The next “RPG series I’ve never played before but decided to give a go now I’m back into the genre” is the Tales Of series, starting with a lot of people’s favourite entry in Tales of Vesperia. It was interesting looking into which one to start with as the fanbase is actually quite split across a few different titles for a few different reasons, but in the end I went with Vesperia, if nothing else I thought it would make the two Project X Zone games make a little bit more sense when I get to them in the next year or two! After having played through the game I can say I really enjoyed myself, a few niggles here and there, most of which I hear were fixed in later titles, so… yeah. Let’s take a look!
Background:
Kicking off with some combat! Always liked how the portraits on the health bars react when they do moves or get hit…
Tales of Vesperia was oddly released exclusively on the XBOX 360 in Japan on August 7th 2008, the US August 26th 2008 and in the UK and Europe June 26th 2009. I guess there was a deal struck to try and push more XBOXs in Japan, but I also guess it didn’t work because XBOXs are still unpopular there now in 2026 and a PS3 version of the game was released exclusively in Japan on September 17th 2009…
The Definitive Edition, which is based on the unreleased outside of Japan PS3 version, has more playable characters, lots of new voice work (including distractingly different voice actors for some roles during the new cutscenes if you listen to the English voice track…) and more, plus the DE also adds updated graphics and stuff. It is lacking in some of the extras from more recently released Tales Of remasters, especially side quest markers, which would’ve been handy but hey-ho.
Gameplay:
Not sure why I screenshotted Yuri running around on a bunch of ice, but here it is!
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, as Tales of Vesperia is an RPG after all so the bulk of the gameplay is as you’d expect: you walk around a world map, you enter settlements to talk to NPCs to get clues to missions, side quests or just world building stuff, you fight enemies on the world map (not random encounters, you see them on the map and can dodge them if you want, most of the time anyway) and when you beat them you gain XP that can level your character up and increase their stats and money you can use to buy stat-increasing equipment. In the various dungeons you fight bosses at the end and they feature puzzle elements like having to move crates, use a magic ring to turn magic posts on and off, find a switch to power a door that leads to a lever that can open another door in another room that allows you to progress, that sort of thing, alongside lots of generic enemies to fight as well. So yeah, nothing new there, but the Tales Of series does have a few unique wrinkles, so let’s start with the combat system, shall we?
Tales of Vesperia has 3D action combat for its battles, though its weird because to start with you’re locked on to an enemy and can only move straight towards it, like a 2.5D Beat ‘em up or something, but it was soon revealed you can hold one of the shoulder buttons to freely run around in the space, which made dodging much easier! I get some Tales Of fans were still insisting of classic Tales Of 2D-like combat but I think it would’ve worked better having a toggle so I didn’t have to keep holding a back button down the whole time… Anyway, you control one of your party members and the rest are AI controlled, with you having the ability to give them commands during battle when needed, and trust me, it will be needed quite a bit. I had Estelle as a healer during most of the run and if I didn’t alter her AI to not use the higher end healing magic unless I tell her to she’d have been out of MP (or TP in this case) in seconds. In fact this was still an issue as no matter what I did the CPU would frequently use their special attacks (or “Artes”) and by four or five battles in they’d be automatically using my items to restore their TP! Thankfully a button prompt appears allowing you to stop them from using an item, but until I got enough money to buy a whole bunch of TP restoring items it was a constant struggle to stop them. Anyway, as mentioned then you can attack with a normal attack string, use items and block attacks with a button, but also assign Artes to eight button / analogue stick motions, with each costing different levels of TP to pull off, some are spells that need time to chant before casting, meaning you want a good mix of close range fighters and spellcasters to keep things flowing. Overall it’s a fun combat system (thankfully for a game this long!) but there are bits I either didn’t understand or didn’t bother with much.
