Despite having played several Tales games over the years, I wouldn’t begin to call myself an aficionado of the famous series. I still find JRPGs in general somewhat intimidating and often difficult to work through, but I feel comfortable saying that Tales of Hearts R (ToHR) might be the best Tales games I have played. The story is pretty simple and traditional, but the gameplay, especially in regards to its JRPG-ness and combat, run deep, resulting in an all around engaging and satisfying experience.
The protagonist and the character that you control by default is a sixteen year old named Kor Meteor. Kor is a Somatic in training, as his late mother was before him. His grandfather, who Kor calls Gramps, is training Kor in swordsmanship at the beginning of the adventure. Kor has turned a new page in his training, and his grandfather bestows upon him a Soma, a special rare weapon that only Somatics can wield. Kor has shown prodigal-like skills and has the ability to Spiria Link with other humans, a technique which allows him to enter what is essentially a person’s emotional core, the very fiber of their personality.
This ability gets tested too soon, though, and Kor inadvertently shatters a special young girl’s Spiria Core, spreading it out across the land. Her name is Kohaku, and there is something unusual about her that might hold the key between a proverbial war between good and evil. In an opening cutscene, we witness her and her older brother, Hisui, running from Incarose, a witch. The siblings leap from a cliff side into the ocean when cornered by Incarose. Kohaku washes up on the shores of Seaville, Kor’s hometown. Kor finds her, and she awakens moments later. It isn’t long at all after that when Incarose appears and attempts to finish what she started. Gramps dies in the ensuing fight and Kohaku is struck by a crippling spell from the witch. Kor tries to save Kohaku by performing a Spiria Link, but he soon encounters an insurmountable adversity. The result shatters Kohaku’s Spiria Core, creating a massive celestial display that is seen by all the neighboring towns. Her Spiria Core has shattered, and it’s up to Kor and Hisui to start the adventure of finding and restoring it — until then, Kohaku is but a shell of herself, unable to feel or express basic emotions or speak with much coherence. Meanwhile, other less severe cases of Dispiria — people behaving erratically with one or more emotions completely out of alignment — are occurring in neighboring towns, and it’s getting worse. It’s up to Kor and his allies to set things right.
Playing ToHR should feel right at home to anyone who has played Tales games on consoles. There are ‘safe zones’ in which no combat occurs, i.e. towns. In towns, you meet a variety of NPCs, buy and sell goods, rest at Inns, perform a few side quests, and otherwise just move the story and characters forward while also giving players a break in between combat. Once you are ready and the story has developed to where it’s time to move on, you simply exit the town at the appropriate zone and head into the Field, which is the vast area in between major locations. In the Field, you will face random battles every fifteen seconds or so and there are also treasures to discover. These treasures are easily found given their animated visual cue, but sometimes getting to them takes a little more effort. Unlike some Tales games, you do not see enemy characters walking around in the game world, you only see Kor. So random battles are unavoidable and when one starts, the screen ‘shatters’ and within four seconds the battle is underway.
I used to loathe random battles and I actually still do in turn-based RPGs, but the Tales series has done a good job of making these plenty tolerable. Battles typically take anywhere from five to forty seconds and the combat mechanics get to be so deep around five hours in (around the time Beryl joins your Party) that there’s plenty of ways to play. Similar to other Tales games, combat is pretty much free-flowing, but you have to be mindful of the point system. The point system is a step up from the slow pace of turn-based, but it prevents players from spamming attacks, too. To perform Artes, which are special attacks, and actions be it an aggressive sword combo or a simple healing spell, you need the tech points (TP) to do it. Stats improve as you earn XP and level up.
