Tales of Abyss - US Bound
 

2006: The Year of the PS2 RPG.

Yet another high profile RPG coming to the US and believe or not it's a Tales game!

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/rpg/tale...ml?sid=6148428

And here is a nice new trend! New content promised for the US release:

First Rogue Galaxy and now Tales of the Abyss. I think I just wet myself. ;_______________;

oh, hell ya! there is a god!! I didnt think this would get an NA release.. im so happy right now, almost into tears :P

So now I wonder what the US exclusive content will be. I'd rather them skip exclusive content and voice the ENTIRE game this time. ToL had half the voice content missing which were missing from the character quests. That was pretty disappointing to me at least. But if they are adding additional content then maybe they're taking this game seriously and there won't be any budget cuts.

I don't care much about new weapons, but extra skits and sidequests would be nice.

Hopefully this won't be an issue. This game should benefit from the giant localization staff reworking Bandai did with Namco USA. They'll also have the huge voice cast resources from Bandai's US anime division as well which wasn't available when Legendia was going though localization.

all i care about is the loading times.. and framerate issues on the overworld map. other than that.. im cool, im stoked to just play it!

That's nothing. I came like three times.

Ugh, another 3D Tales game?

I wanted Tales of Rebirth. That had some high-quality 2D spritework.

I wouldn't be too annoyed-- Tales of the Abyss is not like Legendia. While it's no Rebirth, I admit, it's an excellent game.

Abyss is better than Rebirth. Man, you guys are no better than GameFAQs in this regard. We're getting one of the best Tales games ever (the 10th anniversary game, no less,) and everywhere I look I see responses like "...I wish it was Rebirth."

It kills me that 90% of the people saying that have never even played the game and only want it because OMFG HIGH QUALITY 2D GRPHXS. I've played both, and Abyss is by far the better game. AND I've never even finished Abyss. I did finish Rebirth though, and had absolutely no will to play through it again with the gradeshop.

Kiss my hairy white ass. The only Tales game I haven't played is Tales of Tactics, and I still think Rebirth is better than Abyss. Rebirth is absolutely perfect in almost every regard to gameplay-- loading times, speed, comboing, camera, and hit detection all work beautifully. Story isn't exactly stellar, but now you sort of expect racism to always have a role in Tales games.

Abyss, though not to same degree, has a lot of the problems Symphonia has. Plus you have to tack on the loading times.

I was mostly directing it at this comment, which proved what I said...

In any case, I highly anticipated Rebirth and I did have some fun with it. Of course, I only used the same 4 characters the entire game (refused to use Mao and Tytree because of how they look, so sue me) and even then I still didn't like them very much. IMO no Tales cast of characters is better than Legendia's, and I haven't played Symphonia more than 1 hour so I can't compare Abyss to that.

The gameplay was fun but I still like Destiny 2's battle system better (it's extremely fast), and the fact that hi-ougis in Rebirth were finishing moves made me very sad. I also don't think there were enough skills to use in battle and they weren't exciting/flashy enough.

Abyss had better music, at least. (less Tamura, more Sakuraba)

From the screenshots, it looks like a combination of Symphonia and Legendia.
But damn, Rebirth does have some very pretty sprites. I'd love to see both come over.

Admittedly, just as far as graphics are concerned, Rebirth does look a bit more "fresh" while Abyss looks a whole lot like Symphonia and Legendia have a love-child. But I'll take whichever I can get.

Amazing. It's a very good thing that I picked up a Swap Magic just recently. I don't have the cash to spend on all of these RPGs :(

Doesn't prove shit. All that proves is that he thought the game's 2D sprites were pretty.

For me, Rebirth's was my favorite cast. Not great, but I've always thought the Tales series was weak in this regard. I don't see how someone can dislike Tytree, though. Mao definitely, and Annie yes (though she's a must for battle), but Tytree was awesomeness personified.

Destiny 2 was fast, but the Stamina system made things a chore (attack, run back, guard till bar replenishes, repeat). You could ignore it until it was empty, but that pretty much guaranteed negative GRADE. Not to mention the single line thing for battle is getting boring. As for the hi-ougis, I share your sentiment to some degree, but I like the idea of not having to play the game three times over to obtain them all. If Majin Rengoku Satsu wasn't worth it, nothing else is going to be. With regular skills, I thought they were flashy, but toned down just enough to not be distracting. I hated being interrupted in Destiny 2 by Harold or Reala when they were casting Crazy Comet and Execution, which was all the time.

Finally, I also kind of agree with the music. I thought some tracks in Rebirth were great, but Abyss had a great soundtrack for having those cool remixes.

Right. I said there's a disturbing trend in people saying "I wish we had Rebirth in North America" who seem to base that want entirely on the 2D graphics. He also dismissed the game (Abyss) just because it is in 3D, as most games are these days.

Anyway... I could watch the entire Crazy Comet chain 10,000 times and never get bored of it. Oh well.

You missed my point there. What I'm saying is that, with the evidence shown, all you can prove is that he would have preferred Tales of Rebirth, and one of possibly many reasons is because he thought the 2D graphics were nice.

You're assuming anything else.

I don't think I outright assumed anything about that poster or about you. If I did, well then I didn't mean to offend. I just made a very general statement. Isn't this getting off topic, anyway?... umm, let's be friends! :)

Namco US would not bring something that didn't even make a hit in Japan... Rebirth is probably the only Tales game that did not make it into the "Playstation 2 THE BEST" series, meaning that its sales record is pretty low.

