Tales of Vesperia

Over in my homeland, in the apparently, Great Britian theres a large shortage of entries from the Tales series available. With only around 3-4 out of its 10+ cast list the main critiscm of Vesperia being a tad too similair to the past games can safely be overlooked when the last console Tales game you played was 5 years ago with almighty Tales of Symphonia.

Thats not to question Tales of Vesperia as an absolute beast of an RPG game, no matter which oddly shaped piece of land you've been raised in. Its got all of what makes JRPG's so likable from its enormous story quest, the story itself actually being engaging enough to keep you playing over the 40+ hours, small parties of magic slinging sword slashing anime archtypes and of course the ever present construction of your characters abilities.
There is also plenty of the genres typical faults present aswell. The story for example will take far too long to finally reveal its hidden motive with the first 10 hours having you stride through a bunch of smaller quests that all eventually link together to the grand-daddy story element. The random battles, with the Tales series in particular infact, while not random can still quickly become more than tedious and will have you escaping some not to avoid the difficulty but to avoid the drole of button mashing for 4+ mins.

Story-4/5

As stated before the story starts off small time and will stay that way for much longer than you'd prefer.
The main hero appears as Yuri Lowell. A young swordsman who spends his days trying to fight the disadvantages of being part of the lower case. He's hardly a bad person, but that view may quickly begin to wash over on some people from witnessing his actions.
Infact Yuri is an incredibly compassionate person when he needs to be, always doing his best to help others in need. Just how he goes about with his help is usually what gets him in the cross sights of the people he'd much better avoid.
Such as his hunt for the blastia theif. Blastia are a variety of orb like objects varieing in size which all act as the general power source for Vesperia's interpretation of Earth, It helps give electricity to water to even the skills to fight.
The said blastia thief has made of with the lower quarters water suppling blastia core thus putting the poor folk in a severe shortage of water.
The thief though is rumored to be a nobleman and with your typical discriminitive class system the nobles word are always above the denizens of the slums.
Yuri heads over to the noblemans mansion to return the orb ignoring the threats he may enthrall himself in. Arriving there, the theif manages to make his escape leaving Yuri at the mercy of the Empire knights. In jail he is helped out by a mysterious old man who sneaks in the jail key to help Yuri escape.
Making his way out Yuri will bump into Estellise, a naive noblewoman who for unknown reasons is being chased by the knights also. She claims she is looking for Flynn to give him some urgent news about his life being in danger.
Flynn, a high ranking soldier of the Empire and also one of Yuri's best friends who grew up in the slums along with him, Yuri decides to help Estellise out and with his trusty dog Repede the three set out from the capital in search of Flynn and of course the blasta thief.

Now any veteran or well anyone whos played a similair story-driven RPG can guess it'll get much more complicated and the initial worries will seem like an afterthought to what will eventually plague the hero's. Tales of Vesperia is no different but for it actually arrive at the world crisis concept it will take you to get to around a 3rd of the story.
Fortunatly everything until then sets in motion for the ending chapter's story focus at least and the small stories through it all are still enjoyable and will keep you playing to find out how it furthers.
Not so predictable twists will play out nearing the end and alot of climatic questions are asked per-usual this type of game concerning friendship and our role as a person and how we choose it ect. It gets increasingly heavy as the game goes on but it still hands each plot device when its turn is ready so you won't feel overwhelmed with multiple plot-points going on at once.

The characters that populate the story are all lively and some are genuinly likable, others are simply annoying and can't manage to scrape themselves out of their own anime-stereotyp. Estelle especially at the beginning is a character everyone has seen before, too many times for another appearance to be tolerable.
There'll be a perverted old man who will join the group as the comic relief and theirs of course a high strung pre-teen who talks loudly and boasts about everything but is secretly insecure and terrified of what hes having to go through, talk about day-jar-vu.

But like I mentioned, specific characters can truelly reach out to us with their complex understandings with Yuri especially giving you alot of character development concerning how far hes willing to go to truelly help the world and the innocents that populate it.

