galacticdonut

Great writeup!

I just finished up the main game and future arc finding most of the sidequests and skits (I'm going to run through NG+ with a guide now) and I agree with most of your points, you're right that the skits fleshed out the cast a lot more than the main story did. The future arc alone was fantastic for that, if only for Malik and another character constantly winding everyone up about romances.

I can't believe they got that "painful finish" skit in though, that's probably the dirtiest thing that's been in a localised Tales game!

The combat took me a while to get used to having not played a CC Tales game before, but eventually I got the hang of it. It's definitely more rewarding about dodging/guarding and being able to spam the hell out of attacks in burst eleth was super satisfying. Oh and the Eleth Mixer is amazing, having the cooking options set to triggers mid-battle and the item production on the field was great. I hope they put something similar back in after Xillia.

Which guide did you use for your playthrough? The one on the Tales forum looks comprehensive enough so I was going to go with that.

It's most likely just a placeholder date to allow you to pre-order it, but you never know. Gamestation updated their internal 'release dates' sheet which has it (and literally about 11 other unconfirmed games) all coming out on the 24th of September, which we usually take to mean "Probably before christmas!"

I think so yeah, it counts as your activity for the day. It's been a while since I played it last.

Middlesbrough, UK.
10Mb
Working fine for me

Well I'm reversed with Yuko and that sports guy Kazushi, can I fix the S.link by finding them were they normally stand and talking to them?  I'm rank 7 with Yuko and rank 6 with Kasushi. One other thing, does anybody remember the days you can hang out with these two? "

Yep, basically keep trying to talk to them until they start up a conversation with you. From there you have to pick the correct option to fix the link. If I remember right you can only attempt to talk to them once a day.
This will happen to any of your s.links that you haven't spoken to in over 60 days, or 45 days if it's with one of your romance options and they're past a certain rank (usually between ranks 5-7). It gets even shorter if you're dating multiple girls and none of their links have been maxed. Fun eh!

Yeah I can understand your frustration there. Tales games pretty much expect you to do a  second playthrough if you want to do everything. My experience with them has been to play through 'normally' the first time for the plot and then follow a guide for the second time, usually with 2x experience or changing the difficulty.
You're right though, usually if you miss the first step it doesn't show the rest and Judith's spear quest seems like an annoying exception. 140 hours? Damn, I've just gone over 135 waiting for 'To Points Unknown' to unlock  and I thought I was being methodical!

If you have access to a PS2 I'd definitely recommend trying out Abyss, as it's the most similar to Vesperia of the other Tales games currently out there. The only downside is that the performance isn't great (battle loading times) and it might feel a bit clunky compared to how smooth Vesperia is, but it's probably my favourite of the series.

Ah, I didn't realise achievements could vary between regions. I understand there being a difference between PC and 360, but seeing two seperate lists on the same format threw me.
Bit of a shame that, oh well.

Cheers for the reply

I didn't see another topic like this so apologies if this is a duplicate.

I suspect this is more of a linking problem than anything else, but I recently picked up Tales of Vesperia (yay Europe) and was suprised that only 45 people were listed as playing the game when I checked my achievements section.

Here is the page with the set of achievements/players that I get from my profile - http://www.giantbomb.com/tales-of-vesperia/61-20836/achievements/?sgid=833
On the top right of that page you can see there's another listing for ToV which has the majority of people (1000+ players) here - http://www.giantbomb.com/tales-of-vesperia/61-20836/achievements/?sgid=200

I'd guess the PAL release for this is screwing something up along the line and thought I'd mention it. No idea if it's a site thing or a problem with Microsoft but something feels wrong about having 40 points and being 7th on the overall rankings!

Interesting that Tim has his name on the front cover, that's pretty cool.