Tales of Legendia.

Originally Posted by yangxu

Do you mind giving me the link to their official forum? I can't seem to find it on the website... =/

http://tales.namco.com/forums

The topic in particular is here

The part of his post in regards to CQ.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy Critter

"WHY IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY WOULD YOU IDIOTS DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT?"

It's not because we enjoy it.

The Tales series has a solid track record in Japan. Legendia had somewhere around twice the amount of voiceover of previous installments, which you can do when you have evidence that it will pay off.

Tales in the US, though, has a somewhat spotty record. Symphonia did really well, but Destiny I and II didn't. Legendia was developed for PS2, a platform that has its share of RPGs, and in the US it is the first PS2 Tales game. (I don't want to get into a platform battle here. It is what it is.)

There were a lot of unknowns around how Legendia would do here, which meant that we couldn't justify the jump in voiceover quantity. Cuts were on the table from day one.

WHY THE CHARACTER QUESTS?

The fact that cuts were made was not my call. Something was going to get cut regardless of what I thought. In the end, though, what got cut...yeah, that was my call.

The Japanese version was still in development when we first started talking about localizing Legendia for the US. The decision of what to cut had to be made early on, so I couldn't play through the entire game and see exactly what they were. My understanding here then, was that the CQ were side quests, just addition content for the people who want to know more about the characters that would be like an unlocked start menu item once you cleared the "real" game.

So the fact that there was a lot of voicework devoted to side quests made that section especially vulnerable.

Jam it back in, in the dark.