This is sorta a replay and sorta not a replay. My original Tales of Vesperia review is not only up on this site, but it's also one of the very first ones I wrote here~. Granted it's so short that it's hardly a review by the standards of how I write them these days ^^;. With that in mind, with a close friend of mine also starting to play this for their first time, I figured now was as good a time as ever to replay through this, and play through the PS3 version that has the updated content in it (the same content that's in the most recent remastered international version). It took me around 70 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware. (which is a little odd, given that it took me less time to beat the 360 version and yet I feel I messed around aimlessly a lot less in this playthrough, but whatever).

Tales of Vesperia is the tale of Yuri Lowell, a vigilante who dropped out of the royal guard after becoming disillusioned with their way of meting out justice. What starts as a quest to capture the thief who stole the power supply to the slums' fresh water supply (predictably) eventually ends up becoming a quest to not only stop a corrupt government, but one to save the world itself from a fiendish and monstrous foe. This wasn't the first Tales game I beat, but it's the one that made me a fan of the series, especially with its wonderful and fun character writing. I've been curious for years how it'd hold up to a replay, and I can say for sure that at least the character writing (up to and including the new addition to the cast, Patty) is still excellent and very charming. The greater narrative however... failed to impress ^^;

Vesperia, at its core, has an environmentalist message above all others. However, it also has a lot to say about justice with the dynamic between Yuri, a vigilante, and his childhood friend (and captain in the royal guard, trying to change the system from the inside) Flynn Scifo. It also has a lot to say about governance and a fair amount else, but it casts far too wide a net. Fun and charming character writing aside, its environmental and political metaphors get terribly confused and difficult to discern by the end (and following some to their logical conclusions, you can arrive at some rather unfortunate ones).

Character arcs are for the most part alright, but with the big exception of Yuri. His entire arc sorta relies on you, the player, buying into the game's core assumption that his way of doing things, killing people on his own idea of justice, is inherently wrong. But the game does an awful job of convincing you on this point, and really just expects you to believe that at face value (despite that fact that everyone he kills on his own initiative is a cartoonishly evil and irredeemable person (not to mention they're also often offensive stereotypes in one way or another), and honestly the game suffers from generally poorly written villains on the whole). Yuri's dialogue writing is fine, but his character arc being so poorly, coupled with the poor construction of the larger themes, drags the overall quality of the narrative down significantly, and for anyone who likes to dissect the messages in the media they enjoy, they will likely find a quite frustratingly mixed experience with Tales of Vesperia.

Gameplay-wise, Vesperia is a really solid improvement on the 3D Tales games up to that point. Continuing on from the trend from Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss before it, the 3D action combat system works really well and feels fun to engage with, and it's been tuned up very nicely from those games. Boss battles also have 'secret missions' you can do, which while ostensibly a mechanic focused around achievement hunting, is still a fun way to spice up the weaknesses bosses often have in these games. Granted, some of these secret missions are pretty damn hard and/or very hard to figure out without a guide, but they're still a fun additional gimmick for this game. All in all, it's a simple to learn and fun to master system that's not quite at just how complicated the system would get come the following Tales of Graces.

The presentation is very nice. Though it's a bit of a shame to have the step down from 1080p to 720p going from the 360 to the PS3 version, the game's anime art style still comes through very well and in a way that doesn't tend to tank the framerate either (though that does still happen sometimes ^^;). The music is quite nice too, and it does a good job of setting moods and atmospheres.

Verdict: Recommended. This is still quite a good game, though it's certainly nowhere near as good as the Tales games that would come after it. If you aren't as much of a media studies person as me, the writing likely won't bother you nearly as much as it did for me (just like it didn't really bother me when I played it years ago when I was much less up on media studies stuff). The remaster's English VA is pretty awful in how it didn't get the original VA back for their new lines, but if you can stand that, this is a perfectly fine game to get into the Tales series with if you were so inclined~.