I only played this game for a little over two hours. Naturally I won’t rate it but I think it’s enough to know if I would like this game or not and I will try to explain why I don’t think this game is for me and not to say that I think Vesperia is a bad game.


A slow, very slow start:

As I started the game, I was quite intrigued by the initial events. Something casual like a fountain breaking and the local hero running to the rescue is a very good way to start things, I think. Plus the game looks nice, the art style is really good looking and the town environment is much better than a lot of more modern and also flatter 3D JRPGs.

Then after about ten or maybe twenty minutes, I’m down to my first dungeon right after the tutorial. A dozen or so guards to fight with but basic attacks. After every combo I have a long recovery during which I can do nothing and I get ganked a lot. I know, the game will provide me better tools but why am I thrown at a dungeon so early with none of them? The combat at that point is really not very interesting and I think it expresses perfectly what I don’t like about this game’s pacing. Instead of putting things in your hands right away, it’ll instead slowly do so over the course of multiple hours while throwing bread crumbs at you.


Loading screen, battle, loading screen:

There are a lot of fights right from the very first dungeon and they have a very particular way of happening. When you encounter an enemy, you’ll have an animation of battle starting which is sort of like what Pokemon did, this already takes one good second. Then you have a loading screen, then another animation (thankfully you can disable this) with at least one second of nothing happening before you can move. Then after the fight you get at least one fade-in into a screen with your score, then maybe a level up screen, probably some party dialogue which is very repetitive especially when you fight every few steps, then another loading screen of 1-2 seconds to go back to the map. You’ll probably walk a few steps and do the same cycle again. This is very, very painful to me. I played other JRPGs, usually they try to lessen the time for these things. Final Fantasy for example (I only played the 2D ones) had pretty straight to the point fights, get an encounter, beat the enemy and move forward. Chrono Trigger doesn’t even have loading screens at all, not even when moving to new areas. I just can’t get used to this pacing.

A while later, you fight your first boss. You may have levelled up and unlocked a new move which doesn’t change the way you fight at all. Anyway, you get your second party member and from now on the game is mostly about you out-healing hits. It sort of plays like a mmo where you just attack and get attacked back. Sometimes you’re stuck in the middle of a group and get stunlocked too.


Too many skits, can’t jump lines:

When you get your first party member, the game also introduces skits, short conversations that show party interactions every once in a while. You get a prompt telling you about it and you can choose to watch them or not, granted the way it’s presented with such a big popup makes it seem like an essential part of enjoying the game (and so say the fans). Two new problems appear here:

First of all, you cannot skip dialogue lines. I can’t read it like I would read a visual novel and skip to the next line. Considering the length of these, I cannot believe there’s no feature to just move on to the next line. You just have to stop what you’re doing and sit there for a minute or two for the characters to finish their voice lines. I honestly find it very awful. Added on top of that, they happen every few steps you take. Seriously, every few steps I just felt bombarded by skits. Why is the game trying to make me stop so often to watch skits? Why can’t I do anything without constant interruptions? You enter a new area, skit. You fight some monsters, skit. You move midway, skits. You reach the next checkpoint, skits and probably a cutscene of the party resting. Even when you reach a new location, suddenly you can’t go out of town until you move the story forward because the game removes your party and won’t let you out another.


A combination of slowness building up into… slowness:

So yeah, I feel like everything is designed to break the pacing in this game. The way battles work, the skits, the long loadings even on a modern computer, the speed of menus and even the speed of things like a dialogue box transitioning into the other. I didn’t mention it but cutscenes are also very slow with a lot of moments where the camera just sits there before moving to the next shot and the overall pacing of the story is also oriented toward slowness so it just doesn’t help. Why is the game so slow?

Is it a problem for a game to be slow? No, I don’t think so. I’ve played Trails games and they are very slow, slice of life JRPGs. Why didn’t I dislike them? Because the slowness is only in the pacing of the story and adventure, not literally included in the game mechanics. On another hand I absolutely hate Animal Crossing for its tedious menus where I love most farming games with efficient menus. I don’t like games that force you into cosiness and taking your time, but I could spend hours in Monster Hunter doing nothing and chilling in the environment because I decided to do it myself in a game where I love the gameplay, menus and pacing. I dislike Red Dead Redemption 2 for its overly slow animations for everything and it seems natural that I would not enjoy Vesperia, I guess.

I just feel like it wastes my time for nothing. What do I get out of taking my time so much in the game? Do I need it for immersion, character development or something similar? I really don’t want to spend so much time when I feel like the game could have been twice as short just because it doesn’t have a button to let me move the dialogue forward or because of its movement speed or another feature like that.

