Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - The Tales Mobile Curse
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TranceLimit174
 Posts: 958 |
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I'm surprised: no mention of the Dead or Alive series officially being dead in the water since it recently came out that DOA7 was canned during early development?
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wolf10
 Posts: 901 |
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Bamco should take the millions they want to invest in the next Tales mobile title and go crawling back to AlfaSystem to beg, on hands and knees, for a new Radiant Mythology game for Switch. Seriously. The US only got the first, kind of experimental title, but Radiant Mythology 2 and 3 were amazing stand-alone RPGs. Bamco has lost sight of how players got invested in Tales characters because the games themselves were good enough to be worth investing the kind of time that made them feel like family.
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PyrosAWX
Posts: 15 |
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One big problem that Luminaria had (and Poplinks for that matter) is that there were too many games at the same time. Rays, Asteria, Crestoria and Luminaria all lived together at a point, and I'm pretty sure the Tales fanbase isn't big enough to fund all four at the same time, so the weakest/less interresting ones dies.
I am pretty sure Bamco will prepare another Tales mobile game, for the month of April 2022, Asteria and Rays cumulated $2M together. They know it has potential, they just need to make a feel-good game like those two. As of Poplinks, from what I read (hadn't played the game); is that im@s players didn't had time to play it because the other im@s mobage took already too much time, and while Poplinks featured all im@s subseries, they didn't made enough of cross-series content, so it didn't had much value if you were already playing the other im@s games. |
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AQuin1904
Posts: 264 |
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I would kill for any non-subscription-based port of Shadow Hearts, especially one with any kind of language options. I have all three Japanese PS2 discs, but the timing-based combat system does not play well with modern displays, and I don't have money or space to get a CRT for them. (Come to think of it, I wonder if an emulator would let me do something to counteract that if I played them off a disc drive.)
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 2862 |
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well the fanservice game.ia still going, I don't even know if strong or not but they keep on adding swimsuits and girls and events. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4421 |
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I hadn't heard that, but I can't say I feel to badly about it, even though I like the series. When getting everything for DOA6 would cost several times the the cost of the base game, it was obvious where the focus was. |
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Stelman257
Posts: 267 |
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From what little I played of Luminaria I also want to say that it being an action oriented game with a third person camera, in VERTICLE phone view was such a terrible choice.
Could barely see anything around my character standing nice and tall in the middle of the screen. Surely horizontal phone view would've made far more sense for a game that was trying to be an action game! Launching alongside an endlessly struggling Crestoria didn't help either. At least for me, once I saw how rough things were going with Crestoria, I absolutely had no inclination to spend a cent on Luminaria. The writing was on the wall, but now the well has been thoroughly poisoned. |
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AQuin1904
Posts: 264 |
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Wasn't DOA5 the same way? I remember that game having so much overpriced DLC that console storefronts would crash trying to load it all. And there were the downloadable packs to make other people's DLC display properly, which were a pain to find and get working (and then there was the hassle of navigating all the costumes, including ones you didn't own, to actually select one). Plus there was the whole thing where it stumbled hard out of the gate and had to get relaunched as Last Round. I actually remember that game being pretty fun to play, but everything else around it was a mess. |
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Ruddor
 Posts: 50 |
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I've been playing Tales of Luminaria since mid-November and I liked it even though it had some major flaws. I personally think that the gacha stuff wasn't that obtrusive. Yes it did power up your characters and give you an advantage, but I never felt like I was missing out by not spending money. Plus you get quite a bit of in-game currency just by playing the game. There was also a multiplayer boss battle mode (complete with guilds) where players with high power levels (the whales) would get much more in-game awards much faster than the f2p players, but I honestly didn't spend too much time on that.
