Hideo Baba talks Tales of Hearts R and Zestiria

Written by A. H. on 12 Nov 2014

Tales of series producer Hideo Baba has become almost a permanent fixture at the MCM London Comic Con in recent years, and during the October 2014 event we caught up with him courtesy of Bandai Namco Games to talk about the latest titles in the series, Tales of Hearts R for the PlayStation Vita and Tales of Zestiria for the PlayStation 3.

Without further ado, let's see what the head honcho of the franchise has to say!

UK Anime: First of all, welcome back to the UK and many thanks for taking some time to talk to us.

Hideo Baba: Thank you for coming to see me!

UK Anime: You're here to talk about a couple of games, but let's start with Tales of Hearts R - can you tell us a little bit about this game in your own words?

Hideo Baba: Tales of Hearts R is originally from Tales of Hearts for the Nintendo DS. The reason why we developed Tales of Hearts was to describe what the human heart, and human emotion, is through this adventure.

When we developed the Nintendo DS version of the game, we utilised the touch panel on the console as part of the gameplay experience. When we developed this Vita version, Tales of Hearts R, we recreated the battle system from scratch to utilise the full hardware specifications of the PlayStation Vita. For the Nintendo DS the graphical style is 2D, but the PlayStation version has 3D graphics, so it's completely different. So, the battle system and the graphics are completely different from the original version, so I hope that users are looking forward to playing it.

UK Anime: What's it like developing a large game like an RPG for a handheld console? Are there any particular difficulties or considerations?

Hideo Baba: The biggest difficulty isn't about the technical capabilities of the platforms. When people are playing an RPG, we want the players to be immersed in the story and the game - when the player is sat down with a normal console, they can concentrate more fully on the storyline and become more easily immersed in the game, but for a handheld console people can play the game whenever and wherever they want. In Japan, a lot of people play the game on the train when they're going to school or work, so it's difficult to get them immersed in the storyline, which is our biggest difficulty when we're creating a handheld RPG.

One clear example is if you watch a movie in a theatre, then you're really concentrating on the movie, but if you watch the movie on your PS Vita you can't concentrate so completely on the film. Don't misunderstand though - I think that the PlayStation Vita is a really good handheld!

UK Anime: So what was your solution to this problem? What have you tried to do to solve that problem and ensure that people are immersed despite it being a handheld title?

Hideo Baba: We haven't really found a perfect solution to solve this problem. Tales of Hearts R is, of course, part of the Tales of series so we can't make any radical changes to the gameplay experience. The most difficult problem is that we cannot control the gameplay hours of the user - when they're playing a console game, they're maybe playing for several hours at a time, but playing a handheld game they're maybe only playing for 30 minutes, 15 minutes, something like that.

Of course, we needed to implement features that enable the player to save their game whenever they like or need to do it, so that's a user friendly feature, but we can't actually find a perfect solution.