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[ArchAngelKira]

What I mean is I would still play a tales game regaurdless the rating

 

[D_987]

All comments written in real-time as I read the review because I'm to lazy to read that wall of text twice...

I have only played two JRPGs in my life. The first was the original Skies of Arcadia, for the Dreamcast. It was, and remains, my favourite game. While I will happily admit that I have played other games that are technically better, Skies of Arcadia touched me in a way that no other game ever has. Beneath my cynical exterior beat the heart of a small boy, one who enjoyed happy, colourful games in which you saved the world from eldritch monstrosities with the Power of Friendship.

So first and foremost we have a clear issue here, the reviewer is comparing a JRPG to their single most loved game, which in of itself is an issue [because nostalgia plays a vital part in such things] as you're no doubt subconsciously comparing this game to that. On the review side this paragraph is incredibly wordy and unessential, you attempt to endear yourself to the reader but you don't really go into any detail as to why you enjoyed SoA so much, so the reader doesn't know what you prioritize in a game.

While I didn't play another JRPG for many years, mostly because I kept buying consoles that seemed to have a dearth of good ones, I was always ready to leap to their defence as a genre, and, what's more, I was ever on the lookout for a similar game that would fill the void left in my soul by the cancellation of Skies of Arcadia 2. And one fateful day, I happened across news of a nice, shiny, old-school JRPG that just might satisfy my perverted cravings. What's more, it was on a platform I actually owned. Huzzah! And thus it was that Tales of Vesperia became the second JRPG I have ever played. Could it live up to my expectations, and deliver me some more of that cheerful goodness of which I had so long been deprived? The predictable answer is: No. Not by a long shot. That's not to say that Tales of Vesperia is a bad game, but . . . OK, it kinda is.

So we're two paragraphs in and we've only got one conclusion, that you beleive the game is "bad", I don't share this conclusion, at all, in fact in my view this is easily on the best RPGs made in recent years, but introducing your viewpoint before you've made any relevant points regarding the game isn't usually a good way to start, because I know view everything you write with some cynicism, I'd be more likely to read this review in a disapproving tone, and the whole review could easily come across as a rant.

Even a JRPG nub such as myself can recognise that Tales of Vesperia is as determinedly formulaic as it gets.

Um, what? You literally just described the game as "a nice, shiny, old-school JRPG that just might satisfy my perverted cravings." if you recognized the game to be an old-school JRPG, with all the trappings and possible failings of such a game then what the hell were you expecting? This far into your review your credibility is already wavering. Especially when, as a player of JRPGs I can assure you Tales of Vesperia isn't really a very old-school JRPG at all...

Our hero, Yuri Lowell, is a noble if slightly girly sort who, along with his trusty dog Repede, devotes his time to standing up for the poor and downtrodden. He lives in the Japanese version of the Standard Fantasy Setting - a sort of pseudo-medieval western European society, but with Japanese bits and magitek. A minor act of thievery eventually embroils him in a plot that could doom the world, which he dutifully sets out to save. Along the way he picks up a naive princess, an "adorable" twelve-year-old boy, a bratty teen genius, a dirty old man and a giant pair of tits with a woman on the back. They explore the world. They fight monsters. They go to the jungle bit, the icy bit, the desert bit, the crystalline bit and several ancient-ruined-temple bits. They defeat the villain. The world is saved. So far, so good. This old-school stuff is what I'm here for. It would just be nice if it had been executed with any kind of skill.

This is about as abysmal a paragraph I've ever seen in a review of an RPG, you literally take the bear bones of the game, dismantle the pieces that don't meet your narrative, and throw them at the reader with a large degree of arrogance, we're now 3 paragraphs in and already you've given the reader absolutely no information on the games failing, or strengths beyond your take that it's generic [which yes, in an anime inspired game you tend to get some cliches, but then again I refer you back to, in your own words, "old-school JRPG", so what you were looking for, again I'm not sure - because you haven't actually stated that yet.

OK, that's a bit unfair.

A bit is an understatement.