The villians give a sort of mixed bag too with a particular twist character whos motives revolve around simply wanting to rule the world while another who will actually try and sacrifice humanity for the greater good of the world.
The writing of it all is generall pretty good though the humor can fall flat, like jumping off a 100ft cliff flat. It'll have your usual anime esque humor concerning outdoor bathing and tough girls who get a little shy when expressing their emotions then trying to hide it all through awrkward excuses. 
But I'll admit that at times I did honestly let out a laugh or two at some segments.
The humor though as the game goes on quickly diminishs to let the serious story arcs take hold, to which are definatley gripping indeed with the cheese coming on strong but still keeping you caring for the situation.


Graphics/Sound-5/5

The games presentation is definatley one of the major plus' it has going for it.
The graphics are all presented in a cell-shaded anime style with clear visuals and surprisingly varied animations when comparing to past Tales games. When traversing around towns and dungeons theirs alot of keep you stuck in the atmosphere and the character models are all vibrant and full of colour.
The fighting segments really shows off the graphical prowess with swords being swung everywere with gigantic magic spells covering the entire battleground. In battle there'll always be alot going on and it all goes at a brisk pace with virtually no frame-rate issues of the sort.
The sound is equal in its greatness too with the voice acting managing to pull off alot of believable dialogue and with a game like this with...so..much..dialogue...its a very impressive feat to have it all sounding as good as it does. Sure some characters may take it overboard and almost have you choke on a fat piece of ham, but the voice acting for the most part should help further your love and hatred for particular characters.
The soundtrack is your usual JRPG quality too, by it being a total joy to listen to and worth the hunt to download through torrents and such. It has plenty of different tracks ranging from its catchy pop-rock intro to the soothing piano tunes when roaming a town.

Gameplay-4/5

The gameplay will definatley fill up a large amount of this 40+ hour game and fortunatly most of it will be enjoyable enough to have you keeping up with the game rather than hunting down a save point then heading off to have some pie.
Their is your usual three segments when gameplay is concerned, theirs the exploration of the world map, towns and dungeons, the actual battle's and all the micro-managing of your characters item-set.
The exploration is a sure win with it not really expanding on many JRPG's but still sticking with what we know works. Traversing through large scopes of land or convined dungeons as your avatar (more commonly Yuri but which ever character you choose) keeping an eye for treasure chest and the enemie avatars.
Sometimes while exploring you may stumble upon some puzzles which will usually require the assistance off the Sorcerers Ring, a trademark Tales key item. Shooting the small beam from the ring can help destroy fragile blockades, activate switchs and other such miscellenous to help you through the dungeons.
More often than not though you'll be running down paths choosing to fight through whatever monsters come in your way.
Which predictably leads to the battles which fills the bulk of the gameplay.

For the first few fights you'll be loving the hectic and flashy pace of the battles, but after so much, and you will be reaching that ''so much'' stage pretty often, it'll simply become tedious beyond belief. The typical monster battles may typicall be resorted through button mashing on your part but its also thanks to your own own parties great AI.
Only controlling one character amidst a battle, the other three will be AI controlled and depending on how you tweak their settings will usually play out how'd you'd want them to.
You can choose when to stop attacking, wether or not to use their magic attacks or items to which enemy to attack. Theirs a good deal of customisation to how your party will act and react and even still you'll soon enough gain the ability to switch your controlling of a character mid battle if you want them to act another way.
4 player capability is also available too but that only acts for some added fun and not to replace some shoddy AI.
With 7 unique characters all with a massive list of skills and magic attacks to eventually have available, it gives a great amount of variety with hwiw to fight your way through the many nasties you'll encounter.
Though using the same tatic of just hammering the enemy with your weapon can usually get you through most simple encounters.
The boss battles at least will require a great deal more strategy and care with how you set your party AI, but even the boss battles are pretty easy infact and once you set a specific AI command for the boss' you can usually just stick with it for all the boss'.
Yes while the game looks impressive and gives you the look of a very hectic and sparring battle its all surprisingly easy and theirs probably more players who died against the very first enemy than th final boss.
Still theirs plenty of action packed up and with great maneuvaribility for the battleground, its at least alot of easy fun.
String together easy combo's with just a single button, blocking and backstepping to avoid damage and of course unleashing powerful and visious Art attacks (complete with an epic ultimate Art attack per character) all add up to a very action oriented RPG but with plenty of strategy required, for the most part.

