All things must come to an end, and in the last few years, that’s rung especially true for the world of live-service games. In the last three years, during my time at Noisy Pixel, two separate Tales of mobile titles have launched and then permanently shut down.
While the last franchise title standing—Tales of the Rays—actually closed all but its Japanese servers six years ago, the game has continued strong with regular releases of new content in its home country…until now.
NOTE: The following was written before the shutdown was officially announced.
At the moment, for the first time, Tales of the Rays does not have any upcoming events or banners, a first in its seven-year history, but a familiar situation for people like me who played Tales of Crestoria, where the sudden lack of a gacha banner on which to pull was the clearest sign that trouble was afoot.
If that weren’t already the death flag being raised for Rays, as of May 20th, all iOS and some Android players noticed that in-app purchases had disappeared. An end-of-service announcement was inevitable, and now it’s come.
This is looking like the end of a long, mostly embarrassing saga in the history of the franchise, with publisher Bandai Namco having pushed out five mobile Tales titles in the last decade, one of which never even made it outside of Japan, and none of which lasted more than two years globally. Tales of Asteria and Tales of Link were fairly ordinary mobile games, but the team shot for bigger ideas with Tales of the Rays, which fully recreates the series’ real-time-action combat but was poorly managed outside of Japan.
Following that closure, Tales of Crestoria took an astonishing two years from announcement to launch and was surprisingly embraced by much of the series’ fandom for its original story, which was widely held as being as good as if not better than that of the recent fully-fledged console titles. While Crestoria was still going, Namco Bandai announced Tales of Luminaria, an even more ambitious title that was going to feature a fully original cast and several years of very interconnected episodic storytelling from the perspectives of over a dozen characters.
It was clear that this likely meant the premature end of Crestoria, much to the outrage of many fans who had grown attached to the game (like myself), but I decided to give Luminaria an honest chance and found it to be an exciting title with a ton of potential. Over six following months of updates, it largely lived up to that potential, with the development team actively implementing common player feedback and suggestions and a complex but very intriguing story that was connected by an exciting web of enjoyable characters.
Six months after launch, the game announced its worldwide end of service, as it had been an extremely costly title to keep up content releases for, had not properly implemented any systems that compelled players to spend money, and had not found the huge Genshin Impact-sized audience that it had clearly been courting. Six months.
So, here, as it looks like Tales of the Rays is about to topple, while my heart obviously goes out to those whose jobs will be affected, I have no sadness left to give to Bandai Namco’s efforts to bring the series to an infinitely-monetizable mobile audience. I’ve been burned too many times to be upset that this experiment is coming to a close.
While I do still think that Tales could find an audience in the mobile space, it is going to have to be created with the understanding that it’s going to be a niche title that will be pulling from the same player pool as several of the most popular video games of all time. If the series returns to the gachapon format, it will need to come with the understanding and expectation that the series’ fanbase is going to be extremely skeptical of further attempts to get them to pry open their wallets for games that can be abandoned by Bandai half a year after launch.
Personally, if I were in charge at Bamco, I think I’d just stay away.
Bon voyage, Tales of the Rays. At least you weren’t doomed by the Persona 5 curse.
Tales of the Rays will be shut down on July 23, 2024. An offline version, memorial book, and digital archive are in the works.