Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition

I’ve been a moderate Tales fan for a decade now and it was high-time I checked out Vesperia, considered by many fans of the franchise to be the best one. And what better way to experience its glory than the Definitive Edition released in 2019? How did it fare for me?

Coming from later Tales games, Vesperia’s combat is stiff and awkward. While it might have been the apex of that era; that “Symphonia” era of the Tales franchise before Graces injected a lot of energy and finesse into the series, I had a lot of issues playing ToV. In fact, even if Symphonia was the first game of the LMBS and was damn basic, it often played better than this one!

Its combat system is touted as being a great action experience once you get later in the game and unlock lots of skills but that takes a long time to get there and along the way its hard to train up your ability to interact with those systems. There’s a gap between casual mastery and digging deep into the systems and you need to put in so much effort to cross it. It’s a not a gradual thing. Even past that, I don’t enjoy mastering these systems. I don’t care about getting high combos when the movement and animation of simply attacking are uncomfortably rigid. That manual cancel part of comboing is so jank I could never feel comfortable trying to learn it.

A lot of things in this game are pretty good. The plot is pretty good; sometimes aimless and not good at explaining all of its lore but there were plenty of moments that affected me. The characters are pretty good, too. I wouldn’t say I loved any character but they’re distinct and likeable and their arcs were satisfying to see play out, with the exception being Yuri; I never thought his arc hit unto anything substantial. His arc just waved at themes without touching them.

The music was pretty good too. Unfortunately this was the last time Tales had a pretty good/solid soundtrack. There are memorable melodies in this one. That would be gone by the time Graces and Xillia came around.

Despite my heavy complaints and lukewarm enjoyment of several elements, I think this game is more than the sum of its parts. There might be many gears in this machine that are pretty good, but they come together to make something borderline great. This game might not be as good as people say it, but it still has that classic air about it.