Bandai Namco does it again but this time they remaster a game that deserves the remaster in the first place. A trailer, that is pretty much the opening of the game, has been uploaded to their official Tales of Youtube Channel, and it has been remastered too. Personally, I see it as they could have done more, they are clearly using some sort of upscaling technique that makes things look odd. If anything, it wouldn’t be weird if Bandai Namco themselves didn’t use some sort of AI upscaling for the intro as having to redo everything is painful, but that does not excuse them of having done such a thing.
Bandai Namco did it weird
Personally they could have done something better, but we are speaking about Bandai Namco here, back in the very early days of gaming, Bandai was a synonym of “Cheap Licensed Anime or Tokusatsu game”, and they still seem to be holding that flag proudly even today. Sometimes they had moments of genius with one off games like Digimon World, but that’s because the team behind programming the game was really involved with things. Tales of Eternia however hails from an era when Namco held the property and was also separated from Bandai.
The original release in the year 2000 was received with pretty positive reception, so I expect the same will happen with this remastered version as the game hasn’t aged poorly. The fact that it offers the ability to switch between the original and remastered mode is a big boon many other games should allow. As a matter of fact it is crazy that you just can’t go and play this game in 4:3 aspect ratio to simulate the era accurate setup one would have for this game. More games should give the ability to play them on 4:3 aspect ratio.
