As I’m sure most of you quickly realized, the Tales of Rebirth post was an April Fools joke. At current, Gemini and I are not working on Tales of Rebirth PSP. Gemini is quite busy with Persona and I’m working on my own projects as well. That being stated, I hope you’ll take a moment to read the following. The photos in question were partially faked. The text was all created using ToR PSP’s internal variable width font. I had to copy that text using GIMP to the actual text boxes, but the font and such is authentic. So are we working on Tales of Rebirth right now? No. Do we intend to work on Tales of Rebirth at some point? Absolutely.

1. I thought the April Fools thing would be fun. It was. It was also stupid. There were comments both amused and annoyed. Some people had a good sense of humor about it, others surprised me with how personally they took it.
2. April Fools wasn’t as fun before Rickrolling came around.
3. The original plan was to also create some menu shots, but Gemini didn’t have time to hack them. Even before that, we wanted to do this with ToD2 as a joke. We thought it would be quite funny since no doubt people would assume we had some personal vendetta against Phantasian Productions. We don’t, of course, though it would have been amusing. Unfortunately, the text format in ToD2 PSP didn’t allow it, plus we were short on time.
4. It was really obvious that it was a joke. I mean, it was supposed to be obvious. I never intended to hide it well. I mean, in the first place, nobody actually goes around looking for real announcements on April 1st, do they?
5. This ‘joke’ was partially a test of interest on my part. It worked well in that regard. ToR, as expected, has a lot of, er… passionate fans. The interest is definitely there. ToR is a project that I want to work on down the line.
6. I am working on translating a Tales game right now. It’s not yet time for me to announce which one it is, though it’s not like there are that many left untranslated…
7. I do have Tales of Rebirth for the PSP. Gemini has Tales of Rebirth for the PSP.  I do like Tales of Rebirth.  I like the PSP.
8. The first game that Gemini and I discussed translating after Tales of Phantasia was Tales of Rebirth. He and I are both too busy right now with other projects to work on it, but we hardly intend for ToP to have been our last Tales translation together. Tales of Rebirth PSP was at the top of our list back then and little has changed since.
9. Given Namco’s current localization policy, I think I can confidently state the following: within five years, there shouldn’t be a single Tales game untranslated (whether by fan project or officially).

So, there’s my “every cloud has a silver lining” post. Seriously, don’t get so tense, guys. I mean, we’re all just talking about games. As long as I am willing and able, I intend to continue working on the Tales games. I love them as much as any of you do. If that doesn’t inspire your confidence, perhaps some of the following will: Phantasian Productions is still working on ToP and ToD2. I know that Cless doesn’t intend to stop there either. Kajitani-Eizan is ever the stalwart guardian of Narikiri Dungeon 2 and 3. Even the games without ongoing translation projects have well documented story and menu guides. The newest games are going to be receiving top class localizations. This is the best time it’s ever been to be an English speaking Tales fan. I mean, what possible reason do we have to be so negative?

Thanks to those of you that made this fun. I was glad to see people laughing it off. I know what it’s like to yearn for Tales games in English, so I couldn’t help but poke fun at that. And even those of you who had harsh words for me, I thank you. Translating Tales wouldn’t be the rewarding experience that it has been if there weren’t passionate fans. Finally, I ask your forgiveness, especially the Tales of Rebirth fans. What I did was all in fun, but I hope I didn’t crush too many hopes with this. With my apology, let me once again state that I would have never done this if I didn’t actually intend to work on Tales of Rebirth some day.

Good day to you all.

- Your friendly neighborhood Tales translator, throughhim413

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Tales of Rebirth, a title that has long excited import Tales fans has recently made its debut on the PSP in Japan (along with practically every other Tales more than a few years old).

The PSP game itself has been around for only a few weeks, but as you can see, we’re already progressing. Gemini and I have both been busy and we hope the results will speak for themselves.

These two shots were chosen because we feel they really sum up all of Tales of Rebirth in two simple words. In fact, it could be said that after seeing these, you don’t even NEED to play the majority of the game. We’ll keep you up to date as much as we can, but for now, I’m afraid this is all we have to show.

EDIT: I almost forgot the most important part! (Well, I did forget it…) We have a short clip showing off some of the progress we’ve made with the menus and such on YouTube. Link