Tales of Hearts R: Good game gone stale

I have a budding yet already very complicated relationship with the Tales series. My first foray into the long-running Namco franchise was Tales of the Abyss on the 3ds, a game that aggravated and delighted me in equal parts: when I finished it, I was both elated and vomiting the whole thing, and the ambivalence persists to this day. My second Tales game was Tales of Phantasia, the original instalment: it failed to capture my interest and I dropped it after a couple of hours—although I’d wager that this was mostly due to the fact that I was playing Final Fantasy Legend II at the same time and thus had more than my fill of retro RPG. (I’ll play it again, I swear, if only to recoup my investment.) My Tales experience is thus a mixed bag, and I was looking forward to playing Tales of Hearts R, hoping that it would provide me with unequivocally positive feelings and erase the uneasiness I feel around the series: after all, Tales of Hearts has been deemed one of the best Tales entries ever produced, both in its original, Japanese-only incarnation released in 2008 and its Vita-revamped incarnation released in 2013 and 2014.

So, did Tales of Hearts R rise to the occasion and manage to redeem the series in my eyes? Well, it did for the most part, and quite brilliantly at that. I definitely loved that game and deeply enjoyed the 40 hours I spent playing it, and I can totally envision myself doing the whole thing all over again in an undetermined future. And yet, the picture is not perfect, as you certainly guessed from reading the title of this post. While it is true that I loved Tales of Hearts R, I could have adored it. In fact, I did adore it at first; but as playing hours went by, my adoration somehow cooled down to become some kind of lukewarm affection. It was still love all right, but it was definitely not as fervent as the fondness I had felt during the early stages of the game, which I deeply regretted—and still regret. Let’s now see how this loss of love unfolded during my run of Hearts R—with SPOILERS included, as you might expect!

The beauty of simplicity

It’s not exaggerated to say that I fell in love with Hearts R within the very first minutes of playing it. I was instantly charmed by the overall aesthetics, all crystalline colours, sleek lines and gorgeous vistas—although the bland world map could have enjoyed a bit more love, as well as some of the dungeons. The contrast with the more retro-oriented, pixelated aesthetics of the original Tales of Hearts is striking; and yet, somehow, the two games manage to evince the same slightly dreamy atmosphere—an atmosphere I was, and still am, very fond of. (It’s worth noting that Namco cannot be blamed for having lazily ported Tales of Hearts from one system to the next: the game went through a complete overhaul, both graphically and in terms of gameplay mechanics.)

I was just as smitten with the fighting system, which is an intoxicating blend of Action-RPG and Hack and Slash mechanics. Battles are random and take place in a separate arena in which you’re free to move at will and attack enemies from any angle. This is similar to the fighting system used in Tales of the Abyss and represents a major departure from the system present in the original Tales of Hearts, which sported a side view of the action and relied more on carefully timed attacks, parries and retreats. These changes make the fighting in Hearts R more frantic and fast-paced, especially during boss fights, where moving constantly is pretty much the key to survival. As in former Tales instalments, you can switch between characters at will during battle, assign Artes to specific button combinations for every character and customize fighting strategies with a delighting amount of precision. Even neater, the A.I. is nothing short of stellar: your allies can take care of themselves incredibly well, retreating when necessary, healing the whole group profusely and reviving dead party members without any input from you, and they dutifully follow the strategies you assign to them. This fighting system is really quite the gem, clear-cut and streamlined without ever being boring or repetitive, and I enjoyed it all from the first battle to the last one.

