If you're a fan of Namco's Tales series, you'll instantly be familiar with what Tales of Hearts has to offer, and that's not necessarily a negative. The new DS role-playing games features many of the old standbys of the series, which is just about all we can confirm after our brief time with the Japanese version of the title this week at the Tokyo Game Show.

With the all the menus in Japanese, it was all we could do to start a game with Tales of Hearts, but once we navigated our way to the play screen, it was easy enough to get a feel for what gamers can expect from this latest Tales handheld title.

The bottom screen of the DS shows a navigation map, and the top screen is where the action takes place. And being a Tales game, there will be action aplenty when you're tangling with a monster. Tales of Hearts uses a real-time combat system, so you'll be tapping face buttons rather than assigning actions and sitting back to watch your characters do damage.

Unlike the newer Tales console games like Tales of Vesperia, the battle in Tales of Hearts takes place in 2D, like the Tales games of old. You'll pop into these battles by running into enemies on the playfield rather than being subjected to random encounters.

Because all the menus were basically unreadable, there's little we can report so far about the storyline, or characters in Hearts. We can confirm that the trademark Tales "skits" are back, though. But the game looks sharp on the DS, and there's a nice amount of detail on-screen. As always, the character designs are creative and unique, and we're looking forward to getting our hands on an English version of the game, if and when the time comes.

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