Tales Series

The Tales of (テイルズオブ) series is developed by Namco (now Namco Bandai). Originally started by Wolfteam, which had later formed into the Namco Tales Studio, the Tales of series began with Tales of Phantasia on the Super Nintendo in 1995. Since then, eight other Mothership Titles, or main games, have been released, along with many remakes and ports, an Escort Title (Tales of the Tempest), various spin-offs, and Tales of Mobile games.

Titles
Many Tales games, starting with Tales of Eternia, have titles for all of the playable characters. Though the effects are always different (or have no effect at all), titles always have a sentence describing it (these lines are sometimes humorous). Though some are aquired by story or level, many come through battle, sidequests, and more.

Skits
Again, starting with Tales of Eternia, voiced skits, or extra lines of dialog not essential to the plot, were included in all the Mothership Titles. However, the voices were always, with the exception of a few occasions in Tales of Legendia were completely cut from the English versions of the games (and sometimes the skits were cut completely). It has been suggested that newer games (such as Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World) could have fully-voiced skits.

Battle System
The Tales of series is most notable for it's Linear Motion Battle System (LMBS), which each Mothership Title has had some variation of. It is an action-packed battle system, in which the player can only run back and forth on a single line (as the "Linear" suggests) to attack the enemies, in a similar fashion to 2D fighting games. However, not all games limit the player to a single line - in Tales of Rebirth the character can switch between three lines, and Tales of the Abyss introduced Free Run, or the ability to run anywhere on the battlefield. Various kinds of attacks can be performed by using direction and button combinations, and skills are assigned similarly, though they consume TP, or technical points, in most games. There are also options to guard and even command allies.

There are three settings in many Tales of games for a player to control a character: Manual, Semi-Auto, and Automatic. Manual allows the player to completely control a character - for instance, if the attack button is pressed, the player will have to go up to an enemy to hit. Semi-Auto, however, automatically moves the character to the enemy when a skill or attack is used. Using these two settings, many of the more recent games (excluding Tales of Legendia) have allowed four players to fight at once in the place of the computer-controlled characters. The final setting, Automatic, allows the computer to control characters. However, these Automatic characters have additional settings, such as the distance from the enemy, how much TP to uses, and much more.