Of the three J-RPGs I've played for the 360, I can honestly highly recommend Tales of Vesperia the most. If you're like me and are a bit jaded about anime-styled RPGs, this one was a breath of fresh air. The story was upbeat and engaging; the cast was fairly witty and well-rounded, incorporating some tired cliches but not relying on them every step of the way; combat was intense and exciting for bosses and reasonably engaging for random encounters; voice acting was pretty good overall and really helped to liven up the cast; the music was pretty good though in some locations the soundtrack is a little grating; and it was generally just a "lite anime" RPG that had a good sense of immersion and pacing.
The only downside for me were the Secret Mission objectives. I recall having to repeat Yeager's boss battle several times mainly because the timing for the objective is kind of hard to determine, plus it's a fairly narrow window of opportunity. Also, you have to use Raven to do it and I'm not the best at playing as Raven.
(Yuri and Rita, though, I rock with)
All in all, it's my favorite Xbox 360 RPG, tied with Mass Effect.
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Lost Odyssey is worth it, too, if you ask me. The game in general felt like it was an old-school engine dropped into a modern-day design. It's turn-based and the party lines up against the line of enemies, typical of ancient RPGs, but I personally didn't mind, I got into the genre on those kinds of games.
The story is pretty interesting, though approached from a very minimalist point of view. The story is relatively simple and uncomplicated (much like said old school games), but somehow it managed to be engaging and even moving at points. Gameplay is fun if you don't mind the trudging pace that turn-based combat can have as well as some really overpowered enemies that appear in some dungeons. The soundtrack is fantastic (probably my favorite of Nobuo Uematsu's work) and the visuals are quite good despite the fact that the text has that annoying quality of only being able to be read by squinting a few inches from the TV that so many games these days seem to have (I don't know if this is because I'm running on a non-HD TV, but if it is, I really wish more developers would take that into consideration).
However, I'll warn that there was one section of the game that almost ruined it for me. There is a part where the party is having a funeral for a secondary character that died tragically. It was a fairly powerful and moving scene, but all the drama drained out of it when a mini-game was introduced during the funeral. Something about having to maneuver a torch to be lit by using the control stick(s). It pretty much shattered the immersion at that point.
Still, it was so much fun to play and a pleasure to watch. If anything, it was too short, only being about 30-40 hours without sidequests.
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Finally, I won't say I don't recommend Star Ocean: The Last Hope........I'll just say that one should make a very informed decision before they purchase. You know how I said earlier in my post I'm jaded about "anime RPGs", well this game is part of the reason why...
Honestly, the game does have some good points. Combat is fun and a big improvement over Star Ocean 3; which is good because the meat of the game *is* combat. I've spent something like 2 hours in a dungeon before (or at least it felt like two hours, you lose track of time when battles chain on and on ad nauseum) only to be treated with less than five minutes of plot at the end. It looks good (despite "looking" rather uncomfortably like Phantasy Star Universe in some spots), it sounds good (the soundtrack is probably my favorite part of the game, to be honest), but I just can't applaud the rest of the product.
The game is pretty much a relentless barrage of "anime RPG" cliches and I'm not even exaggerating. It gets so bad that sometimes I feel like I may projectile vomit from how incredibly stupid the characters act and how horribly the plot is constructed. The cast are mostly cardboard cut-outs with thick layers of melodrama and silliness slapped on, doing and saying things that feel forced and unrealistic just to serve the needs of the already dangerously contrived plot. Secondary characters are brought in just to supplement said contrived plot and have no real lasting appeal (considering at least two of them died within ten minutes of meeting them in scenes that were more awkward than dramatic). All in all, I feel nothing for most of the characters and their individual objectives because I really do feel like I've seen it all before and seen it done MUCH better.
This feeling wasn't that bad until they Jumped The Shark; and before the first disc was even over! For those of you who have played it and know about the "Area 51 on the parallel dimension version of Earth" part, you'd know what I'm talking about. That section almost made my brain implode from the complete lack of logic on the part of the party as well as the pathetically weak storytelling involved (compounded by who I consider to be the second most annoying character in the group, Meracle, just under Lymle). It made me want to sue Square-Enix for that hour or so of my life back.
Also, every time Welch appears on screen, it makes me want to disembowel myself; I honestly use her cut scenes as excuses for bathroom breaks by now. Which is annoying because I can tell she's there as a sort of tongue-in-cheek kind of comic relief (she makes fun of anime and several anime cliches/absurdities, as well as jokes about anime's cultural influence on future generations), but tongue-in-cheek works better when the same character isn't embroiled in the subject material that is being made fun of. Kind of like Yahtzee once alluded to in his No More Heroes review, I kind of feel like she's suppose to be annoying on purpose as sort of an ironic statement about the fans; Square-Enix did it back in Star Ocean 3 with the big "4D Space" revelation that I personally interpreted as trolling gamers to some extent, but here I just can't bring myself to care enough to look for the satire.
Now to be fair, I'm only about 20 or so hours in. I'm on Roak, just cured Reimi of her random stone illness, and am about to go look for Sarah. I'm still anticipating the rest of the supposed party to join up and I am hoping that they will bring something interesting to the table. Though it worries me that I've heard about four potential candidates (Myuria, Arumat, Sarah, Crowe?), but there are only two spots left in the roster. If this game were awesome, it'd let me shove Lymle and Meracle out the airlock and let all four of them in the place of those two ankle-biting rugrats (I say that in good faith that ANYONE, no matter how cliche, would be more tolerable to me than those two); but alas, most GameFAQs are not that far in yet and my local GameStop was sold out of the guide. Still, my point is, the game *may* get better; I've played plenty of games with rough spots and characters that I've wanted to punch in the throat, but I still enjoyed the overall experience.
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tl;dr: Tales of Vesperia and Lost Odyssey are must-haves if you're an Xbox 360 owner as far as I'm concerned. However, rent Star Ocean 4, but take it with a grain of salt. If you dare to buy it, just know that it's pretty clear to me that the staff didn't go into this game with a very mature mindset, so neither should you.