Really hated these few fights where you play as Yuri by himself against a bunch of people. Really showed how bad I was at the combat…
For starters there is a limit break-like meter that fills up over time that allows you to enter “Over Limit”, but beyond being able to do a constant attack combo or use Artes with no cost it didn’t seem to do much. I later found out that by doing some side quests and picking up certain things you can get your Over Limit up to a higher level and use “Mystic Artes”, which are powerful cutscene attacks. I had no idea this was a thing until right near the end of the game. Oh well! There are also little symbols that appear on enemies when you attack them and if you hit them with an Arte that has the corresponding symbol then you have a chance to do a “Fatal Strike” that kills it right then and there and nets you extra points. This is one of the things I was taught, did a few times, kind of forgot about it in the heat of later battles and then sort of tried to do a few times later when I thought about it. Basically I often just played with physical strikes and hacked and slashed my way to victory while taking advantage of CPU allies chipping in with moves and spells while I ran around a bit menu-ing to use items or CPU Artes. Hey, on the default difficulty, it worked! … most of the time (I’ll admit to lowering the battle difficulty a few times during some later bosses…) On the open world you can attack enemies from behind or stun them before striking them for an advantage but likewise if an enemy attacks you from behind you get a random selection of allies instead of your planned party.
Outside of battle there are a few Tales Of things to talk about too, most notably the “Skits”. As you travel around the overworld or through towns and dungeons a little icon can appear at the bottom of the screen, pressing the button will call up a little skit between the playable party, fully voiced with partially animated portraits accompanying them. They do a wonderful job making you feel these characters are walking alongside each other, having a chat while they go and makes you really care for the cast as the story goes on, more than you would just seeing them during cutscenes. It’s one of the things I’d heard about the series and one of the things that made me interested, so I’m glad it lived up to its reputation. While you can cycle through new weapons for each character the weapons come equipped with Skills which can grant you stat buffs or other advantageous things that you unlock the more you use the weapon, so it’s worth your time keeping older weapons around for a bit longer if there’s a Skill you want still waiting to be unlocked. Once unlocked you can assign Skills in a menu, based on a certain amount of points. You can also assign Titles to your characters but I didn’t see any point beyond aesthetics in a menu and sure enough researching it, there isn’t any other point to them (apparently later and earlier entries have stat buffs hidden behind certain titles) although some come with a change of outfit, if you want. Another thing you can do is cook a meal with ingredients you find around the place, doing so can give your party temporary buffs to stats and the like, though how well they cook is dependent on which character you pick to create the meal. I actually forgot about this quite a few times, leading to some amusing Skits where everyone started complaining about being hungry and wondering why it is they haven’t eaten anything for a while…
The main cast have a bit of a chat.
So overall Tales of Vesperia is as deep as you want it to be (there are quite a lot of extra stuff you can do on repeat play throughs as well, including a store where you can play about with how the game works by spending points you earn during battle) but I certainly enjoyed my blind play through. My only real complaint was how side quests happen organically, as in you talk to a random NPC and he’ll mention something they need or something and it’s up to you to remember to do it. Forget and enough time passes and you can miss your window and the quest isn’t doable anymore. Worse, if you didn’t decide to randomly go back to an old settlement that doesn’t serve any purpose to the current story anymore then you can miss out on an important side story altogether. This is why the current trend of Tales Of remakes mention side quest markers being added as a “quality of life” feature, because it would’ve been handy!
Graphics and Sound:
Dashing through a crystal cave.
The graphics have a very nice cel shaded anime look to them, and the backgrounds in towns and the like are often nice too. I will admit from afar I always thought the Tales Of games looked pretty generic, but having played through this I can say it didn’t bother me much after a while, and playing another game with the same art style won’t bother me when the times comes.
Sound wise is good too, the background music does its job well (I do like how the generic battle theme changes twice during the course of the story to keep it fresh) and the sound effects are good. The voice work is great, I played with the English voices on out of curiosity, knowing I could switch them back at any time, but I enjoyed them enough to keep them on until the end. As mentioned there are new Skits and cutscenes not present in the original 360 version in this Definitive Edition and some of the voice cast weren’t asked back, leading to a weird disconnect when for example our main character Yuri suddenly sounds slightly off during one of these new scenes. Credit to the replacement in that I didn’t always notice, but when you do you do and it can take out of moment a bit.