If Tales of Vesperia had been entirely devoid of merit, I wouldn't have finished it. For a start, it's very pretty - and not in the sense of being graphically sophisticated, but in the rather more important sense of being aesthetically pleasing to look at. Everything is, as per specifications, drenched in glorious colour. Every aspect of the game's neat little cartoony visuals is well-designed, simple and effective. After years of the muddy browns and grime that pass for good looks in western games, Tales of Vesperia is a like a gentle massage for my optic nerves. And on top of that, the core gameplay is really rather good. It includes, of course, the standard wandering around in dungeons, opening treasure chests, solving puzzles and fighting monsters.

Can't argue with that.

Once you've encountered a monster or something else in need of a sound thrashing the game switches to something that, according to Wikipedia, is called the Evolved Flex-Range Linear Motion Battle System. What this hilariously overblown title means in practice is that you are warped to an arena to fight a group of enemies in real time. You control one character, the rest being under the command of the AI. Luckily enough, you can set strategies for them, which are reasonably effective at stopping them from doing anything too suicidal. You have eight shortcuts you can assign to your myriad of special moves. While hotkeys aren't exactly a revolutionary gameplay development, in this case it makes the battles feel like a fighting game in which the controls are tailored to make sense to you, rather than requiring you to memorise a dozen complex combos. Get it right and it feels smooth and intuitive. Supplementing these basics are equipment, skills, Overlimits and half a dozen other arcane and unsettling game mechanics that would take far too long to explain even if I fully understood them.

You mean you didn't understand the games systems? I know you don't play many JRPG's, but they really are extremely simplistic, and the game gives you full, interactive tutorials on each subject...

The upshot of all this is a combat system with a good deal of depth. If you feel like it, you can spend hours fiddling with menus in order to find the perfect setup. Or, if you're like me, you can wade in and start pummeling and you'll probably get by just fine. In the end, Tales of Vesperia makes jumping around hitting things fun, and it's one of the few RPGs I've played where grinding is a pleasure rather than a chore.

Unfortunately, Tales of Vesperia also contains many design decisions that might charitably be called questionable. Among the nasty tricks the developers pull on you are unexpected difficulty spikes, puzzles involving spotting small grey objects in large grey rooms from unhelpful camera angles, forcing you to play a boss battle as the character you've never touched before because he's insufferable and steers like an aircraft carrier, and at least three separate situations where a cutscene followed by a boss fight is followed by another cutscene followed by another boss fight. While none of these are deal breakers, they cause moments of frustration that would have been extremely easy to avoid with a little thought and an extra savepoint or two.

All seem like very minor points; and ones I have not come across at all; at the end of the day the game is a "old-school JRPG' and narrative comes before gameplay, in this case, having to fight two bosses in a row is not uncommon in RPG's and complaining about such a thing is near asinine. You complain of difficulty spikes, but make no mention of the ability to change the difficulty level whenever you wish.

Tales of Vesperia's worst gameplay crime, however, is its side quests, which are legion. They are also extremely easy to miss, many involving a complex series of actions that require trekking halfway across the world map and back again. These are rarely hinted at and often necessitate doing things the player would have no conceivable reason to do. And, as if to prove that Namco really do hate you, you're often given a very short window of time to complete them, after which they're gone forever. Knowing this before I started the game, I decided that I would succeed in finding these quests where others had failed. After every major event I journeyed diligently around the world map, checking each settlement, talking to anyone promising and following up any clue that suggested a possible sidequest. After completing the game, I discovered that I had missed nearly all of them. Without a guide you are going to miss a good deal of this game's content, which is a shame for those of us who take joy in discovering things for ourselves. Once again, however, it's not a deal breaker.

It's not a deal breaker because the games content within its main storyline alone is so vast side-quests should hardly be a focus until the second playthrough; I do agree sidequests are difficult to spot, however you're still yet to sprout anything that backs up your previous comments, in fact you've even stated the "worst gameplay crime" is "not a deal breaker". Hence my previous issue with you revealing your opinions at the start of a review.

But Scobie, I hear you cry, what is this legendary deal breaker you keep yammering about? If the game looks good and plays OK, what exactly is your problem? Well, as some of you might know, gameplay is only the filling of the JRPG pie. Story is supposed to be the delicious crunchy pastry, and it's at this point that the game, rather like my metaphors, breaks down and starts dribbling on itself. From the moment the opening narration intoned "Our world . . . Terca Lumireis" I realised, with a sinking heart, that I was in for a lot of bad acting, melodrama and overwrought exposition. What I didn't realise was that a bit of cheesiness was not even half of Tales of Vesperia's problems.

