Tales of Eternia ONLINE

» see toeo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Namco announced this in October 2004 as a partnership with Dwango, with a beta in early 2005 and a launch that spring. The beta arrived on 27 July 2005 and the launch did not arrive at all that year. A second closed test ran from 16 January to 5 February 2006, followed by an open one from the 16th to the 28th of that same month. The service opened properly on 3 March 2006, alongside a boxed version sold at no fixed price.

What they built was a faithful port of a single-player combat system into a world with other people in it. The Tales games fight in real time on a two-dimensional line, and the online version kept that with a modified combo timer, so a player coming off the PlayStation game recognized the controls immediately. Character creation went down to the hair and the shape of the face, then asked for one class out of five, each modeled on a party member from the console game. The class could not be changed afterward. Production I.G made the animated sequences and the theme song was Mami Izawa's やまない雨はない, which translates as there is no rain that does not stop, and which reads differently now.

Europe got two shots at the game this was based on, a PlayStation release in 2001 and a PSP port in February 2006, the second one landing in the same month the MMO's open beta was running in Tokyo. The handheld version I could have walked into a shop and bought. The online one had a Japanese client on a Japanese account system with no intention of ever leaving the country, so there was nothing here to be locked out of except the news that it had closed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the piggyback ~

Dying in this game cost you experience, which was standard. The unusual part was the way out of it. Another player could pick your downed character up and carry them on their back to a church, where you were restored without the penalty. It is a small mechanic and a completely clear one, because it makes the cost of death payable only by somebody else agreeing to walk you somewhere.

~ ten months and then the notice ~

On 12 January 2007 Bandai Namco Games announced the service would end on 31 March. The stated cause was 諸般の事情, various circumstances, the Japanese corporate formula for a reason that exists and will not be shared. The trade press added the part the company left out: the number of accounts holding a valid paid play period had been going down.

The wind-down was more generous than most. Anyone with a live game ID on 29 January had their expiry pushed to 28 February at no charge, and from 1 March to 31 March the whole game ran as free play for every account holder. That is a full month of a subscription MMORPG given away by a publisher that had already decided to switch it off. Character data was deleted on the last day.

~ what the series kept ~

Tales went back to single-player consoles and stayed there. Mainline entries kept arriving for another twenty years with the battle system getting revised each time, and the series has not attempted an MMORPG since. Eternia itself is being remastered for modern platforms in October 2026, in its original single-player form, twenty years after the online version opened and nineteen after it was switched off.

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