For the most part, I'm a firm believer that if a game doesn't grab you in the first few hours, it's time to collect your ass and move on. More than once I've waded through the beginnings of heralded j-rpg's, just to find myself saying, "Well, that was just stupid." Girl with bunny ears? "Stupid." Twelve year-old moron yearning for self discovery? "Fucking stupid." Whatever I might think of the genre, it is populated with the above examples to a disappointing degree. The closest I've come to actually enjoying myself was with last year's Lost Odyssey, but eventually the turn-based combat drilled a hole in my face and I could no longer continue playing due to massive blood loss. It's too bad, really, because I thought the story had promise. I'm not a big fan of amnesia (if you don't know who you are, you can fuck off), but Mistwalker seemed to be creating something that wasn't going to tank itself halfway through.
I didn't forget the title of this post; I just think that in order for me to explain what I love about games, I also have to explain what I hate. And, if you're Lost Odyssey, what could have been good, if not for the painfully old-school combat. So, these are my two criteria for playing and enjoying an RPG:
1 ) No annoying crap characters that I would rather use their skin for lamp shades than listen to them blather on about blah-de-blah; fuck off.
2 ) Updated combat. I understand there are a lot of people who enjoy turn-based combat. I'm just not one of them. That's the end of that story.
So, Tales of Vesperia. I got burned before with Eternal Sonata, so I wasn't initially looking forward to this. I've never played any of the Tales games, and in a strictly aestethic sense, it looked like another Sonata.
Well, I was wrong.
The first thing that impressed me was how clean and crisp everything looked. It's one of those art styles that will still have girls blushing ten years from now. Very sexy. After my initial fawning period was over and I started learning what the story entailed, I learned something previously thought of as myth: I'm not playing as some douche who
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