the child you were will not return

And there’s quite a lot of detail to chase! Out of all of the settings of the Tales games, Auldrant has the most comprehensively-documented facts and figures. I’m drawing primarily from the Famitsu Perfect guide for this, but there’s still a ton of ingame lore that a dedicated fan can document. It’s not quite on the same level as The Elder Scrolls, but it’s much more detailed in its worldbuilding than pretty much any game in its series. The history of the world gets tied very heavily into the story, such that understanding at least the broad strokes is essential to understanding the plot of the game. I don’t disagree that it creates a bit of a barrier to a new player, but for anyone who wants to really immerse themselves into a constructed setting it’s got a lot to offer. And it’s all very consistent! I’m not going to get into it here, but the setting’s magic system is one of the hardest and most unforgiving in its internal consistencies.

One area that’s caused no small amount of consternation over the years is Auldrant’s calendar. We know exactly how long it is (765 days per year), how many months there are (13), the number and names of the days of the week (7, and they have a naming convention following modern Japanese day names), and the current year (ND 2018). We also know from the game’s opening narration that it has an axial tilt, because Yulia’s Score specifies that the Hod War lasts “for a full cycle of the seasons.” It’s also definitely a solar calendar, as the number of days on the calendar is the same as Auldrant’s orbital period. The planet’s orbital period is a cheeky pun on the publisher’s name (765 can be read as “na-mu-ko”, and Namco uses it in other places). Most of the time, it’s relegated to the little bit of trivia that one Auldrantine year is more than two Earth years long. If you do the math, Jade is a little over 73 Earth years old – something he’d probably use to bolster his Old Man shtick if he knew about it.

What we don’t get, however, is any context for seasonality or even important holidays. The new year just… starts. When the game opens up on ND2018 Rem-Decan 23, Remday, there’s no sense that it’s been a little over three weeks since New Year’s Day. There’s no leftover party decorations. I can’t recall any NPC dialogue about starting a new year, though TBF it can be really easy to miss talking to one NPC. And the location of Baticul itself is not very helpful if we want to gather environmental context clues. The city’s latitude is either just inside the tropics or just outside of it, and we don’t get a great map projection to make that determination. The only, and most important, context clue we have from Baticul is that it’s located south of the equator.

Fortunately, Luke gets yeeted into Auldrant’s northern hemisphere about 15 minutes into a new game. And that’s where our context clues start to get interesting!

Over the course of the next couple of hours, we learn 3 things that help us peg the month of Rem-Decan to a season. 1, the forest north of the Cheagle Woods burned down. 2, that the Fubras River – a continent-spanning river that would make our modern Nile look like a drainage ditch if it was real – is at its lowest point for the year. And finally 3, that apples are in season. Stick a pin in that last one, because it’s actually the most important data point.

The other two support that the northern half of Rugnica – the largest of the continents – is experiencing a dry season. Forests aren’t usually tinderboxes unless there hasn’t been any rain in a while. A river, and especially a giant one like the Fubras, being at its low point means that its tributaries aren’t being fed with either rainwater or meltwater. Dry seasons aren’t exclusive to summers, though low water levels might point to a lack of snowpack at the far edges of the Fubras’ watershed. Without a watershed map, though, that’s just speculation on my part.

What isn’t speculative is that apples are in season in this part of the world. Luke falls ass-over-teakettle into the game’s plot when he steals one by accident from a fruit seller. It’s specifically an apple, and specifically one that’s freshly-picked from a local orchard. And that’s how we know that Auldrant’s northern hemisphere is experiencing summer.

If you don’t follow, here’s the implications: apples require something called “chill hours” in order to bear fruit. Chill hours are however many hours that a particular cultivar of apple tree needs to spend between 0-7ºC (32-45ºF) in order to get the hormonal signals necessary to bloom. Without experiencing these chill hours, apples (and several other fruit) don’t produce blossoms and, therefore, fruit. Once the bloom starts and the apple blossoms are pollinated, it takes several months to grow new apples. Assuming that they grow fruit at a speed proportional to apple trees on Earth, the earliest apples will ripen around the equivalent of late June or early July. Which means that in Auldrant’s northern hemisphere, the start of the new year is somewhere between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox.

I’m now going to take a sharp turn into lorecrafting. If this is where you want to hop off, hop off. I’m going to show my work, but I don’t have any more facts to share. This is speculation, albeit evidence-supported speculation.

I think that the Auldrantine year is synced up to the seasons of the northern hemisphere, but inverted from Earth’s year in our northern hemisphere. I think that the start of the new year is on or around the summer solstice. And I think that because we know that the months at the start and end of the year are named after Rem/Lorelei. While the final month of the year, Lorelei-Decan, breaks the scheme a little, it’s preceded by Rem-Redecan. The first month of the year is Rem-Decan. And the very middle of the year is Shadow-Redecan.

I think

I think

that the order of the months is representative of the cycle of summer and winter in the north. The new year starts on the longest day of the year in the month named for the aggregate fonic sentience of Light. The months cycle through to Shadow-Decan and Shadow-Redecan, representing the loss of daylight and long nights of winter. If the summer solstice in the north is the first day of Rem-Decan, the winter solstice is Shadow-Redecan 35. The rest of the year cycles back to longer days, finally ending on the day before the summer solstice. For anyone wanting to keep track of them, the equinoxes are on Gnome-Decan 18 and Undine-Redecan 52. Whichever season it is in the north, remember that it’s the opposite one in the south. Baticul, Sheridan, and Belkend have seasons that are inverted from Daath, Grand Chokmah, and Yulia City.

There is. one. small problem with this, though. Since we have a detailed calendar, we also have canon birthdays for the playable characters. And there’s a lot of symbolism in choosing a day to assign to a character. I haven’t run all of the party through the paces, but I can say straight away that the 11th month of the year, at least in the north, is not a time in which the days grow shorter and the veil between life and death seems thin. It would be in the south! But in the north, the days would be longer than the nights and life would rapidly return to the land. It’s a time when early flowers bloom and the last vestiges of winter are withering in the sun.