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 have been focusing on completing games, which delivered 100% satisfaction to the consumer. That was our intention during the development of Tales of Arise.”
Tales of Arise got plenty of praise and positive feedback from critics and players alike and, in particular, many players wanted to see what the playable cast was up to after the events of the main game. Each of the characters will get episodes and moments for the player to experience how they’re living a year out from the ending.
With Beyond the Dawn clocking in with over 20 hours of additional content, it’s not just icing on top of the cake for an already solid game. “We strongly believe that this is more like an amazing dessert after the wonderful main dishes because of the volume of the contents,” Tomizawa said.
Elsewhere in the Tales series, it was only fairly recently that the games were consistently localized. Tales of Arise had a simultaneous worldwide release, but the entries that came before had gaps between their Japanese and international releases. There were even some older mainline Tales games that never left Japan, like 2004’s Tales of Rebirth and 2012’s Tales of Innocence R. Despite this, porting older games to modern audiences is a decision that Tomizawa said, “is always actually something on our minds.”
However, Bandai Namco also notes that bringing over old games isn’t such a simple task and that there are various factors to consider. Posing the other issues, Tomizawa asked, “What are the best formats? The best platforms? Also, should we deliver exactly the same contents nowadays?” He said that the development team needs to actually think about how it can tailor the experience to the modern world.
Earlier entries such as Tales of Eternia and Tales of Legendia are stuck on older platforms like the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable. Tales of the Abyss received a 3DS port in 2011, but Nintendo shut down the eShop earlier this year.
One way to make older games more accessible is through subscription services like PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass. Sony has included many older original PlayStation games through its Classics catalog too. Tales of Arise was localized into several different languages other than English such as Russian and Simplified Chinese. So if any of the older games that were only translated into limited languages or get localized, then they’d also be expected to receive the same treatment.
“We'd also like to foster those newcomers who haven't actually had the chance to enjoy those games, but started playing the franchise with Arise. We should also provide them access to a full localization,” Tomizawa explained. “So if we would like to deliver those old classic catalogs, we need to be fully prepared for those newcomers as well.”
As for future entries in the Tales series, Tomizawa said that he prefers darker and more mature storylines, so Arise was more reflective of his own taste. However, he also believes that the franchise is diverse and that there needs to be brighter stories in the midst of the darker ones. The important elements of a Tales game is how it looks, as well as its story and atmosphere.
Since Beyond the Dawn is a continuation of Arise, Nazamil’s story is still a mature one. “We still believe that this dark atmosphere in combination with the pure characters makes it special for Tales of Arise,” Tomizawa said.
