Based on video upload dates, I can say that I started Tales of Vesperia at some point prior to August 27th of 2018. Back then, the only Tales games I had any meaningful experience with were Tales of Phantasia and Tales of Destiny, and the idea was to get a review out for the original Xbox 360 release before Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition released and search traffic for it started to boom. There aren’t a lot of changes between the two (though being able to skip cutscenes is something I very much wish the original allowed), so that’d give me a head start without having to worry about embargoes or anything. Initially, my impressions were incredibly positive. “Oh, I like the distinctive softness of the art style. Wow, the characters and story are reminiscent of those in SNES-era jRPGs and not at all annoying. Sweet, the combat system is pretty intuitive.” And then many of those things stopped being true. Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition just released, but I’m only something like halfway done with the original because of how frequently I’ve made excuses to keep from playing it. Maybe this was a good game 10 years ago, but it isn’t one now.
I wrote months back about how much I hated the ridiculous Gattuso Boss Fight, but that’s not the end of the badness. Tales of Vesperia‘s combat is unreasonably clunky in general, and an enemy running around can be pretty much impossible to hit with a normal melee attack as you continually run behind them, stop in your tracks, and then attack the air because they’ve since moved. This is a weirdly common occurrence.
That wouldn’t be a bad thing if your CPU-controlled allies were capable of taking care of themselves, but they aren’t. You can customize their behavior somewhat, but they’ll always be limited by the confines of their own suicidal stupidity, prone to wandering into enemy attacks and needing to be constantly saved unless you take hour-long breaks between each story beat to grind out levels. They’re consistently disappointing.
Even the Tales series’ signature sorcerer’s ring is painful to use. The idea is that you can stun enemies with it to enter combat at an advantage, but it doesn’t stun all enemies. Sometimes it alerts enemies to your presence and causes them to rush you, while other times it freezes enemies but not in the way that gives you a combat bonus. That’s assuming you can even hit them, too, which isn’t a given. Tales of Vesperia is abysmal at communicating relative depth, so good luck figuring out exactly where you need to aim to connect with a tiny flying bat enemy. It didn’t take long for me to simply stop bothering trying to hit enemies with the sorcerer’s ring. The entire mechanic is more trouble than it’s worth, and I found myself getting frequently caught from behind while trying to aim.
Back when I was struggling with the Gattuso boss fight, I looked up information online and found people swearing up and down that it was the only difficulty spike like that. It really isn’t. Sometimes there are absurdly powerful enemies just standing around, and the game teaches you to run away while conveniently failing to mention that there’s a countdown before you successfully run. Since there’s no reason to run away from normal enemies because of how weak they are, and you can’t run away from bosses, there’s no realistic reason to expect anyone to know this ahead of time.
Some of the actual bosses are incredibly irritating difficulty spikes, too. Sometimes you’ll steamroll a boss on your first attempt, while other times you have to use what feels like 100 high-damage special attacks before they finally go down, and your allies are no doubt getting themselves killed all the while.
Even the story falls apart before long. Self-indulgent terminology makes conversations with voice acting sound incredibly forced, and there are long periods where nothing happens at all. I can’t even count the number of times someone has left the party to do their own thing, only to be rejoin minutes later after conveniently being discovered at the next stop. Put simply, Tales of Vesperia is prone to overexplaining things that don’t need to be explained, and underexplaining things that do need to be explained.
Characters are given totally different motivations and tasks, which is pointless because it forces a whole bunch of contrivances to keep everyone together anyway. It also bloats the script by ensuring that almost every stop has both an extended farewell (that you’ll quickly learn not to take seriously) and an overlong rationale for that character deciding to travel with the group again. Meanwhile, no one thought to mention that running away has a timer. The priorities here are totally out of whack, and even the ways Tales of Vesperia draws inspiration from older, better games goes horribly awry. Was anyone really nostalgic for the parts of old jRPGs that tasked you with wandering around and looking for an arbitrary cutscene trigger to move the story forward?
Tales of Vesperia has a lot of those, and sometimes you have to hit multiple triggers without knowing what they are to ensure that the whole process takes 10 times longer than it has any right to. Sometimes this means talking to absolutely everyone in your party, while other times you have to try to exit a village (despite your character having no reason to leave before your business there is concluded) to trigger something. It’s padding, and while that may have been acceptable once upon a time, it’s caused Tales of Vesperia to age poorly. This is an annoying game.
The post The more I play Tales of Vesperia, the less I like it appeared first on Killa Penguin.
