About

About this site

Work on this site started in September 2024, 2 months after Rays ended service. I've always wanted to make some sort of fan site, but I've never really known what. I had a few ideas in my head, but then I realized they all linked back in some way to Rays. So, for my own sanity, I would just make a broad site about Rays! ...Well I say that, but it's spiraled out of control in a way that a narrower subject wouldn't have...

Where did the name "Dana's Cradle" come from?

The name "Dana's Cradle" comes from the way the setting of the game, Tir Na Nog, is sometimes referred to in the story. After the original world, Nibelung, was destroyed, Dana created a new world inside her heart to serve as a refuge for the remains of humanity. This world (Tir Na Nog) was thus "Dana's Cradle". Maybe it's a bit self-important, but I like to think of all the preservation and archival projects sort of like that...

The tagline, "remembering Tir Na Nog", is pretty self-explanatory I think: Tir Na Nog is the name of the world the Rays story takes place in, and since the game ended service, we're remembering it.

About the web master

I'm Kip. I've been a Tales fan since around 2011. My favourite character from the original story's cast is Mercuria, and my favourite from Recollection is Elnath. My favourite Tales characters who aren't from Rays are Harold, Misella, and Lukius.

My History With Rays

When I initially heard about Rays, I was skeptical because all of the previous crossover games neglected the parts of the series I loved, but I had some hope when I saw the first Tales of Destiny 2 event (at the time, and probably still, my favourite game in the series). I picked picked up the Japanese version... and an English release was immediately announced! So I waited, and waited, and downloaded the English version. To be perfectly honest, it ran poorly on my phone and the gameplay and story were both too involved for what I wanted out of a mobile game. I tried to keep up with it but it fell by the wayside, and before I knew it, the global release reached the end of its service.

Some of the people in my circles who spoke Japanese were still having fun with Rays, but without any fan translations, it wasn't really worth thinking about. And so for a long time... I didn't! And I drifted out of Tales fandom, and didn't think about Tales for a while. A few years later, I got back into Tales (I played Berseria for the first time! I like that one) and hesitantly thought to myself: well... Rays still exists. And even if my phone (still the same model as when global ended service) can't run it, maybe Bluestacks can run it? And that's how I hesitantly got back into Rays.

Of course, my Japanese is poor and it was worse then, so I was just playing the game. But I kept hearing things that interested me so finally... I sat down, collected every English resource for the story I could, and started reading. There were a couple points I had planned to stop just because there was a gap in the translations or something similar, and it would make for a clean stopping point. But every single time, I'd read up to that point and go. Okay! I want to know more. And keep going. and of course eventually I reached the point where the translations... stopped. Entirely. And so I stared at it for a bit. And started learning Japanese, because I was just that drawn in by it. (Okay, shortly after that I did find someone had written summaries covering most of that part of the story, which I am eternally grateful for.)

In the end what made me so attached to Rays wasn't the crossover cast, but the characters introduced in Rays itself. To some extent I expected this; the main reason that pushed me over the edge to finally read Rays's story was learning a few details about Neamhain. But I hadn't quite expected that it would become one of my favourite pieces of media, or that I'd love so many of the characters original to it so much, or that I'd be sitting here typing this.

Why A Fansite At All?

Even though I'm seemingly too young to have grown up on the fansites of yore, I actually did. The moment I learned how to read I was poking through Pokemon fansites on a regular basis. When I got into Tales in my teens, there were still some Japanese language fansites online, which I spent hours exploring. That's actually where I picked up my first bits of Japanese, though I didn't work on it much after that.

Like most people, I didn't think much about fansites after they died out. But the more I saw people talk about reviving the concept, the more I went "hey, I want to play too!". Ideas are sort of a struggle for me though, so it took a while for me to settle on an idea I liked.