Now in its seventh year, the Tales of Festival is the ultimate celebration of one of Japan's most popular RPG series. Drawing 22,000 fans over two days to Yokohama Arena just outside Tokyo, the festival is a chance to see voice actors from the games - all the way back to 1995's Tales of Phantasia - interact on stage and act out skits, along with live music and exclusive updates on new Tales of games. It's fan service on an epic scale.

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“ Women tend to be more interested in the story and the characters.

see deal Tales of Zestiria - PlayStation 4 $24.99 on Gamestop

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While it's fairly surprising that a single franchise could gather an arena’s worth of fans for two days running - despite an eye-watering ticket price of 7,000-13,000 yen ($69-127.50) - what is all the more impressive is the gender split. Far from the stereotype of a game otaku sausage party, the crowd at the 2014 event is almost exclusively female. Tales of Xillia 2 and Tales of Hearts R will soon be released in North America, with Xillia 2 hitting PS3 on August 19 and Hearts R on Vita in late 2014, but in Japan they are both out already. The next game out in Japan is Tales of the World: Reve Unitia on 3DS - but the really hot news is Tales of Zestiria "Ever since the first game, Tales of Phantasia, the series has had the theme of coexistence – for example, various human races living side by side with animal races – and the series has always taken that very seriously. So for the 20th anniversary game, Zestiria, we intend to honor those origins deeply."It may seem weird that the game is exclusive to PS3, but the logic is obvious. New-gen hardware has yet to really take off in Japan, where gamers prefer handhelds and smartphones. PS3 is still king among the current crop of home consoles, with 10 million units sold. It takes great games to move new hardware, and Zestiria could have been a major boost for PS4 sales there, but it is no surprise that Bandai Namco was unwilling to risk putting its high-concept game on a console fewer than a million people already own."Of course I'm interested in making a game for new-generation hardware, but the 600,000 or 700,000 Tales of players in Japan are unlikely to have the ready funds to buy both a copy of the game and a new system to play it on. So it's a question of timing," says Baba.Tales of Xillia 2 is a rare sequel in the Tales of series – the third after Tales of Destiny and Tales of Symphonia. Baba says Namco Tales Studio had created a surplus of unused content for the first Xillia game, prompting a return."There are two planets in Xillia: Rieze Maxia and Elympios. Most of the first game was set on Rieze Maxia, but we showed very little of Elympios, so we decided to introduce new characters to revisit that world," he says. "Xillia was the 15th-anniversary title here in Japan, and because of that we made way more material than could ever fit in one game, including all this background history, and we didn't want it to go unused.”The English version of Tales of Xillia 2 was announced shortly before the North American release of the first game, with localization work on each being carried out consecutively by Bandai Namco's US office, then finished off back in Japan. The first game was released here nearly two years after the Japanese version, and Xillia 2 will have a similar schedule when it arrives in August. Baba explains that the generous collectors' edition of Xillia 2 is a way to acknowledge the patience of fans in the West."There are lots of challenges. There are so many cultural differences, so we spent a lot of energy working with the Western localization team at Bandai Namco America and our domestic localization team to get it right. It takes a long time. It's not just a case of translating the text; you have to get every word just right, so that it gives the same feeling as the original Japanese. The localized game is as close as possible to the Japanese original, and the same in terms of content."And then there's the more compact Reve Unitia. Baba says the game, which has no relation to the previous Tales of the World smartphone title, Tactics Union, is being developed with the portable market firmly in mind, allowing players not only to play on the go but to team up with friends and play together. Currently there are no plans to localize Reve Unitia.When asked whether the side games in the series bear any influence on subsequent main titles, Baba replies, "No, never. Quite the opposite: We cherry-pick elements from the main games to use in the side games, but we've never taken a game system or something like that from a side game to use in the numbered games."Before we parted, I asked Baba how he plans to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Tales of series next year. This year’s Tales of Festival will be hard to top – maybe an even bigger dragon statue at the entrance? – and Baba looks blank for the first time since we sat down. "I hope to do something our fans will enjoy," he offers eventually. From the sight of 22,000 of them enraptured at Yokohama Arena, it's safe to assume they will.

Daniel Robson is a Tokyo-based freelancer who writes about Japanese games, music and weirdness. Follow him on Twitter: @ItCameFromJapan