8/16: Tales of Hearts R (Vita)
There are many games in the Tales of series that I really should have played first, as I have not played most of the highly praised ones, but I really wanted to play on the Vita and I randomly decided to play Tales of Hearts R. I have heard very little praise for the game, but I still wanted to give it a shot and I’m glad I did.
The story of the game centers around Kor and his quest to gather the shards of Kohaku’s Spiria (which acts as a soul for a person), which of course eventually leads to saving the whole world. It’s a fairly simple story overall, but I was fine with that since a lot of the character interactions were interesting in some scenes and funny in others. I really enjoyed all of the main characters you can play as, with sometimes Kor being the exception. He’s just so incredibly dumb and loud that he did get on my nerves at times, but at least he was genuinely trying to do the right thing without trying to show off all the time like many loud anime protagonists might do. One other thing to note about the story/characters is that the translation can be a little bonkers at times. A lot of times it feels like someone decided that the original dialogue wasn’t good enough as is and decided to turn the puns and cheese up to eleven. As an example, Kor’s catchphrase is “Kor doesn’t TRY, Kor DOES!”, which sounds really odd to me especially since he doesn’t normally refer to himself in first person. Another example that’s just really weird, during amore serious cutscene where the team is confronting a bad leader guy, Kor says this to him:
I now sort of have an idea what the insult is suppose to mean, but it’s still just such a weird thing to say. I’m not sure if this is actually what the original Japanese dialogue was saying, but it certainly feels a bit out of place to me. That being said, the dialogue often was good for a laugh, even if it wasn’t suppose to.
From what I can tell, the gameplay is pretty typical for a Tales of game. Battles are in a side view (but you can move around freely if needed) and are go by very quickly, which your smashing though the monsters with both regular attacks and Artes. Outside of that, it’s mostly talking to random people, maybe doing a side quest or two, or looking around the overworld for various goodies. One aspect that I think is a bit different though is the Soma sphere thing, which acts as a sort of skill tree. As the characters level up they get a certain number of points, which they can allocate to several categories on the Soma sphere thingy. Each category levels up certain stats and at certain milestones, upgrades will be unlocked such as weapons, Artes, and skills. You can see what upgrades are available in each category so you can choose what you want to go for first, but you have to go through each category’s list of upgrades in the order they appear. So if one category has a nice weapon you want but it’s way down the list, you’ll have to unlock whatever is before it first. It’s not really a complicated system, which was fine with me but it may be disappointing to those who really like diving deep into skill trees.
Everything else about the game is just alright. The soundtrack is just there, graphics are fine but nothing special, and there wasn’t really anything else that stuck out as being really bad or really good. So overall while I did enjoy the game enough to beat it, it definitely didn’t blow me away either. If you haven’t played a Tales of game before, I don’t think I would recommend this to be your first, but I think it’s an alright game if you don’t set your expectations to high.
