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Bandai Namco, Stop Telling Us to Play With Ourselves

Bandai Namco, Stop Telling Us to Play With Ourselves

Let’s talk about the Tales series of RPGs. While you may not have heard of the series until its breakthrough Xbox 360 hit Tales of Vesperia , the Tales series has been around as long as the SNES with its first release, Tales of Phantasia , and there has always been one thing that set this apart from other RPGs of its kind: multiplayer.

You see, the Tales franchise uses an interesting take on the standard RPG battle system. Tales battles take place in real time (though on a separate battlefield from exploration screens). The games require a variety of fighting game fundamentals to be played well, from expert blocking, knowledge of chains and combos, and spacing/poking to keep an enemy on its toes.

And ever since the very first Tales release, another local player was able to get in on the fun, controlling a character in battle and working with the primary player to drive that combo counter up and up. As consoles became able to support more controllers, more and more players were able to join in on the fun, and while there were sometimes problems (Like Tales of Symphonia ’s wonky camera that only followed one player at a time, making you effectively play off screen) the “best” way to play these games was with three other friends.

Sadly, Bandai Namco has apparently come to the conclusion that everyone who plays JRPGs has no friends, as it has stopped allowing four people to effectively play its Tales games. It’s not that it has removed the four player capability from the game. No, that’s still there intact. It’s just that it’s started locking away the best abilities in the game for single-player only play.

This first really reared its ugly head in Tales of Xillia , where they introduced the “link” system. By linking with a character, you were able to use a variety of cool combo arts, which is awesome. However, by linking with a character you also forced their control to be switched over to A.I., which is horrible. There’s really no reason this had to happen. You could have just as easily not done that and the link system would have worked just fine, but for some reason, Bandai Namco decided it’s better this way. That means, at most, you’ll have two players controlling a party of four, in two linked pairs. This unfortunate game flaw carries over to Tales of Xillia 2 , which similarly made the game uninviting to four-player parties.

So all the Tales multiplayer groups out there have been waiting for the next big release, Tales of Zestiria , to come out, only to see that this game ALSO discourages four player play. In the game, you have to play as pairs of humans linked with elemental seraphs. One of the most powerful abilities in the game is “armitization” which causes your human character and seraph character to fuse together, gaining the powers of both and obviously removing control from one of the players.

Of course, in both of these circumstances players could choose to simply not use those systems, but the games are balanced around them and much of the gameplay depth relies on them, so four player parties would only get a fraction of the actual gameplay experience.

Bandai Namco, Stop Telling Us to Play With Ourselves

I understand why Bandai Namco is doing this. They are trying to create gameplay systems that are fun to play in single-player as, let’s face it, most JRPGs are single-player affairs. However, I don’t really see why this can’t be done without continuing to make the game fun to play in a multiplayer context. Why alienate one group of players for the sake of another? Bandai Namco, you have a multiplayer gem here. Why would you keep telling us to go home and play with ourselves?

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