Since the moveset evolves, and many of them are best in particular situations, you may find that you change them so fast, you never really know for sure which controls do what. In best RPG tradition once you get into the game you’ll be just as concerned with growing your abilities as you are about slaughtering the beasts in front of you. Others are learnt through skills, and these can be learned permanently if you do them repeatedly. Some of these happen as you level up, some are taught during the story or in side quests. You also learn new attacks as the game progresses. Artes and spells use magic points, so these have to be managed. You have a wide range of moves, which include basic attacks, artes and spells. Character dialogue is excellent, and varied with the cast constantly bickering and bantering as they explore.Ĭombat is in real time with you taking control of one (or two, with a friend) of your team of four. The music is mostly jaunty and pleasant but lacks the emotional punch of a good Final Fantasy, or the drama of Zelda. Unfortunately, it isn’t very well optimized, with microstutter appearing regularly to interrupt the game’s flow. The remastered PC version allows you to play at 60 FPS, and has filters improving the game’s overall appeal. Character designs are great and there are a huge number of combat moves, many of which are spectacular, particularly the spells. Tales of Vesperia’s graphics are occasionally gorgeous, but do look a little flat sometimes. There’s plenty of replay value to be had working through the game again to get what you missed, and as you can carry powerful items through, your subsequent playthroughs get much quicker. Tales games are designed for multiple playthroughs, and this is no exception. It’s unlikely you’ll do everything without a guide, but you can carry quite a lot over from game to game. But once you start to figure out the various sidequests available to you, you’ll soon find yourself with far more to do than you have time for.įinding everything is quite the task though, especially given the length of a single playthrough. That can make the game feel a lot more linear than it is. It doesn’t help that much of the additional content doesn’t become available until the endgame approaches. If you don’t consult a guide, you can easily miss a lot of what’s there. A lot of the wider content is quite hard to stumble across on first playthrough. There are all kinds of playable sub-games however, ranging from poker to snowboarding, to a kind of warehouse sokoban. That makes keep of tracking things very tough, but does keep things interesting as you often get a surprise cutscene when heading back to a town, or resting at an inn. That means you’ll stumble across scenes hotch potch style as you revisit older areas. The game doesn’t have a proper side quest tracker, and many of them are just a case of being in the right place at the right time. There are costumes, titles, skills and combat moves to find, along with a monster book and item book to fill out. Some characters also have skills that complement each other, such as getting stat boosts when particular members are in the active team.Īside from the story, there’s plenty to think about with side quests and various types of collectable to hunt down. The characters bond gradually through the game, and their interactions subtly change to reflect this. The characters keep the game fun, however, and things do eventually gel. The story meanders, twists and turns, and you’d be forgiven for wondering exactly what is going on at certain points. There’s an environmental subtext to the story too, with humanity’s overuse of resources leaving the world imbalanced, causing an ever greater flood of monsters to besiege them. But it is also a tale of friendship, with your team of loners and misfits gradually overcoming their personal demons as they try to figure out how to do the right thing in a confusing, morally ambiguous world. Like many JRPGs, Tales of Vesperia is a sprawling tale that sees your band of heroes fighting for the existence of the world itself. It’s not the first time we’ve looked at it, we had a brief look at the original XBox 360 version demo many years ago. More recently, a remastered version, the ‘definitive edition’, appeared on PC and consoles, giving players the chance to experience it again. Originally released on the XBox 360, it was then expanded for the PS3 where it gained two extra playable characters along with new sidequests, items and abilities. Tales of Vesperia is an epic JRPG from Namco-Bandai. TALES OF VESPERIA: DEFINITIVE EDITION REVIEW
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