In an interview with Famitsuu, Bandai Namco Games' Tsutomu Gouda and Yoshito Higuchi shed some light on their upcoming Xbox 360 RPG Tales of Vesperia. Gouda is serving as the game's producer, while Higuchi is acting as creative producer. The game is developed by the team responsible for Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss. However, Vesperia's scenario writer has not worked on Tales of Symphonia. As always, the anime sequences are produced by Production I.G.

Both, the game's length and the amount of CG scenes will set new records for the Tales franchise. Bandai Namco Games promises a resolution of 1280 x 720. The US release of Tales of Vesperia is set to feature a main theme different from the Japanese version. However, both will be performed by the same Japanese artists.

Tales Studio had already conducted some basic research into high definition visuals during the development of Tales of the Abyss. Back then, the developers immediately wanted to apply this newly gained knowledge to create a next-generation Tales game, but their superiors eventually nixed that plan because of concerns related to the project's profitability. Development of Tales of Vesperia began in earnest about two years ago, in May 2006.

There won't be any online play, but online rankings for minigames. Higuchi also was open to the idea of making items available for download via Xbox Live's marketplace.

When asked about a potential PlayStation 3 release, Higuchi declined to give a straight forward answer, commenting only he couldn't say anything at this point. Thanks to the PlayStation 3's very high specs, bringing Tales of Vesperia to Sony Computer Entertainment's platform was technically very well possible, though. He contrasted this situation to the porting of Tales of Symphonia. Because Symphonia had originally been developed for the GameCube, it was extremely difficult to port the game to PlayStation 2. Eventually, the team had no choice but to reduce the framerate, so the game would run on PlayStation 2.

Tales of Vesperia will be available sometime later this year.

• Famitsu