I didn't like Abyss that much, but at least it's got a much more interesting storyline than Rebirth, and the fact that you can run freely around the battle area like Star Ocean is definitely an appealing factor to fans.

Namco US no longer exists. It has been completely replaced by Bandai Entertainment staff which tend to have different views on US releases.

Hell yeah. I'm surprised as to how many people are taking this news so amazingly. Blogged about it this morning and I'm finding nothing but love for Abyss.

Time to buy it a second time!

(Anyone wonder what'll happen to Karma?)

Im really wondering about this exsculsive stuff, for the NA version. I think it would be cool to have an optional dungeon, or optional boss or 2.

An optional dungeon would be pretty awesome if it were done à la Dawn of Souls style with optional bosses from past foes from the series.

Even more good RPG news. I've only played Tales of Symphonia and Phantasia and I've found them entertaining. I haven't got to Legendia but I'll probably get around to it after clearing more of my back log and when it gets to around $20. None the less, I'm looking forward to it.

I'm so looking forward to this it isn't even funny really, when I saw the initial screens for Abyss back in the day I thought to myself how hot the game looked just with the artwork and initial screens. Then it was skipped over for Legendia, leading to ANGUISH.

But no more, this is great news. The question is how much of my backlog can I vanquish before this is released though.

Wasn't skipped over... they decided to bring Legendia here before they even knew Abyss existed.

Well that's interesting. I was concerned we'd lose it like we have with Rebirth and Destiny II PS2 anyway. Suppose that isn't the case here, so all is well in the end.

It is interesting though to see Legendia and Abyss released four months from each other in Japan and to have the US localization company NOT know about Abyss if that were the case, but eh.

Good lord, I love you Namco. Looks like my pleading letters actaully got us somewhere, eh? Eh?... Well, probably not, but still, this is the most friggen awsome news I've heard in quite some time. Better than the Rogue Galaxy news even. I love the Tales series, and I was even on the verge of importing this one but now, looks like I can wait.

Wow, Im so excited. I feel kinda bad that I haven't gotten a chance to finish Legendia though, with the school and the physics and the calculus and what not. But now that summer's here, Im gonna replay Legendia the way it should have been months ago.

Im surprised though, Namco wasn't one to give us Americans a second shot, back when Tales of Destiny 2 (not Eternia for those two of you that don't know this) years ago. Even more recently, Tales of Symphonia is said to not have sold up to expectations (for shame its my absolute favorite). But look at us now, we got Legendia, Phantasia for the first time, and now we're getting Abyss. How absolutlely fabulous is that!? Its absolutlely absolultely fabulous, thats how much!

Hey, maybe if we all dream hard enough, Namco will bring us ToD 2, and Rebirth as well. That would be the day I could die, well, atleast be wounded, a happy man.

I didn't have a doubt that Abyss would come stateside. One reason is that it is one of the best games in the series - because of that I believed some high-quality localization work and smart marketing will yield many sales. In addition to that, Abyss may capture the interest of many new players to the series - increasing the Tales fanbase. Similar in fashion to the amount of people who got into the Zelda series after the release of Ocarina of Time, or the people who got interested in Final Fantasy after the release of Final Fantasy VII.

I'm looking forward to the extra content that is mentioned - this teaser builds up a lot of hype, so I'm convinced their extra content will not be half-assed. Thus, I'm looking forward to it!

They didn't even know that the character quests were a major part of the game, so that wouldn't surprise me at all.

What? I'm pretty sure the high sales with this game was actually quite shocking for Namco. The game is even a 20 Dollar Players Choice at this point and kinda easy to find.

Maybe you're right Miles, but one has to admit that there the Cube hasn't fared well for RPGs in general. Thats why I don't doubt the low-sales thing, and its just something I've read and discussed in other forums. Thats why, or so they say, the PS2 version of Symphonia wasn't released stateside. Which, I don't know about everyone else but I would have re bought that game in a flash just for the extra contnet.

It not getting many RPGs doesn't have anything to do with sales. In fact, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door just became a Player's Choice.

The PS2 version did not come over because it was the exact same fucking game half a year later, but with a few added extras and shitty load times. There you go.

Alright, I wasn't stating my post as fact. Sorry, I was worng.

But on a completely different topic, what dictates something becoming "Player's Choice" anyway? Atleast back in the day of the SNES, games were cheapened, and labeled "Millions Seller" which is very straight forward. Who knows if Player's Choice is actually "We printed way too many." Any ideas anyone?

If it were like that, Skies of Arcadia: Legends would've become a Player's Choice.

It means demand exceeded supply and they reprinted the game on a large scale to accommodate it.

ToS was ridiculously popular. Fuck, it still is. Go trot your ass to gamefaqs and see for yourself. The forum for it there is still very active despite the game no longer being new. (Most forums are active for a few months and then die terrible deaths) The Gamecube doesn't have trouble selling RPGs, it has issues when it comes to bothering to release any. I honestly can't even think of any RPGs on the console outside of ToS, Baten Kaitos, FF:CC and I guess Fire Emblem if you are counting SRPGs along with them.

Well, atleast it's good to know that this' headed to the U.S :). Which we'll no doubt be having similar Tales actors of the past. Like with Came Clarke (which he did work in Symphonia and Legendia).

Though, Generic Badass. If you have a severe hate towards Abyss, why do you even come here then? I mean, isn't this a topic for fans. That will get them psyched up and wanting to play this game.