Tales of Arise Producer Is Open to Bringing Older Tales Games to the West

ign.com:

In 2021, Bandai Namco’s Tales of Arise took home the award for Best Role Playing Game at The Game Awards. Since its release, it has gone on to sell over 2 million copies across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.

Two years later, it’s getting a new story expansion called Beyond the Dawn, which takes place one year after the events of the main game. The party of six meets a young girl named Nazamil, who is half Renan and half Dahnan, fated to fall under the curse of a mask. As such, the party must find a way to avert her fate.

As a story expansion, Beyond the Dawn is the first of its kind for the Tales series. In previous entries, if there was a direct story continuation, then a fully fledged sequel would be released. For example, 2003’s Tales of Symphonia got a sequel in 2008 with Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Tales of Xillia 2 released in 2012, one year after Tales of Xillia. 2016’s Tales of Berseria, meanwhile, flipped the trend and was actually a prequel to 2015’s Tales of Zestiria.

In an interview with IGN, producer Yusuke Tomizawa touched on the decision to go the expansion route, as well as the future of the Tales series.

Back in 2021, Tomizawa confirmed that Tales of Arise wouldn’t receive any sort of story DLC, similar to what Square Enix’s Naoki Yoshida said about this year’s Final Fantasy XVI not having planned story DLC too. As we’ve recently learned, that isn’t the case for both games. However, both Tomizawa and Yoshida’s reasoning for not initially including story DLC was the similar: release a game that offered a complete experience.

“There was actually no secret intention that even though I said we are not going to any DLC, that we were on the back end developing DLC,” Tomizawa explained. “Our dev teams