Heart Is a Blast

We at KAJITANI-EIZAN’s Patch Site hope you can take a moment to appreciate the lighter moments in life even despite ongoing world events, including, but not limited to, the war beginning in AD 2022.

I was meaning to get around to writing a proper post about it, but last year, while pretending to start a machine-translated, hex editor-based fan translation project for Tales of Rebirth, we released updated patch versions for Roleplaying Dungeon 2: Translator’s Cut and Roleplaying Dungeon 3: Translator’s Cut. You can check the readmes or the post I made regarding the new features in the latter; the former was updated with all those features and a couple more besides. If you have any interest and didn’t realize this was a thing, go check it out! This time, I thought I’d instead talk about a cool new feature in Tales of Hearts: Translator’s Cut — the Blast Gauge indicator.

In various older Tales games, enemies have a hidden gauge that measures how much pressure they’re taking from the player’s party. If it fills up, the enemy enters a special mode, often breaking your combo and forcing you to go on the defensive. The first example is probably from Tales of Destiny 2, which had enemies and allies alike enter the Spirits Blaster state when they dealt or received enough cumulative damage. This was called Overlimits in Tales of Symphonia, and you probably know the evolution of the mechanic from there into a beloved series staple. In Tales of Destiny Remake: Director’s Cut, your allies would consume Blast Gauge to unleash their powerful Blast Calibers (High Ohgeez), while enemies would perform a Blast when their gauge was maxed out to turn invulnerable for a short period and perform a special attack. To help you know when this was coming so that you could prepare for it, once the targeted enemy rose above 50% Blast, the game would helpfully pop up a display in the corner telling you the current percentage. Once it reaches 100%, the enemy will Blast out of your combo.

Tales of Hearts has much the same system, but the game doesn’t actually show you the percentage. This leads to a lot of kor-ache when enemies Blast out of your combo, as well as some confusion over just why they seem to Blast so often. For example, spamming the same Arte over and over seems to be a favored strategy for many players, and as it turns out, is also a great way to build up the enemy’s Blast Gauge quickly. But since the gauge is never displayed, and the game doesn’t tell you this piece of information, you wouldn’t know for sure, unless maybe you played ToDR:DC previously.

This oversight was brought to my attention by Kevassa via his video of that one volcano boss, where he uses a memory viewer to check the Blast Gauge value and then overlays the value onto the video of the game. Seeing this, I thought, why not implement this directly into the game? That would be a new feature worthy of the Translator’s Cut. So, I did:

By the way, Tales of Hearts is also known for the ability to combo a boss into the stratosphere for literal minutes by spamming an aerial juggle Arte over and over, because apparently, enemies can’t Blast in midair. However, it’s worse than that. The game actually checks the attacker‘s aerial status rather than the defender’s. That is to say, it doesn’t actually matter whether the enemy is midair or not — the enemy can stand planted firmly right on the ground, and as long as the person attacking them is hovering an inch above the ground, the enemy can’t Blast until someone touching the ground attacks them or the combo ends.

I’m pretty sure this is a bug, so naturally, this is fixed in the Translator’s Cut. The game now checks if the enemy is in midair, not the player. And, as I previously alluded to, in Translator’s Cut, even if the enemy is being juggled into the stratosphere, and their Blast Gauge is soaring well above 100%, well… at some point…!

Oops, perhaps I’ve said too much. Okay, that’s all for now, and hope you have a great April Fools! Stay safe, friends!

(This post is dedicated to Tales of the Swole Tales of Crestoria, RIP 2020-2022. Special shout-out to the amazing localization team!)