Mar 272024
After my mixed feelings on Tales of Arise, I still haven’t bought the DLC, but I’ve nevertheless been looking forward to news from the Tales series.
Well, this isn’t exactly the news I’d hoped for.
Several older Tales games have been delisted from PSN without warning. After seeing a Reddit post about it, I took a look for myself to confirm it.
In North America, Tales of Symphonia Chronicles has been delisted, although you can still purchase Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World separately. In the reverse of that, Tales of Xillia and Tales of Graces f can be bought together as a bundle, but aren’t available separately. Tales of Xillia 2 has been delisted completely, as has Tales of Hearts R for the Vita.
According to the online reports, similar delistings have occurred in the European and Japanese stores as well.
Bandai Namco hasn’t made any official statement about the games being delisted yet, so it’s not clear if this was intentional or just an oversight. The most optimistic take would be that they delisted them in preparation for bringing them all to modern platforms… but I don’t feel even that optimistic, especially when what’s been delisted is so inconsistent.
However, next year is the 30th anniversary of the Tales series. Maybe they’ll surprise us after all.
Now my backlog is overflowing with Tales games, because I bought all the games that were available at the time, so the games being delisted doesn’t affect me personally. But as a Tales fan, it’s sad to see a number of the games suddenly become that much harder for players to get.
They probably are just going to modernize them, right? I mean it would be weird to take them down otherwise, it’s such a popular series that they probably still sell pretty well.
That’s the optimistic outlook, but the lack of any announcement about it makes it concerning.