Tales of Vesperia (Xbox 360)

Wasn’t expecting too much - wa trying to find a good game for my little brother. It needed to 1) Work on the Xbox 360 2) Be age appropriate for a 9 year old (I try to avoid graphic gore and bad language) 3) Be actually something he would play and not get bored of after 10 mins. A success! I scoured the internet doing loads of research and this was what I found. This is a quest game with lots of fun to be found smashing buttons in fights and listening to the silly voice overs of the characters. It may have older graphics and be a bit samey but is overall really, really enjoyable. We have played it a lot. For reference I also bought him Portal 2 and Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise at the same time and this was by far the winner, though he did also like Portal 2.

This is one of the best Tales games out there. I fell in love with  Symphonia  and  Abyss  returned my affections, but some of the recent games in the series have left me feeling cold (*cough*  Xillia ). Vesperia has taken almost everything I loved about Symphonia and improved on it.Let me just get this out of the way now. The biggest flaw with Vesperia is its story. A lot of Tales games have confusing stories but Vesperia takes the cake for being the most confusing on an hourly basis. In other Tales games you know what you're trying to achieve more or less from the beginning. In Symphonia you're trying to save the world from decay. In Abyss you're trying to stop the miasma. In both games the situation takes numerous complicated plot turns that completely alter the manner in which you're expected to succeed in your task or even what that task means, but on the whole the initial quest leads directly to the end quest. In Vesperia you have no idea what's going on until you near the end. At 30 hours in I still didn't know what was happening and I had no indication that the world was in danger at all. After every major event Yuri asks Estelle whether she wants to continue on her current quest (which changes repeatedly) or investigate some new incident. The party is constantly struggling to find a reason to stay together. There's not really the sense of unity that the other games had. This is all tied into the game's theme of growing up and deciding your own path, but it's a really bad idea from a storytelling standpoint.Now if that sounds bad, well, it kinda is. But it's not as frustrating as it might seem. This is largely because of the characters. Vesperia has assembled one of the best cast of characters I've seen in a video game. Yuri Lowell is the lead and he's a ball of laughs. Unlike other Tales protagonists he's not quite as kiddish (he's 21, an old man by Anime standards). I was very impressed with what they can do when they have a more mature character like this. When the game goes for the stereotypical Tales character reveals (gosh, is that obvious princess really a princess? No...) Yuri reveals he's known the entire time and just hasn't bothered to tell anyone. You can feel his self-satisfied smirk at watching the others in shock. His friend and foil is Flynn (an NPC unfortunately). He's the second part of the duo and is essential to the question that drives the game: is it better to work from within a crooked system to try and change it from the inside, or to oppose it directly knowing that it means not much will get done. Yuri takes the latter approach, Flynn the former. As you might imagine this leads to some conflict but also some really interesting exploration of the issue.The other characters are good too. Estelle is totally not a princess. Honest. Raven's the untrustworthy scoundrel type who's always whining about his old age (he's somewhere in his 30s the poor man). Karol is a kid who wants to overcome his fear of, well, everything, in order to become a guild leader and respected person. Rita's very angry and likes hitting people. Judith is... odd. Let's leave it at that. Repede is a dog. With a pipe. Yeah, I don't get it either. These characters are fun to watch and we still get the great Tales cutscenes that reveal background details and conversations to expand on the plot and characterization.The mechanics of the game are basically the same as earlier ones. We still get an open world and enemies you can see approaching and sometimes avoid. Fighting is done in a fighter game format and real time. Your companions are computer controlled, although you can determine the tactics they should follow or override their commands. The graphics are much better than in Symphonia, while continuing the same cell shaded style. Instead of the big headed wide-eyed spheres of that game we get more realistic Anime figures.I don't think this game quite beats Symphonia, although it definitely has areas where the improvement is massive. The plot is to blame for this defect, but it's never bad enough to make the game anything but fun. You want to find out what happens to these characters, even if you don't necessarily want to see it told in this way. The cities are charming, the gameplay first rate, and the plot (when it finally shows up) decent.

