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The story
On 5ch’s Hardware/Industry board, a discussion broke out over why Bandai Namco’s popular “Tales of” RPG series hasn’t had a proper new entry in recent years. Posters pointed to competition from Chinese RPGs like Genshin Impact and frustration with the sales strategy of skipping Nintendo platforms for new releases, while opinions split over comparisons of worldwide cumulative sales with the Persona series.
What people said
Now you don't even hear the word "Tales" anymore.
If you're just trying to clear it, you just spam your strongest move over and over, and the newer games even have pay-to-win moves now, which kills the mood.
Flashing microtransaction banners mid-game is the height of stupidity.
And now there's no new game at all.
and then a steady stream of other Chinese games kept popping up after that.
The odds are stacked way too high against launching a brand-new mainline entry to compete now.
On top of that, I think it'd end up fighting over fans with idolmaster.
What Bandai Namco should really be doing is developing games aimed at elementary and middle school boys.
It's not just Tales—Final Fantasy and every other third party fixated on "garbage-station" (PlayStation) are all turning into dead content for the same reason.
Makes sense—he's got a track record of carefully running God Eater (GE) into the ground too.
I still haven't forgiven them for never releasing Rage Burst for PSP.
I just can't bring myself to pick one up anymore.
Remasters do come out, but since everyone knows new entries won't come to Nintendo hardware, they don't sell all that well.
Being that energetic/prolific was actually a good thing back then.
Though typing it out now, it just reads badly lol
Tales scenarios have always been written by men.
The one exception is Destiny 2, credited to the writing collective "Koubou Gekkou," so there might've been a woman in there somewhere, but that's about it.
Xenoblade's got a new entry coming out next year after all.
Though it's not generating any buzz at all lol
JRPGs don't sell these days anyway, so they should ditch the genre and put out a Dragon Ball RPG instead—way better move.
It'd be bad if it just reinforced the image that Bandai Namco is a company with nothing but Dragon Ball and Gundam.
It's seriously about as by-the-book/classic as it gets.
If that wasn't good enough, then literally every JRPG is doomed.
Being "classic" is Arise's only real virtue.
It's like a 5/10 on story, 5/10 on characters, 5/10 on combat—
you never feel the developers' passion, that "this is what we love" energy.
On that front, I personally found Star Ocean 6 more interesting.
> The Persona 5 series surpassed 10 million units in worldwide cumulative sales as of December 2023
—that's what they say, but if you break it down:
> Persona 5 (original): 3.2 million+ worldwide
> Persona 5 Royal (P5R): 4 million+ worldwide (including ports)
> Persona 5 Scramble (P5S): 2 million+ worldwide
I'd guess most of that is the same people buying multiple versions.
So in the end, the actual number of unique buyers probably tops out somewhere between 4 and, at most, 5 million.
Well, that's still obviously more than Tales, but on a global scale it's not exactly a runaway smash hit either.
Right now it's 3.2 million for the original + 8.66 million for the complete edition, so 11.86 million total.
I bet the complete edition alone will hit 10 million by next year.
Tales in particular seems to have taken a direct hit from Chinese games.
Yeah, anime-style characters with lightweight action combat—that's a pretty exact overlap.
——Let me push on just one more thing. Some users have suggested that the scenario may have been altered out of favoritism toward a particular voice actor…?
Baba: That is absolutely not the case. The story and gameplay of the "Tales of" series are built by the entire development team through repeated discussion. If I or certain staff members had let personal feelings or pressure influence things, the team itself would have fallen apart, and there's no way we could have kept the "Tales of" series going to this day. Past, present, and future, the team has always developed these games together as one.
> At the end of the "After Episode," a "To be continued." message appears—that's meant to indicate it leads into the ending of the main Zestiria story.
People were just mocking the abrupt, thrown-together ending as a "To be continued," it's not like that message actually shows up in-game…
The plan is to only put ports on Nintendo hardware, withhold new entries as a "serves you right," and funnel customers to the PS5—but that's probably not going to work.
This isn't the time to be saying "Patalliro's selling, let's rip that off."
What's the point of asking if people buy something that only creepy otaku ever bought to begin with.
Background and Key Points
The “Tales of” series is Bandai Namco’s other long-running console RPG franchise, alongside Persona at rival Atlus — it began with Tales of Phantasia in 1995 and became known for near-annual mainline releases through the 2000s and 2010s under producer Hideo Baba, plus a steady stream of remasters and side entries. That release rhythm broke down after Baba’s departure from the company around 2018, and Tales of Arise, released in 2021 to solid reviews and reportedly over 2 million copies sold, is still the most recent mainline game — nothing new has been announced since. The series also quietly dropped Nintendo hardware support for new entries starting in the PS3-era Xillia, unlike stablemates such as Final Fantasy that still cross platforms.
The thread doesn’t actually agree on why Tales stalled. Some blame Bandai Namco’s platform strategy of chasing PlayStation exclusivity while Nintendo hardware only gets old ports; others blame competition from free-to-play Chinese anime-style RPGs like Genshin Impact, which target the same visual and combat niche at zero upfront cost; still others think Arise itself was mediocre — “5/10 across the board” — while a counter-camp insists Arise is a perfectly solid, classic JRPG and that damning it means the whole genre is doomed.
What’s easy to miss without Japanese-market context: the “new” titles posters cite, Tales of the Shire and Tales of Kenzera, aren’t mainline Bandai Namco RPGs at all — Shire is a Lord of the Rings life-sim spinoff and Kenzera is an unrelated Surgent Studios game that merely shares the word “Tales.” Neither answers the thread’s actual complaint.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Why Has Tales Become Such Washed-Up Content, or “Owakon” for Short???.”
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