I'll reserve judgment on these comment until I read further down, but this whole paragraph comes across far to whiny.

As you might have guessed from the fact that Namco apparently hired a pretentious fifteen-year-old fanfic writer to name their planet, Terca Lumireis is less than convincing as a world. The entire planet is very obviously constructed only to facilitate the plot, and to shuttle the player quickly from one pretty location to another. Of course, this is true in most every game of this kind, but if the player is constantly reminded that this is the case then something has gone wrong. There's no sense that the world you're in has a history, even when characters spout it at you at great length. Above all, there's no sense that this world was made with the idea that someone might live in it. Terca's Lumireis' sheer genericness compounds the problem. It's possible, with a bit of imagination, to put a fresh spin on things that can make even the most hackneyed settings feel new, but the developers have stalwartly resisted this temptation. Tales of Vesperia is unquestionably at its most interesting when it steps outside its Standard Fantasy Setting comfort zone, but that happens far too rarely for it to make a difference.

I disagree entirely; can't really argue with your opinion, as it's all subjective, though I do have to question how much attention you were paying to the narrative with comments such as "there's no sense that this world was made with the idea that someone might live in it." -_-

Unfortunately, the story that this world was constructed to facilitate probably wasn't worth even the little effort displayed. Ladled over the standard kill-the-abomination-to-save-the-world concept is a thick porridge of unresolved subplots, pointless diversions and redundancy. The plot is a bloated monster, staggeringly drunkenly and aimlessly from place to place like me after that time I decided it would be a good idea to mix up a pint of Malibu and Jack Daniels and drink the lot. It takes thirty hours of faffing about with political intrigue and minor villains before the main plot deigns to reveal itself. Kind of. It's hard to say when the game's main plot begins, because there doesn't seem to be one. The party's ultimate goal changes about once every half an hour, so what is presumably supposed to be an epic quest turns into a series of mini-quests. The only thing that marks the real start of the plot is that everything beforehand is suddenly reduced to complete irrelevance. At the sixty-hour mark the writers throw up their hands in despair and the rest of the plot is powered exclusively by magiteknobabble, courtesy of the resident teen genius.

I'm not even going to go there, because this paragraph is so out of touch with the reality of the situation it's almost rage-inducing; I just feel the need to question why you want the game to introduce the bad guy within the first 5 minutes and have you chase him all game - that's the generic RPG plot you keep labeling this game with when, as you've just proven, that's not the case at all...

On top of this mess is some extremely lacklustre storytelling. A lot of Tales of Vesperia's cutscenes give the impression of being done on a budget.

Because they are on a budget...

Only about half of them are voiced. Apart from the occasional lavish FMV sequence for important bits, everything is done in-engine and with the minimum of effort. Things are often implied rather than directly shown, presumably to save on animation, and while this sometimes works, it often makes it unclear what's just happened. Combined with the game's length, and the profusion of subplots that dive in and out every few hours, the result is that quite frequently I had no idea what the hell was going on.

The game comes on one disk; that sales strategy comes at a cost, but ultimately I really don't see the narrative issues you're complaining about, do you really need to see every little detail within the animation, when it's implied the game makes it extremely clear what is occurring, and each sub-plot is built around layers that develop the characters and form the basis for the final 15 hours or so of the "main plot". It's an interesting story mechanic, one that games like Mass Effect uses; the only difference being Tales gives the situations more context because they don't occur in an order the player can choose them. Why you had trouble understanding the narrative structure is beyond me.

Tales of Vesperia is cliched in its generalities - I had all the major plot points down by a third of the way through

Considering the main plot point isn't introduced until 2/3s of the way in I don't see how that's possible, it's best not to exaggerate in a review.

