The Failure of the Tales Series: It’s Namco’s Fault

by Josh Frappier

Original Editorial: Can’t let it go? It’s time to!

While Cless Aileron is right to argue that Namco should not – for financial reasons – release more Tales games in North America, the failure of the series rests completely on Namco’s shoulders. Namco has done nothing to treat North American RPG fans with respect and has done nothing to show that they actually WANT the Tales series to succeed in North America.

Namco’s initial mistake was not releasing the original Tales of Phantasia for the SNES outside of Japan. While this may not seem like an overly serious error at first glance, when one examines which RPG series have succeeded in North America since the FF7 Revolution, it becomes rather obvious that much modern RPG success is due to critical and word-of-mouth acclaim of past games in the series or other games that the company has made: The success of just about everything Square has released in North America is so ubiquitous that even the Saga series – generally held in low regard by myself (though I will soon give Saga Frontier a 2nd chance now that I actually have a manual and a few guides to help me with the game’s system) and a majority of RPG fans – does well enough that its fans are rewarded with no releases. And there’s no way Sony would have given Final Fantasy 7 the commercial push that it gone had Square not already been highly regarded by the then-niche RPG fanbase. Other companies that have been successful in the North American RPG market include Nintendo, thanks largely to Super Mario RPG and Earthbound Sega, thanks mainly to the Phantasy Star series, and Camelot, thanks mainly to the Shining series and to the Golden Sun series, Enix, thanks to Dragon Warrior, the Soul Blazer Trilogy, and Star Ocean, and Game Arts, thanks to the fact that the Lunar games were just about the only thing on the Sega CD worth playing, which allowed the remakes and the Grandia series to succeed. By not releasing Tales of Phantasia (Donkey Kong Country 3 and Super Mario RPG proved that the SNES was hardly dead in 1996), Namco has forfeited this initial momentum, thus dooming the Tales series to never develop beyond a niche fanbase.

Major errors were also made in the release of Tales of Destiny and Tales of Eternia (which Namco of America labelled as Tales of Destiny II to appeal to North America’s sequel-obsessed mentality, much to the confusion of Tales afficionados). Much character development and virtually all voice acting was cut from the somewhat censored localisations (including all of Tales of Destiny’s world map dialogue and Tales of Eternia’s camp dialogue), and a secret character was even cut from the North American release of the game! Obviously, many people who knew this stayed away from the games in disgust at Namco’s lack of respect for its North American products and the cuts didn’t do anything for the game’s reputation. Additionally, Namco and Sony gave this game virtually no hype, which is akin to murder for a company that – in spite of its reputation and incredible success in virtually every other genre -- has never established itself as a household name among RPG fans.

In short, it is a shame to see this series fail in North America. The blame, however, belongs to Namco, and Namco alone, for not treating the series and North American gamers with any sort of respect.