The most important key to approaching Tales of Hearts R is context. If, going in, you don’t know this is a remake, you might be a little confused. You might not understand why the cutscenes shift in style, quality and resolution. You might not understand why it seems so dated compared to other recent Tales releases. But, you’ll still understand you’re playing a Tales game, and Tales of Hearts R certainly succeeds at that. While unremarkable on its own, this is still a solid game, and as always the fast-paced combat is a great way to stay engaged to an otherwise cliché-ridden story.

Tales of Hearts R follows Kor Meteor, an oddly-named youngster who has the power to wield a Soma. Basically, it’s a gimmicky equivalent to a super sentai weapon. Being able to use a Soma gives you a weapon based on your inner strength, and you also have the ability to enter the core of a person’s being (Spiria being the jargon of choice here) to… do things in it? It isn’t clear, but after going into and totally wrecking a mysterious girl’s Spiria, it’s up to Kor and the usual goofball cast of anime tropes to make things right.

Soma looks, sounds, and feels silly, but it’s an interesting way to tie weapon advancements into character growth instead of relying on treasure chests and shops to power up. Each level up grants Soma points, and you can distribute them among stat categories. Dumping points into each category boosts relevant stats, and reaching levels in each nets you an ability, skill, other generic power-up or a brand new weapon. The weapons feature both a novel appearance change and a new set of offensive stats based on the category.

This adds little to the usual skill tree formula in practice, but it does in form, and that goes a long way in these number-crunching situations. Little shakeups like this, little bits of unique window-dressing, sort of twist your brain into thinking about familiar situations in different ways. There’s value in that, for sure.

Other than that the usual trappings are present. Combat is hyper-active, with tons of emphasis on racking up combos for big damage. The enemies don’t last long enough for much of that to really take off for a significant chunk of time, but once you get further in (well after the mechanics are introduced, unfortunately), you can juggle mobs for days, chasing them around in and out of the air with ease. Other than some awkwardness with switching back and forth between the Vita’s dpad and analog stick, kicking butt in Tales of Hearts R is business as usual.

Where things get weird is in the way Tales of Hearts R looks and feels. This is a remake of a DS game, which never made it to North America (and was also split into two games, with different art styles). It’s very colorful and mostly voice-acted, but whenever a new animated scene triggers, inconsistency abounds. The original cutscenes from the DS version are intact, and are mostly great. The animation is really good, despite the 4:3 aspect ratio. Also included are new cutscenes, bright and colorful and screen-filling. They’re also significantly lower-quality than the originals. This juxtaposition can be a bit jarring at times. 

In sum: Tales of Hearts R is a portable Tales game that may have been a bigger deal had we been playing it when it was originally released, but now feels like a step between Xillia 2 and whatever happens next. It is nice to have a unique portable option after Tales of the Abyss on the 3DS, and it does look nice on the Vita despite the uneven cutscenes. In the end, if you like Tales as a series there’s plenty of good old-fashioned JRPG fun to be had here. 

Hint: Make sure to pick out as many SP boosts as you can from your Somas, most of the passive skills are very useful.

by Lucas White