What went wrong with the Tales Of series?

What went wrong with the Tales Of series?

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Baba

he left a long time ago.

There hasn't been a new game since he left. Bereseria was mostly developed alongside Zest.

It's your fault, you didn't buy Vesperia, Zestiria and Berseria in all plats.

Ran out of new, good ideas. Coasted on success after success with only iterative improvement until the well eventually went dry and there was no where to change or expand to. And they never had the same kind of polish and sheer nostalgia factor you see with something like Dragon Quest, which can basically get away with making the same game over and over because they know they have an entire install base that not only likes the way they are but would revolt if they ever did try to change. Tales assumed they had the same, but really all they had were a bunch of people who thought Tales of Symphonia was pretty neat and exotic when they were teenagers and had only played Final Fantasy but eventually got tired of playing the exact same game every few years.

No new 2D games.
I want the Sonic Mania team do it.

I bought Zestiria and god I wish I didn't
Bought Berseria too and that game and it's gameplay was boring as shit.

The writing also felt like it was getting worse from release to release. Or maybe I'm getting more jaded.

I pre-ordered Zestiria, it was the first Tales game on Steam, I was hyped, then not.

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Part of it I think has to do with building up a tolerance to the Tale's series heavy reliance on using the same anime tropes and story beats every game. They don't change enough, eventually you just get a "I've seen it all before" vibe which can take a lot of the appeal out of a story even if it's otherwise done well.
That said, I went back and played through Vesperia again after the rerelease and I still enjoy it's story and characters much, much more than any of the more modern Tales games despite not having played it in about 10 years. So maybe there is some truth to the writing just getting worse in general.

Last good Tales game was Symphonia.

Baba and his shit waifu.

everything

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not enough zagi

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Beat Tales of vesperia for the first time a few weeks ago, is it true Aifread shows up in most Tales games?

It never quite had the budget or mass appeal to truly shine. Even games like Vesperia and Symphonia are 8/10 at best.

>a rival just for the sake of having a rival
I both love and hate this trope.

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>Gameplay
It's the move away from pseudo-fighting game 2d line fights into 3d that has diluted the core appeal of the gameplay. There's a nice feel of fighting in a 2d cross-section, even when the battle itself is 3d, that makes moves and the flow of battle easy to plan around.
>Mechanics
Character progression gets more complex with new subsystems in every game and a lot of them take stupid amounts of time investment just to develop your characters properly.
>Story
The tropes are as heavy as ever, but they draw from more modern influences and don't resonate with you like they did when you were younger. I personally think the modern anime storytelling styles are shit but that's just my opinion.
>Characters
Everyone is just... Shallow. Starting with Abyss and onward characters are entirely built around one feature and the eventual subversion of it in a (usually) predictable manner. This works fine in the earlier games but they just get shallower and shallower in later games. Mascot characters are getting objectively shittier too.

Xillia was their highest selling game so they tried to keep on making games similar to that one
I dunno how or why it was their most successful when it was one of their more mediocre titles but since then they have been the using the same graphics engine, same type of boring color choices and boring environments, and every game since has had that Xillia feel to it of being just mediocre in terms of actual gameplay
The people that are in charge in the direction Tales headed are just corporate heads trying to make profits with their characters, merchandise, phones games, etc
It's no longer about improving upon each game and making something passion, its about making a game with a known name on it to make money

In other words, Bamco doesn't care anymore because their shit will still sell

Symphonia happened and made the series as mainstream as it could be at the time, but Namco failed to capitalize on it.

So, we have a really meh series with nothing but average tier releases. At least we don't have to wait fucking 10 years between releases like with Square, but they could put an additional 6 months into each game to push them to the next level or something...

I like Berseria a lot, but I heard that's the best the AI has ever been and it was pure shit, so I'm not touching the other ones.

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