XSEED pessimistic about working out a deal with Namco to localize Tales games

Tales of Vesperia PS3 box art.

Tom Lipschultz, the Localization Specialist of XSEED, recently revealed that his company is looking into the possibility of localizing the Japan-only games in the “Tales of” RPG series for North America. In the next day, he added the following statement in the comments section of the Playstation.Blog: 

Until and unless we establish a deal for a title, we can’t really discuss it in much detail. But we are well aware of the fans’ desires. Trust me, if we CAN make all your dreams come true on this, we certainly will — we’d be foolish not to! But that’s a big if, for a variety of reasons, so please, don’t get your hopes up too high. Just know that we’re well aware how much fans want to see these games released — your pleas HAVE been heard.

When another fan subsequently asked a series of question centering on whether or not XSEED is indeed discussing a deal with Namco, Tom Lipschultz responded:

I can’t really comment on any of that. Honestly, I’ve probably already said way more than I should. I’m afraid I’ve gotten everyone’s hopes up, which I didn’t mean to do. There are a lot of reasons why we would WANT to release the games, but just as many reasons why we might not be ABLE to; and unfortunately, the latter may ultimately outweigh the former. All I can say is that we’ll do what we can. And unfortunately, specific information on our relationships with other companies is something we can’t really discuss.

I hate to give such an “official”-sounding answer, but subjects like these are tricky to address without people reading all kinds of subtext into them. And I honestly didn’t mean any subtext whatsoever here: I literally just meant that we know how much fans want to see Tales games released stateside, we’d love to release them, and we’ll look into that possibility, but we can’t guarantee anything at all.

He later added the following statement when further pressed on the subject:

Like I said, we’ll do what we can. But honestly, from Bandai Namco’s point of view, campaigning to get *us* to release their games is probably not encouraging in the slightest! If you guys want to see more Tales games released stateside, you should let Bandai Namco know you’d like to see THEM release the titles. Let them know you’re interested! Might send the wrong message to them if you tell them you’d like to see other companies release their games, y’know? That’d be like saying to George Lucas, “Dude, I love Star Wars! Won’t you please let Tim Burton have the license to it?” George Lucas would just be like, whaaaa…? ;)

But yeah, we’ve got some Tales fans over here too, and whether they release the games or we release the games or Atlus releases the games or NIS releases the games or WHOEVER releases the games… we’d be really happy to play them in English ourselves! ;)

Despite numerous fan requests, Tales of Vesperia on the Playstation 3 and Tales of Graces on the Nintendo Wii have remained as Japan-only titles. Namco also have no plans to release Tales of Graces F and another new untitled Tales game for the Playstation 3 outside of Japan. Unfortunately, it sounds like Namco aren’t too eager to hand over the localizing rights to another publisher.