Tales Of Hearts R Cover

Speak to Granny (woman in red with a yellow quest marker). Buy two Apple Gels OR give her two Apple Gels from 001 Slime drops. Receive Melange Gel.

PlayStation Vita has a glut of games. A glut of great games, in fact. And as a device that’s found a sustainable home in Japan, many of those games happen to be Japanese. But here’s the thing: you’d think that with such great Japanese support would come a plentiful array of great JRPGs.

But you’d be wrong. Think hard and scroll mentally through Vita’s catalog, and you’ll only come across a handful of traditional JRPGs that are actually worth playing.There’s Persona 4 Golden, of course, arguably.

Then there’s Final Fantasy X X-2 HD, Rainbow Moon, Child of Light, and the like. But indeed, many quality RPGs on Vita – and there are a lot of them – are action-oriented. Soul Sacrifice, Rangarok Odyssey, Toukiden, Ys: Memories of Celceta, Valhalla Knights 3, and even the upcoming Freedom Wars. The list goes on and on. “I don’t know about you, but this has created a serious craving for more traditional JRPG fare on the handheld, at least for me.

It’s unfortunate that to get my fill, I’d either have to play mediocre games like Hyperdimension Neptunia or the Atelier series, go in a more dungeon-crawling direction with something like Demon Gaze, or queue up any number of wonderful PSone Classic JRPGs, ranging from Final Fantasy VII to Wild Arms. I want something native to and at home on the hardware, a traditional JRPG. And with Tales of Hearts R, I may just get what I’m looking for. Now, calling Tales of Hearts R native to Vita is a bit of a stretch.

Battle worlds kronos switch. Battle Worlds: Kronos is a turn-based strategy game deeply rooted in the hexagonal tradition of the genre. The planet is once again torn by war, for the succession of a new emperor.

That conspicuous “R” in its name stands for Remake, because Tales of Hearts originally came to Nintendo DS back in 2008. Its R iteration launched in 2013 in Japan, and this November, we’ll finally get it in the west, both at retail and digitally. Likewise, calling it traditional is also a bit disingenuous. It's not turn-based or full of sprites. It just has the heart (pardon the pun) and soul of something from the days of yore.

And that's what makes it so intriguing to me. I first went hands-on with Tales of Hearts R back at E3, and about some of its broader points: combat, exploration, and the like. This time around, at TGS, I played a build that placed me in a similar place in its world – in and around a settlement called Prinseur – but instead of running around fighting, I ran around talking. To townsfolk, that is. I also spent time exploring the menus and trying to discover some of the little things that make Tales of Hearts R tick.Kor, with his trusty Soma. “For starters, I stumbled across Hearts’ interesting upgrade system called Somas.

Each character has his or her own unique Soma, and they come in the form of a weapon. For instance, main character Kor uses a sword for his Soma. Using SBP – presumably “Soma Battle Points” – earned after successful fights, you can upgrade your various characters’ Somas to make them stronger.

Each Soma has five sections that can be grown with points: Fight, Belief, Sincerity, Endurance, and Mettle. It’s up to you to figure out whether you want to buff a particular character out in one or two respects, or strength him or her evenly as you go.

After all, each piece of the Soma affects certain statistics. Scrolling through fully translated menus also brought me to Artes and Skills, two important categories well known to Tales fans. Artes are basically spells, spells that can be utilized in battle either through calling up menus or, more conveniently, by inputting simple, fighting game-style combos with your analog stick and face buttons. Not surprisingly, each character has Artes that fit his or her strengths and tendencies; Kor, for instance, has a ton of offensive Artes, like Corsair Slice, Meteor Strike, and Shining Gale, while his female companion, Kohaku, takes on the role of healer, with the likes of Dispel and Heal (although she can also use devastating attack-based Artes like Photon and Burning Strike). Back, too, is another Tales franchise convention: cooking. Using ingredients that you’ll find in the world, after battle, or through purchasing them at various stores, you can cook up meals to make your party temporarily stronger, earn more experience points or Gald, heal status ailments, and tons of other stuff. Interestingly, your ability to cook certain meals is tethered not only to your dedicated Cooking Level, which is raised by successfully concocting dishes, but it’s also associated to books you have to purchase from merchants called Sacred Texts, tomes that will teach you top-secret (and all-important) recipes.Time to fight.Exploring the town of Prinseur also gave me a little bit of insight into the game’s story.

Based on the scenario recaps in the menus, we’ll visit Prinseur well into our adventure. This town, which is dominated by a cathedral, is surprisingly vast, and a little bit confusing to successfully navigate. Most NPCs have little to say; I did, however, trigger a cutscene that displayed some of Tales of Hearts R’s voice acting, which is all in Japanese.

That should certainly please series purists. “A brief presentation given by long-time series producer Hideo Baba also shined some light onto the game’s overarching story. Kor, the aforementioned protagonist, lives in a small, isolated village. One day, a girl named Kohaku stumbles into the village with her older brother, Hisui. They’re being chased by someone or some thing, and they’re trying desperately to escape. As it so happens, Kohaku and Hisui lend their name to the game’s title, because their last name, as it turns out, is Hearts. Worse yet, Kohaku’s heart – and therefore, her emotions – have been stolen, crystalized, and strewn about the world.

In classic video game fashion, it’s up to you and your friends you meet along the way to travel the globe, collect the fragments, and restore Kohaku to her normal self. The story’s unlikely to win any awards for originality, but I suspect it’ll get the job done. Its hook is more likely to be in its mechanics and characters than the actual story, but I hope that when the final product rolls around, we find a quality story along with all of that other good stuff. Speaking of the final product, Tales of Hearts R is set to come exclusively to PlayStation Vita on November 11th in North America and November 14th in Europe. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for our full review, which we’ll render before the game launches.