Targeting enemies is important for ranged attacks, but I spent most of my time playing as Kor and using his sword. To target an enemy, just press R and you can use the d-pad to change your target. Or, any enemy you hit becomes targeted, too. The left stick can be used to run freely while the d-pad can be used for doing quick steps towards or away opponents as well as changing up how your basic attack (X) behaves — if you press up or down on the d-pad while pressing X for example, the player you are controlling will attack differently. For Kor, pressing up and X launches many of the weaker enemies into the air, making a aerial combo pretty easy, and it’s really effective. I should mention that you can switch between any members of your party in combat by pressing triangle and then Start and tapping on the icon of who you want to be — none of these incurs any kind of delay or load times, too, although it does pause the battle. In combat, triangle is also used to pause the action to allow you to change Strategy, Formation, or access Items and Arte. Shortcuts for many actions can also be assigned so that if you want Hisui, who is adept at healing, to cast a healing Arte you can make a shortcut that requires you only tap his icon in the HUD or swipe up.
The combat or battle system is pretty complex, and took me a while to really get comfortable with all of the advanced features of it. Fortunately, not all mechanics are introduced right away and, when they are, you can go into a quick tutorial mode. This helps, but expect a small to moderate learning curve before you are comfortable with all of the options at your disposal. The options include setting up multiple battle strategies in which you specify how your AI will behave. You can choose between several styles that dictate their battle posture, include conditions for when they should do x or y, and also limit the amount of TP they will expend. These strategies do make a noticeable difference, and depending on your settings might mean the difference between success and failure. Despite these detailed conditions though, I felt like the AI sometimes didn’t quite get my intentions or wouldn’t be able to compensate properly. For example, I had a strategy that instructed Hisui to cast a healing spell if anyone’s HP was less than 40%, but there were times when he just couldn’t react quickly enough because he wasn’t moving clear of the heat of the battle fast enough to give himself the space and time to cast the spell. On the other hand, these disappointments are not as common as a good, successful outcome in which party members do their part pretty well.
As combat is such a major portion of the gameplay, it’s only fitting I spend some more time on it. While there are a lot of great offensive tools at your disposal, defense is also a must. Blocking with Square saves lots of otherwise lost HP, and you can also have your entire Party simultaneously block after their current action by pressing down on the d-pad and holding Square. This has obvious uses in battles with enemies that move fast or cover an area with their attacks. Blocking is also used when enemies lash out in a rage attack, which they will do if you are hitting them too much too soon — they will glow red, you will hear a cue sound, and an instant later they will attempt a powerful attack. If you miss-time your block, you’ll take a pretty good blow, but if you time a parrying block just right, the game pauses for a split second to show off your cool block, and then you automatically perform a powerful counter; it’s cool stuff.
Cooler still are the Chase Link mechanics that Beryl teaches you. One of the best by-products of these is that they speed up the random battles. Basically, as you continue to hit an enemy, you will see blue, snowflake-like target appear on them, known as a Chase Marker. If you then use a Break Attack (L plus X or O), a Chase Link will have started. A timer appears on your character’s status icon in the HUD, and so long as it’s not moved to 0 (the far left), you can continue to bash this enemy without fear of repercussion. With Chase Dash, you can instantly, like, teleport over to the enemy to continue the beating. You can extend the Chase Link timer by doing more Break Attacks or doing a powerful Cross Chase Charge, which is when you tap on the icon of another party member whose icon is flashing, although the window for doing this is really brief, try not to drop your Vita in the process.
Combat has several other mechanics that the game is clearly better explaining than I am. These include using your Spiria Drives (the vertical meter on the left side of the HUD fills up as you battle, once full you can unleash one of four pre-assigned attacks), Aerial Battles, and Mystic (and Dual) Mystic Artes. There’s really no rush to learning all of these mechanics, but they do make your battles more efficient and certainly more engaging. While you can switch control between your party members during a fight, I instead chose to set a few Strategies and let them manage themselves while I played an aggressive melee Fighter style with Kor. This worked well and was also fun.
