There have been advancements in Tales of technology. 29 years almost to the day after the 1997 Japanese release of Tales of Destiny, the second entry in the still-running Tales of JRPG series, players have found a way to recruit a party member long thought unobtainable.
Shared on YouTube by Kevangelion, who cites help from fellow JRPG scientists SymphoniaLauren, Mziab, and Ethanol, the "Legitimate Lilith Recruit Scene" made waves in this particular JRPG community. Although this was changed in the PS2 re-release of Tales of Destiny, the original PS1 version did not allow you to recruit Lilith Aileros normally. Or so we thought.
It turns out you can recruit Lilith in this version of the game – you just have to jump through more hoops than an aquarium seal working overtime.
The route necessary to recruit Lilith also helps explain why nobody found this until now. If you do anything wrong, you're locked out for good, and the venn diagram of that wrongdoing and normal play is nearly a circle. No typical player would be expected to find or anticipate all of this. This is a caliber of Easter egg that we don't really get anymore – the kind of discovery you only make by digging straight through the stone that you thought to be the bottom of the rabbit hole you've already dug.
In a 26-step guide, Kevangelion summarizes the Japanese forum post surfacing this method. Lilith will join your party in Part 2 of Tales of Destiny if you do everything right – quite forcefully, ironically, with the character exclaiming, "I'm coming with you, like it or not!" – but good luck dodging every possible mistake without a guide.
If you take items from homes, you're out. Dungeon loot is fair game, but even grabbing things like Apple Gel or food from early areas will apparently break the rules. If you manually change protagonist Stahn Aileron's weapon in Part 1, you're out. If you sell or discard the silver ladle weapon, you're out. If you get scolded by NPCs like Rutee Katrea, skip or interrupt certain conversations, annoy some merchants, or talk to Lilith more than once in Leene's Village, the whole route seemingly falls apart.
Kevangelion's summary sounds simple: "The route assumes: a 'clean,' obedient Stahn who listens and does not pick fights with the plot — no house loot, follow destination prompts, keep conversations moving." But as soon as you dig into the specifics, you find a mine field of ways to accidentally push Lilith out of the picture.
"The fact that this was discovered almost three decades after this game's initial release is crazy work, it makes me wonder what other secrets in other Tales games have not yet been discovered," one user speculates in a YouTube comment. At this point in the longest release gap in series history, I'll take anything Tales-shaped to tide me over.
