September’s finally over, meaning it’s time for the first ever monthly update post! We’ve got a bunch to share, mostly relating to Tales of Breaker and Tales of Breaker R, so strap in!

First of all, make sure to join our Discord server if you’re following the project or if you want to help out. It’s a pretty easy URL so you shouldn’t have trouble: https://discord.me/talesoffangames

Many of you may be wondering something along the lines of “what’s so special about Tales of Breaker?” Well, I’d hope that the fact that it’s a Tales game lost to time and overly aggressive DRM would be enough for you, but I’m happy to give you more information. Tales of Breaker was the first main Tales series game to feature a female protagonist. In addition, it featured some very unique mechanics that would later be used and completely butchered in Tales of the Tempest.

In Tales of Breaker, rather than making contracts with spirits, you collect Jenes Migrate gems (JM gems for short). These gems function in a few different ways. First of all, they act as an extremely powerful customization method, basically allowing you to determine a character’s stats and role by equipping them as they give substantial stat bonuses usually calculated in percentages. In addition to that, major JM gems act as summon spirits, allowing the characters to summon powerful spirits from the gems. Last, but certainly not least, Mika (and some other characters) can use certain special JM gems to merge with the creatures within in battle, significantly changing her playstyle. This last part is one we’re especially excited about and can’t wait to show you in Tales of Breaker R.

Now on to the good stuff. You may have noticed the rather gorgeous sketch of Mika as the icon. That sketch is thanks to our wonderful new head artist, Polka! They will be leading the character design and concept art side of things while the rest of our art team focuses on spriting and environment art. We’ve got a fun team of people so far, though we’re still looking for artists, programmers, and especially music composers.

I’ve put together a list of what we are doing and what we aren’t doing to help people out. Some stuff is needed while other stuff is impossible to do. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Stuff we are doing

Recreating the full story of the original game as accurately as possible

Translating all available material related to Tales of Mobile

An original script loosely based on the original

Skits and lots of them

An original battle system inspired partly by the Tales of Destiny remake

A Tales-style engine using MonoGame that will be open source and released publicly

1080p, 60FPS target resolution and framerate (not all animations will play at 60 FPS)

Windows, OS X, and Linux builds

A full soundtrack based on the original soundtrack (or as much as we can salvage)

Mystic Artes

In-battle voice acting

A playable test demo to show off the battle system at some point prior to release

Stuff we aren’t doing

Full voice acting unless we get a really good group of voice actors

Animated cutscenes or an opening unless we somehow get a really good set of animators on board

A licensed opening song unless someone gives us the rights for free

An exact recreation of the original game. It’s designed for Super Famicom levels of power; we can do better. Also literally impossible to exactly recreate the game because so much is lost.

Accepting money. Bamco is generally very nice to fan projects (one of the reasons I love them), but I don’t want to test their patience.

Stuff we might be doing

Minigames

New playable characters

New dungeons

Our current focus is translating everything we can and constructing the engine that the games will be built on. We’ve jumped around a bunch in deciding on the platform to build the games on but after a bunch of work we’ve settled on MonoGame. It’s extremely flexible, free, and has support for many platforms. Cherrim has been doing rough translation of script and various materials while I’ve been doing my best to localize them. Everything’s in an extremely rough state right now, but if you look at the Tales of Breaker (Original Game) page, you can see a bunch of what we’ve done (as far as I’m aware, it’s more than existed in English before this).

There’s a lot more to talk about, but we’ll save that for future months. Make sure to jump into the Discord if you’d like to help or just hang out; I promise, we don’t usually bite.

~TeganGibby