Dec 212020
As I mentioned before, the Tales anniversary live stream came and went without any announcements, only the promise that next year will be more exciting.
However, the celebration has made some of us hope against hope that we might get remasters of older Tales games… or even localizations of one that were never released outside of Japan.
From December 15 through December 19, the official Tales Twitter account celebrated its history. They started with Tales of Phantasia, the first game in the series, and continued on in order, looking at one game per day.
For each game, they tweeted a trailer and details about some of the major characters.
This first got fans’ attentions because each trailer begins with a PEGI 12 rating, even for games that were never released in Europe. However, it’s possible they simply wanted to rate the trailer content itself.
But then on the fourth day, we reached one of the unlocalized Tales games, Tales of Destiny 2.
(The game released in English under that title was actually Tales of Eternia.)
They didn’t treat Tales of Destiny 2 any differently. The English Twitter account tweeted about it with an English trailer and invited fans to “appreciate” this game we’ve never had a chance to play, and Bandai Namco US retweeted it (although Bandai Namco EU did not).
Now, it’s not like they made a full English trailer for this; these trailers feature dialogue-free gameplay sections and scenes broken up by a few narration-style English lines. But still, it’s almost mean-spirited for the English Twitter account to include a game we’ll never be able to play.
I expected them to keep tweeting a game a day until they reached the end of the series, but their Tales of Symphonia tweet said it was the end of the anniversary week and they would “continue next year with more revivals.” I’m not sure if that means they’ll resume in January or not.
So what do you think? Are they planning a Tales Anniversary Collection? Are they going to re-release and localize games like Tales of Destiny 2? Or did they just decide to highlight every game, even for an audience that never got them? (It’s probably that.)
Meanwhile, I have a lot of Tales games to catch up on already… Maybe I should work on those while I hope for news.