This seems to be a fairly uncommon opinion so I thought I would share it. I tried looking up similar opinions on the internet and I only found a few people expressing these concerns. Somehow, the usual response was “have you ever played a JRPG” as if they’re all like that. The only other game I can think of which is this slow is perhaps Ni no Kuni, although 3D JRPGs seem to be generally slower than the older 2D ones from the little experience I have with them. Sure a lot of them would have fillers, random encounters and other ways to just lengthen the game but at least those made you play the game. You wouldn’t play a Final Fantasy if you dislike the battle system and a shitton of encounters is annoying in its own way, but it still makes you play the way the game is built ultimately. A filler arc is still a part of the game where it plays the same as usual. Vesperia on another hand won’t let me play and will constantly remove the game out of my hands.

this honestly plays a lot like old-school final fantasy games not so much in the combat but just the story progression and how to the world expands i know a lot of these tropes arent exclusive to ff but this one really gives the vibe. that being said the combat just wasn't for me i found it kinda of tedious and i wasn't dying to play this style of game since I already played a Tales game this year and I already played the whole of the pixel remaster and ff8 and 9 last year and this year but I am trying to finish the larger games in my hard drive to free up space and these jrpgs sure are big that being said for a definitive edition this is severely lacking in quality of life features, autoplay cutscenes/text would've gone such a long way.

Cast de persos incroyable, Yuri est un protag magnifique (et j'adore Flynn aussi il est génial), le gameplay est très très très fun, l'OST est VRAIMENT BON, il y a beaucoup de contenus et les graphismes et artstyle sont géniaux. Le système d'armes et les skills d'armes est très addictif aussi et motive le joueur à essayer toutes les armes possibles pour apprendre tous les skills. Le scénario était assez bien aussi, honnêtement c'était une expérience extrêmement agréable et addictif, c'est dur de choisir entre Vesperia ou Berseria mais ils sont tous les deux mes jeux Tales prefs

RITA MORDIO ELLE EST LA MEILLEURE

having only played tales of the abyss out of all the tales of games, i was fairly disappointed. only my desire to see this terribly paced bogged-down story through carried me to the end. characters are fine if you are okay with anime archetypes with nothing new to offer, but the constant talking about the same things over and over started to get on my very forgiving nerves after a while. it looks cute, the world is somewhat interesting, combat is boring and the story is clunky and meandering. it gets by on charm of its little anime cutscenes and its fighting dog with a pipe

judith and flynn were great though loved these guys

I think I love this? I was wondering what I would feel at the end of this journey. You have to look back at a couple of nagging issues and ask how much do they deter this?
Lets start with the thing I grew to love but still have to admit has issues… combat. The opening of this game is stiff as hell. You feel limited by all means in terms of execution. Yes this game has you learn things through weapon use, but as opposed to just learning skills like magic etc, you learn things that change how you execute attacks. Think the core combo is too limited, use a weapon that extends your base combo. Want to link your artes to basic attacks, learn the skill for it. Want to learn altered artes? Well learn the skill that you use to pair with your core artes . Want to link artes and altered artes? Theres a skill for that. It’s astonishing how much what you can do in combat evolves and its about tuning execution and links, the game feel drastically evolves, but should you have to deal with the length by which it takes to open up? Does that make up for the enemy jank that shows up in terms of their invincibility and how it can make combat less fluid. Dealing with enemy stagger and your own staggering can make you so frustrated. However when you are able to customize the feel to your style of play, it’s marvelous. It’s crazy that I focused on one character and there are 6 other characters with different touches and focuses to get into. Judith in air options sound so astounding and I still struggled to execute chancels to improve the feel and player expression further. I loved this when it was at its best and think if I had any fighting game skill, I would be in awe further. The feeling of doing a mystic or burste art is really elite gaming.
I also wonder how to feel about the core story here. If you ask me to explain the Adephagos? I couldn’t tell you. If you ask me to explain how aer relates to the adephagos or the Blastia, I might have a few words. Theres a moment in the game where Rita starts setting up the core reason plot and the formula and I just tuned it out. It felt like incredible world building at times, Myorzo is wonderful. Learning the history of the guilds and even why the main villain has beef. But I drifted in and out of it, and I don’t know if I can say plot wise this has anything to chew on.
You know what you can chew on? Characters. This is an elite cast. Yuri Lowell is truly a gaming icon. This is very much a game about how Yuri changes others , rather than how Yuri grows. It’s marvelous to see a JRPG protagonist get their hands dirty in the ways they perceive and engage villains as well as justice. That evolves Karol,Estellise and Flynn. Flynn and Yuri’s dynamic is immaculate. In particular the way that Aurion really starts to wrap the bow on the world, really sets the stage for the emotional beats to be wrapped up with the crew. Seeing Karol and Raven’s arc in the story is just genuinely beautiful. They get sensational emotional beats.
Add on top of this beautiful graphics. Great skits that make you smile and inject the feeling of growth. Some good music (I can’t believe I said that Matoi Sakuraba is very hit or miss for me). Some fun dungeon maneuvering. It leaves me feeling great. Something small is missing to take this adventure over top, but when I think of the ideal JRPG, this is what I will think of. The one thats not trying to be anything outside of the shonen energy and plays the cards straight but smartly straight? This is it.

