The Tales Series Has Rockin’ Theme Songs

9 responses to “The Tales Series Has Rockin’ Theme Songs”

1. 

   ravenblayde

   February 25, 2015 at 4:03 pm

   Will listen to when I get home from work.

   I was actually listening to the themes of ToV and ToGf today while at work.

2. 

   falkirion001

   February 25, 2015 at 4:20 pm

   Probably my favorite JRPG series ever. Miss hearing Ring a Bell (Vesperia) and White wishes (Graces F), gotta put them back onto my ipod

   1. 

      vanit

      February 25, 2015 at 4:45 pm

      I was addicted to them up until Symphonia; it reached a point for me where they felt so generic and lost interest. 🙁

      1. 

         falkirion001

         February 26, 2015 at 9:29 am

         I started on Symphonia, had no exposure to it before then.

3. 

   negativezero

   February 25, 2015 at 5:34 pm

   Many of these were cut or changed / vocals removed for the localized releases, because Namco couldn’t be bothered getting international rights to the songs.

   Also, SNES version of the Tales of Phantasia opening is way better than the PS1 version. It’s also a technical marvel: full digital vocals on a system that only had 128kb RAM on a cartridge that only held 6mb data.

   1. 

      plime97

      February 25, 2015 at 6:37 pm

      That is actually an insane feat of storage now that I think about it…

      And nothing annoyed me more than the lousy Tales of Hearts opening that we get here in the west, it’s pretty much just background music (where’s my vocals??)

      1. 

         negativezero

         February 25, 2015 at 6:47 pm

         Yeah, Hearts was the one that really stuck out to me recently. But a few of them also had basically karaoke versions of the opening songs as well, I just forget which of them since I basically only watch the opening once. I know Abyss was one of the ones they did that with.

         Vesperia’s was swapped out for an English vocal version but that was acceptable because the artist wrote sang both versions as she’s bilingual.

         The SNES Tales of Phantasia opening basically uses the usual sequenced music stuff and loads the vocals as digital sounds. They’re pretty low bitrate and monoaural, and basically everything is cut up into a sequence of hundreds of tiny pieces and streamed in in sequence to avoid overloading the tiny amount of memory the SPU had. It’s an incredibly impressive bit of software engineering to achieve something we basically take for granted now.

4. 

   bodmaniac

   February 25, 2015 at 9:15 pm

   As good as Starry Heavens is I will always prefer the orchestral theme used in the PAL version of Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube. It just always seemed to fit better with the rest of the in-game soundtrack and matched so well with the end theme and the credits.

5. 

   wolkenkatz

   February 26, 2015 at 4:02 pm

   Tales of Innocense R (Japanese release) actually had a new intro done by Kokia as well, and while it didn’t change the song, the intro to Tales of Xillia focused on the protagonist you chose to play through with at the beginning.

   I can’t get enough of Zesteria’s intro though. I remember when I was staying in Roppongi for a week, flicking through the channels and some live music show was on. AKB48 was singing, and it had a catchy tune, but the audience was subdued like they were in a library, and AKB48 was playing for your benefit, so don’t misbehave. Superfly was up next. The audience went nuts, and the performance was awesome too. It’s amazing what happens when focusing on belting out a song is the priority, rather than the choreography.