Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition Reviews

Hard to believe there was a time when Bandai made good games like this for a few years.

Love it. Characters are Super!

I dislike many things about this game, I could write a high effort essay but I won't, I will instead list off bullet points of things I liked and disliked. Liked: The cel-shaded art style from the previous two mainline games returns in HD and looks gorgeous - The music is pretty good - The combat is pretty good - There's an obscene amount of things to do for better or worse - In-game JRPG casino Disliked: - the pacing is irredeemably bad and the story is all over the place in the worst possible way. Story wise there isn't even anything tying it to the other games until the final act and it feels like an obligation - Aside from a few excellent character moments near the middle of the game everything else is so paint by numbers with the characters that it bores you to tears - Side quests are needlessly complicated, documented poorly and mostly missable, hope you play with an FAQ open! - A majority of the sidequests give you completely pointless rewards and are mostly wastes of time in the worst possible way - The map goes mostly unused until the final 10 hours/the final act where suddenly all the side stuff opens for real and you have it dumped on you en masse - The main plot is regularly regarded as being "grounded" and not too entirely based in fantasy which shows the people that say that probably haven't actually played it themselves or are talking out of their behinds. The political/guild maneuvering COULD be interesting but it mostly isn't, the intrigue just isn't there. It's all abandoned anyway towards the latter half of the game for stereotypical JRPG plot which would be perfectly acceptable if it didn't pretend to be something else for most of the runtime. -Rita is annoying and someone should smack her The End

The game is very good. Very similar to Final Fantasy but not as serious as FF. Also it has more "anime"-style graphics. I like characters, acting is good. Everything is so cute and beautiful. The plot is very slow burning but pretty interesting. The battle system is strange and confusing. I am just clicking all buttons. FF7 battle system was more understandable but I guess more fun. But this one is not but, it's just strange. This was the first Tales of game I've ever played. I have never ever heard of this series before and it looks like I've missed a lot! I am going to finish this one and probably Berseria too!

Unfortunately, this game just doesn't quite do it for me. The characters aren't all that compelling, and the plot just kind of slogs along slowly. There's a huge amount of content, but a lot of it feels like filler. There are so many characters who are just kind of mundane time-wasters. The core plot is actually pretty neat and a bit of a unique twist on a standard JRPG formula, but so many of the characters just don't really add a lot of value to it. The gameplay loop is weirdly formulaic for most of the game - you go to a location, find out about a local problem, go do the local dungeon, return to the location, go travel to the new location. There's never two dungeons in a row, or any kind of "go do multiple things at once" situation. There's nothing really mixing up that formula as you progress through the game even though you get new forms of transportation and an old school big world map which allows you to revisit old locations. The old locations don't really get updated, except when they receive stealth updates as the plot goes on, so if you don't want to miss out on skits and new advancements you have to laboriously check all of them (when most of them haven't changed). The combat is also less than satisfying, because so many of your team's attacks knock enemies down, during which time you can't really combo on the enemies. It's like the pieces are mostly there but they're just not assembled in a satisfying way to make a finished product. The game needed just a little more polish and I guess that came later in the series' lifespan as they iterated on this version of the combat system. I also experienced some issues with controller recognition, and more than once had to exit the game and re-open it to get it to recognize my controller again for whatever reason. Also note that my Steam playtime is inflated due to steam continuing to count time while I'm alt-tabbed out with the game paused and chatting in discord or whatever. Real playtime around 50 hours. Completionists would spend more time than that as there is a great deal of extra content including a lot of postgame, but you'd have to be a real diehard for the game to want to do it all.

I leave a review just to inform people who might consider to purchase and playing with joystick, there is a bug in game that leave your selection cursor (im not aware of the technicality) in your item menu randomly moving out of control. It's a small annoyance especially if you were browsing thru huge of items selection and trying to read item desc. Im not aware of any fixes and from what i read, there are slim to no chance dev team gonna fix it. So yea, it's not your joystick having a drift or something. Game was fun tho, i enjoy it back in 360 and i enjoy it now.

Imagine a co-operative fighting game with your friends where you slowly unlock your full kit, but you also have a great cast of characters and full story along with it.

one of the best classic Tales series besides abyss.. Story is nice, battle sistem is simple but tricky have many secret quest along the game, and have many hard boss. Final boss is easy, but if you unlock secret form(3rd phase) the final boss became very very hard. i just downgrade my difficulty to easy and grinding some lvl, still the boss is hard. but eventualy after many tries i can beat it. Recommended Tales Series !