- but in its specifics it is frequently mystifying. I had no idea what was going to happen next, because I had no idea what was happening. I suppose you could count writing a story that is simultaneously predictable and impenetrable to be an impressive achievement, but honestly it's impressive only in the sense that the Chernobyl disaster was impressive. The fact that this whole narrative soup appears to be merely a device to deliver environmental moralising as simplistic and heavy-handed as anything from Captain Planet is just the icing on the cake. Which, according to my earlier metaphor, is a pie. And to tell the truth I can easily imagine this game's writers being the sort of people who would ice a pie.

A very confusing and poorly written paragraph, "a story that is simultaneously predictable and impenetrable to be an impressive achievement" in particular being a sentence that makes sense, and as stated previously, lowers your credibility as a reviewer telling me if I should buy the game or not.

But rejoice! There is a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it is a weak and ghostly shimmer. This being that some of the characters are not totally insufferable. Our hero is unfortunately the only one who manages to break out of the shackles of cliche. As well as being generally heroic he has a refreshing tendency to murder people, which is nice.

The rest of the cast stay resolutely one-dimensional,

No, they don't - that's just a ridiculous point to make when the whole point of the plot is the way every characters ideologies change...

but after ninety hours of listening to them talk even I, a person who lost his soul down the side of the sofa about five years ago, found myself getting mildly attached to them. In the end, it was the characters who pulled me through where the story failed. Except for Karol the comic-relief kid. And Estelle, the aforementioned naive princess. The writers, reliably predictable as ever, took "naive" to mean "as thick as very very sticky treacle pudding", so Estelle's job is to drive the plot through idiocy, occasionally get kidnapped and demonstrate a complete inability to make a decent egg salad sandwich. The minor antagonists are similarly lacklustre, being cartoonishly villainous, campy and once, in the case referenced above, humorously foreign in defiance of geography and common sense.

The game doesn't take itself all that seriously, a lot of the things you complain about here are meant to be taken as jokes, see the "minor antagonists" as proof.

Voicing is also spotty. For the male leads it's passable, whereas children, women and minor characters get the short end of the stick in the acting department, something that does not serve to make Estelle and Karol any more likeable. Of course, this is all rendered moot by the fact that one of the major characters is voiced by D.C. Douglas, a.k.a. Albert Wesker of Resident Evil 5. I cannot criticise the voice work of a game that has D.C. Douglas in it. His deep voice and delicious hamminess automatically make up for the shortcomings of the rest of the cast, along with the not-insignificant side effect of giving me the man-tingles. Naturally it would have been much better if everyone in the game had been voiced by D.C. Douglas - it might even have made Estelle bearable - but for some reason this never occurred to anyone on the game's production team.

I agree with the voice acting comment, but really, D.C. Douglas? There're better performances than his in this game.

Much like me, what Tales of Vesperia needs more than anything else is an editor.

You don't even need to joke about that; it's true.

The game feels rushed and underfunded

Rushed? The 60 hour RPG with tons of missable side quests and additional content feels rushed?

and I'm inclined to believe that this is not a product of insufficient time and money but of unrealistic ambition. Cut out the first third of the game and pour the money saved into polishing up the rest, and you've got a shorter but considerably more satisfying experience.

I get the feeling you missed the narratives purpose entirely, and were expected more of an old-school JRPG than you got...

As it is, the best you can say is that there's a decent game buried under all the flab. Tales of Vesperia is by no means unremittingly awful. I still pick it up and hack at some monsters every now and then. But in an RPG like this the transient fun you can get from nice visuals and decent combat is not enough to make up for the game's large-scale structural flaws. If you're seriously desperate for some story-heavy RPG action, and think you can get past the narrative problems, then give it a go. Otherwise, it's best avoided.

Overall not a terrible review but defiantly one that needs to expand more on the points it wishes to express and cut down on the unneeded narrative; well presented, however.

 

[Scobie]

DELETED

 

[ShenCS]

H'okay, I've been a JRPG fan for quite a lot longer than I had first realised (for some reason I have childhood memories of Final Fantasy 1 which I'm sure came out before I was born) and I particularly love the Tales series and Vesperia is tied with Symphonia as my favourite of the series. So I'm admitting here and now that my opinions will be coloured somewhat.

