I'm pretty sure that where the programmers were new (some were veterans) they got to stay and work on the next Wii Tales game. Graphic designers, whether new or old, are by now involved in all Tales Studio games anyway. If director/planner Arahori is not let go we will see in a future Tales game, VS. might be a good candidate to include him due to the random nature of it (which doesn't fit into the usual approaches of the two classic teams).
Yes, but I believe their in-house team graphic designing capability was severely limited, for starters they recycled and altered areas instead of doing new ones so there's only effectively a handful new areas in the game, they couldn't afford the time to make a new world map, then the character modeling was pretty bad and low poly; plus I bet like Team Hearts received the 2D team destiny artists that wouldn't be fit for a home installment anymore team ratatosk received... lousy modelers from team symphonia, whose technique was more geared towards the low poly with little texturation (that was Tales of the Abyss relative strength, it wasn't exactly well textured, but it looked good enough) as that would be pretty improper for a high budget team symphonia tales at this point. they mimic that technique while attempting to make even "less" chibi than Abyss (who wasn't chibi but still super deformed) which IMO prejudices it by using roughly the same ammount of polygons and keeping the lack of detail going on, so I'm inclined to say either they're the same artists or they have the same the same weaknesses/limitations.
I understand perhaps you're making mention of the artists who do the cut-ins and stuff hence why in ToS the returning characters (Lloyd and company) lack cutouts, but I felt the artists they had working full time on the game must have been too little.
As for programmers... perhaps, but then again... why did Namco lead this kind of development? Tales of Graces has been in development since 2006, why not merging the engines before? even if the other one was not on the level it is now it would still be miles and hills over the ToS2 engine, and that way they could debug and optimize it earlier. It's so clear they've done a new one from scratch instead of using the tales of the abyss engine port that it hurts they actually gone with such inferior unoptimized and obsolete tech prior. This is what they should have done in the first place.
I can see a few programmers being involved on Tales of Graces afterwards, mainly the dude that supposedly brought the aerial combat to the table in DotNW, who was coming from Team Destiny's battle programming, but... perhaps not the majority of them, for that would mean the team symphonia gobbled the whole team ratatosk up (meaning it doesn't exist anymore).
As for Arahori, sorry I'm not familiar with him.
And VS. being done inhouse is something that strikes me as strange even today, I figured it would be so easy for alfa system to put this game together with all the modeling and character movesets they did with radiant mythology that I can't shake the feeling they must be involved.
EDIT: What did you guys think of the ToSDotNW battle system, btw?
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