapons could have been something great... usually I'm not a fan of tying skills to weapons (one of the things I hated most in Vesperia), but the way skills transfer and are not unique to weapons made this system a lot better. In addition, creating patterns on the normin board to enhance your skills added a lot of depth to the game.

Combining this with the fusion system, that allows you to fuse weapons together to create new skills, or retain the skills you already have, could have been something great. COULD HAVE BEEN. But one fundamental problem takes this genius system, and turns it into one of the most useless and frustrating systems I've ever seen in a JRPG... and that is, not showing the normin board on the fusion screen. Because the fusion screen doesn't show the normin board, you quickly stop caring about the resulting patterns from your fusions.

Rather than wasting your time going back and forth through menus to see what the resulting pattern would be, you end up just saying "fuck it, I dont care about the resulting pattern, I just want this skill". So that genius normin board system, becomes essentially useless. So many of the problems in Zestiria could have been solved with just a little more time in QA, or some small changes to menus... but I have a feeling this game didn't really go through much QA at all.

Zestiria has neither a good story, nor good gameplay. Out of the 13 mothership titles I have played, I would put this game second from the bottom, right between Symphonia and Abyss... at least it wasn't as bad as Abyss.
 
How many Team Destiny games have you played? Because Zestiria is a Destiny game through and through.

Destiny games like Zestiria, Rebirth, and Graces tend to be less polished and more experimental in the gameplay department and with less focus on story and character. Team Symphonia games tend to push iterative design elements and focus more on characterization and development over other elements.

The results usually speak for themselves, but the games have both their and and low points. From what I've seen, most Japanese fans tend to prefer Team Symphonia games like Symphonia, Abyss and Vesperia (despite being low sellers, they do get a huge fanbase on the resell market). American or Western fans seem to enjoy Team Destiny games, despite not having played them before or playing older games that don't really signify the split between the team's style in the later entries.

Players seem to applaud the Graces battle system for the CC mechanic, but glaze over the host of issues with the Graces battle system. Uneven pacing in random battles, broken boss mechanics, and extremely punishing of aggressive play styles (score a 99-hit combo on a boss? Watch how their meter goes up faster than yours). Not to mention the difficulty settings.

I think that Team Destiny did do extremely well with Tales of Destiny Remake (aside from some of the bosses), but it seems to be the only game from Japanese and American fans who played it, universal praise.


On that note, I do want to mention that Team Symphonia and Team Destiny have since disappeared after Tales Studio was reincorporated into Namco. What remains of Tales Studio now is largely a team of members who worked on the original Tales of Hearts game and began emulating the styles of the older teams. Xillia has more Symphonia style to it, while Zestiria is more Destiny-styled. Hideo Baba, since taking over the Tales franchise has attempted to merge the two team styles and bring in mechanics from both teams (and artists) as a way of catering to fans, and I think he's done a pretty good job. That said, I do hope Director Higuchi (Destiny 2, Vesperia, Abyss, Symphonia) would come back and make another Tales game. He's shown to be a far more competent director.
 
I much prefer the older titles, tighter stories, that dont make you wait 15 hours to get interesting.

Tales of Phantasia
Tales of Rebirth
Tales of Destiny
Tales of Eternia
Tales of Destiny 2
Tales of Graces
Tales of Legendia
Tales of Vesperia
Tales of Xillia 2
Tales of Xillia
Tales of Symphonia
Tales of Zestiria
Tales of the Abyss

I also know that Graces had a TERRIBLE story... but the combat was just so good that it didn't matter. The game was straight up fun.
 
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