From the first line of the first verse of Vesperia's incredibly cheesy english-dubbed opening, I felt like I was revisiting a game from my childhood despite knowing for a fact that I wasn't. I think most Tales Of entries of its era share this anemoiac quality to some extent, but Vesperia hits different thanks to its sheer honesty and relative lack of ambition. Above all else, It's a character-driven game. Of course, there's a global conflict in there and a bizarrely sharp (or at least surprisingly so for the genre) bit of commentary including a cop's slow realization that they may, in fact, all be bastards, but playing the game for anything other than the cast is bound to get old fast.

To focus on them, Vesperia resorts to familiarity. Put simply, it's Final Fantasy IX, from its introduction to its structure and the inner workings of its equipment and skills. Squaresoft's is a far more ambitious game, constantly moving between setpieces and elegantly shuffling the party to maintain the tight pacing of a blockbuster, which can make its lower-budget sibling feel awkward in the way it incorporates truncated versions of its core elements, but the tradeoff is usually worth it. Vesperia doesn't need to explain anything to you, so it can focus on what it's good at.

While not pre-rendered, the game relies on fixed camera angles and paths to make the best of each tiny locale. A walk through a town is a nicely designed oner that suggests not just the space but its atmosphere and the characters' place within it. Behind the models, multiplanar matte paintings make for spectacular vistas and small navigational disappointments that are definitely better for the mood than later entries' obviously artificial open spaces. In an exercise in focus and restraint, every slice of Vesperia's world is a memorable little set for the party to exist in.

Also in line with the "less is more" approach, the characters' personalities can be summed up in a sentence each, which is bad news for people who make a hobby of equating "familiar" with "generic", but has the benefit of making them immediately iconic while leaving a lot of space for nuance. They join the party naturally and take little time to fit in. The skits (opt-in sequences that build up character dynamics and are just great fun overall) work their magic in the background and by the time everyone is officially together, you've seen them in enough situations to span a 48-episode SoL anime. It may not make for an instant epic--in fact, the story itself isn't all that important--but it can turn any minor situation involving them into effective drama. I just love the party, really. Watching them grow closer and find excuses to stay together even when they've achieved their individual goals and could legitimately just leave gives me so much joy.

The game's only real problems come from the times its design and structure betray the character focus. There's a lot of side content peppered throughout the world, but most of it is only accessible during the final act, when urgency is at its highest and you're used to not backtracking to find hilarious new dialogue in towns you've already seen. My advice is to periodically check them out if you want that extra bit of texture and character. For the ending, though, I don't have any advice. Once the final battle's over, the game is just kind of done. Most character arcs have gotten some closure by that point, but a lengthy epilogue was so obviously the right choice that I was baffled when the credits just started rolling.

"I enjoyed the characters so much that I wouldn't have minded another 20 hours of skits" is about the most positive complaint I could have, though, and the journey was lovely. Looking back at the game feels like remembering an old trip with friends, and that sort of nostalgic feeling is a reprise of the reason I picked it up in the first place.

O que dizer de Tales of Vesperia? Em 2021, comecei a jogar o game bastante empolgado, pois joguei o Tales of Berseria e gostei muito mesmo do game, já que foi meu primeiro game da série Tales of. Então joguei esse que dizem ser um dos melhores da série, cheguei até a metade do game e com mais ou menos 80 horas do game abandonei ele, toda aquela empolgação foi embora e tudo por conta do combate, história e sidequests que sinceramente são até legais algumas, porém são meio que jogadas no nada e você que se vire para achá-las ou concluí-las, já que algumas são perdíveis. Com o tempo, o game se torna cada vez menos interessante, principalmente pela história, que mesmo com o game zerado, eu continuo sem entender boa parte dela.
E agora, em 2024, resolvi retomar o game de onde parei e finalizá-lo de vez. Dessa vez, me aprofundei um pouco mais no combate e melhorou um pouco, mas ainda continuo não gostando muito por conta da sua repetição. O ponto forte do game com toda a certeza é o seu pós-game. Apesar de ainda achar o pós-game do Berseria melhor, assim que matamos o boss final e carregamos o nosso save temos bastante coisa nova dentro do game. As cenas animadas, apesar de poucas, também são algo legal no game, uma pena o game ter tantos problemas assim.
Contudo, esse game ainda mantém o combate mais clássico da série e alguns vão gostar disso, o que não foi o meu caso. Tem um bom pós-game e alguns personagens carismáticos, em contrapartida, tem uma história esquecível, um combate desinteressante e sidequests perdidas no meio do game, talvez jogando com um guia fique mais interessante. Minha nota final para o game é 7.8/10.