Vesperia is actually a pretty unique approach to the story and the characters compared to most big name JRPGs and games in general. A part of your criticism was that a lot of the time you had no idea what you were doing and felt you lacked a kind of ultimate goal, the former of which I found odd and the latter I can be pretentious enough to explain. Perhaps I've just built up a barrier to bull from playing so many JRPGs over time, but I always felt perfectly clear on what I was supposed to know and do at every stage. This isn't a complaint, merely a point of view. It feels arrogant and defensive to say something like "this is only your second JRPG" and honestly, your opinion is valid (why would you lie?). So I'm just mentioning that it's not a consistent complaint. The story isn't really meant to first seem like a High Fantasy, where you're journeying to save the world against impending doom and evil - it's a Heroic Fantasy, a tale of the characters and personal growth. I'd even go as far to say as it only went to become a High type because it's a JRPG and is what is expected. Anyway, as I said, it's a tale of the characters, of something more earthly to begin with - a simple quest to return a stolen treasure, from which complications and new discoveries eventually lead to a grander plot. Now you may be saying "as does most JRPGs, RPGs and games from all genres", but the thing with Vesperia is WHERE the complications come from: the characters (particularly Yuri and Estelle, but what do you want, they're the main characters). This is actually quite a rare thing to see in a JRPG and is quite a great step towards Western ideology of story-telling (which is both hypocritical and xenophobic, but we won't ever admit that). So I've always felt like the main story is merely a framing device. It's almost sitcom-like. Now obviously, this won't be to everyone's tastes, but it certainly bats off the common criticism that JRPG stories are driven by coincidences and contradictions. So good step for JRPGs in general, making this certainly a game one should recommend to a JRPG cynic in my opinion. I should probably also mention that the Tales series has a long history of starting off as seeming cliche before then totally f*cking everything up and really messing with heads. Symphonia and Abyss pull it off best, but you might have missed it due to not keeping up with the plot.

You make a big deal about missing so many side quests and you're absolutely right in that regard as it is the sidequests that really make the story, or rather the characters, really come alive and so hiding them away is a fairly brain dead thing to do. It's incredible the extra dimensions they add to all the characters, leading me to claim that Vesperia has the strongest main cast for any piece of media I have ever seen. Maybe I'm fanboying a little here, but seriously, I cannot think of anything that quite matches it.

Yuri for example lets the game touch upon some very deep themes, namely that neither way is always right. He and his rival Flynn operate on two different sides, which is a really big thing for the story. While Flynn is squeaky clean and incredibly heroic, like most JRPG heroes before Final Fantasy VII took off and made wangst cool, Yuri is a lot looser with morals and clothes, although still ultimately heroic. Both do things the other would never do - but you're controlling Yuri, the one who does the dirty stuff, so naturally you'd expect to see his vigilante behaviour glorified. While it does seem to be to start with, as you delve deeper you start to see the consequences of his actions which brings it back down. Both Yuri and Flynn have failed at different things due to their unyielding ideologies, and while Flynn screwed up more (done, let's face it, to keep you liking Yuri, because the public generally don't want their hero to be too flawed), the idea of balance and reason still comes across strongly and, in my opinion, very believably.

Estelle is definitely the weak link of the cast, but even then she can get some strong characterisation. As mentioned earlier, Tales games like to pretend to be cliche, which I theorise is the reason for Estelle's early character - to sucker you in. That and the type of character she is has a strong presence within Japanese culture yadda yadda stealing from the newsletter. I feel that the whole "she's read a lot of books" thing that was used to make her seem intelligent despite her naivety fell flat and was generally unneeded. Despite that, I liked Estelle. She was bold and independent despite her archetype, whilst still remaining quite feminine. In actuality, a pretty strong character that represents the society both modern and fictional. Maybe I'm biased towards her because she seems like people I know and so felt like a good friend from the start, but surely that's only another point in her favour.

Karol is amazing. I generally hate the little comic kids in JRPGs. That's an archetype that needs to go die. But Karol really is amazing... if you can find the sidequests for him. I'd feel bad spoiling this for you or others, so there really isn't much I can say, but for a little kid he has a rich backstory, substantial motivations for both behaviour, actions and relationships and is overall quite heartwarming to watch once you know enough about him. While I can't say I equate him to reality as much as the others, he really is incredible to watch grow as a fictional being. You almost feel proud of him by the end.

