Less than one month after the release of Tales of Xillia Remastered, Bandai Namco has announced that Tales of Berseria Remastered is going to hit Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC on Feb. 27, 2026. While Bandai Namco has been working seriously on its ongoing Remastered Project — which is great, don’t get me wrong — choosing Berseria feels like a missed opportunity to focus on what matters.
Released in 2016 in Japan for the PlayStation 3, Tales of Berseria stands out for keeping the series’ traditional action-based combat, while presenting a more serious and darker revenge story. Following Velvet Crowe, a woman who turned into a type of demon called a therion, Tales of Berseria is also considered a light prequel to Tales of Zestiria since it’s set in the same world, and the events in the former take place 1,000 years before those of the latter. Later in 2016, Berseria received a PlayStation 4 version, and then, in 2017, a Windows PC version.
That Berseria was going to be remastered has only ever been a matter of when, not if. As part of the 30th anniversary celebration of the Tales of series, in December 2024, Bandai Namco announced the Tales of Series – Remastered Project, which is defined as a long-term plan focused on bringing the series’ classic games to “a new generation of consoles with quality-of-life enhancements.” The first two titles games in this initiative were Tales of Graces F Remastered, released on Jan. 15, and Tales of Xillia Remastered, which hit modern platforms on Oct. 31. Prioritizing both of those games made sense, considering you needed to have a PlayStation 3 — or a Wii for Tales of Graces — to play them until now.
Although the remastered version slated for next year will make Tales of Berseria even more accessible by adding it to the libraries of other platforms — and hopefully fix some of the localization errors in the post-game quests — it’s already pretty accessible. The biggest appeal of the 30th-anniversary project is bringing titles that are almost impossible to play nowadays. Despite how good Berseria is, you can easily get it in a Steam sale or boot up the PS4 version on the PS5 and enjoy the game. Considering the Tales of series started in 1995, with Tales of Phantasia for the Super Famicom, there are several titles that could more meaningfully benefit from the time, energy, and financial support required of a remaster.
Everyone’s favorite entry, Tales of the Abyss, should unquestionably be the focus now. Considered one of the best titles in the long-running JRPG series, Abyss is now available only to those fortunate enough to have the Nintendo 3DS version or the PlayStation 2 one. Take any list of “best Tales games” and you will see the story of Luke fon Fabre appear in the top three in most cases.
Next, in order to make this project a complete homage to the series, I’d love to see Tales of Phantasia remastered in some capacity. Revisiting the inaugural title would help a new audience understand the history behind the Tales of series — a movement we’re seeing being made by other developers and published too, such as Square Enix with its Dragon Quest series. (Another great option for the remaster treatment is Tales of the Tempest, a Nintendo DS game that was released exclusively in Japan.)
I understand that remastering old games is not an easy task. We know, for instance, that the original Final Fantasy Tactics code was lost. When it comes to the Tales of series, while the source material seems to still be available, producing the remasters involves finding and analyzing the old data. As reported by Automaton, the Tales of IP’s general producer, Yusuke Tomizawa, explained during his panel in The Tokyo Game Show 2025 that “it’s a bit embarrassing, but since there were multiple different development studios working on the series over the years, we have to find the original data first. And when we do find it, it can be full of gaps, which takes months of analysis to deal with.” Even so, rather than re-releasing games that are already widely playable, I’d rather see remasters of games that could’ve been lost to time, like Tales of Graces and Tales of Xillia.