I also deeply enjoyed the overall user-friendliness of Hearts R. This is a game that is utterly dedicated to making your gaming easier—in sharp contrast with Tales of the Abyss, which seemed to go out of its way to make your life more miserable. (Jeez, I should write a post about this game one day.) The leveling-up system is easy to grasp and use: on top of gaining levels, you reap some points that you must allocate to five virtues/qualities in a dedicated menu. Once you get a certain number of points, you gain new Artes, Skills and weapons to equip: simple and straightforward, just as I like leveling-up systems to be. To make things even better, you gain levels quite often throughout the whole game—even during the very last hours, which usually rather show a slowdown in this department. Let’s also mention that all cutscenes can be skipped, even during your first run: this is absolutely a blessing, especially when you’re forced to make several attempts at a boss fight preceded by a cutscene. (Yep, I’m totally speaking from experience there.) Also, shops always have the products they offer in stock. While this may seem pretty obvious for an RPG, it is not as far as the Tales series is concerned: Tales of the Abyss’ shops were regularly out of stock for unfathomable reasons, forcing the player to backtrack or go forward in order to buy the goods they needed. (This still makes my teeth grind, seriously.) Cherry on top of the convenience cake, sidequests are available at all times—sometimes long before you can actually fulfill them—and the characters presenting you with said sidequests are identified by a yellow question mark floating over their heads. Now, maybe this goes a step to far in terms of hand-holding; but I’d chose this configuration ten times over the infuriating one present in Tales of the Abyss, where sidequests were available only during a short period of time and not signaled as such, which could lead one to mistake them for plot-relevant quests. (Once again, experience speaking.)   

The game also had me wrapped around its finger with its gripping pacing. During the first 20 hours, time flies by as you visit one town after the other, explore dungeons without a hitch and run ever forward, driven by a palpable sense of urgency as you’re embroiled in an pressing quest in which every second matters. There is not the slightest hint of backtracking and things flow unhindered, and I really found myself more than eager to tackle the next milestone in line. In fact, the pacing in the first half of Hearts R is simply one of the best pacing that I’ve ever encountered in a J-RPG, especially a story-driven one. It is compelling and intoxicating, and it makes you feel like your actions truly matter in writing the game’s history. This is not an easy feat, and Hearts R must be praised abundantly for mastering that delicate alchemy between storytelling and player’s input and giving the impression that what the player does makes a difference in the game world—at least during its first half. Things turn sour in the second half, as we’ll see later; but that doesn’t erase or nullify the achievement of this compelling first half, which boasts an enthralling pacing not matter what.

Last but not least, Tales of Hearts R captured my heart with its storyline, which is simple and limpid yet strangely riveting. In an era where J-RPGs feel compelled to brandish complicated and inflated storylines to distinguish themselves from their peers, the clear-cut and unpretentious narrative of Hearts R was a delicious breath of fresh air. (SPOILERS ahead!) Here’s the gist of it: playing as the young, lively and a-bit-dumb-yet-pure-hearted Kor Meteor, you find an unknown girl passed on the beach next to your home village, bring her home and offer her help… and end up accidentally shattering her soul, or “Spiria Core” as these things are called in Hearts R’s world, all under the eyes of her brother who joined the fray in the meantime. Nice job rescuing people, Mr. Clumsy! Of course, you have to repair your horrendous mistake, and thus ensues a desperate quest to collect the fragments of the girl’s Spiria Core before less scrupulous individuals get their hands on them—these things are laden with strong emotions, see, and can be used to nefarious purposes such as manipulating people. Of course, there are hints that the girl and her brother, Kohaku Hearts and Hisui Hearts respectively, harbour deeper and darker secrets: a shady sorceress is out to get their heads, a mysterious woman seems to live within Kohaku’s Spiria Core, and a conveniently vague and ominous prophecy gives you an inkling that more serious developments may lurk ahead. This all promised a compelling tale about taking responsibility for your actions, fixing your mistakes and amending your behaviour, mixed with a sweet budding love story—I mean, which boy wouldn’t fall in love with a girl whose soul they are patiently rebuilding, and which girl wouldn’t become smitten with a boy who is dutifully collecting the pieces of her soul? This whole collecting affair could have turned into a giant boring fetch quest involving an indefinite number of nebulous MacGuffins, but it manages to be exactly the opposite, thanks to the engrossing pacing that I mentioned above. The search for Kohaku’s Spiria Shards—much classier than “pieces of soul”, indeed— occupies the first half of the game and is clearly the best part of it as far as narrative is concerned. The good ol’ incentive of Saving the World is all well and nice, but striving to cure a young lady from an lifelong apathetic state in which you put her because of your own stupidity and recklessness turns out to be just as compelling an incentive—maybe even more, because it is not as ridiculously overused as the “Save the World” trope.  