Between the combat mechanics and the Soma upgrades, I found myself referring to the Library (accessible from the pause menu) a few times. It’s not that the game explains these features poorly, it just took some extra effort on my part to grasp them, but it was time well spent. Speaking of Soma, these are the special, rare weapons that certain people, i.e. Somatics, can wield. As you and your party members level up, you earn SBP, or Soma Build Points. At any point you can enter the Soma Build screen to tweak how your character’s Soma evolves. There are five elements to every Spiria — Fight, Belief, Mettle, Endurance, and then a unique one for each character (Sincerity in the case of Kor, Tenacity for Hisui, Vitality for Beryl, etc). Depending on how you allocate your SBP, you get access to new Somas, Skills, and Artes, but you cannot undo your selections so care must be taken. The first few times I used this area I took advantage of the Auto feature which basically asks you what type of character do you want an individual party member to be. For Kor, I made him a Fighter, while Beryl was a Caster, Gall an Individual, and Hisui was Support. With these responses, the game selected a way to distribute my SBP.
If you upgrade “neighboring” Spiria elements you get a Spiria Bonus. Note that selections here do no effect Somatic Bonds, which you form between characters. Somatic Bonds are formed between players as relationships improve through story events, some of which are basically “view-only” and others involve you selecting something to say in the conversation. It’s worthwhile then to watch all of the available Skits, which you can do when you see the name of the Skit in the lower left of the HUD. To watch, simple press Select, sometimes these just remind you of your current objective, but there are many dozens of these that build the story and characters through brief interactions. Note that Somatic Bonds help form more effect Cross Chase Charge attacks and you can view the meter representing the Bonds from the character menus.
So the shards of Kohaku’s Spiria have spread far and wide, taking Kor and his party across a lot of terrain and against a lot of enemies. Some of the toughest foes appear in the Spiria Nexus, this is a special place inside of a person’s Spiria that you experience only when you perform a Spiria Link with them, which occurs during certain pivotal story points. Kor enters into this Nexus, which is represented as a bluish-purple maze. Certain paths contain treasure, but in any event there will be several random battles leading up to either a welcomed, non-combative story event, or a tough boss fight against the dream-eating Xerom. The Xerom are a tough crowd brought back into existence by Incarose, the antagonist. Fortunately, as is the case throughout the rest of the game, save spots are well placed, meaning you won’t lose much time if you die and have to respawn.
Two other notes I wanted to mention are cooking and humor. Cooking is introduced early on, and it gives a variety of different stats boosts and adds another layer of RPG gameplay. Recipes can be bought or given to you if you happen to find this goofy character known as the Wonder Chef. The muscle-bound, egotistical chef hides inside of a magical chef’s hat that you can find randomly. When Examined, he pops out and gives you a new recipe and ingredients, as well as a few lines of funny dialogue. Otherwise, recipes are bought at shops just like consumables and armor. You can, and should, assign cooking shortcuts to your party members so that during the battle summary screen, you can very quickly cook up a new meal, maybe a rice ball or chicken, etc., that your party can immediately benefit from (giving you HP, or TP, etc). Besides finding and purchasing ingredients and recipes, you will need to pay attention to the facial expressions of your party members as you assign cooking shortcuts to them. Some party members are better at cooking things than others, like Beryl makes Chocolate Bananas better than Gall, etc, and certain members get more benefit from certain meals than others, too. As far as humor, I thought the Tales team did a good job of injecting humor into the dialogue at regular intervals. These aren’t intended to be knee-slapping hilarious, but they earned at least a few smirks and a chuckle or two from me, and those moments were welcomed.
Regarding presentation, perhaps the first thing you need to know is one that really shouldn’t matter: there is no English dub track, only Japanese, and there are a lot of voice overs. This didn’t bother me in the least, though, as whether I’m watching Asian cinema or playing a JRPG or an SNK fighter, I prefer the voiceovers to be their native language. English subtitles are of course provided, and they’re accurate, with only a few forgivable goofs (once an “ambush” was called a “nutbush,” lol, and “world” was spelled “whirled,” for example). Besides, like most games, you typically absorb the text much quicker than you hear the audio, so unless you must wait to hear every spoken word, just reading the subs is the way to go anyway. Regarding the music, it’s good, kind of sleep-inducing in the Towns though, and the effects are fine. Graphically, ToHR is fluid and colorful, with a nice draw-distance in the Field, and smooth animations and cutscenes, too.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
