I apologise I haven’t updated in months. What with finishing university and graduating I’ve been quite busy ^__^;; I’m taking a little break from Final Fantasy merchandise right now to expand into my latest love: the Tales series. I’ve been a huge Tales fan since I first played Symphonia back on the Cube but I haven’t brought much merch until recently. With the recent launch of Tales of Xillia I thought I’d share some recent merch I’ve brought.
Here we have the three Tales of Xillia puzzles made by Ensky and released only in Japan. The first two are 300 piece puzzles: one is a group shot of the girls and the other with the boys.
At first glance the girls puzzle is certainly a lot more entertaining than the boys one and I very almost didn’t buy the latter. The girls has a relevance to an event in the game (I won’t spoil) but the boys seems a lot more disjointed. That being said, now I have played and completed the game I appreciate the male puzzle much more as I do love the whole cast of characters.
I am more used to completing 1000 piece puzzles so these two were very small (26x38cm, just slightly smaller than A3 size paper) and were quick to do.
The third puzzle I brought was the one I was looking forward to most: a 500 piece group shot of all the main characters.
It really does have a stunning picture: I love it so much! I didn’t realise when I purchased it though that it is 50x75cm which is as large as my 1000 piece puzzles. To compensate for the size, the puzzle pieces were children sized!

Difference in puzzle size between the smaller 300 piece one on the left and the larger 500 piece one on the right.
The larger pieces did make it easier to do and having a larger image was actually really nice in the end. It looked amazing when complete.
Ensky also supplied in each box a foil bag of fixative (I am assuming) and a flat plastic spreader to wipe across the puzzle to fix it in place. I was tempted to use it but I settled on not doing it. The joy of the puzzle is making it and it would be disappointing never to be able to make them again. To make up for not being able to display the puzzle complete (not that I had the room anyway) I have ordered a Tales Cafe placemat/poster to put up instead š
I am realy loving the variety of merch which is produced in Japan for the Tales series so I will be updating with more in the future. I do have a 950 piece Tales of Xillia 2 puzzle on preorder too, I can’t wait to get it!