Earlier this month, Namco Bandai announced that two new trailers for Tales of Xillia would go up following the events of the recent Tales of Festival that took place over the last two days. Both trailers have just went up and we have an analysis of both of them.

The game 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.



The first video is another trailer video, the successor to the previous Tales of Xillia trailer from last year's reveal. We get our first look at progress, the game's opening theme song from Ayumi Hamasaki.

No scenes of the actual opening video are in this trailer, but we do get a look at what appears to be one of the game's villains midway through the trailer.



The second video is the game's first system video. First up is a look at the game's Short Chats, which are confirmed to be voiced --- they essentially work like the traditional Long Chats but don't require pressing a button to initialize them.

The video follows up by showing off the overworld map action button mechanics that were revealed earlier this year. One new piece of information is that, depending on the action, the viewpoint may switch to a first-person perspective. This is shown when some of the characters crouch to crawl under tight places. This system also lets characters jump down from high ledges instead of jumping up to them as the scans previously revealed.

The video follows up with a presentation of the Xillia's DR-LMBS. The fighting chats are confirmed to be animated and can be triggered at the beginning of the battle instead of only when triggering specific actions. A blue line attached to each character also appears when in Link Mode and it seems that they can't walk too far away from each other when attached. A demonstration of the real-time character swap mechanic is also demonstrated, followed by a couple Resonance Artes. The system video concludes with a Long Chat skit.

(Those wanting a more detailed explanation of the various Skit systems in Tales of Xillia can refer to our previous article detailing them.)

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.