Namco-Bandai Continues to Bring Tales Stateside
- Scribbled on June 10th, 2008 by Jonathon Howard
- Filed in Microsoft Xbox 360, Press Release, RPG, Release Date(s)
More news coming out of Microsoft’s RPG Press Conference: Namco-Bandai’s announced Tales of Vesperia will be coming to the U.S. of A this August with a European release in early ‘09. Vesperia is Namco-Bandai’s first Xbox 360 JPRG and from the screenshots it doesn’t look to stray from the formula that has made Tales games so successful: Beautiful character design, colorful and cheerful atmosphere, and a combat heavy game-play.
The combat in Vesperia is an evolved form of that seen in the 2006’s Tales’ game, Tales of the Abyss which is called (a mouthful) the “Evolved Flex-Range Linear Motion Battle System”. Battles take place on a 3d field in real time, and the combat flows naturally as your party advances and retreats. Also returning is the “overlimit” gauge, which can be split up between party members or stacked onto a single character, the gauges have different effects depending on how they’ve been allocated, like blocking a special attack or making the character invulnerable. Also new is a customizable combo system.
Namco-Bandai has been hush-hush with the actual story of Vesperia and not much can be gleaned from the character profiles, here is what we know: You play as Yuri a young man bored with provincial life, yearning to explore more of the world (sound familiar?) Yuri gets himself thrown in prison where he meets a beautiful young woman who is naïve and doesn’t quite understand how large the world is, oh she also has healing magic (sound familiar?). The two set off on a epic journey that might involve a long lost race of highly advanced people (also, sound familiar?)
I have to say I’m impressed with how Microsoft has really gone after JRPGs and Japanese developers in general.
June 15th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
[...] days ago Microsoft and Square-Enix had a big press conference in Japan - you can read about it here and here. At said press conference, Microsoft touted the exclusivity of two of the titles, Tales of [...]