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INTEREST: Producer: Western Audience Influenced Tales of Arise

TheWolfhart wrote:

The Vesperia Definitive Edition was the most recent release, which most people think it's the best game of the series, but the previous one was the newest core game Tales of Berseria and it was great too. It had a very good reception in case you want to compare personal opinion vs consensus. It is my understanding that people enjoy the Tales of series because of the gameplay mechanics. I certainly do and it's one of my favorites overall. It is well known among other JRPGs to be action-oriented instead of turn-based. If you or anyone wants to call it generic then please point me to others with the same style of gameplay because I'd be more than happy to play them.

Trying to play Vesperia again after Berseria is really hard for me. It's so stiff and slow compared to the more recent entries. Even Graces which came out a year later had a much more refined combat system than Vesperia, or at least the Graces F port did. I never played the original Wii version, maybe the Wii version was just as bad.

Gameplay is important but story and characters are also important for any RPG. Tales always has great characters. If someone doesn't like anime then I guess they don't like anime style characters and stories. But for those of us that do, Tales has kept that element which other franchises like Final Fantasy have lost over the years in their strive for more realism and down-to-earth characters.

Grimvice - Bishounen and bishoujo are Tales' main selling point for me. Persona is a great game but the artwork isn't that pretty.

Can't stand spending hours for playing when staring at ugly characters. It was the main reason I ditched Mass Effect trilogy, because the characters looked so disgusting

(the fish like alien and the alien with ugly mouth/teeth in particular).

That being said, I feel like starting with FF13 the FF games have becoming more western, FF 15 they really pushed it,

It kind of reminds me of the same condrum with the riske games. The games like Senran and Omega, are catered to a specific group, they want that nudity and ecchi. By trying to censor these games, to somehow appeal to a broader group,

Did that Tales producer actually talk about Western *audiences* being an influence? Because by his quotes in the article, it looks and sounds to me like the Tales team pulled influences from Western game design, not so much from what they thought a Western audience would like. Hence, the adoption of Unreal and the more realistic open world systems they seem to be hinting at.

This really doesn't have to be the automatic bad thing some people are assuming.

doctordoom85 wrote:

This really doesn't have to be the automatic bad thing some people are assuming.

Japanese community always consider it as a bad thing. Fans were not happy with Star Ocean 5 and expressed complaints at Square-Enix for it. Ogawa san said western gamers do not enjoy watching cutscenes or seeing panties so he removed cutscenes and add bigger panties to a character in the game. Fans disliked how linear FF13 was which were made because Toriyama-san said linear games like Call of Duty were popular in the west and western fans did not enjoy going into towns and buying items, exploring towns and talking to people. Western gamers want constant action and a linear path to follow that is full of action. Both fans and game developers have been criticizing all of Sony for adopting American sensibilities about game content. Games that borrow from the west are heavily criticized by the fans here.

Western gamers want constant action and a linear path to follow that is full of action.

shabu shabu wrote:

Western gamers want constant action and a linear path to follow that is full of action.

Yeah, because the big difference between the current Big Thing in Western touchstone fantasy games like Skyrim are how linear and relentlessly on rails they are, versus all those good old Tales games which are widely known for their branching, wide open worlds that can be explored in any order and let the player basically control what the plot, characters, even goals of the game are.

Wait.

Final Fantasy XIII predates Skyrim by 2 years. Believe it or not, open world games weren't always a thing in the western market. Remember, this was early PS3/360 era. Think Gears of War, Bioshock, Call of Duty, Halo. Hell, Fallout 3 had barely came out a year before Final Fantasy XIII did. Even today, there's still plenty of linear games like Uncharted, Last of Us and Call of Duty, God of War, Tomb Raider. Some of them might have slightly open hub areas to explore at times, but they're largely linear experiences. Or as they usually call them, cinematic experiences.

Okay, but Elder Scrolls 3 and 4 came out well before Final Fantasy XIII.

Also, what, there suddenly aren't linear Japanese games? I didn't realize Legend of Zelda was so heavily western-inspired until Breath of the Wild came out. Metal Gear, what a completely western series until the 5th game. And we all know Japanese game fans hate the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series.

Seriously, see how quickly these generalizations fall apart? Also, funny thing, The Last of Us, an EXTREMELY Western game, sold very well in Japan, and that was in spite of its CERO Z rating which normally hurts sales in Japan.

Did that Tales producer actually talk about Western *audiences* being an influence? Because by his quotes in the article, it looks and sounds to me like the Tales team pulled influences from Western game design, not so much from what they thought a Western audience would like. Hence, the adoption of Unreal and the more realistic open world systems they seem to be hinting at.

HeWhoSlapsAll wrote:

You notice how you had to go back to Symphonia and Vesperia? Why not praise the games the came afterwards? Sounds like their formula has run it's course.

That sounds pretty hypocritical considering the amount of Elder Scrolls and Fallout fans I see constantly dump on Bethesda for their handling of those franchises for the past 10 years, and people insisting Witcher is the only good RPG game and keep bringing it up after half a decade.. The idea that Tales is bad because of "generic anime" is dumb because you can pigeonhole WRPGs into the "generic shooter" or "generic fantasy" labels like that. Cyberpunk, Deus Ex, Mass Effect, and Fallout are just generic futuristic shooters. Or Elder Scrolls and Witcher are generic Tolkien fantasies.

Please don't hold one person's nostalgia for Vesperia and Symphonia as a representation of the Tales fanbase. Those two are most well known in the west because of their marketing push and they came out when a lot of the western fanbase were children, so nostalgia is a big factor. My favorites in the franchise come before and after those titles: Eternia, Graces, and Zestira. All amazing games. The only Tales game I actually dislike is Legendia.