Tales of Eternia Remastered seems to understand the assignment

Over the last several years, Bandai Namco has been making a concerted effort to bring many of their classic Tales of games to modern platforms; Tales of Eternia Remastered is no different. The last time I personally wrote about the Tales of Remaster project was a little under two years ago with Tales of Graces f; a remaster that left a rather strong first impression that Paul eventually stated held up for the full length of the game, several months later. The scope of both the game and the demo I played for Tales of Eternia Remastered differs greatly from the demo I managed to check out for Tales of Graces f Remastered back then, but the important bits stay mostly the same.

First, a few asterisks; I played about half an hour of Tales of Eternia Remastered, compared to the roughly two hours I'd had with Tales of Graces f Remastered when I'd formulated my impressions of that project. Additionally, while I don't believe it had any major impact on my impressions it's worth mentioning that my demo for Tales of Eternia Remastered happened less than 2 hours after I had landed in Tokyo after a 13 hour flight, earlier this month. Jet lag very much could have had an impact and might have meant I missed some warning signs, or some particularly nice improvements to the game. 

With that out of the way, I think the most important changes to Tales of Eternia Remastered come down to the visuals and the translation. Bandai Namco chose to default to a raw pixel approach to showcasing the game, in widescreen; while some aspects of the game have greatly benefited from an increased resolution, much of the game's assets remain as is, with only an increased output resolution having an improvement on the presentation at that base level. What stands out much more is a redone, improved translation - coupled with a much more pleasing font and text boxes compared to the original. Unlike previous remasters, Tales of Eternia is a primarily 2D game; so I'd wager the improvements to the translation offers a far greater upgrade than the comparatively minor, but still greatly appreciated, improvements to the visual clarity. We didn't get too much of a chance to take a look at some of the game's redrawn portraits.

One of the more major changes to the game's structure comes down to optional objective markers; I did run into some minor difficulty parsing the way forward during some scenes, based almost entirely off of a personal disconnect between the game's pixel art and which segments of a screen I could actually move across. Maybe that was down to jet lag, maybe not; but it did offer a good example of how the objective markers could give a nice little nudge in the right direction when necessary. Gameplay, too, has seen some improvements - including battle speed options, and some improvements to auto-battle. While the A-LMBS system remains engaging, so far it feels like it successfully straddles the line between improving accessibility while maintaining the integrity of the original game.

That goes for the experience as a whole, even if I wish I'd had a longer session to better immerse myself in the changes, and perhaps a chance to demo the remaster on multiple platforms. Considering it's an original PlayStation game at its core, I don't foresee any major issues - but our demo was on a PlayStation 5. I would have loved the chance to go hands-on with either the Nintendo Switch version or the PC release to compare; the game is already Steam Deck verified, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to have gotten a broader view of the state of the remaster across a wider range of platforms. For now, at least I can report that it feels like its in a promising state; not that it should be too much longer before we get a chance to check out the full release.

In just about half a month from now, Tales of Eternia Remastered launches on October 15, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. Stay tuned for our further impressions in the weeks ahead.