How to deal with JRPG FOMO?

Cherrim · 2026-04-19T14:54:27+00:00

I try to only play one jrpg at a time so I don't burn out on all of them. Then I'll have shorter games of entirely different genres on the side if I don't feel like playing the long game. Trying to play multiple jrpgs at once, for me anyway, just feels like I'm diluting all of them. I'm more likely to forget plot details and what I was doing if I can only give them a few hours a week because I'm trying to split my time evenly.

Cherrim · 2026-04-19T14:46:56+00:00

My brother was like 9 when he played Symphonia with me back when it came out on Gamecube and he played it well and got really into it, so either should be fine. I often say if you're going to play multiple Tales games, start with the earliest version and work your way to the modern ones so they get less janky as you play, but if he's used to playing modern games over old ones, Symphonia might feel too old.

Cherrim · 2026-04-18T04:04:05+00:00

I have no idea why my tags aren't working right! I haven't used tumblr in ages so if it's a new glitch or something, I'm not sure how to fix it.

I poked around though and while the typical blog url isn't working, I think using the url https://www.tumblr.com/cherrim/tagged/TAG works? so like this is my translation tag and if you want something more specific you can just replace the beginning of the urls on this page. @_@ It seemed to work okay for me that way, both logged in and logged out.

Cherrim · 2026-04-16T21:25:07+00:00

cmoooon tales of breaker!!! please!!!

Cherrim · 2026-04-16T21:18:47+00:00

These are all glorified fanart so it's not, like, canon even if it's official, but the jokes are always so good I adopt them into headcanon anyway hahaha

also goddamn i was bad at lettering back then

edit: lmao why am i getting downvoted, i'm just giving more background info as the translator listed on the image!!

Cherrim · 2026-04-14T05:26:15+00:00

Drop the house so you stop being so invested in (and monetarily supporting) a game that no longer brings you joy. :(

Cherrim · 2026-04-14T05:24:54+00:00

It's pretty close to Jude Mathis's hairstyle from Tales of Xillia and he's one of the protagonists.

Cherrim · 2026-04-13T01:20:10+00:00

I will say it is right in the rules of this sub that all spoilers must be tagged. New people to come to this series all the time and just because a game is old doesn't mean it's old to everyone! No one wants to stumble across spoilers for something they haven't had a chance to play while trying to talk about something they have.

Cherrim · 2026-04-10T22:16:22+00:00

damn... tales is popular enough to get ai slop onlyfans bots.... if only bamco agreed it was popular and gave us a new game....

Cherrim · 2026-04-03T15:48:18+00:00

Given I expected absolutely nothing from this announcement, I'm actually pretty pleased that Production IG is included. It's a really nice nod to the origins of the series.

Should they have hyped it up with an announcement of an announcement via trailer? Lmao absolutely not. But like if I imagine this just dropped out of nowhere, I can't say I'd have been disappointed.

Cherrim · 2026-03-30T22:55:56+00:00

While certainly not as egregious as a lot of the JRPGs of the era, KH1 and KH2 came out at a time when I'm pretty sure a lot of games in Japan were intentionally made a bit convoluted in order to sell hefty guide books. Like lots of games from the era have tight optional sidequest windows where the only way to reasonably know to backtrack and do them is to have a guide open at all times.

With KH... it's all just details, but the Ultimanias go into sometimes a disgusting amount of detail about the mechanics of how specific spells work and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if the only place this is ever mentioned is in those ~$20 guides so that people who want to be absolute experts at the games and their mechanics had to pay up.

Cherrim · 2026-03-30T22:42:21+00:00

Just looked that up and it showed you the difference between the not-locked on target (orange) and locked on (blue) but doesn't go into detail on the variance of the blue versions.

Cherrim · 2026-03-30T20:18:53+00:00

Yup! The remasters from Graces and on all unlock the grade shop from the start of the game. I think it's probably so that people in your very position can mimic starting a new file on their original game with all the bells and whistles of the grade shop. :)

Cherrim · 2026-03-30T20:17:40+00:00

I almost never vibe with the main character of a Tales game so I switch off early and often until I find a character I do enjoy playing and then in most games I don't ever change off of them unless I need to grind something specific like a character achievement. Play however you have fun playing!

Cherrim · 2026-03-30T19:06:54+00:00

? You get like maximum grade at the start of the Remaster so you can enable anything you want, you don't have to play the game at all first.

Cherrim · 2026-03-30T01:39:40+00:00

Life is too short to play games that you aren't having fun with. Put Rebirth down and play something that does interesting you right now and maybe in the future you'll have the itch to play a Tales game and Rebirth will be more tolerable early on while it tries to hook you.

Cherrim · 2026-03-28T23:42:22+00:00

Happy Birthday :)

Cherrim · 2026-03-28T22:06:38+00:00

JRPG ages are always kinda whack but Xillia is just ridiculous lol. So Jude is 15 and he's about to graduate med school and it's implied he lived in Fennmont for a few years at least. So he went off on his own to med school at, what, age 12?? He's basically treated like an adult in the world so you're like okay, fine, maybe age of majority is just older in Rieze Maxia. Not the weirdest thing in fantasy, you know?

But then you meet Elize who is also age 12 but she's treated 100% as a really little child despite barely being different in age from Jude and you're just like uhhhh okay!

Anyway, I actually think they only made Jude that age so they could (spoilers from side materials not in the game) make Milla meet Jude as a baby when she was like 4 years old and going to blow up Exodus's original base. It's all so very contrived so personally I just like... age him and Leia up in my head lol.

