It's obvious that Namco Bandai has lofty goals set for their latest entry in the Tales series, Tales of Xillia, with it being the first title built solely for the PS3 in Japan. We've finally gotten an idea of just what their sales expectations are now thanks to some marketing documents that have been leaked on a Japanese gaming blog.

Tales of Xillia will utilize the contrast between light and shadow, which will lead to the game having a different art style direction than Vesperia's anime-style graphics or Graces's watercolor-style graphics (it could be more of a hand-painted or oil painting-like feel if the concept artwork is any indication). Baba stated that when he saw some of the concept artwork images running on actual hardware he was very impressed.

In this chart Tales of Xillia is represented by the red line, followed by Tales of Graces f in yellow and Tales of Vesperia (PS3) in blue. The pre-orders are on the vertical axis and the horizontal axis shows the weeks before the release (starting thirteen weeks before Tales of Xillia's release). Vesperia and Graces both had sub-par numbers hovering around 50,000 units eleven weeks out but Xillia has already reached 80,000 during the same time frame. The rest of the red line shows what Namco Bandai expects the title to sell leading up to the release, which ends up at about 200,000 units according to their calculations. These calculations are in part due to a "record pace" in pre-order sales according to the company.

The other image shows the sales figures of the previous two ports compared to their original versions. Tales of Vesperia (X360) sold 210,000 units compared to the PS3's 420,000 units. Tales of Graces (Wii) sold 220,000 units compared to Graces f's 345,000 units. Thus, the company is expecting that a built-for-PS3 title will outpace the PS3 port's sales.

Tales of Xillia will be released on September 8 in Japan exclusively on the PS3. No word has been given on a North American or European release.