Tales of Zestiria Sure is a PS3 Tales Game – TGS 2014 Hands-on

Tales of Zestiria might be the PS3’s last exclusive big-name JRPG when it hits Japanese stores in January of 2015. I played a pair of demos at the 2014 Tokyo Game Show today. Having played both of the Xillia games recently, I felt immediately comfortable with Zestiria‘s controls and overall flow.

Just as before, enemies on the 3D fields chased me if I got too close, then swept me into a separate battle screen. In battle, each special move has a usage meter — deplete it, and you’ll have to let a certain amount of real time pass before you can use it again, similar to some Kingdom Hearts games and others I feel like I should be able to name, but can’t right now because the last 48 hours have been a sensory overload.

Combat also featured character fusion, with a human and a Tenzoku character going all Super-Saiyan for the united purpose of ruining shit. It felt right. Too bad the demos didn’t give me a huge variety of moves to work with.

Zestiria expectedly looks about the same as the Xillia games, as the Tales of series has pretty much gone as far as it’s gonna go on PS3 hardware. That’s not to say it looks bad or anything — quite the opposite, it looks very nice — I’m just making the note that you shouldn’t expect a graphical improvement.

The story sounds like par for the JRPG course: there are heavenly beings (the aforementioned Tenzoku), and the world yerns for peace and unity between the humans and these Tenzoku. The people are praying for a hero, and by golly that’s gotta be you, dear player.

There is no specific release date set outside of Japan, but Tales of Zestiria is currently penciled in to arrive in Europe and North America before the summer of 2015.