Preview: Tales of Graces f Remastered Adds Welcome Quality of Life Features

With the Tales of series celebrating it’s 30th anniversary, Bandai Namco has chosen from it’s wide selection of titles to bring a Tales of Graces remaster to modern consoles and PC. But Tales of Graces f Remastered does more than that, as it offers multiple quality of life features and the inclusion of content that was previously limited to Japan. But does it hold up? And is it worth jumping into a title that feels so utterly divorced from what the Tales of series is today — at least in terms of gameplay.

Bandai Namco revealed it would be bringing numerous quality of life changes to Tales of Graces f Remastered, providing a fairly comprehensive list in August 2024. And while it’s easy to take that at face value, you never really understand how impactful these can be until you see them in practice.

The developers of the Tales of series have continued to place an emphasis on narrative, and their characters, more or less making this a focal point for the games themselves. So it seems natural that Tales of Graces f Remastered will allow you to turn off battle encounters. During my period with the game, I didn’t make use of it but saw the value in the function as I traveled back and forth from my objective to the nearest locale to sell items and turn in requests — these function as smaller side quests that reward you with currency and items, which help you stockpile resources to upgrade your weapons and armor.

I had forgotten how complex these systems could be in earlier Tales of games, or how unwieldly the controls were. But the muscle memory from the hours of Tales of Symphonia I played kicked in after about half an hour as I finetuned the A.I. for my companions. I remembered I needed to move in the direction enemies were relative to my character on the screen and tilt my thumbstick in any of the four cardinal directions to execute specific attacks. While not the most intuitive, the combat is still satisfying, especially when factoring how you can control your party members or weave using items in and out of more sticky situations.

The developers also made consideration for players that may have already gone through Tales of Graces f on either the Wii or the PlayStation 3. Skits can be skipped and you will even be able to skip the “child” stage of the story if you’ve seen that song and dance before. This makes the game more accommodating for additional playthroughs. That said, I do have to agree with the developers when it comes to the story and characters being the driving force of any Tales of game, and Tales of Grades f Remastered is no exception.

I loved hearing characters chat after combat, and I loved the way the skits extrapolated on events I had more or less jumped into during the preview session, or just how the characters would share things about themselves. It made me realize how much I missed the old Tales of formula. Tales of Arise was fine and all, but the previous Tales of entries just had that extra something that made them feel very much their own. And at the end of the day, it’s great that his remaster is going to make it to modern consoles with all of the content that was previously exclusive to Japan attached.

Honestly, I found what I played of Tales of Graces f Remastered enjoyable. If this is the first effort of Bandai Namco from bringing more series to modern consoles and PC, I’m interested to see what else they’ll bring and how they’ll be handling those releases going forward. And if the new audience gained from Tales of Arise will love these titles just as much as the rest of us.

Tales of Graces f Remastered will come out on the PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC on January 17, 2025.