
Tales fans, at least the few who own an Xbox360, can rejoice with the knowledge that Namco has officially announced the Japanese release as being August 7th, with an expected price of ¥7,800. The game has been designed with full internationalisation in mind (so forget about a Japanese dub), with an English language version set to follow shortly. No word on the PS3 release, of course.

The latest game in the Star Ocean series, スターオーシャン 4 THE LAST HOPE / Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope, will be an Xbox360 exclusive to be released in 2009, it has been announced.
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It seems one of the new additions to Soul Calibur IV will be the ability for characters to lose clothing (“armour”) as battle damage. The pictures and videos (below) seem unambiguous in showing a variety of characters, male and female, suffering clothing destruction to varying degrees.
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Gantz creator 奥浩哉 / Hiroya Oku has apparently turned his hand to character design for Soul Calibur IV, it has been revealed in the latest issue of Young Jump. His contribution will be one of his trademark top heavy females, a supernatural samurai in the Taki vein, wielding two swords and monikered “修羅”, Shura, cheerily meaning the scene of a bloodbath.
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Any ardent fan of the excellent Tales series of RPGs will already know about the magnificent looking テイルズ オブ ヴェスペリア / Tales of Vesperia, the latest and next generation incarnation of the series, but there has been something of an upset over the bizarre decision to release the game first on the Xbox360, with a PS3 release not even confirmed yet – whilst no denials, and the eminent logic of releasing the game to its main market on the PS3, as well as prior precedents in porting this series and others, all tend to suggest the PS3 release is all but inevitable, no official announcement has been forthcoming, until now… sort of.
It seems some observant soul managed to spot buried in a Bandai Namco financial presentation an entry (now amended) for ToV listed as due for release later in the year for both Xbox360 and PS3, however no sooner had the news got out than the document was amended to refer only to the Xbox360 release; the original page is mirrored below.
Just what kind of mistake this was may only be revealed by the passage of time, but most Tales fans can but hope it represents accidental confirmation of the PS3 release, and hopefully for this year and not next.
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More Details on クロスエッジ / Cross Edge / XEdge, the newly announced PS3 mixed franchise RPG are provided here by Famitsu. When I first heard of this game, I was sceptical, and seeing those screens (which look distinctly PS2 in calibre), and also hearing the somewhat mixed reception in the Japanese blogosphere has done nothing to allay my concerns, even if it does include Etna.
Including a bunch of popular characters from a variety of games and then letting the player dress them up might cut it for a dojin game, but my suspicion is that such a pastiche of characters will not result in a rewarding story. Perhaps it could more accurately be thought of as charcter goods. Still, it remains to be seen how this will turn out; the developers involved can hardly be keen for their characters to be involved in a licensing debacle (or can they?).