Tales of Vesperia: Early Impressions

I picked up Tales of Vesperia the other day and I'm already 9 hours into it. So far I have mixed feelings about the game. It isn't bad or anything, I'm just not so sure if it's as good as previous Tales games. That isn't to say the game is without it's charms. No, in fact it has a lot good going for it - the grapics for example - I think the game looks amazing. Not quite the level of Eternal Sonata, but still really pretty. Another perk would be that the game has some pretty cool character designs.

I can't speak much about the story yet, since the game seems pretty slow to start things up, but it seems like typical Tales fare at this point. One of the new features, skills - allows your characters to learn abilities from different weapons and you can equip this abilities on your characters by allocating skill points. This system is similar to the Star Ocean series, so I'm pretty comfortable with it.

Aside from that, things stay pretty true to the Tales formula. Except, the game seems to have gone backwards instead of forwards. While Tales of Symphonia is my favorite Tales game, Tales of the Abyss redefined the series in a number of ways. Most notable were the cores that you could equip on your characters to manipulate their stat growth. And the combat system was easily the best in the series. Not only did it flow smoothly, with just the right level of difficulty - but the inclusion of the elemental areas really added a lot of depth to the combat. All of these factors are missing in Vesperia - and honestly, I have to wonder why.

While we're on the subject of combat - the combat in Vesperia feels too slow. You'll also find yourself getting interrupted constantly by enemy attacks. It's really quite annoying and often times frustrating. Another annoying thing is that the Boss fights are extremely unbalanced. You will go from owning enemies in a given area, to completely wiping on the bosses. It makes no sense.

Another thing that has been annoying me is that titles are in the game - as per usual - but I don't know what they do. The game doesn't give any indication to wether or not they affect stat growth, and if so - how the affect it. I assume there must be a reason behind the titles other than just displaying them in your status screen. So I dunno, that's really bugging me.

Gameplay issues aside, I have a few problems with some of the characters. First off is Rita, who is in all fairness, pretty hot. The problem is she's a fucking bitch. She never appears to come off as nice in any situation other than when she's taking care of blastia. Which is some sort of magical item in the game that gives people powers. As far as I can tell they're just machines of some sort. So she falls into that category of person that favors objects over human beings - and that shit always annoys me. She even complains about shit in battle while no other characters do that. If she gets attacked while casting she bitches, if you use too much TP she bitches. I want to like her, but it's hard.

Flynn is another character who comes off as annoying. He's some super tight ass upstanding soldier who holds justice above all else. We haven't seen much of him yet, but he comes off as a fucking douche. And finally theres Zagi - seemingly one of the main antagonist in the game - he looks like a fucking faggot and acts like some goth 14 year old who's obsessed with killing and death. Yeah - lame fucking villain.

Another thing that's annoying me is I don't have a guide for this game. Yes, I like using guides when I play games. I like the feeling of completion and efficiency. I'm sorely lacking that at the moment since there are no guides out online or off. Funny that I wrote a guide for Symphonia though.