So, this is the game I hopelessly fell in love with: a beautiful and straightforward tale about taking one’s responsibilities unfolding in a gorgeous game world with crystalline aesthetics, complemented by a flowing adrenaline-laden fighting system and a pleasant accessibility. Alas, this adoration was not meant to last: I should have known that “simplicity” and “JRPG” is the biggest oxymoron ever, and that this initial limpidity that I treasured so much was not meant to last. And sure enough, it was only the prelude to the game royally soiling itself.  

Overplaying the part

Let’s be blunt: the second half on the game, i.e. the last twenty hours, is a sickeningly glorious exercise in fake longevity. For some reason, Namco felt compelled to overinflate their game in various ways, ruining the gorgeous simplicity that had prevailed in the first half of the game and sapping whatever originality it had managed to muster. Indeed, the second half of the game could be subtitled “Modern JRPG 101”: it is an amalgam of all the JRPG clichés of the last fifteen years—party member turned traitor turned good again, mechas slowly learning to feel emotions, heroes being the offspring of courageous warriors who sacrificed themselves to seal a foe forever but failed miserably at it, impossible love story and much, much more—and thus comes across as utterly unimaginative and boring. Let’s now take a closer look at the various ways the game unraveled after the halfway mark.

The user-friendliness and gorgeous crystalline aesthetics endured until the very end—the latter even increasing: the last third of the game is home to the most breathtaking vistas. The fighting system remained mostly preserved too, apart from one annoying detail: as the game went on, the fighting arenas became wider in order to accommodate spell-casting foes. While this may seem inconsequential, it had the annoying effect of forcing you to cross greater distances in order to attack enemies. This both lengthened battles and made them more tedious, as you could spend a good chunk of your fighting time just running after moving enemies. Still, this was far from being the biggest hurdle; and had it been the only problem appearing in the second half of the game, I wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning it.

A much more serious issue was the unraveling of the pacing. The compelling urgency present in the first half of Hearts R is put to death in the second half, as the game forces you to backtrack, make detours and generally squander your energy in annoying wanderings. Dungeons become larger without becoming more interesting in the process, bosses that you already fought must be taken down a second or even a third time, and you spend more time trying to locate that already visited town that you’re forced to visit again than discovering new and exciting places. This dilution of the pacing is actually a collateral damage, and can solely be blamed on the biggest issue of Hearts R’s second half, which is none other than the collapse of the storyline.

What a waste, indeed. I cannot find any other words to describe my disappointment at how the narrative of Tales of Hearts R evolved in the last twenty hours, going from a straightforward and limpid story to an over-bloated attempt at epicness bursting at the seams with clichés. Sure, there were also clichés in the first half, such as the recurrent recklessness of Kor, the overprotectiveness of big brother Hisui towards little sister Kohaku and the obligatory lame misunderstandings about peeping into the Ladies’ baths by accident; but they were innocuous, and hardly noticeable. The clichés that plague the second half, on the other hand, are massive and unescapable. (SPOILERS ahead.) Here’s what happen in a nutshell: once the last Spiria Shard is collected and Kohaku is herself again, we discover that the lady living in her Spiria is actually an extra-terrestrial being that took her as host when she—Kohaku, that is—was still in her mother’s womb. But that’s not all: in the same breath, we also discover that Kor himself hosts such a being, unbeknownst to everyone, and that this being dressed like a disco superstar is actually malevolent and wants to release the power of one of the moons orbiting around the heroes’ planet—which happens not to be a moon at all, but rather a giant flower-shaped artificial organism called Gardenia whose sole purpose is to suck Spirias. Huh, really? Gee, talk about imaginations running wild. 

