It's been back-to-back disappointments for Tales fans. Bandai Namco, publisher of the long-running JRPG series, broke hearts last month when a teaser for an anime-style RPG turned out to be a Sword Art Online game, and now a hyped announcement for Tales' 30th anniversary has offered similarly disappointing results.
This 30th anniversary Tales announcement was first teased back in February by anime studio Ufotable. The fact that this teaser was coming from an anime company rather than Bandai Namco itself meant that it was always unlikely to be a new game announcement, but Ufotable has created cutscenes for numerous Tales games, and has even worked on a few smaller animated Tales projects. Something like, say, a full anime adaptation of one of the Tales games wasn't out of the question.
Instead, after more than a month of anticipation, Ufotable announced 188 anime-style Tales illustrations and a concert to be held in Japan in May. In isolation, those would both be nice enough announcements for series fans. But as it often does, hype had already boiled over, and Tales fanatics were largely left cold by the news.
"The way they hype things up is just terrible," as one Japanese fan lamented in a tweet translated by Automaton. That person concludes, "the Tales series itself has fallen so far out of favor that the fans’ frustration is at an alarming level… "
Another says, "If they hadn’t done an announcement of an announcement for this and just shadow dropped it instead, everyone would have been thrilled by this."
You'll see similar sentiments from fans in the West on places like Reddit, where the series' 30th anniversary is being lamented as "a disaster."
It's closing in on five years since the launch of Tales of Arise, the most recent entry in the series, and with no new entry yet announced, we're likely about to see the largest gap between new Tales games since the franchise launched in the '90s. It's possible a new game may get announced as part of Summer Game Fest in June, but I don't blame anybody for not wanting to hold their breath after getting burned multiple times over.
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