Tales of Vesperia Continued

01 Jul 2009 at 16:35:00 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (360)

There's a big problem with games that ask you to rely on allied AI: generally, allied AI is retarded. Final Fantasy XII cleverly avoided this issue by giving you Gambits – little tools to program your allies to behave exactly how you want them to. If you see them using Elixirs to heal a scratch they got on a thorn, it's your fault. Tales of Vesperia not-so-cleverly charges headfirst into this problem by giving you a Gambit-equivalent and then having your allies ignore them like a bunch of wittering cretins. That's perhaps a little unfair – usually, the strategy system works accurately, but it doesn't give you the precision you want. You can set characters to avoid enemies at 25% health, or 50% health, but nowhere in between. If this means that a boss can do, say, 30% damage in a single combo (as many can) then you're going to have to set it to 50%. But this means that your limited supply of healing items is going to dwindle much, much faster – unless you limit the ones your allies can use. Which then means that either you're going to have to manually heal them every single time using the items you choose, or wait for your party healer to do it (until said healer starts running out of mana and starts using more items...)

Still, when my entire party barring one person is dead, and she's a mage who's been told to stay as far away from enemies as possible, and rather than resurrect anyone or just stay the hell away she runs in to try and melee the boss, I think I can be forgiven for suspecting foul play. Fortunately these are fairly isolated incidents that only really crop up on some of the more difficult boss fights; most of the time, your allies are more than capable of looking after themselves, and it's only when you're trying to be particularly clever that you'll suffer problems. Unfortunately, as most boss fights have unskippable five-minute cutscenes and conversations beforehand, these are the worst possible times for you to suffer a death. Still, it's a solid combat system with depth and variety, and the combination of this and the lack of random battles means that combat never really gets tedious. And, hey, if the AI really gets on your nerves, then you can always plug in a second controller and hand it to a friend for combat, or just swap to play a character who isn't Yuri to see if you can do it better.

World design is even more impressive. Every town has a theme of its own, complemented by the excellent music, and feels like a separate location. There are no copycat towns here, with everything having a purpose and a very different feel, and the sumptuous cel-shaded graphics that run with nary a dropped frame give a visual spectacle too. While blastia is a fairly silly made-up word, the constant usage of those same devices, with most towns having a barrier blastia to keep monsters out, or aque blastia to provide water, gives the world a unique feel and a reason for all the monsters wandering around outside. It's consistent, gorgeous, and inventive.

But the real treat lies in two areas: the characters, and the way they're handled. Yeah, okay, the naïve sweetie-pie needs a hefty punch in the face, as does the boisterous brat, and I'm fairly certain that you'd be killed by any drinking game that revolved around every time said sweetie-pie has a crisis of faith or says the line “I... I'm coming too!” but everyone else is great. There's a dichotomy between Yuri and his friend/rival Flynn, both of whom are idealists who go about trying to improve the world in different ways; Flynn works with the Imperial Knights to change the system from within, while Yuri gave up on that and works more as a vigilante, committing plenty of crimes along the way – a few of which are actually pretty shocking and provide some of the absolute highlights of the plot. There are a few characters I wish we'd had more opportunity to learn about, but when that's the worst thing I can say about the characters (who are, again barring the aforementioned gruesome twosome, rather impressively voice acted) it's a pretty good sign.

Beautiful visuals, entertaining combat, decent character development, and some gameplay tweaks that avoid some of the more irritating angles of the genre make up this huge, huge game. Tales of Vesperia is easily one of the best JRPGs on the Xbox 360, despite being very much a throwback to earlier titles. If you've played another Tales game, you know what to expect, but this is definitely one of the best of them. With a little more work on making side-quests accessible (as far too many are time-constrained) with the plot pieced together a little more coherently, and some improved AI, this could be an unmissable gem. As it is, it's just highly, highly recommended.

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