Tales of the Rays

» see tales-ch.jp/torays as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Bandai Namco announced Tales of the Rays on 15 December 2015, the day the Tales series turned twenty, as the first item on an anniversary lineup. It launched in Japan on 28 February 2017 on both phone stores and ran until 23 July 2024, which the publisher's own closing post totals at 2,703 days. Nobody was ever told why it ended.

The pitch was the part the other Tales phone games had quietly dropped. Rays carried a version of the Linear Motion Battle System, the sideways real-time combat the console entries are built around, fitted to a one-handed flick and laid over the CC economy from Destiny and Graces. The lead game designer was the man who had built those console battle systems going back to Eternia, which is a strange credit to find attached to a free phone game. Bandai Namco said plainly that the combat was the element worth keeping, and that sentence is the reason the offline build exists at all.

It ran wide. More than two hundred playable characters, drawn from twenty-six separate Tales titles, and three of those sources were themselves dead mobile Tales games whose casts Rays simply absorbed. It passed a million downloads on 22 March 2017 and two million on 12 October 2018. That second number is the last one the publisher ever announced, with almost six years of service still ahead of it.

The English build lasted ten months and closed in May 2018, so for six of its seven years Rays existed in Japanese only. The ending it held back until the servers were gone was never translated into anything.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the one that tried ~

Most of the mobile Tales games were card games wearing Tales art. You collected characters and tapped, and the fight resolved itself somewhere behind the interface. Rays put you back on a line with a character you were actually moving, chaining normal attacks into artes with a flick, on a phone, in 2017. Among the mobile Tales titles it stands alone in attempting the thing the series is actually known for.

The producer who fronted the farewell had written an earlier post saying he personally conceived both Rays and Tales of Luminaria. Luminaria opened in November 2021 and was shut 258 days later. He left the series that September, two months after burying it, with Rays still running and nearly two years left on its clock.

~ what was built to outlast it ~

The offline build shipped on the day of the shutdown itself, version 7.0.0, roughly ten gigabytes, keeping whatever characters and equipment you had already earned and unlocking the main story outright. Into it Bandai Namco put an eleven-episode ending written specifically for the occasion, readable only once the live game no longer existed.

Around that came a memorial page on the Tales channel and a full-story playthrough posted to the official YouTube account, for anyone who was never going to install ten gigabytes just to find out how it finished.

Movic took orders for a two-volume memorial book as well, roughly six hundred pages, at 13,200 yen. For a free phone game that never published a revenue figure, that is a heavy send-off.

~ the money and the clock ~

The paid currency stopped selling at eleven in the morning on 21 May 2024, the same moment the closure was announced, which gave players nine weeks to spend down whatever they were holding. What they could not spend fell under Japan's Payment Services Act, article 20, paragraph 1, the clause that obliges an issuer of prepaid value to refund it when the service behind it is withdrawn.

On 22 October 2024 two clocks ran out together. It was the last day to claim money back for unspent mirror crystal, and the last day to download the offline build or move it onto a new handset. One date closed the account and the archive. Two years later the offline build is a 404 on Google Play, the Japanese App Store listing is gone, and the lookup comes back empty, so the thing that was built to outlive the game did not manage to outlive it by much.

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