Tales series producer Hideo Baba has been making waves in a pair of interviews. In conversations with Digital Spy and JPGames.de, Baba gave insight to numerous issues in the Tales series, including decisions on localization.
On why Tales of Vesperia (PS3 version) and Tales of Innocence R weren’t released in the West:
Actually, the team is working on many titles and they have to release them in Japan, so the timing is very important. And also the localization is a big challenge with many problems for the team. I would love to release those two titles on the western market, but the timing and the feedback from western branches were not very good at that time. So this is the reason why those games did not make it to the West.
On why Tales of Vesperia came over on Xbox 360 but not PS3:
Tales of Vesperia was the first title in the series which was planned to be released simultaneously in Japan, North America and Europe. This was very difficult and it was such a heavy burden for the team. So for the PS3 version, it was decided to reduce this burden and to develop it just for Japan.
But the one issue that has gamers excited was his confirmation that there are remakes to older Tales games being worked on.
“We are planning to re-release old games to other platforms in the future, because the old games have some origin and offer standard features of the Tales series,” Baba confirmed to Digital Spy.
This will not be the first time a Tales game has been remade for newer consoles. The first remake came in the form of Tales of Phantasia, originally on the Super Famicom and re-released numerous times from the original PlayStation to the PlayStation Portable as recently as 2010. In this past year, Tales of the Abyss was released for the first time worldwide on the Nintendo 3DS, six years after releasing on the PlayStation 2.
This information also comes less than a week after NAMCO BANDAI confirmed the western release of Tales of Xillia (available next year) and nearly a month after they revealed Tales of Xillia 2 (expected to release in Japan this November; no confirmation on whether it will release in the west).
So, what Tales games do you want to see re-released?