The Tales series of JRPGs has been going for eighteen years and has over a dozen entrants in the main line with several spin-offs; Tales of Vesperia(ToV) was the first one to hit the current generation of hardware with its appearance on the 360 in 2008, though it didn't get a European release till a year later. It may seem odd to write a review of that game right now, some four years after it became available here in the UK, but having recently played Tales of Xillia(ToX) I was reminded just how strong a game ToV truly was.At first glance ToV was really quite impressive, the beautiful shell-shaded style of graphics used for the title were gorgeous for a 360 game some four/five years ago and while it didn't stretch the systems capacity it was still one of the more visually striking titles to come out at that time. Added to this ToV was also blessed wit one of the best casts, both in terms of writing and performance of any JRPG Troy Baker's lead as Yuri Lowell was superb: sardonic, chilling and occasionally warm hearted he was never less than captivating and within a few minutes you knew that this was a character and story you wanted to follow through to the end. The rest of the cast ranged from the just about acceptable through to the almost pitch perfect and there have been few if any video games, of whatever genre to have matched ToV in this department, either at the time or since.Another strong point of ToV was the pacing of its plot, what starts out as a simple hunt for a stolen item gradually escalates till the characters are involved in cross continental wars and eventually a threat from a big bad to (you guessed it) destroy the world. Okay so the notion of a villain wanting to destroy the world, or at least the human population on it is pretty hackneyed stuff in any videogame, but, in ToV, that pacing I mentionedwas so smooth and so clever that the segues in the evolution of character motives never felt as jarring and out of place as it so often does in less well written titles. Added to which the actual villains in the game are largely interesting with complex and often sympathetic motives, they and their views are often explored as deeply as those of the protagonists and it makes ToV one of the best written games, not only in the Tales series but in JRPGs in general.The game play for ToV is fairly basic but more than good enough. The combat system is just complex enough to grab and hold your attention through the sixty odd hours you will throw down into this title. It starts off as a light attack, heavy attack combo with elements of free running and item use. This is basic enough that it is and has been the staple of most non-gun action games for the past fifteen years. However as the game progresses you will find yourself learning how do do ever more complex and damaging attacks throughout the first twenty to thirty hours. This, combined with the benefits which accrue from using certain attacks a sufficient number of times keeps combat interesting enough. It does rather encourage grinding, but not to the point where the game gets bogged down. You can almost always tackle the next boss without having to spend an hour or five running in a circle in order to level up. However when you do level up the rewards for gaining new attacks and manoeuvres is always rewarding, so much so that you sometimes might feel inclined to grind. (Personally I don't but it comes down to a personal choice.)The rest of the game, outside the main plot, is made up of exploration, item collection, party interaction and side-quests. All of these are good to excellent. The party interaction might not be everyone's cup of tea as it's mostly made up of skits which feature two dimensional talking heads, swapping comic or dramatic dialogue. In another game this would be truly tedious, but as stated above, the acting and writing here are more than good enough to lift these segments. The degree to which one enjoys the item collection portions of the game definitely comes down to a matter of personal taste, that said there is a crate moving mini-game which was rather entertaining in a puzzle solving type of way. The exploration and the side-quests are, well they're good, very good. If you don't like exploration of a game world, then don't play any type of RPG and certainly not this sort of JRPG, it is the omega to the plot's alpha in the genre. What makes ToV's sidequests stand out is how often they're tied to allowing us to find out more about the characters and game world in general. Whether it's trying to find a top of the line weapon for Judith (the game's principal bit of eye-candy/fan-service) to helping out an orphanage, by following through on these sub-plots you inevitably uncover a great deal more about those characters with whom they are most closely associated.And, really, this is where ToV lifts it's head to come close to being one of the greats in the genre. While Yuri Lowell might be the strongest and most interesting character in the game, he's by no means a character surrounded by cardboard cut outs. Rather, this an incredibly well populated world of hero's, villains, anti-heroes men and women just out to make money, get revenge, keep their city, empire, guild, family, or what have you, from falling apart. They make up so rich a tapestry that you fully believe in the reality of the world of Terca Lumireis.What few flaws there are in the game (the noticeable difference in both quality and character design between the in-game engine and the cut-scenes; how desperately irritating Karol can be; the occasional plot twist which was posted to the player about three weeks in advance) are tiny when compared to how good a game it is overall. There have been very few JRPGs in this generation which can stand alongside Tales of Vesperia, and of those few (Valkeria Chronicals; Ni No Kuni; Persona 4 and, if one wants to stretch the definition of the JRPG, Yakuza's 3 and 4) none of them have been available on the 360. So, for owner of that console who wants to see what a JRPG can actually do in an excellent, well written, well acted game with good combat and great characters, really you need look no further than Tales of Vesperia.

I am not a huge fan of the Tales series but I played many of their games and I enjoyed parts of them and was frustrated at others. This game is one of my best experiences in this series as it has some of the best characters and story is fine but nothing groundbreaking. The battle system seemed better than Graces f form me too. My problems with this game and the series in general is the overreliance on cliche, the overrecycling of assets such as monster design and the not very engaging stories. Despite this, this game is of the best in series.