Game 38 – Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition (PS4) – 50 Hours
It feels bad to say this, but this game is my least favorite in the Tales series so far. This came as a surprise to me because apparently this game is considered the best in the series by all the websites that I’ve looked at. Personally, I found it to be a relatively comparable experience to the other Tales games I’ve played. But there were a couple areas where this game definitely fell short and that’s why it’s at the bottom for me.
The biggest letdown for me by far was the story. The pacing felt extremely poor at the beginning, with a trivial quest to fix a goddamn fountain carrying you through the first 10 HOURS of the game. It was such. a. slog. Then after that’s resolved, it’s another 10 hours trying to find Phaeroh so you can find out why he insulted Estelle. Exciting right? That second plot thread does pick up little minor points of interest over time before you actually meet Phaeroh, but it was still not a compelling motivation to keep playing. I’ve seen more intriguing plots out of Saturday morning cartoons, for crying out loud. Compared to Tales of Berseria where Velvet’s brother gets murdered in front of you within the first hour, this game was a huge disappointment.
As the game continues, the story gradually gets better and ends with a solid conclusion well told, but I still had a couple gripes after getting over the huge hump with the game’s beginning storyline fumbles. There’s a LOT of technical science-y stuff integrated into the plot which can be very confusing to follow. Some of the villains also felt superficial and left me wanting more development, such as Alexei and particularly with Zagi. The Adephagos was also disappointing when it showed up because it had been hyped as this cataclysmic event, but it ended up barely being an inconvenience. Like… one town gets attacked, and you have to save some migrating villagers once, and that’s it. For the majority of the time sky just gets purple and weird and you can stroll through every town like nothing bad’s happening at all.
The characters were another aspect that felt a little hit and miss for me. There’s usually one character in every Tales game that I can’t stand (with the exception of Xillia), and in this game it was Rita. Was just unnecessarily antagonistic and rude all the time. Also I didn’t really enjoy the party dumping on Raven over and over and over again, and wearing that Old Man joke down to the nub when he’s like… 30? But I digress. On the whole, I liked these characters. Some of the ones that I thought I would despise ended up growing on me over time, like Karol and Patty (who is hilarious). I think a really interesting aspect of the characters was Yuri acting like a vigilante and killing villains by his own discretion alone, and whether or not that was moral to do so. I was hoping for a little more conflict between Flynn and Yuri as the game progressed, but that doesn’t really pan out in the end. Ah well.
Despite my gripes with the story and characters, the gameplay is just as good as any other Tales game. I didn’t mind going back to an older version of the combat system, even if it is a little more clunky. I really appreciated how challenging the game could get at points as well. However, I don’t think the combat was truly perfected yet, so while I’m sure this was very impressive at the time, going back does reveal a couple rough spots around the edges. One of my biggest gripes was the locking of specific skills like backstepping and using items on allies behind skills that you have to learn and equip, and the game is not balanced at all with the limited amount of points you have to allocate to these skills.
Even though this game came out on the 360 first, this game has not aged at all with the graphics. This game was absolutely gorgeous. What I really loved was traversing that big overworld looking for secrets and filling out my monster book. I’ve been missing that from the newer games. The Definitive Edition also comes packed with a lot of extra content which definitely adds a lot of value.
It wouldn’t be a Tales game without some glitches and sloppy presentation. This time it was the sound design. No joke, I spent a good 15 minutes trying to get the sound levels to an acceptable level. The opening scene in the Lower Quarter where the fountain is blowing up assaults your ears with a deafening cacophony of crashing water and you can’t hear a damn thing. Once I finally got that under control, I was still having issues with the volume of the voices, particularly during some of the skits. The other weird thing about the sound was the recasted voice acting. Even though I never played the original and had no prior knowledge of the redone voicework, I still noticed it. It’s unmistakable on Yuri because the voice actor was a different person, but Karol, Estelle and Judy also have varying qualities of their voices from line to line. It ended up being distracting because I ended up focusing more on the character’s voice than the lines they were saying. I wish the new voice acting was an option you could turn off, but it’s not a huge deal.
There is one part about this game that I was pleasantly surprised about, because this game easily has the best music in the series. The Tales games have never been notable for their soundtrack, but this game actually has a great OST. The exception is the opening theme however, which is my LEAST favorite in the series. I don’t mind the lyrics, but the instrumentation was not good, especially with that strange dissonant riff after the first chorus. Oh well, can’t win them all, I suppose.