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Posted on September 12, 2011 by Alex Donaldson

Tales fans waiting to see if the newly released PS3 title Tales of Xillia will make it West might have just had a clue in the form of some files buried deep on the Blu-ray disc of the Japanese release.

Friend of the site and twitter sleuth Aeana went digging into the files of the game and found subtitle files which appear to refer to English, French and Italian subtitles for the game, though the files are currently blank and only feature dummy text.

On the disc all of the game's text files are named with the final modifier .SDBJPN. Different files ending in .SDBJPN refer to different text for different characters and segments of the game. That's where the game pulls all its text from subtitles to menu options.

The Tales of Xillia disc also features other SDB file endings - namely SDBENG, SDBFRA, SDBITA, SDBSPA, SDBPOR, SBDNLD and SDBDUE. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that these files refer to English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, the Netherlands and Deutschland - German.

The existance of these files on the Japanse disc seems to indicate that a localization of the game for these three languages has been seriously considered and possibly prepared for, even if the current files are mostly empty and useless. However, we can't reiterate enough that this confirms nothing and could alternatively just be the most basic placeholder code - so take it with a pinch of salt and don't get your hopes up too high.

"The files are inside a gigantic 2GB datafile, TLFILE.TLDAT, inside the game's USRDIR," Aeana explained to us. "There's an accompanying header file that gives filenames and offsets in the file, so I used that to rip out all of the files (148,476 individual files!).  It has pretty much all of the data in the game, including textures, music, etc. and then there's the text files that I mentioned."

"It's the text for everything in the game.  Event text, skit text, menu text and item descriptions, battle tutorials, etc.  I've found a little bit of everything in there. But yeah, only the SDBJPN files actually have any text in them.  The non-JPN files have the string identifiers associated with dummy strings."

In an interesting bit of trivia, Aeana also told us that digging into the files revealed that Tales of Xillia only has 2.19GB of actual game to it - the other 4GB or so on the Blu-ray is dedicated entirely to pre-rendered movies that play throughout the game.

We'll fire off an email to Namco Bandai and see if they bite. Tales of Xillia has already shipped over half a million units in Japan, so even without a Western release it can already be considered a pretty hearty success. Erren's got a copy of the Japanese version, and we'll bring you an import review when she's done.

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