Tales of Vesperia (XBOX 360) Part 1

Glenn

2008-09-18 23:21:13

In an epic journey to Best Buy last weekend, I acquired three video games. Tales of Vesperia (XBOX 360), Spore (PC), and Infinite Undiscovery (XBOX 360). In twenty hours of glory since then, I've traveled the continents and seas in a hodge-podge group of social outcasts, a princess, and even a smokepipe touting wolf-dog.

I'm talking about the first of the three games that I've tried, "Tales of Vesperia." It's strange to me to be so interested in playing an RPG. The last one that I actually beat was Final Fantasy 8 back in 1999. Since then I've gotten into a couple of games, mostly on DS; like Rocket Slime and Phantom Hourglass. Other than that, I've either watched people play patchwork parts of games or simply found better things to do than solve ancient mysteries in Tomb Raider: Legends or find the flower-girl in Dirge of Cerberus. Great games I'm sure - but playing hacky-sack, or drawing EoD, or something else was always cooler.

But Tales of Vesperia is my kind of goofy. First off, I like the characters. Let me clear up a misconception and tell you that the main character is, in fact, a guy. Yuri, with his long hair, slender build and a purple color scheme, looks astonishingly feminine. I keep on expecting some sort of Le'Chevalier switch or something. But, he's actually kinda cool with his fight-the-establishment mentality, and he ends up meeting some really fun people in his journeys. So, I'm coping with the gender-bending character design -- At least Yuri's not a pansy like Vaan (FF12).
(in the most squealy, annoying, ear-drum-melting pitch possible) "I wanna be a SKYpirate! YipeeEEe!!"

The battle system is a real-time button masher. It reminds me of the first game I played with that battle system, Star Ocean 2. You run around pressing X and B as fast as possible; baddies fall, giving you monies to buy shinies that let you press X and B faster. And as with all RPGs, the more you wander around like an idiot pillaging people's private residences or wherever the story drops you, the more the game rewards you with awesome weapons and armor. I'll tell you now that it's nice there are no random encounters -- you can usually trick and sneak your way out of fights and move the story forward. A caveat for those sneaksome ninjas out there though -- it's EXP-based character levels, so you need to fight sometimes or you'll get toasted by *coughcough*thefirstboss,Zagi*coughcough.*

My favorite part of the game is how it shows character interactions. What happens when you have 10 mismatched people traveling around the world together? What side-story antics ensue when you pair up a flower-selling Ancient, a half-crazed EX-Soldier, a super-busty Bartender, and the most awesome villian of all time? In most games the answer is NOTHING. In Tales of Vesperia, your characters hold side-conversations with eachother that either fill out the storyline or better, reveal tangents in their goofy and conflicted natures. These conversations show up in between plot-moving events with a flourish of the SELECT button and a relevant conversation title in the lower left hand side of the screen. Sometimes Yuri will take the time to dunce on the stupidity of some of the other characters, or sometimes the hot-headed mage will rant about how she's going to fireball her arch-rival to a crisp. It's random. It's awesome.

Overall (up through 20 hours) I'd give this game a 9 out of 10. At first it's a lot of "I'm sorry, our Flynn is in another Castle," but it's slowly revealing a deeper storyline that I think will be pretty dang cool. It's got a lot of the classic elements, but for once, I'm actually in for the ride.

- Glenn