This was quite a poor port. The game worked up until Deidon Hold (quite early on) and then most of the times the game doesn't seem to recognize or register X/A (PS/XBOX) buttons. However there is a fix by simply going to the Button Config > Change controller (ex: Controller1 to Keyboard&Mouse) but do not apply, just simply hover > press Alt+Ctrl+Del and click cancel > and your game should be fixed and choose any controller setup and apply. Hopefully there will be no other issues and this fix works for you. Now then, Tales of Vesperia is the GOATed of all tales series *imo*. The cast is amazing. Our Main Protag, Yuri Lowell, is not your everyday Shounen MC like Goku from DBZ. He is definitely more of a Dark Knight, an Avenger, the Punisher. Flynn Scifo is the bipolar counterpart of our MC. Mister Hardworker and Mister Perfect. Loved by all. He is all about Law and Order, stability, rules, respect. Doing things properly and in accordance, the right way. While both have the same goals, the way they go about resolving issues and matters differ greatly. Lastly, Estelle. Our guillable, naive, goody tissues heroine. She makes the perfect candidate to journey with our hero Yuri. She balances him out as if she were the Sun and Yuri the Moon. The story is heavily centered around the trio (non-romantically). The rest of the main cast are supporting cast, with a couple of them story important. Moving on, I would like to talk about the combat but rather than jumping straight into it, I would like to do comparisons with other Tales games. -Tales of Symphonia is the predecessor of ToV and quite dated since it didn't have the FreeMove function holding down L2/LeftTrigger that ToV has. -ToV introduces more mechanics over ToS such as FatalStrikes and OverLimit (an Install mechanic if you play fighting games). -ToV universally tries to modernize all characters to have their own Burste and Mystic Arte which is nice even though certain characters are preferred to overlimit over others. -Tales of Xillia, a newer release, appeals to the audience with it's high speed and fluid combat. The modernize thing about this game is that it gives every character an opportunity to shine and be amazing. The issue with this is that i've seen NG+ Unknown difficulty and there has been mention that the hardest difficulty only makes the bosses turn into punching bags. The movement speed of every character is insanely fast. ToX progresses nicely but as you start to understand your artes and boss fights, it starts to feel more like a No Gravity infinite combo kind of a game than strategical. With every character being so amazing to work around, there isn't much university for melee other than 1 being melee/healer, 1 being melee/spell, another melee/physrange etc... -In ToV, frontliners tend to move faster than the backliners. Backliners also didn't have the greatest combos or melee Artes. It is extremely important that players make their backliners attentive and target > fend off the enemies that target your backline. This creates individuality and why that character was good at that "role" like a "RolePlayingGame". -ToV Normal difficulty provides a great experience to players to enjoy with enough difficulty. In NG+ Unknown difficulty provides insane challenge. From my experience with Boss fights, it made me and my fellow gamers man up asap. We started applying better punishment and timing combos, team coordination and teamplay. As Yuri, I would never be able to rush in to hit a Boss targeting me but have to Kite them for as long as I could in wait of Rita's spells. My mage, Rita, gives me better opportunities to strike. When bosses would target them I would have to forcefully skirmish them in hopes of stagger and fending them off my backlline. When everyone seems to be low on HP or TP, we would have to scatter and play defensively as we try to recover the situation. There was so much communication between us and thinking involved. All of the above mentioned with my Carry Over Artes/Skills/Equipments but no LV carry over. The feelings of facing an overpowering foe. The amount of excitement, adrenaline rushing through us. The crazy comebacks, The feelings of accomplishment when Victory was achieved. This game feels good. Don't get me wrong, my review is a comparison as to explain why *imo* ToV is the GOAT tales game. All mentioned tales games in my review are still great (not good, GREAT). I'm very sorry for anyone who started their 1st Tales game that launched after ToV, since this game will definitely give you dated vibes.... Highly Recommend if you are looking any or most of what I mentioned!

- Great story. - Great variety of characters (Yuri Lowell being my ALL TIME FAVORITE "Tales of" protagonist). - Great soundtrack (both town AND battle themes). - Great visuals. - Great combat system (arguably THE BEST combat system in all "Tales of" games). I have some gripes with the story in the last few chapters (as well as the terrible post-game extra dungeon), but overall this is one of THE BEST Tales of games I ever played. Highly recommend it! [b] Final Rating: 9/10. [/b] [h1] Summary Ratings: [/h1] [table] [tr] [th]Game[/th] [th]Rating[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Tales of Symphonia[/td] [td]10/10[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Tales of Vesperia[/b][/td] [td][b]9/10[/b][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Tales of Zestiria[/td] [td]7/10[/td] [/tr] [/table]