👾 Tales of Vesperia (🇯🇵 2008/2019)

It took me several years to complete its story in short bursts because I wasn’t invested enough. It’s an overrated entry in the series but overall its ok.

🎮 Played on Nintendo Switch
Rating: ✨✨✨▫️▫️

Tales of Vesperia is my first trip into this franchise. After being swallowed by near 70 hours of gameplay, I can definitely say that this is a must play for RPG fans.

Like most RPGS, the artstyle is the first thing hurled at you once you boot it up. I'm glad to say that this game is beautiful. Not only the many environments you'll visit looks great, but character design, anime cutscenes and music are very good. The charismatic cast of character also helps. Yuri, the protagonist, for example, may look like your typical anti-hero cliché guy, but as the story unravels, you find out that he's a bit more complex than than your standard main anime guy.

In fact, most of your party members are fairly well-written, with good plots, believable motifs and an overarching development over the game's 3 acts. Patty, the definitive edition's new addition, should be enough to convince you to spend time here.

It's a pitty that, although the cast is great, the writing and pacing do not help the overall storytelling. This lighthearted story is good. It actually goes a bit deeper than most regular RPGS, but the RIDICULOUS amount of not so compelling dialogues and slow interactions kinda kills the game's rhythm. And while the story is compelling, its supposedly epic moments are somewhat dull. I blame the pacing. Vesperia kinda outstays its welcome, which is a shame for a game so good.

But while playing this gargantuan game, you'll experience one of the best gameplays that action RPGs of its time had to offer. The battle system definitely carries a bunch of shortcomings and limitations, but it works surprisingly well. Organizing your party and skills feels strategical, buying and synthesizing equipment and items is nice, boss battles are challenging, the game often gets tactical and intense, the AI works neatly, dungeons are simplistic and well-designed and pulling the right combos at the right time is addictive. It's all too fun. This game is from the XBOX 360 era, but yells PS2 RPG. And that is a fantastic compliment, in my opinion.

The thing is, being a product of its time, Vesperia's gameplay is filled with limitations and archaic design flaws. If you like to nitpick, you might easily fall off the wagon. The combat takes a while to get used to, movement is stiff, difficulty spikes towards the end can make it a little grindy, getting mobbed and stunlocked in any fight IS a thing, you have to wait the enemy get up so you can damage it again, there are PLENTY of enemy reskins instead of new ones and not every dungeon is fun. And then there are the sidequests. Probably the most notable problem with the game. They are missable, clueless for no reason and, sometimes, rather unrewarding.

Yet, Tales of Vesperia holds up reasonably well. I'm glad I got to play such an intriguing RPG. Its shortcomings and pacing issues may not be for everybody, but the game constantly compensates you for playing and spending time with this remarkable cast.

Play this game. It has Patty in it. Do it for her.

Progressively falling in love with classic Tales, and this was no exception. Having a main protagonist already set in their ways with little room for growth is a risk, but Yuri is such an entertaining character that it more than made up for it. The party dynamic was really strong too; I really enjoyed the main cast as a whole. The story was a little weak, though.

I think this was the game where I really started to figure out how the combat system of these games work, and once I got things going I had a really good time with it. Overall a very solid game, and I would more than likely go back and do the extra stuff at some point.

Playing this after having played the original version on the Xbox 360 so many years ago, so far loving the characters/plot/gameplay just as much. As someone who's grown up on the Tales series, Tales of Vesperia is an easily lovable game with a just as easy to love cast of characters, however I can see the game being seen as boring by others not too familiar with the series. I'm not as interested in mastering combos when it comes to combat gameplay, and as such the combat gets a little repetitive, however this can be easily challenged by someone with more ambition. The Definitive Edition does present some issues when it comes to sound mixing, as some of the characters have new voice acted scenes. These new scenes have different sound levels compared to the original scenes, and can sometimes be jarring.