Tales of Xillia detailed in Famitsu

This week’s issue of Famitsu has a good amount of new detail on Tales of Xillia, revealing a couple of surprising changes from the franchise’s traditional formula.

Xillia will not use an overhead perspective, but instead a behind-the-back view. The buildings and other objects in the town are full-sized and not as ‘chibi’ as they might appear in other Tales games. This could be a part of the game’s attempt to create a more reality-driven experience.

The magazine broke down five key words for the game:

Liese Maxia – the name of the game world. It has spirits, but only those who’ve been converted to solid form may see them.
Spirit Power – Liese Maxi’s energy source. It is used to power lights, ships, etc.
Spirit Maxwell – the master of spirits. He is sort of a god-like figure who watches over the humans and spirits of Liese Maxia.
La Sugall and A Jule – two of Liese Maxia’s greatest countries, both at war against each other. La Shugall is a great country whose aim is dominance in Liese Maxia. In it lies Il Fan, the world’s largest metropolis and an area where inhabitants can freely use the Spirit Arts. A Jule, a small country, is still considered a developing nation. Their military learns to control monsters, apparently.

Two main characters were revealed during the game’s announcement, which is a first for the series. Jude Mathis (male) is a 15-year-old medical student and Mira Maxwell (female) is a 20-year-old spirits master, able to summon spirits and control the four elements. Jude looks up to Mira and wants to be able to assist her. Mira is naturally honest and sometimes an airhead. The two meet each other while Jude is investigating the arrival of a large number of patients in the hospital, due to a backfiring of Spirit Arts.

According to series producer Hideo Baba, both Kosuke Fujishima (designer of Jude) and Mutsumi Inomata (designer of Mira) are designing an equal number of characters for the game.

Jude and Mira will team-up in battle using a system called “Link Mode”. In this mode, the character controlled by the player is the ‘master’ while the other character will help by surrounding the enemy, blocking, etc. An Assault Counter (AC) bar joins the TP bar in battle, which empowers players to chain attack until their supply runs dry.

The magazine has screenshots of the game’s fields, which are said to have elements to excite adventurers. The team mentioned that they’re focusing on quick load times.

Tales of Xillia will launch on PlayStation 3 in Japan in 2011. It’s currently 60 percent complete. Namco Bandai have yet to announce a western release.

We haven’t been able to get a hold of the scans quite yet, but when we find them, we’ll update the post.

Thanks, Andriasang, Abyssal Chronicles.

Update: Here’s the first scan. There’s more, but we’re waiting for them to appear online.