I spent some more time with Tales of Hearts R. I made my way through the next two dungeons. The second dungeon, with cutscenes, tutorials and making sure I explored every bit took between 30 and 40 minutes. That's pretty short, and I'm wondering if it's because of the game being made for portable systems. The third dungeon is taking a bit more time, but that's because it has multiple paths that go back and forth.
The second dungeon also introduced Gall Gruner, the older character for this installment of the series. If you're familiar with the Tales series, there's almost always an older character who acts as a mentor to our teen/young main character. It was Kratos in Tales of Symphonia and Malik in Tales of Graces. Tales games are kind of formulaic.
In between the two dungeons, there were town shenanigans, and we meet a giant paintbrush-wielding Somatic, Beryl. She eventually becomes our fourth party member. Kohaku gets kidnapped, so it's off to the mountain where she's being held at the summit!
I should mention that while the mountain is described as "being northwest of town", you have to travel in the opposite direction and go over a bridge to get there. If you're giving directions, you should mention this.
In this dungeon, we first get a tutorial about some additional combat mechanics that involve being able to essentially teleport around and smack on an enemy nonstop. What's disheartening about this is that you can team up with a character, but you need to use touchscreen functionality for it. This means, I can't use it do it easily on the Playstation TV. I dropped Valhalla Knights 3 for this, but I'm going to try continuing on with Tales of Hearts R for now. Tales games aren't usually that difficult. If it turns out that not being able to use this part of the game is a dealbreaker, then I'll have to move on to another game.
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