Tales of Innocence

"Innocence...regained?"

If anyone played Tales of the Tempest on DS and took that as an example of how Tales of Innocence would be nobody would have looked twice at Innocence. The first Tales of game on the DS was a shambling, disfigured attempt to put the adored series into your palm sized console. Luckily, Bandai-Namco decided to change development teams and opted for Alfa system who, before working on this title, were generally reserved for the mission based Tales of the World titles, such as the latest offering on PSP, Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology.

You play the part of Luca who is a reincarnation of a God called Asura. After finding this out you go on a journey around the world to try and find out what happened to him in the previous life. You meet other characters along the way like Iria, the gun wielding cowboy girl. Interestingly, this is the first time one of the playable characters in a Tales of game has used guns.

A lot of the PSP game can be seen in Innocence, nowhere more evident than in the battle system. The majority of the fights take place on a single plane, running back and forth, slashing and stabbing and dodging beasts. Hold the R button, though, and you can move in any direction that you want. The only downside is that you can't attack while in this mode or guard, but evasive moves are easy to pull off and most of the time the monsters are too slow to catch you.

With the exception of the boss battles and some of the later monsters you can run in, slash then run out without so much as a scratch. Every one of your hits can stun the enemies for a short amount of time and with a little timing and chicken-like tactics you can pretty much breeze through all of the normal battles as long as the monsters don't trap you.

The graphics, for a DS game, are actually quite good. The background textures are well detailed, the character models are distinct and more importantly they feel solid. One gripe about the towns, though, is parts are blocked off by an invisible force. The path is open to, say, run around the race track in Ragum but you just can't get by. Would it have killed someone just to put a fence there so it looks a little more plausible?

Each village is distinct and offers new types of architecture to gaze at to distance it from the last place. Of course, what would the game be without the desert and snow villages that pop up in the Tales of games like cameo appearances.

The game can get tedious and down right annoying at some times. Mainly its the dungeons that really grate. Everything in the dungeons is the same with no distinguishing marks at all. They also seem to be unnecessarily long, with straight paths that go on forever and lead to one chest. All this adds up to lots of confusion and back tracking as you try and escape the dungeons after activating the memory circle and killing the boss. A simple addition like a map on the bottom screen would have saved a huge headache but this was left out. Which is a shame considering a map uses the bottom screen to good effect when you're on the world map.

As always for the Tales of series skits provide character depth rarely found in RPGs but these give a better understanding of the characters and are invaluable in fleshing out the story and points of view from the characters.

Styles are a new addition to Tales of Innocence and another layer to the skills system. At first you have only four different styles to chose from. Advance for offensive abilities, Wisdom for magic abilities, Guardian for defensive abilities, and Technical for abilities that can't really be classed in any of the other styles. There is another style hidden away that has abilities for the Tension gauge and is the only way to activate the Hi-Ougi for the characters.

Cooking is back and can play a big role in overcoming some of the tougher battles. The recipes are found in chests or you can buy them from the Guild's if you have enough grade points. Some of the recipes are linked so in certain cases you may not be able to get a recipe if you haven't obtained previous ones. Cooking is only used for recovery purposes, you can use it to level up your styles quicker or reduce casting time for spells.

Aside from the main storyline you also have Guild Missions to complete. There are seven Guild Dungeons spread across the map, excluding the hidden one, and in each of the closest villages is the guild. The missions can be simply search and destroy missions, finding an item, finding a missing person, or defeating a certain number of monsters in the dungeons. Alfa System drew on their experience from Tales of the World in this respect and the variety in quests is refreshing.

Apart from the opening soundtrack the rest of the game sounds uninspired. Yeah, the battle music never gets boring but it doesn't hit the right spot either and for some strange reason parts of the soundtrack sounds very much like Final Fantasy IV.

This title seems like an apology by Namco for the previous 'Tales of' title on the DS, and it goes a long way to making that apology. If only a little more time was spent in diversifying the dungeons (or adding a map) and adding a little more pizz-azz to the music then it would have apologized in total for that other game in the series.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/08/08

Game Release: Tales of Innocence (JP, 12/06/07)