Tales of Vesperia: A Reprieve

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was about to set Tales of Vesperia aside and move on to another game this weekend. At about 10 hours in I was finding both the game's combat system and story to be less than satisfying. I am now 18 hours in, so what happened? Two things changed on Sunday night, I broke down and read a FAQ on the combat system, and the story took off.

I generally do not like to read FAQ's as they feel like cheating, but I find in RPGs, especially JRPGs, that FAQs are often the only way to get a true explanation of how a game's systems work. This proved to be especially true with Tales of Vesperia. The game never really explains to you how combos work, and the tutorial sections are not especially helpful since there is no way to exit, change your character setup, and come back in to try it out. They also do not allow for enough repetition to truly understand what works. I understand that the Tales series is largely a niche within a niche, and that it has a core group of fans that it caters to, but it seems to assume you already know many of the core concepts of how the combat system works. It is especially odd to assume that a player has played a previous game in your JRPG series when you release it on Xbox only.

The FAQ cleared up a whole bunch of confusion about how the different types of Artes worked, how combos work, and that there was still a lot of capabilities to be unlocked in the combat system (you get the ability to chain together much larger combos as the game goes on). This last point is true to the extent that I know realize that this game has an almost FFXIII pace in unveiling its game systems. Anyway, combat is much more fun now and I am looking forward to the full system unlocking.

The story has also shifted from being a bunch of losers wandering aimlessly while looking for a rock to something more political. There is now intrigue involving the throne and the guilds. While it is still fairly silly anime stuff, it does have a bit more depth and edge to it. I do wonder why they waited until 12 hours in to get there though.

The game remains very linear, you basically just walk from town to town with little to no chance of getting sidetracked, I am hoping this opens up a bit as well.