![]() Surprising, because they are actually very well produced, and among the standouts of the entire package. Surprisingly enough, the issues come from the anime cutscenes that intersperse the game in Tales of Hearts R. The actual in game graphics are simplistic and unspectacular, betraying their DS game roots, but they look sharp and defined enough that you don’t mind them. The actual presentation won’t likely change your mind either. "Tales of Hearts R's writing completes its trifecta of bad storytelling." Whether it’s because the translation is bungled, or because the original script to begin with was bad, but Tales of Hearts R’s writing completes its trifecta of bad storytelling. Bad characterization and story can sometimes still be redeemed by sharp writing, but Tales of Hearts R fails even there, with some cringe inducing writing and attempts at humor that try too hard to be funny, and end up falling flat on their face. The basic dialog is voice acted in Japanese, and since I don’t know Japanese, it’s hard for me to tell whether the performances are good or bad, but the writing that shows up in the subtitles is awful. It doesn’t help that the writing, as mentioned above, is terrible. Tales of Hearts R is like Japanese anime cliche 101, featuring characters that fall into groan inducingly predictable archetypes- a protective older brother, a good Samaritan protagonist, an evil witch, a wise old man who acts as a mentor, a girl who needs rescuing… if the story is predictable, the characters are even more so, and where the best Tales games in the past have benefitted from some genuinely fun and compelling casts that have either enhanced the story or covered for it, Hearts R begins to try the player’s patience by confronting them repeatedly with characters you don’t just not care for, but also actively dislike. It’s an all around bad plot with an uninteresting premise, extremely low stakes, and a predictable resolution, meaning that the arc can never keep you interested or compelled. ![]() It’s on Kor, the protagonist, to recover shards of her heart to restore her feelings. The story is laughable, and comes off as a worse riff on something we have already seen in Ni no Kuni– a girl has her spiria (think of it as the manifestation of her spirit) shattered, and she loses her ‘heart’ and her ability to emote as a result. It just is."Ī large part of my apathy towards Tales of Hearts R (much like my apathy towards Dawn of a New World or Tales of Graces F) comes from its awful characters and story, all of which rely on tired tropes, cliches, and pandering humor to cover up for what is just terrible writing all around. "In 2014, with more even more modern (and better) standards to judge it against, and with an audience that was never its intended demographic to begin with, assessments of Tales of Hearts R can be brutal. Now, in 2014, with more even more modern (and better) standards to judge it against, and with an audience that was never its intended demographic to begin with, assessments of Tales of Hearts R can be brutal. Hearts represents a period of slump for the franchise, when the games it was putting out weren’t going down well with anybody, not even its traditional Japanese audience. So this is a game that wasn’t all that well received when it was released to its intended audience, to begin with. It’s important to keep that in mind when you go into it- the Tales series has been making some great strides lately with memorable games, but those are all more recent and modern games. Tales of Hearts R on PS Vita is just that- it is a remake of a Tales of game on the Nintendo DS, which was never too popular in Japan to begin with, and was never even brought over to the west. So of course, as more and more new fans come into the fold, it’s as good a time as any to try and revive some of the older, less popular entries into the franchise, and expose them to a broader audience. The Tales series has been growing in popularity for a good while now, not just in their homeland of Japan, but also in the west, where it’s become so popular that publisher Bandai Namco have committed to being more consistent with their otherwise patchy track record with localization.
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