Bandai Namco has finally announced a humiliating official recall of its notoriously buggy Wii title Tales of Graces, a mere three months after release.
Bugs include a wide variety of issues with second play-throughs, a number of non-appearing enemies and items, and most critically several bugs which can break the game by preventing progress.
Whether they have tackled alleged Wii crashing bugs is not mentioned.
Sadly, the Wii’s inability to handle heavy patching seems to have slipped their QA department’s mind – the disc swap will be by direct mail at an unannounced date.
Namco’s policy of beta testing its Tales games on secondary systems seems to be paying off – a bug-free PS3 release incorporating user feedback, new characters and plenty of DLC will doubtless arise later in 2010, much to the delight of Wii owning Tales fans.
Why are people complaining about the recall? They’re actually fixing the bugs instead of keeping them in there, and people are bitching?
I don’t really see this game getting a PS3 release. I really don’t.
The last Tales game I played through was Tales of Destiny on the PS1. This is why. When most of the Wolf Team left to go form tri-Ace, they took with them a lot of the talent. Destiny was alright, but after playing Phantasia I can see how it’s kind of a pale imitation. Eternia (Destiny II in North America) was worse, and aside from a bit of a jump for Symphonia to near-Phantasia levels, the series has been declining in quality ever since.
It’s the Tomb Raider of RPGs. Ever since Tales of Destiny II in 2002 (which didn’t see a North American release), the series has seen at least one release per year as a main title. Compare that to Star Ocean, which has seen… five releases total since 1996, one of them a direct sequel spin-off released on the Gameboy Color.
Star Ocean games don’t come out nearly as often for good reason… They often incorporate bug testing and other factors like talent which allow the released title to feature a high level of quality.
Riiight… Star Ocean is all quality and the only good Tales games are Phantasia and Symphonia. Say, did you play Star Ocean 4? Either version works, as they’re basically the same. You’re going to tell me that, outside of the battle system (which still has big issues on its own), it’s a “quality” game? Man, you’re full of it.
Star Ocean stopped being “quality” after they made the second game and tri-Ace hasn’t managed to make a game that was more than just “okay” since the first Valkyrie Profile. Tales might end up with some shitty releases, but they at least have done *some* good stuff in the past ten years, most notably the remake of Tales of Destiny.
What’s wrong with Star Ocean? We both agree the first two/three games were great, no issue.
Star Ocean 3 was beautiful for the PS2 (and the surprise spin people love to bitch about was something that was painfully obvious to anyone who was paying attention to the game, had played either/both of its main prequels, and had paid attention to the Encyclopedia – they even talked in-game about other games made by tri-Ace as “other planets” – Duh?!), and I’m loving just about everything offered in SO4 (and the various vocal tics are not NEARLY as annoying as originally advertised). I’m not seeing what their problems are?
Star Ocean, quality?
Lol nice one troll.
If namco is just going to be a lazy ass, might as well release it for PC and let the fan hackers fix their errors.
Why do I get the feeling that this is becoming an uncomfortable habit for game developers these days?
They’ll release a title that hasn’t been properly tested, then release a patch a month or so later to fix what should not have been there in the first place.
Other examples of this include the PS3 port of Bayonetta and the general release of Fallout 3 (that game still has a ton of bugs lying around well over a year after it’s initial release).
This case where the hardware limitations meant the problems couldn’t be patched comes as a well deserved bite in the ass for Namco.