Then there comes to just how you equip your characters to have them assured to absolutly own every battleground.
Of course you'll have your usual armor and weapon equipment including a slot for a special item to make you immune to poison, added attack power and ect.
But theres also the skills and arts to ponder about. The arts act as your magic and attack abilities with each character having a good amount of unique abilities to learn and dominate with. As player one though, your only limited to setting yourself with 4 on the left analog stick with a direction correspong to a specific abilitie when pressed with the art button.
The other analog can also be used to set 4 more moves but is usually set for having you macro 4 other abilities from the other characters so you can have them perform a specific abilitie you'd want to have at your fingertips.
The skills come along as large list of miscellenous concerning added hit points to attack resistance to even new skills such as the ability to backstep or remove flinching when attacked upon.
How your character learns them though is through your weapons, Most weapons will have the skills locked inside, and through the excuse of a technique which utilises blastia to unlock he skills within, can have you learn whatever skills are bestowed on your weapon.
You'll fortunatly already have whatever skills equipped when concerning the skills attached to your weapons but upon aquiring better weapons its then that you'll have to decide in which skills you want to stick with. You'll have a limited amount of skill points to spend so theres alot of customisation available when you begin to rack in as many skills as fighting techniques.
It adds even more variety with how to play the game and which roles to set your characters at that too and for the purpose of merely trying to find every unlockable skill per character, it gives another list to tick off including the variety of monsters and items that are automatically jotted down when found, in your journal.

The gameplay all comes together as nothing quite revolutinary but comfortable enough to have you stick with it.
The exploration is a limited for the towns over how small they all are, which may make looking for the Inn and shops convienent but for me it took alot of personality out of the towns when say compared to the larger towns you'd explore in Tales of Symphonia.
The battles like I've said plenty already, is fun and frantic for so long but concerning the simple monster battles can become monotonous and will have you feel the added exp isn't worth the possible 2-4 mins of tapping the X and Y buttons.
Another small gripe I have with the battles is the lack of characters. Theirs 7 playable characters in total, which is still a formidable number seen by some, but with one as a dog which literally just acts as...a dog...no secrets concerning this character...it leaves you with a smaller cast of playable characters than what most JRPG's hand you, not to mention Tales of Symphonia which has 9. Flynn Schifo not being playable (least not for longer than 5 minutes)  was dissapointing as it was confusing too, which him featuring enough in the story and even on the front cover. He may be confirmed for the ps3 release as a main playable character, but why he wasn't in the original to begin with only screams a reason for some cash cow uder-twisting.

Replay Value-4/5


The game as a whole will at least last a meaty 40 hours and with loads of hidden side quests, weapons, items and character titles and dungeons to hunt down throughout.
Playing through again will probably be neccesary for most to get the full 100%, but theres not really that much difference concerning how the story pans out on a second playthrough. Like Tales of Symphonia for example, theres no relationship building with specific characters growing more of a liking to Yuri than others and there won't be any dialogue choices featured anywere either.
Its a shame it had to be taken out but it doesn't nearly ruin an already great character rich title.

Tales of Vesperia can't help but have itself forced into a comparison with Tales of Symphonia for me, considering its the only other notable Tales game available over here. With that said its a worthy sequel in terms of its gameplay and style but still losing out in terms of its characters imo, but that said unless Kratos Aurion manages to feature again in a Tales game playable I doubt any Tales game will ever match ToS's characters.
But much like ToS, its a grand epic journey with enough charm with its characters to maybe spawn some fanclubs and indefinatly some lusts that'll need to be quenched with the ps3 version.
It is more or less the same, so any Tales fan won't pass the chance for more interactive anime but concerning europeans, its definatley a must buy for any JRPG afficiondo.

4.5/5