This is one gorgeous game...

I also love how quick the loading to battle is (a little longer when returning to normal somehow) :-)

It does look beautiful..everything looks so good. I cannot see anything that looks dodgy in any way. The subtle lighting effects during battles are nice, and menu's look clean and efficient to traverse. It's got winner written all over it.
  
I'm looking forward to the next trailer also. 

Looks great. Looking forward to more info and footage... I am not, however, looking forward to the announcements of the Western release dates.

I'm really excited for this game. Still need to play through Tales of Symphonia: DotNW though.... ugh...

Looks the same as ever. :-\

Why would you want it to change? It's always looked beautiful. We just like finally seeing more of it, not expect the new stuff to look different...

I hope it can keep up the Tales series excellence. I hope they take a step back with the battle system, though. It's becoming way more complicated than it needs to be.

Someone subbed the off screen trailer.

It looks really good, I just hope they are a lot of anime cutscenes... unlike Tales of Symphonia.

" It looks really good, I just hope they are a lot of anime cutscenes... unlike Tales of Symphonia. "

I prefer in game cut scenes, those look really good in the trailer :-)

I'm sure there will be enough of both, it's supposed to be the biggest and best Tales game with like 70 hours worth of main story gameplay.

 Cool. Visually, it looks quite impressive for a Wii game, and the battle animations don't look like they have any of the weird jerkiness that ToS:DotNW had. Color me impressed. Any word on the story so far?
    
Maybe this is irrelevant, but I feel I have to say - and maybe this is more indicative of my waning tolerance for anime-inspired stylings than of the quality of the design itself - that the main character's costume design is just... ridiculous. Even considering the use-every-color-in-the-crayon-box visual legacy the Tales series has wrought.
 
On a tangential note, is Sakuraba composing? I continue to hold out the half-formed hope that Go Shiina returns to score a Tales game (or any game) in its entirety.

God, I'm sure the game will be great, but I still can't stand the character designs.

Btw the thing seen @ the end of the second video is some kind of DS  (dungeon crawler?) game downloaded from the Wii game. It reminds me of Time Stalkers on the Dreamcast, it had a first person dungeon crawler game (think Dungeon Master but simpler) to download and play on your Visual Memory Unit. Except in that case the mini game was better than the main game, I played it to death until the VMU battery died.

The DS game looks cool, it's definitely a sweet addition. I hope other developers follow suit, 
 
That combat looks really fun.

Yes, the combat system looks super fast and fluid, you can also switch characters at will :-)

"On a tangential note, is Sakuraba composing?"

The combat does indeed look fun, and I always love games with dynamic camera angles, but the rest looks just so dull and unoriginal. : / And uglier than most SNES RPGs, both in terms of graphics and artstyle. 
 
O, what I would give for another cyberpunk or steampunk JRPG with prerendered backgrounds and script that is written by a professional, told in-game and is not hampered with by curse that is voice acting. Sigh.

" The combat does indeed look fun, and I always love games with dynamic camera angles, but the rest looks just so dull and unoriginal. : / And uglier than most SNES RPGs, both in terms of graphics and artstyle.   O, what I would give for another cyberpunk or steampunk JRPG with prerendered backgrounds and script that is written by a professional, told in-game and is not hampered with by curse that is voice acting. Sigh. "

Ah, unfortunatly I have never had fun with the combat in Baten Kaitos. But I did actually play that not too long ago for exactly that reason.
 
The abandonment of prerendered backgrounds for design and atmosphere reasons is one of the greatest sins of the last decade of video gaming. The REmake is a shining example of that - and even that is now 7 years old. 
 
And don't get me started on voice acting. Voice acting in video games is a travesty. JRPG scripts in particular have been made five times blander, three times shorter and fifteen times more stupid by the inclusion of VOs. What would have been 2 hours of interactive character exploration on the PSX is turned into a badly written 10-minute cutscene on the PS3.
 It's a fucking tragedy.

The stories weren't that great or elaborate to begin with (unless we're talking Western RPGs like Planescape Torment), not to mention most JRPGs still use a crapload of text and only have voice overs for the primary cut scenes. The 10 minute cut scenes were prelevant in the PSX RPGs you look back to so fondly mind you, they're not a new addition, except now they also include dialogue and not just groans.

As for pre-rendered backgrounds, meh, so glad they finally got over them. REmake should have been done like Code Veronica instead with real-time 3D and dynamic camera work, it would have looked better too since the GC was more capable than the Dreamcast. RE4 didn't look as great (though still great) but it was also a completely different environment than RE, if it was all inside a mansion with careful camera placement they could have upped the detail a lot more, though obviously not to the level of REmake, but the real-time nature allows for other cool stuff.

Also I can't even think of many RPGs outside Final Fantasy that even used pre-rendered backgrounds so I'd say it was the exception rather than the rule. Some of the best games of the era, did not use them. Grandia, Xenogears, and the like.

As for this looking worse than SNES RPGs "in graphics" (the art style, feel free to hate it, I'm not fond of some of the characters myself, but that doesn't make it universally bad, especially with their beautifully rendered environments) what does that even mean? Comparing pixel art with 3D art? And how is this more generic than such games used to be? I look @ FF SNES screenshots (to make sure I remember it right) and I see caves, medieval looking castles, and basically nothing that stands out as so unique. If anything it looks like a generic RPG Maker tileset, though obviously it's the latter that was inspired by the former, but that doesn't make the original any more unique looking. Caves. Castles. Cities. Mountains. Deserts. All rendered in quite a conventional and simple manner for the most part (though their enemy designs were pretty creative).

" And don't get me started on voice acting. Voice acting in video games is a travesty. JRPG scripts in particular have been made five times blander, three times shorter and fifteen times more stupid by the inclusion of VOs. What would have been 2 hours of interactive character exploration on the PSX is turned into a badly written 10-minute cutscene on the PS3.  It's a fucking tragedy. "

Along with the red-head, this new blonde guy is more along the lines of what I expect from the tales series than any of the other characters so far. 

 
 
New character: Richard

Gallery

Gallery

" Someone subbed the off screen trailer.

"