Celebrating 20 years of the Tales of. series, publisher Namco Bandai Games held a special live stream to look back at the franchise’s successful past. Of course, what kind of special event would this be if they didn’t announced the next big installment in the series: Tales of Zestiria. The game is the 20th Japanese anniversary commemorative title and will be releasing on the PlayStation 3. Namco Bandai also revealed that the game will have a worldwide release, so we won’t see a massive time gap between the Japanese and Western release, hopefully none at all. No release date has been announced so far but a 2014 release date can be assumed.
Tales of Zestiria will be the 15th main title in the series and will return to its root fantasy setting, after the last few games are set in a science fiction esque world, where dragons will play an important role. The game will have an emphasis on choice, exploration and variety of terrain. In order to create a visually appealing game, Tales of Zestiria will have all previous character designers: Mutsumi Inomata, Kosuke Fujishima, Daigo Okumura, and Minoru Iwamoto. The battle system will be designed by Tatsuro Udo who also did the battle system of Tales of Graces. Animation studio ufotable will be producing the opening and animated cutscenes, they have been doing so since Tales of Xillia.
Tales of Zestiria follows Alicia and Slay, the former being part of a royal family. There has also been a bunch of screenshots released for the game showcasing the game’s characters, open world and its beautiful environments.
The first promotional video for the game was also revealed:
The announcement for the worldwide release was in response to strong sales of the international release of Tales of Xillia, where it sold over a million copies to date. Additionally, the game’s sequel will also be coming overseas later this year. And top this off, Tales of Symphonia Chronicles will be releasing on the PlayStation 3 later this month in North America and Europe. The game features a HD remaster of Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. So the Tales of. series is gaining a lot of traction outside of Japan.
The Tales of. started in 1995 with the release of Tales of Phantasia on the Super Famicom (SNES). The game was developed by Wolf Team, who are now known as Namco Tales Studio and published by Namco. The game received a positive reception and has allowed more games in the series to be developed. To date, there are fourteen games in the main series with over 10 spin-off titles. While the Tales of. enjoys high sales within Japan, the popularity of the series overseas has been rocky. Though, in the last decade the series has been gaining more popularity outside of Japan. There are also four anime series based on separate entries in the series, as well as an animated film, Tales of Vesperia: The First Strike, released in 2009. To date, Namco Bandai has announced that the series has sold over 15 million titles.
Tales of Zestiria will be releasing on the PlayStation 3 in Japan, North America and Europe. There is no confirmed release date so far but a late 2014 is speculated.
Source Article – Siliconera
Source Images – Siliconera
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