Rita is my favourite character. I guess I just have a soft spot for plucky underage girls with implied lesbian tendancies. Therefore I feel it would be too biased for me to really comment on, but I will just add that her creepy love for magic rocks does have an explanation both sad and disturbing. Exile, both forced and self-imposed warped her from a young age by loneliness and she began substituting machines for human contact and emotion. As a psychology student, I read a lot into the dangers of that and really made me connect to her through sympathy. But like I said, I love Rita, she's entertaining and both fits the tsundere stereotype and goes against it with her hidden depths. Plus she can fricking fly.

Repede is a dog. With a knife. 'Nuff said. Well actually, he does seem like a bit of lazy design/filler for the party slot and he's pretty much entirely unnecessary. Yet still, he's fairly well designed and strangely appealing despite it all. He feels like an extension of Yuri, an embodiment of his soul and past. But couldn't the same be accomplished by a macguffin of some sort?

Judith is also a fantastic character. Flirtatious and fun, air-headed but determined, intelligent and fiercely independent, with a strong emotional side... apart from her Ms. Fanservice status, I'd say she's an excellent portrayal of a female in a video game. And no, not even the glorious West can get this right. She's a badass action girl, but she's not a ***** about it. She's very, very far from being one-dimensional but this does lead to some of her motives and actions coming across as a little contrived. Here is an example of the lack of polish you mentioned. She's just a step away from being a perfect character and a true model to be studied and learnt from by the entire game industry today. As it stands, she's still one of the best we have. If only they toned down the fanservice. Damn Japan.

Raven is... quite unique. He certainly adds a ton of humour to the game and the skits with him are generally great. He fits the mold of the shifty team-mate leading a double life, but isn't really offensive because of it. His growth and the other character's reactions to him are pretty good but again you can feel the slightly "rushed" nature as you pointed out. He does however serve as the connecting point to various parts of the main plot and serves as an interesting counter measure to the younger crew. Raven is a character you really have to analyse to actually -get- him, as even gameplay elements such as his Mystic Arte reflect his development.

So basically yeah, the cast is really, really great and take the story to a whole new level but very sidequest dependent to get that, which fits your complaint just fine, especially as a newcomer to the genre. The problem here is the balance. Easy-to-get sidequests are great for the newbies but alienate and irritate the more hardcore fanbase who've spent the last two, three decades learning to turn over every single nook and cranny and experiment with everything. And naturlich, vice versa.
Also, I thought the voice acting was stellar. What games would you say have better voice acting?

As for actual feedback on your review, I feel you need to sort out priorities for when dealing with a video game review. You said the gameplay was quite rewarding, just slightly sloppily executed in terms of the -narrative-. This could be seen as equivalent to a film with good action sequences but a dodgy story, but it's not. Good gameplay will always dwarf the story in importance, so you sort of ended up contradicting yourself when you said it was a bad game at the beginning of your review. However I enjoyed reading it and while I disagreed with plenty of your opinions, you still presented them pleasantly and that's all we really ask for when dealing with opinions.
As a final note, I will like to add that there has been some SERIOUS debate about whether or not the 360 version was intentionally dummied down so they could rerelease the real version on PS3, which is what lead to most of the rushed feeling. I'm personally in the camp that they did because as shown by their refusal to release the game outside of Japan shows, Namco-Bandai are complete and utter douchebags.

 

[Delock]

Ok, I'll start out by saying that comparing this to a favored game from one's childhood is extremely unfair, especially since they're not even the same series, however, I don't necessarily disagree with you everywhere.

Your biggest point about the environment is probably where I see your point the most, especially in a "save the world" game. The world looks glorious enough, but I really don't learn much about it, and this seems to be the fault of the narrative from what I can see. The unique features of the world are described only through the perspective of someone living in the world if they are described at all. For example, Blastia and such things are so central to the plot, and yet they're never really expanded on. I get to see examples of them, and hear how they work with other unique items to this world, but I never really learn about them. Looking at the other Tales games (I'm being kind and not comparing it to the mass of JRPGs I've played) this is strange, as all of them took the time to play around with explaining their items by either having the main character not listen in class, never encounter them before, have amnesia, or just not understand them like the rest of the world. In the end, the characters' knowledge here sort of blocked me out.

