September 20^th, 2004 (12:00am) - Details on Tales of Rebirth for the PS2 have been rare to come across, but here are a few smaller ones.

Word on the streets of Japan say this game will see release there on December 16th. Although Namco hasn’t confirmed this, it’ll probably stick, but stranger things have happened.

The game’s skit system improves on its the one found in Tales of Symphonia: instead of featuring simple inset windows, the conversations between characters that take place when wandering the world map will feature instead full-screen character portraits.

In previous installments there has been one plane of movement during battle, but in this installment there will be three, increasing the strategic possiblities.

The new formation edit screen lets players set up the layout of their party in advance. Lining up stronger characters in front of weaker ones will give the characters in the back rank a defensive bonus, and placing two characters side by side gives both an attack bonus. Support characters can also be lined up in a healing formation to raise the other characters hit points gradually.