Tales of Zestiria preview: the last good PS3 JRPG that isn’t Persona 5?

Bandai-Namco’s latest entry in the Tales series, the PS3 title Tales of Zestiria, harkens back to earlier, fan-favorite entries. The game will celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary by opting to return to the more traditional high fantasy of Phantasia and Vesperia’s medieval worlds.

Series producer Hideo Baba stated that the name, which came from the word ‘Zest’ represented the game’s central theme of passion. Certainly over the past two decades the team has won some pretty passionate fans, but until more story content is revealed, we won’t know just how far that theme dominates the game’s narrative.

The game’s field maps, replacing the world map screen as they did for the Xillia games, are realized here on a fairly spectacular scale. Running through the vast plain in the preview build was somewhat reminiscent of Final Fantasy XIII’s Gran Pulse, and fights similarly transition when you come into contact with the enemies roaming it.

However, special effort has been made in Zestiria to keep this transition as smooth as possible, and so the battles take place in a battle screen version of the exact spot you initiated the fight on, rather than a generic battlefield based on the general area.

The story is thus far hard to judge, but while trailers showed the protagonist attacking a huge dragon, Baba described the dragons as being different to those found in earlier games, neither purely good or evil.

Whether that means some kind of moral ambiguity will be present in the game is unclear, but it’s something I have my fingers crossed for. One of Tales of Vesperia’s main strengths was its main character’s willingness to get his hands dirty (even if it meant sneaking away from the main party to perform said dirty deeds in secret), and that kind of variety to the Tales series’ usual saccharine air was hugely welcome.

But from what we do know, the game seems to be shaping up fairly well. Check out this video of our time with it.

[fve]http://youtu.be/KOlIwjYaxEk[/fve]

Whether the story and characters end up being any more memorable than the swarm of mostly interchangeable anime characters that have populated the blander titles in the series remains to be seen, but the gameplay continues to prop the series up despite that. The tweaks to the system that Zestiria introduces are welcome ones, even if none prove as ground-breaking as you might hope for the series’ 20th anniversary.

Whether the title will also end up being the series’ swan song on the PS3 is also yet to be seen, with Baba not yet decided on where the next game may ultimately end up. Slow Playstation 4 sales in Japan might mean that the series has another PS3 title left in it even after Zestiria has or hasn’t thrilled us.

This story is part of our Tokyo Game Show 2014 coverage.

Here’s what Tales of Xillia 2 was like: