My Videogame Club: Tales of Vesperia

By Patrick Hawes-DeFrias

Each week, I meet up with a group of friends to play through a game that at least one of us hasn’t played before. This time we were in it for the long hall, as we took several weeks to play through the JRPG Tales of Vesperia, of the long-standing “Tales” games. Truth be told, I’ve never really had that much hands-on experience with the “Tales” games, though I’ve been interested in them for quite a while. The idea of a cooperative action-RPG is incredibly fun, and this one in particular was said to have a notably good story. Having just finished it, I’m prepared to share my thoughts on this gem.

First of all, I’d like to talk about the story and characters in order to get them out of the way. Now, that’s not because I think they’re the weakest part of the game- the very opposite in fact. But, because I want people to play this game, I don’t want to spoil anything. So, since I’ll probably have very little to say, There’s a very good style of storytelling going on here- there’s tiny hints throughout the game for the various twists and turns all throughout the game which seem like nothing at first, but then when major plot points occur you realize that you started finding out about them several hours ago. In addition to being intelligently told, the story itself is gripping and surprisingly deep. It starts off as a simple story about finding a stolen object to save your town, but quickly expands to tackle numerous issues, including but not limited to:

·         Government vs. the Common Man

·         Political corruption

·         Social reform

·         Climate change and resource overconsumption

·         The true nature of justice

·         Whether or not vigilantism in a broken justice system is right

·         Governmental independence, and self-reliance

There’s quite a bit more actually, but just look at that list. It’s a hell of a lot to unpack, that much is certain. I can’t remember the last time I played a game that both A. tackled this many topics in its story and B. actually managed to pull it off well. But, this game manages to do just that. If nothing else, this game is worth playing just to get you thinking about the world.

The characters are where the game truly shines, however. This is another game where you can probably name off every named character off the top of your head, which is always the mark of good characterization. Every major character is unique, from the villains, to the NPC’s you meet, to every member of your party. And speaking of your party, I haven’t seen such a colorful cast since Shadow Hearts: From the New World (check out our Characters We Love: Frank Goldfinger article to learn more about that cast). Again, I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just talk about one of the first characters you get in the game: Repede. Repede Is the dog of the main character, and rather than just biting or scratching to attack, he actually uses knives and swords (which he wields with his mouth). He’s surprisingly intelligent, and during the course of the game interactions with the other characters inform you of his personality (because, of course, he can’t talk). He doesn’t seem to fully view himself as a dog, though he doesn’t consider himself to be a human either. He has a strong sense of justice, and he fights to protect the dogs and cats of the capital city. He knows who he likes and who he doesn’t, and he certainly has his favorites in the group. Despite the fact that he can’t talk, you get a good feel for who Repede is and where he stands with everyone else. His personality even reflects his fighting style- he’s the thief of the party, but not only can he steal things and move quickly, he’s also the best at using items because he gains a few skills that make any item he uses more effective, thereby showing that he’s most comfortable using human tools to support his friends.

The last thing I wanted to discuss about characters before moving on is the Skits in the game. Skits are apparently a common trend among the Tales games, where after performing various actions in the game, you’ll be prompted wo press a button to see an optional conversation between the party members. These can happen after certain conditions in battle, after using a character’s most powerful attack for the first time, and there’s even a few that happen after going for a long period of time without using the cooking mechanic to have your characters eat. Most of these are comedic in nature and help give some levity later on in the game, and they all showcase the characters interacting in a more casual environment, which makes them seem more like real people. A similar thing occurs whenever you finish a fight- whoever gets the last hit either says some kind of final taunt, or ends up having a brief few lines to say with other people in the party. And, sometimes there’ll be special dialogue after certain boss battles. There’s not a ton of them, but again it makes them seem more like people, interacting in situations other than just cutscenes. It’s very refreshing, and I hope other games do something similar.

The gameplay of this game is simultaneously incredibly deep, but at the same time fairly shallow. Let me explain: There’s a TON of customization in this game. Your various attack and support abilities, called artes, come in a vast number and variety, and are acquired from countless different sources, including using other artes often. To make them easier to use and prevent having to go into a menu to use them, there’s 8 hotkeys you can use for them, which allows you to set up a perfect loadout for how you want to play. And if you decide a different arte would be better, you can equip them to your hotkeys on-the-fly. In fact this is true of everything you have, including weapons and armor. Find out that your water-element bow is healing the fish monster that’s attacking you? Just swap it out. In addition to artes, you also have passive abilities called skills, which you get either from leveling up, doing specific sidequests, or by learning them from weapons that have them equipped. This encourages you to experiment with your loadout all the time, find as many quests to do as possible, and collect everything you can in order to give each of your characters the perfect build. However, beyond that, the combat of the game is very simple. Not to say that it’s easy, just not terribly deep. Now, if customized properly, you can have certain characters (mostly the melee based characters like Repede) do crazy multi-layered attack chains that involve hitting a guy into the air, using an uppercut to send him even higher, then using a spin attack to keep the combo going, and then finish with a rapid-hit attack. In certain situations, the game starts to look less like a JRPG and more like Devil May Cry. But, there’s several limiters to that. First of all, the skills and artes you need to pull off crazy combos like that don’t come up until the last third of the game, so until then, you’ll be focused on hitting enemies with powerful artes, using any support artes you have such as buffs or healing, and then just mashing your basic 3-or-4-hit combos until you have a good opening to use artes again. This is helped significantly by the inclusion of the Limit Guage, which puts you in a powered-up state that keeps you from being staggered and lets you fire off artes incredibly fast, as well as giving you access to incredibly powerful super-attacks called Burst Artes and Mystic Artes. But again, that doesn’t open up immediately. You have to get about halfway through the game before that system opens up all the way. And besides, some characters aren’t built to do crazy combos at all anyway. There’s three in particular- first is the game’s healer, who actually does have access to quite a few attack artes and could probably do some good attack chains… but, since they do all the healing, buffing, status curing, etc., it’s just more effective to keep them on the back line using support skills and maybe hitting enemies with spells now and then. Second is the game’s black mage. They just aren’t all that great at attacking, and even the handful of physical/short-range artes they have tend to have a casting time, thereby making 99% of their attacks useless for combo chains, other than for aiding another character’s combo from far away. This means that they’ll be spending their time hanging in the back row casting whichever spells are the most effective. Lastly is the games ranger/archer (the character I used the most), who mostly uses mid-range arrow shots to attack. You can combo out of these into artes, but once you get a good combo you can chain their 3-hit arrow combo into, the strategy mostly becomes about figuring out which situational arte will work for the current situation until you can fire off that combo. Now, as game balance goes, this makes sense and it’s good to make sure all the characters don’t play the same. But, this method of gameplay is a bit repetitive for an action RPG. Thankfully, the constant unlocking of new skills and artes will distract you from this for a long time, but sooner or later you’ll start to notice it.

The last thing I wanted to talk about in terms of gameplay is the AI of your party members and the difficulty of bosses. Now, in this particular scenario, all of us had at least briefly touched the game in the past, and only one of us had actually beaten the game before. There were 3 of us total, with the 4^th character left to the AI to control. Now, my friend who already beat the game warned us that the game’s difficulty spikes during boss fights and we’d have to set it to easy during them. He played it with one other person before. It turns out, that one extra person made all the difference as while it was difficult, we were able to beat the bosses without switching to easy, though the final boss proved to be a real meat grinder. It seems to me that the game REALLY expects you to be playing the game fully cooperatively, especially during boss battles (most normal encounters are pretty easy even without human-controlled party members). Why do I think this? Well… the AI for friendly characters is pretty bad. One thing my friend who beat the game before didn’t even realize was that you can actually set parameters for your AI characters, effectively programing them to fight how you want, similarly to the gambit system from Final Fantasy XII. We used this system to manage the game’s healer (since all of us agreed that we didn’t want to play as a white mage), and even with this, we still ran into problems. Despite the fact that they’d learned a resurrection spell, the healer insisted on using our resurrection items, ensuring that when an enemy finally ended up killing them, we had no way of reviving them, usually costing us the fight. We ended up just turning off that particular character’s ability to use items at all and just manually ordered them to use them whenever necessary. There’d also be times when they’d cast the resurrection spell twice in a row for no reason. The game allows you to switch your currently controlled character between automatic and manual control on the fly, which we used for taking breaks, and whenever I did this I noticed my character doing odd things as well, such as waiting about a half-second between doing anything (such as moving, attacking, blocking, etc.). Point is, unless you’re playing on easy, I wouldn’t recommend playing this game without at least one other person. I’m fully convinced that my friend had the trouble he did due entirely to the AI characters not playing efficiently. Lastly, there are many times during the game where the game removes several members of the party, forcing player 1 to either go solo or fight with just 1 other party member. These particular encounters are very difficult. But, that’s not the big issue- it’s that players 2 through 4 have nothing to do, and that’s problematic in a cooperative game.

Despite these glaring issues, though, I’d still whole-heartedly recommend this game, because of two things: one, an action JRPG that’s fully cooperative is a truly rare experience (in fact, it’s mostly “Tales” games that have this experience). The story and characters are fantastic and memorable, and I’d argue that’s the most important part of a successful RPG. If you want to give Tales of Vesperia a shot, you can probably pick it up dirt cheap for Xbox 360. There’s a PS3 version as well, but sadly it was never localized. It’s a shame really, because from what I understand it adds more playable characters, more dungeons, more story, and several hours of new content. PS3 games aren’t region-coded, so if you understand Japanese you could play it, but that version will cost you a pretty penny. But hey, the new year’s upon us, and with so many remastered games coming out recently, Vesperia’s lucky stars might shine once again!

Sources:

http://aselia.wikia.com/