Tales of Graces F, Next Tales of formally announced
After a V-Jump leak last week, Namco Bandai has held a conference this morning to officially announce three brand new Tales games – two for PlayStation 3 and another for PSP.
Tales series producer Hideo Baba spoke on the upcoming, yet to be titled PlayStation 3 Tales game at the conference, debunking all of this Tales of Unitia talk. (artwork courtesy of NeoGAF)
“It seems that the title ‘Tales of Unitia‘ is being rumored on the internet, but it’s not this name,” Baba told the audience. “We create the titles for the series once we’ve firmly set the story’s message. We’re in a state where the formal title has yet to be set.”
Until it’s titled, Namco Bandai is referring to the PlayStation 3 RPG as Next Tales of.
The game’s character designer is Daigo Okumura, who’s done character design for Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, as well as art design for Tales of Vesperia and Tales of the Abyss.
Closing off conversation about the game, Baba concluded: “Using the visual technology that we’ve accumulated, we will make a title that we would not be ashamed of calling a 15th anniversary game. We’d like to retain the good points of the series and include new play elements to create a title like never before.”
The official site for Next Tales of can be visited through here. It contains small bits of different artwork released just today, as well as a countdown currently at 135 days. For a high-res version of the above artwork, visit the gallery.
Tales of Graces F is the second PlayStation 3 title. It’s described as a “powered up” version of the game, as the Wii version was brought down by bugs when it released last year – so much it had to be recalled. It’s set to release in winter 2010 and will include an after-story that takes place six months after the end of the game. The after-story is three script books long. For comparison’s sake, the main story is four script books long. That’s basically a whole new game added on to the original.
The official site for Tales of Graces F can be found through here. The first screenshot for Graces F can be seen by way of the gallery. A trailer will be released on the Japanese PlayStation Store in mid-August.