The legendary "Tales of" role-playing games humbly began as an unpublished novel written by Yoshiharu Gotanda, a young programmer at the video game development studio called Wolf Team. When presented with Gotanda's Tale Phantasia concept, Wolf Team sunk its teeth into the project and developed it into a console role-playing game in1994. The studio's parent company, Telenet Japan, wasn't known for publishing the highest quality products and Wolf Team wanted something better for this title. When the studio searched for a new publisher Namco (Bandai Namco) won the bid over Enix (Square Enix) and struck a lucrative agreement with Telenet Japan and Wolf Team.

Shortly after signing contracts, internal conflicts arose between three major players on the project, Namco, Telenet, and Eiji Kikuchi, the executive director of Wolf Team. Disagreements over staffing, game character changes, renaming the title to Tale Phantasia, and other marketing decisions caused the release of the title to be delayed by a year. Before the game was published, many key staff members, including Gotanda, left Wolf Team and formed tri-Ace, future developer of the Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile game series. Through all the struggles and strife, the first Tales title was finally released in 1995 with many technical achievements, as it was the first Super Famicom game to be 48MBit in size as well as the first to have streamed audio voices.

With the release of Tales of Destiny 2, Wolf Team and Namco were still a dynamic duo with Wolf Team developing all Tales games and Namco publishing them. In 2003, the two decided to take their relationship to the next level when Wolf Team officially joined the new Bandai Namco family and synthesized into Namco Tales Studio. This new studio became the main developer for Tales' main title games, except Tales of Legendia (developed by Team Melfes, the internal Namco development team of Tekken and Soul Calibur fame) and Tales of Innocence (developed by Alpha System). However, it wasn't until 2007 that Bandai Namco gained majority ownership of the series when Telenet sold their franchise rights.

That same year, Bandai Namco re-classified all the Tales games into two categories, Mothership Titles or Escort Titles. Mothership Titles consisted of all the main titles, while Escort Titles contained stories independent from the franchise, such as side stories, stories derived from Mothership Titles but are not direct sequels, and stories that contain cameos of characters from other titles. Escort Titles include Tales of Tempest, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Tales of the World series, and the Tales of Fandom series.

Throughout the history of the Tales franchise many different people have come to work on the series but the united identity of the games has only strengthened. Though most of the titles' stories do not relate to each other, there are aspects that fans have come to recognize in Tales games and expect in future ones. For example, the quality of storytelling and complex themes that challenge the players thinking is a given in a Tales title. It is common to see themes include the protagonist dealing with issues of racial discrimination, loss, or stopping antagonists who attempt to improve the world in a socially unacceptable manner.

A guaranteed inclusion in the Tales games is its unique and innovative battle system, The Linear Motion Battle System (LMBS). This real-time battle system differs from traditional turn-based battle systems found in many RPG games. Instead of getting reprieve from enemy attack while the player plots their next strike, the enemy will continue attacking forcing the player to think on their feet, bringing in a whole new depth of gameplay to an RPG. The player controls one character's movements and various attacks depending on their weapon choice. They can also indirectly control up to three or four accompanying characters' actions. Each character is controlled through one of three modes-manual, auto, and semi-auto. In manual mode, the player completely controls the character, while in auto mode, the AI controls the character, and semi-auto mode is a hybrid of the manual and auto modes.

Since their debut in Japan, Tales' popularity has spawned radio shows, animation series, spin-off console-based games, a brief stint as an online MMORPG site with Tales of Eternia Online, and even mobile phone games with the Tales of Mobile line. As more and more releases are featured outside Japan, their oversea popularity and sales have grown immensely. This burst in international popularity has moved Tales from a Japan only series to a RPG staple all over the world and with the recent release of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, the future of Tales games looks bright.