Tales of Vesperia Impressions

 

When I got home from PAX last week, I went to Gamestop determined to choose one of the two RPGs that had just released, Tales of Vesperia, or Infinite Undiscovery.  I’ve never played any of the Tales games, am a huge fan of Square-Enix, and lean towards photo-realism over cell shading, so with all else being equal, I would have chosen IU. 

I just couldn’t ignore the fact that across the board, Infinite Undiscovery was getting poor reviews, while Tales of Vesperia was being received a bit more warmly.  In the end, all the big company names and graphics can’t trump better gameplay, so I plunked down my money and walked out with the Tales title. 

I must say that I haven’t been disappointed in the slightest.  The visuals are good, and the story so far has been engaging and well paced.  That isn’t to say there aren’t some normal JRPG cliches (evil empire, crazy mishmash outfits, get a boat then an airship to progress, etc.), but your party is diverse and full of interesting personalities. 

The voice overs are excellent and add to the story–the only thing is that they sometimes aren’t present in a scene, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to which scenes are voice/text, and which ones are text only, which can be jarring.

Fans of traditional JRPGs will not be fans of Vesperia’s real time combat system, but while I appreciate and enjoy turn based combat, I’m loving the depth and the fast past action of the battles in this game.  Vesperia has a very layered and deep combat system, which includes blocking, normal attacks, and using special attacks called “artes”.  Then it teaches you at various points in the game several other layers of combat, including overlimits and bust artes.  What you end up with is a very satisfying battle system to engage with every time you run into enemies, which are on the screen instead of randomly encountered. 

Like most JRPS, Vesperia takes a while to get going, and it has a habit of making you traverse a dungeon you just went through, battling the respawned monsters that you just hacked up on your way in.  I’ve also run into one or two boss battles that seem unbalanced–I was tempted to bump down the difficulty for these fights, but instead decided to go grind a level or two. 

These flaws are forgivable though, as the game really captures a fun and engaging atmosphere and communicates it well to the player.  It’s an excellent RPG for the 360, and one that I’m finding I keep saying “just one more save point” to. 

–WG