For all the ludicrousness of this development, this is not even the worst narrative sin committed by the game. This could actually have passed if it had been handled properly: the “aliens living in Spirias” plot twist comes across as conveniently shocking while not popping up entirely out of the blue, and Creed, the ultimate bad guy dressed as ABBA in their heyday, is threatening enough to give you the desire to eradicate him on the spot. And that is what should have happened, in my opinion: I was so pumped up when Creed revealed himself that I wanted to finish him immediately, after taking down his cronies one by one in the most epic showdown of them all. Instead, the game forced me to run away from these fights, kicking and screaming… Only to make me spend the next bloody twenty hours trying to find a way to reach Creed and his crew again after they escaped into a flying fortress and set up to rouse Gardenia.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is clearly the bloodiest, dirtiest narrative crime Tales of Hearts R is guilty of. To reveal the identity of the big baddy at the halfway mark is not only stupid, it is also totally counter-productive: anybody could figure out that after twenty hours of pursuing said big baddy, even the most motivated player will be bored to death and have lost all their motivation to set things right—anybody but the guys at Namco, that is. Sure, they tried to make that over-extended second half easier to swallow by stuffing it with flashbacks, character development and various twists and turns, but this simply does not work. All these events come across as hurdles and hindrances whose sole purpose is to extend the game’s longevity, and that is exactly what they are. But there is worse: in the context of Hearts R’s storyline, this development is purely and simply unbelievable. We are talking about saving the world from a giant alien menace; I will gloss over the unbearable platitude of the whole premise to concentrate on how ludicrous it is compared to the game’s previous events. To put it simply, your party is not up to the task. This miscellaneous crew of characters from all walks of life was competent enough to collect pieces of a girl’s Spiria, but saving the world seems just too huge a task for their frail shoulders. No matter how hard the game tries to convince you that they can do it by shoving the old “If we’re united we can overcome any obstacle!” credo down your throat until you vomit it, it is simply not believable, not even remotely. This development is too wide a stretch, and it comes across as redundant J-RPG fare: saving a single girl was not enough, oh no—they had to throw the whole world into the mix.   

I have nothing against saving the world in JRPGs, mind you; but the way Hearts R presented things is just too clumsy and hard to swallow. The transition between “Piecing a Spiria together” and “Saving the World” is way too abrupt—“inexistent” would actually be closer to the truth, even though the game tries to squeeze in a sequence in which your party ponder their options and wonder if they are up to the task—yet after that, events take much too long to unfold until the final showdown. Namco could have made these developments much easier to digest by either: a) Letting us fight Creed and his cronies right after they revealed themselves and before they actually endangered the world for good by rousing Gardenia, thus putting an end to the game around the 20 hour-mark, or b) Cutting the game in two distinct parts—the first about curing Kohaku and the second about saving the world—and letting a good amount of in-game time pass between them. The latter was done in a good number of games, from Solatorobo to Popolocrois, to great results; and it would certainly have worked just as well in Hearts R. The whole “Saving the World” business would have seem much more plausible if a couple of years had elapsed between the two halves of Hearts R, giving the characters the opportunity to train and become accomplished fighters instead of the bunch of misfits they are, and the issue of the abrupt transition would have evaporated altogether. The two instalments could have been sold separately, à la Tales of the World, or put together on the same cartridge and separated from one another by credits à la Solatorobo. Of course, the option of letting us fight Creed and his crew right after they revealed themselves and ending the game there was also perfectly viable. It would have been all the more viable as we do not actually fight Gardenia itself at the end—the game fortunately didn’t step as far as pitting us against an moon-sized alien entity—but rather Creed, after which the menace is eradicated for good. This outcome reinforces the feeling that Gardenia was only used as some kind of plot device to increase tension—to no avail, as far as I was concerned—and that things could have been dealt with twenty hours before, when we first uncovered Creed and his crew. But I guess such an option was simply out of the question: the game would then have been slandered for being way too short, clocking at “only” 20-or-so hours. Oh, well.

That being said, I don’t want to sound overly negative: I did love the second half of the game too, and I didn’t exactly have to force myself to finish it. Fighting was still just as compelling, the vistas were just as gorgeous, and the lovely ending was just what I expected, letting us (SPOILER) witness Kohaku and Kor’s sweet love confession to one another (END OF SPOILER). All in all, I’m really glad that I finished that game, and I enjoyed every minute spent playing it. To end on an unashamedly positive note, I am quite optimistic about any future run of Hearts R: now that I know what to expect, I won’t be disappointed again and I’ll certainly be more able to enjoy the game for what it is instead of projecting my own expectations on it. Although Heart R’s story ended up being longer and more convoluted than I had hoped for, the game still managed to redeem the series in my eye and make me want to try more Tales entries. I certainly love it ten times more than Tales of the Abyss, at any rate, and I will undoubtedly play it again. I’m also quite curious about the DS original; and since I actually own it, I will probably play it sooner or later, if only to satisfy my insatiable curiosity regarding gaming history. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!