Story:
Yeah, if only your journey would continue… *ahem*
What I liked about the story was how it took your classic Luke-Leia-Han set up of blonde nicey-nice good guy, Princess who becomes tougher and a better leader as the story goes on, and a loveable rogue type and placed the rogue in the spot of the main character, reducing the straight up good guy as a side character who’s occasionally playable. The loveable rogue in question is Yuri Lowell, a former knight who quit when he became disillusioned as to how the country was ran and how it treated the poor and downtrodden and has begun to take matters into his own hand alongside his canine companion Repede. During the course of the game he meets Princess Estelle, who has the mysterious ability to heal without casting any spells; Karol, a young man who wants to be a brave hunters guild member but is a bit of a coward; Rita, a mage who is researching Blastia (crystals that contain magic that everyone in the world uses in their everyday lives); Raven, a middle-aged war veteran whose laidback nature hides his tragic past (he’s a good laugh, really enjoyed his storyline!); Judith, a “Krytia” who is worried about humanity’s misuse of the Blastia; and Patty, a little girl pirate who’s suffering from amnesia. You also meet Yuri’s childhood friend Flynn, the previously mentioned goody two-shoes who unlike Yuri continued serving as a Knight with the hope to change to society from the inside rather than openly rebel. Due to his strong sense of justice he often clashes with Yuri’s more relaxed approach, with their dynamic proving to be one of the more endearing relationships in the game. It’s a good RPG party, even if some characters grate a bit, Rita especially takes far too long to warm up the cast and become more well-rounded as a person, spending much of the game as a bit of a cold-hearted scientist type.
As for the overall story? Well, it starts of strong, peaks in the middle and then kind of fizzles out for the final third, sadly. Years before the game starts a war was fought between humanity and a group of creatures called Entelexeia over Blastia, a war that humanity won though at terrible cost. Yuri meets the Princess as she is fleeing the palace to find her Knight friend Flynn, so the two of them plus Repede head off together to find him, running into Karol on the way. As they travel across the world and meet more people and watch as some guilds fight each other they eventually come across an Entelexeia called Pharoh who claims Estelle is the “Child of the Full Moon” and therefore must be killed. This leads to a shift in quest to find out what that means, plus around this time Karol reveals he’s been kicked out of a bunch of Guilds so Yuri encourages him to create his own one, which everyone agrees to join, later dubbed “Brave Vesperia”. Estelle is eventually kidnapped by the higher up knight Alexei, who wishes to use her power to bring forth the “Shrine of Zaude” and reshape the world in his own image…
*Spoilers from here until the next bolded sentence*
Alexei does his subtle villain thing.
Alexei is eventually stopped and everyone is scattered but soon reunite, finding out that Estelle and special types of Blastia are damaging the flow of “Aer” (magic basically) and rather than just unbalance the world it will actually weaken a barrier that had been created by past “Children of the Full Moon” to keep back a world-destroying beast called the “Adephagos”. Well, surprise, surprise, it DOES unleash the beast and at the heart of this is an occasionally seen character called Duke who fought in the war against the Entelexeia and was disillusioned with humanity when they killed his friend and human ally just because they were an Entelexeia, even though it had helped them in the war. He starts a plan that will save the planet but wipe out humanity, seeing it as justified given their horrible actions, but Brave Vesperia have instead come up with a way to stop it by sacrificing all the Blastia in the world instead and using the newly discovered Spirit form that Entelexeia can turn into. Duke isn’t interested (the idiot) so fights the group and eventually falls, watching on as they save the planet and humanity with their strategy, and even chips in a bit of his own energy in the end as the ultimate admission of being wrong. Afterwards Brave Vesperia and other Guilds begin helping humanity cope in a world without Blastia while Duke watches on from afar…
The whole build up to fighting Alexei on the Shrine of Zaude was really good, but the sudden shift to an apocalypse creature and Duke being a sort-of villain whose single-mindedness was maddening just wasn’t as interesting…
*Spoilers End Here!*
Overall the main plotline wasn’t up to much, but the personal stories (that I just don’t have the time to type them all up!) were often really good, and in combination with the Skits made me want to see what happened to Brave Vesperia and its members in spite of the weakening main plotline.
Thoughts Now:
This was a secret “hunt” that I was told people had to frequently land and take off in a certain place to get it to spawn but for me it literally jumped me as soon as I landed! Made me laugh.
Tales of Vesperia was like watching a long anime series, it had some weaker moments, some “filler” and a good mix of comedy, drama and action to go along with the visuals. The main plot may fizzle out but I grew to really care and like the characters with the help of the Skits so I was happy to play through to the end to see their personal stories come to an end. The gameplay was fun too, though I imagine if any Tales Of veteran were somehow watching me play they would’ve been banging their heads against the wall. As with these taster RPG reviews I have to ask the question: will I play another Tales Of game down the road? The answer to that this time, is yes! Happy to plug away at another when we reach a quieter time, game release-wise, so stay tuned!
