Tales of Vesperia

As a huge fan of Tales of games, Vesperia hardly disappoints. It nails nearly everything I love about Tales games.  Colorful graphics, likable characters, fun dialog, and fast combat.  My only complaint are the weak dungeons, and skill micromanaging.  The dungeons felt really short and linear.  Micromanaging your skills was to tiresome, because you gain new skills way to quick, and you have to do it across 7 characters.

If you've played any of the previous Tales of games, like Abyss or Symphonia, then you should know what to expect from this game.  There aren't a whole lot of new ideas in this title.  The only thing I can think of are Blast Artes and Fatal attacks, and I rarely used them.  Even story ideas, plot, character personalities feel a bit rehashed at this point.  

Other than those minor complaints.  This is easily my favorite RPG for the Xbox without a question.  


----------Battle System----------
Tales of Vesperia is a team-based action-RPG.  You control one character, while three other characters fight by your side.  You can pause the battle at any moment and set a next move for one of your three characters, or even tell them to use items.  You can even go into your menu and set their strategies, and personalities.

All enemies are visible on screen before you go into battle.  After you defeat them, you get the obvious experience points, money, loot (for synthesizing), grade and LP.  LP gives points to your weapons.  Each weapon your character has equipped has skills attacked to them.  When you get enough skills for that weapon you can learn that skill without having to equip the weapon.  

In another menu, you can micromanage your skills.  When you level up, you gain slot points.  You can divide these points among your skills, and learn new abilities.  Some skills power you up, others give you new artes and so on.  

You use Artes in battle, just like every Tales game.  Artes are like your magic and attack skills.  When you learn enough, you gain new Artes, some are even combinations of previous Artes.  Tales of Vesperia introduces Blast Artes.  If you hold down while performing an Arte, you'll then produce a 2nd Artes, which they call a Blast Arte.  Simple as that.  

When you fight, you fill up a "Limit" meter.  This Limit meter turns your character nearly invincible for a short period of time.  During your journey, you'll gain the ability to use more than 1 Limit Meter at a time in battle.  If you use 3 Limits in the same time period, then use a Bust Arte, you can then perform a Mystic Arte.  Mystic Artes are the ultimate attack from your characters, and they are unique to them.  

One other attack they introduced to this game are Fatal Attacks.  Each monster has three small gauges, only viewable if you click on them.  The more you attack Up, Down or Straight, you decrease those gauges.  If you empty a gauge, then you get a short period where you can perform a Fatal Attack.  This isn't a guaranteed kill, but if you do kill the monster with a Fatal Attack, then you get better loot from the monster (and of course,an extra hit).  

The dungeons are kind of short, and linear.  They also don't throw enough puzzles in them like the previous Tales games (excluding Legendia, which had NO puzzles).  You hardly backtrack in dungeons either.  Tales of Symphonia 2 for the Wii had better dungeons, but they're mostly rehashed from the original Tales of Symphonia.  



----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Yuri Lowell.  You're an ex-soldier, living in the lower class world.  Yuri quit the Knights because he was fed up with them only serving the upper class.  So in a Robin Hood like manner, he decided to help the lower class.  When a thief comes into the lower part of town and steals their Water Blastia, this causes the town to flood.  The Upper class, obviously, doesn't do anything about it.  So Yuri goes sneaks into the Upper class part of town to find the thief, but all it does is get him into more and more trouble.  

Yuri eventually runs into the sheltered princess, Estelle.  Estelle wants to leave the castle, and Yuri wants to find the Blastia thief, so they decide leave the country together for an adventure.  Yuri is quickly accused of kidnapping the princess.

Like all Tales of games, the story starts off rather slow, not quite as slow as Abyss, but still slow.  It's so slow that you probably won't have a sense of "world destruction" until 45 hours into the game.   

Overall, the characters were good and the dialog was amusing enough.  The skits are probably the least funny of the Tales of games though.  I just wish there were more original ideas and character types.  Yuri is nice, but the rest of the cast is kind of cliche, even for a Tales game.  

Even with that said, they still have fairly strong and likable personalities.  So you won't hate any of them, but you probably won't remember some of them in a few years either.  



----------Graphics----------
The graphics are pretty awesome in some spots, and kinda dated in others.  I loved the cutscenes.  The characters animate really well, showing a ton of emotion and action in these scenes.  There are a few variations of cutscenes though.  Some cutscenes are created with the game engine, which look pretty impressive.  The graphics are celshaded and look almost like an anime, which is a nice feat.  Then you have the actual anime cutscenes.  These scenes are slightly blurry, and I don't understand why they needed them when the game engine ones looked so nice.  I guess they were there to show off more action.  There are even some Final Fantasy styled CGI cutscenes.  Which is kinda weird.  Heck, some of the anime scenes even blended in CGI for effect.

The graphics that seemed dated were the towns, dungeons, and world map.  The towns and dungeons were extremely small and very confined.  There was nothing to exciting about them.  I loved the art style for the towns, but on a technical level, there is nothing separating them from Tales of Symphonia or Tales of the Abyss.  The world map, while miles better looking than Symphonia or Abyss, was very last-gen too.  


----------Sound----------
The music and voice effect are top notch.  Tales of games rarely disappoint me with the sound.  The only thing I wish was better was the music to the opening anime sequence.  

Skits are fully voiced, and most cutscenes are voiced.  Only the most important of cutscenes are voiced out.  There was a few cutscenes I was scratching my head at, thinking they should have put the voices in.  Oh well, not a huge deal though.


----------World Map----------
The world map is very typical for a Tales of.. game.  The world maps are heavily inspired from the old school Final Fantasy maps.  The game flows fairly linearly through out most of your time with it.  You'll slowly gain access to ships then a flying ship, but they gave you way to much freedom with little to do when you got your flying ship.  

That is my only problem with the map.  When you get your ship, you can go anywhere but through shallow water, but there wasn't much shallow water to begin with.  So you could explore 80% of the map about 20 hours into the game.  The real problem was the lack of things to do outside of the main quests during this period.  The game opens up later in to the game, but by then I just wanted to finish it up and move on.


----------Time to Complete Game----------
61:43

The game ends with an awesome cutscene, then credits.  The credits are crude (but cute) drawings of your party after the events of the game.  There isn't a huge ending to the game, but it was cool enough.  

After you beat the game, you can start a new game plus+ just like all the modern Tales of games.