Hawk-eyed fans caught Bandai Namco Europe posting and hastily deleting a YouTube placeholder for an August 18 announcement video starring much of the main cast of Tales of Xillia and teasing "Tales of Series News," all but confirming that the 2013 JRPG is next in line for a remaster.
The thumbnail for the scheduled video post, per SkyDragonOfThebes on the dedicated Tales Reddit community, features female lead Milla Maxwell and companions Alvin, Leia Rolando, Rowen J. Ilbert, and Elize Lutus (with her doll Teepo). The only one missing from this particular screenshot is male lead Jude Mathis, though it's likely he'll appear elsewhere in the full video once it's released.
This sort of announcement video is Bandai-standard for new Tales releases. Assuming Bandai Namco sticks to this timeline, a Tales of Xillia remaster could well be announced as early as Monday, August 18, some 12 years after the game's global release and nearly 14 after its Japanese launch.
Earlier this year, we got the well-received multiplatform release of Tales of Graces f Remastered, which revitalized 2012's Tales of Graces f, originally released as just Tales of Graces for the Wii in Japan in 2009. If we're lucky, the next remaster will also be available for all platforms, including PC and, now, perhaps Switch 2.
Tales of Xillia would be next in line for a remaster, and Bandai said last August, and reiterated last December, that there's more where that came from and it was positioning itself to release such remasters "fairly consistently."
A Tales of Xillia remaster is particularly exciting to me, not just because the game is still one of my top three favorite Tales installments, but also because it was my introduction to the series. I have fond memories of spending hours upon hours chilling out and practicing combos for Milla and Jude.
To this day, Tales of Xillia has one of the best and most fluid combat systems in Tales and ranks among the best in action JRPGs altogether, especially if you like juggling enemies for an unreasonably long time. Its skill tree, which sees you obtain new abilities by unlocking squares of nodes on a spiderweb-like grid, is another standout system. It did a good job balancing base stats and bespoke upgrades, and the way it presented progression was pretty novel for the time.
A sequel, Tales of Xillia 2, was released globally in 2014, but like some people I found it to be a startlingly similar, slightly worse version of the original game. I wouldn't complain if Xillia 2 also got a remaster, in part because I didn't particularly like the next standalone installment in the series, Tales of Zestiria, but I'm much more interested in the return of the first game. For now, we've got to wait until August 18.
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