The voice acting (especially that beginning cutscene... That was not the right way to start the game) could be better at points, though it really did sort of even out. It definitely wasn't anywhere near as bad as Vanille "I Will Tear My Fucking Ears Off If You Say Another Word" from FFXIII. At points it would hit absolute lows, and yet other times seemed to be just perfect.

Also, the difficulty spikes were just unnecessary and cheap, and I've been playing both Atlus RPGs and Rogue Galaxy (where the early chapters have difficulty jumps of such height that pigeons are gathering on the edges of the top to tell white hooded men where to jump off safely). Hell, the demo even had the wolf boss in it (which was in a relatively easy level that seemed even easier when compared to that boss, and this was early on in the game), boldly showing off that it would pull this shit in the game.

Last thing I would agree with you on is the narrative at points was just twisted. The big bad's motive was never given as much power as that of the four previous antagonists and rival, despite the fact that his was the only one I could sort of see myself agreeing with (even if it was extreme). Compare that to the previous game, Abyss, where the main villain was one where it was exceptionally hard to look at his points and disagree with him, especially considering that his goal was to save the world. And the fact that Vesperia's villain has such a quick turn around that I got whiplash didn't help when comparing these two (Abyss's stuck to his guns throughout the entire game, even when confronted with the horror of what he was doing by a family member). However, it for the most part seems to work in a rather strange way, given that it kept its focus on the characters more often than the whole plot.

Now, I've got to disagree with you. First, this is by no means a bad game. If I could play it for 60 hours while still liking it, and feel like replaying it later on, it's at least good.

Second, the battle system is hard to get into, yes, but it is by no means overcomplicated. It requires more thought than just mindlessly spamming attack, and the secondary mechanics (like overlimit, arcane arts, etc.) that you mentioned start to fall into place as you begin to recognize the proper uses as well as the right opportunities. Yeah, I'll admit they begin out as an intimidating challenge (I learned these back in Symphonia, so don't get me started. You actually have it a lot easier here as the games improved in combat), but they happen to work exceptionally well here.

As for sidequests, Tales games love these and I love them for it. It's why replaying them is such a fun task, as you will find things you missed before (hell, Symphonia is still supplying surprises, though it might just be because I don't use a guide for it). Saying that there is too much extra to do is a horrible complaint and one I've never gotten. Yes they require effort, which is why all of them have rewards, even if it is just a cutscene. What I will say is that not telling me completing one of them would add a stronger Final Boss was a horrible thing to do (especially since the one in question is one you would do in order to fight him better).

Speaking of cutscene rewards, some of those "unresolved subplots" happen to be rewards for actually caring about them. No, I will not defend it more heavily than that, since I'll admit the game needs a bit better indication of where to go if you want to do so, but I feel compelled to point out that it wasn't the game excluding these from you because of its narrative.

Lastly, I never got the feeling of rushed, nor unpolished here. Yes, the plot needed a look over once more, but that wasn't anything rushing really seemed to factor into. The whole sort of gameplay cutscenes aren't due to "poor budget" (considering that Tales is a huge franchise and that this is one of the main parts of the series, I'd say that alone needs another look over) but rather a staple of the series, and sort of a JRPG thing in general. Besides the whole in-game graphics leads to a lot less of a disconnect between story and gameplay, with the characters not assuming some other look and movement pattern just for the story than for what I play as. And anytime something is assumed, it's rather cleverly played out so that it's obvious what the action is.

Then you have the fact that you've got the huge amount of cutscenes, voice actors, locations, items, side quests, and game play features, all of which actually seem more than just tossed into the mix haphazardly. I'd say this game was given all the nurture it needed save for a bit more work on that final villain.

What this game in my opinion need more than anything else would be a sort of Codex that explained characters as you learned more about them, locations, and terms, in addition to the story recap journal.

All in all, I'd say your review was fun to read, if a little disagreeable (though I've seen MUCH worse when JRPGs are involved. You at least seem open to the idea that they can be good from the beginning). I'll certainly keep a look out for more of your reviews later.