The real draw for me and the main focus of the game was the single player story chapters. The idea was pretty ambitious for a free-to-play mobile game; the story was told through 21 playable characters, each with their own eight episode stories, with one episode being released each week. While not all of the characters and stories were especially interesting, I did like how this model let you piece together the world and story organically through the viewpoints of different characters. However, 21 characters times 8 episodes plus 8 crossover episodes with one episode a week is 176 weeks, which, even if you don't count the first few weeks where multiple episodes were released, is roughly three years. It didn't help that most of the episodes mostly consisted of running down linear paths fighting the same types of enemies over and over, ending with a boss battle against a big monster. All this, coupled with the mandatory portrait mode and single attack button (and chargeable special moves you could unlock from the gacha), lead to a gameplay system that got dull fast for a lot of people. I'm not surprised the game is ending so soon, especially considering the other Tales mobile games, but I did enjoy my time with it and I feel bad that I'll never get to see how the story ends. |
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Vaisaga
 Posts: 13224 |
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Despite complaints, the vertical orientation of Luminaria actualled worked because you could comfortably play the game with one hand.
It wasn't gatcha reliant either. Enemies scale with player levels and even common weapons and armor boost character power with enough copies. The main issue was lack of repeatable content. At launch you only had story and multiplayer. You can only use specific characters in story mode so you couldn't level or even test play other characters. They added a level up camp eventually, but even that loses purpose once you have everyone leveled. They needed challenge modes like a hoard/survival mode or something where you can aim to beat records. The secret missions had some potential but once you clear them once there's no point going back. Multi player was a point to grind and the rewards weren't anything special. The story and characters were really good and it's clear they were trying their hardest to reach a wider audience. Shame it never caught on. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1117 |
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I don't think Bandai Namco will develop something for the Switch, there're plenty of rumors that Harada has been discouraging developers from making games for it, for example CyberConnect2 wanted to port some old .hack games but Namco would not allow it. Bandai-Namco just works with Nintendo as an assistant developer in games like Mario Kart, Mario Tennis, ARMS and others. They mainly ported licensed games like Jump Force and smaller titles like Fishing Spirits, it seems like they don't consider the Switch an important platform so I don't expect any games like Tales of or Tekken. The same situation with SEGA, when Nagoshi was in charge he didn't want any major game for the Switch since he considers Nintendo's userbase mainly young kids, that's why there's no Sakura Wars of Yakuza on Switch. |
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Themaster20000
 Posts: 863 |
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The DNF leak just makes me sad. Even in it's unfinished state, it's pretty impressive. So much promise down the drain due to terrible management.
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SciasSlash
Posts: 117 |
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A big thing to note about Luminaria is that it didn't actually feature any previous Tales characters, or take place in any previous Tales setting.
It's also worth mentioning that there are two tales mobages still going, Tales of the Rays and Asteria. They've been going strong for years - Rays has been going so long that it features literally every Tales party member ever, plus many of the most popular antagonists. Rather than a 'curse,' it feels more like Bamco sees the Tales franchise as much bigger than it is. I think a lot of franchises would struggle to support three or four different mobages going on at once. Idolm@ster is one thing, because a lot of its biggest successes were in the mobile space to begin with, but even Final Fantasy struggles to keep four different mobile games relevant and popular. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5914 |
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Janky as it was this is nowhere near as bad as Shawn Lee mentioning Bully 2 was in the works.
Which is interesting because 5 also had a ridiculously expensive set of season passes which never dropped below a 60 dollars despite being like 70-80 dollars normally.
Sleeps in the ether alongside Code Chronos. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2544 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I think the main reason why people bit on the Bruce Lee/Fei Long story is because there was an infamous backlash by the Bruce Lee Foundation over Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writing an article about how it didn't match the Bruce Lee that he personally knew. Therefore, the idea that the Foundation was asking for more respectable & honorable portrayals of Bruce Lee likely is true, which in turn would make people take the extreme angle that the Foundation was actively trying to put a stop to certain portrayals, because people just love looking for the negative in anything.
I know I tweeted about it (& it wound up getting partially viral), but even in my own tweet I called it stupid, pretty much from any angle. If it was true, Fei Long was the dumbest example to go with, since he's literally just Bruce Lee in all but name; really, Tekken's Marshall Law would have been the more understandable choice. And even if it was false, it just sounds like the most complicated way to explain why Fei Long wasn't in the plans to return for Street Fighter V. That being said, I do personally think that the Bruce Lee Foundation should contact either Capcom or Bandai Namco & actually get their respective Bruce Lee expys "officially approved", or something; the latter's more likely, since Law is an actual Tekken regular. Sure, it'd be more symbolic than anything substantial (maybe offer a Bruce Lee-licensed DLC outfit), but it'd at least make for interesting PR. |
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