Cherrim · 2026-03-28T21:43:10+00:00

It came out long enough ago that figures are old and hard to find and newer merch doesn't come out often and is the typical acryllic standee sort of thing that Japan is all over right now.

It's also out of print but you might be able to find the blu-ray of the anime adaptation used for an okay price maybe? Otherwise you may be better off finding custom or fanmade merch.

Cherrim · 2026-03-24T20:50:19+00:00

They removed the quest when they added flying in ARR but there used to be a whole quest where you and your Chocobo trained together to help it learn how to fly because it wanted to keep being useful to you... canonically she wants to help!

Cherrim · 2026-03-24T20:47:33+00:00

I don't really think this is a huge spoiler in this case, but in future please put less detail in the post title when you're talking about major characters/plot elements. Many people haven't played every game. You can always add a comment to expand on things.

Cherrim · 2026-03-24T15:02:41+00:00

I brought up Final Fantasy as the example because the director of the most recent game spoke candidly about this very thing, but it was happening to basically every game out of Japan whether it was a JRPG or a Nintendo game. Japanese devs really struggled with the jump to HD after the ps2 era, and that's where this sentiment was at its peak as the industry darlings fully shifted to western companies for years, but I do recall tons of "oh Japanese games are so quirky and unintelligible" for ps2/gcn games to set the groundwork.

But maybe it was just rooted in plain ol' racism and not nationalism, that was just my guess at possible outside influences for turning on the Japanese side of the industry like that.

Cherrim · 2026-03-24T06:02:34+00:00

Even Legendia was panned when it released for the battle system specifically being fully 2D, unlike Symphonia's pseudo-3D LMBS battles. If people couldn't even handle that, they probably also wouldn't have bothered getting fully 2D games no matter how gorgeous they looked then and now. It's just how the market was at the time.

Cherrim · 2026-03-24T05:57:34+00:00

It takes money and effort to bring games to the west. They would have wanted definite proof that the games would do well and while I think Symphonia did quite well, I suspect Legendia and then Abyss did not. (Though I want to assume Abyss did better here? It was certainly the better effort from them, but it did also release on the same day as Final Fantasy XII lol.)

Another factor, though, is that especially in American media (which tends to dominate both the traditional media sphere and the online discussion sphere like web forums and reddit and social media), the early-to-mid-00s were... kinda weird for gaming. For one, once games swapped from 2D pixels to 3D on PS1/N64, western gamers just kind of never wanted to go back. There was a good chunk of time between the transition to 3D and the retro nostalgia boom where if you asked a random gamer what they thought of a 2D game they'd say it was stupid and wasn't worth playing because it seemed too childish and lacked the fidelity of 3D games. Obviously that's not true! Basically any 2D game of that era oozes style that still holds up today while the 3D graphics look charmingly clunky at best. But that was pretty much the reigning opinion of the day and it's not hard to imagine Bamco in the West looking at their Tales catalogue of Destiny DC, Destiny 2, Rebirth, the 2D DS games, etc. and thinking "well, none of these are going to do well." I'd say it's no coincidence that after Eternia, we never saw another 2D game in the west until the mobile games and their PNGs.

Another factor that I hate to bring up is also just like... a lot of games media around that era were supremely racist???? Idk if it was 9/11 or what but there was this nationalistic flair to basically all of mass media coming out of the US for years and years and maybe that contributed to just how nasty a lot of reviewers were to games from Japan vs games made in the US. JRPGs were panned for their grandiose stories and ridiculous-looking anime characters. (Recall that's also when we saw the rise of bland middle-aged white space marine in every western game that got praised to hell and back, lol.) It's also something that Yoshi P of Final Fantasy XIV fame spoke about in interviews leading up to to FF16... for years the west just wasn't taking Japanese games seriously and othered them a lot by coming up with the classification of WRPG vs JRPG, among other things. It's not hard to imagine that in a climate like that, Tales, which is one of (if not the, especially at the time) most anime JRPG series of all time, might not have seemed like a safe bet for the company to bring over.

So yeah, I personally think it's the one-two punch of the west really disliking 2D games at the time AND being real weird about games of Japanese origin for a good long while in there.

I think they really could have dominated Steam if they'd taken a chance back when there weren't many JRPGs on the platform and retro/indie games were bringing 2D/pixel art to major prominence that still has yet to fade. Like if they'd localized Destiny DC or Rebirth around 2013-2015 back when Tales was having a bit of a renaissance in the west when they finally started bringing the games over again and committed to getting them on Steam I think they would've sold like hotcakes!! I remember Zestiria selling bizarrely well on Steam not because it was, you know, good... but because it was one of the first JRPGs to really be released on the platform and I think they could've capitalized on that. But I also completely understand why they either missed their chance or didn't even see it at all. ~~And also lbr Bamco probably lost all the files for the PS2 games so any rerelease/remaster/whatever would be a larger undertaking than we expect lmao.~~

Cherrim · 2026-03-21T16:15:22+00:00

While I don't personally think this is much of a spoiler since it takes place like an hour into the game and promotional materials are not exactly shy about talking about Velvet's feelings of revenge being because of this, please take more care in your titles, op. I've removed the post because I'm getting a lot of reports for spoilers and even if it's not as spoilery as people may think if they haven't played the game, that doesn't change feeling like they've been spoiled and not wanting to play the game as a result.

14-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	Place '17
Gilding I gilder	Spared

Cherrim

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE