Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition Review [Minor Spoilers]

Number of hours played: 60 hours
Completion status: Main story completed

Click here for a TL;DR version

So there I was back in June of 2018, watching E3 with my friends, getting pretty hyped as usual. The conferences were great, and the games… well they looked absolutely incredible. Especially the Microsoft Conference, Resident Evil 2 Remake, Devil May Cry 5, and… Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition? “Now hold on”, I said to myself, “is this from the same series as Tales of Berseria? Why it looks so good”. Curious, I then messaged one of my friends to see if I was on the money. Turns out I was right, and he told me that it was also one of the best in the series as well. That was all I needed to hear, and with that, I booked my preorder and the rest was history.

So that was how I got introduced to the game, but what about the game itself? Well, turns out this was originally an XBOX 360 title released back in 2008, with an enhanced PS3 port releasing the next year, but only for Japan. That enhanced port is what ended up becoming the Definitive Edition. So we’re actually getting what Japan has already had for almost 10 years. The game garnered quite a positive reputation among critics and a very positive one among fans over the years. So needless to say, I had some high expectations for what this game could offer, especially after having played Tales of Berseria and thinking that that was a pretty good game.

So, what did I think about the game? Well… you know what let’s just get on with it.

Story (Skip the first paragraph if you want to avoid any type of spoilers)

Vesperia’s story begins with our protagonist Yuri Lowell, an ex-knight living peacefully in the lower quarter of the city of Zaphias (basically the part of town where the less fortunate resides, it’s actually not as bad as you think). One day, the fountain blastia (think of it as a handle for the fountain) is stolen whilst it was undergoing repairs, causing the fountain to short-circuit and leak water everywhere. And so Yuri takes it upon himself to find the thief so that they can take back the blastia and fix the fountain. To put it simply, the fountain broke, and Yuri goes to fix. Along the way, he meets up with a bunch of other characters and embarks on an epic adventure that is way more than what he initially signed up for.

If the synopsis I wrote just now sounded a bit odd… that’s because the story is… weirdly put together. And is, unfortunately, the worst part of this game. But hey maybe I’m high as duck and like totally wrong but let me explain. Just to give a brief example, the fountain blastia plot kinda gets bounced around a bit in between other subplots before it eventually fades into irrelevancy, with only a brief mention of it later for closure, kind of like an “Oh yeah guess I was still doing this haha” moment. This happened a lot throughout the main story, where they would set up interesting plot threads, only for most of them to go nowhere or have crappy resolutions. There were even some plot points that are introduced only to be immediately resolved within the next scene. Which made me go “Wow, I guess they just did that huh?”. It gets pretty bad around the halfway point of the story, characters would just meander around, getting pretty much nothing done until the plot basically demanded that they move on. The final hours of the game were the worst, however, as they just throw everything interesting they built up out the window just so they can wrap up everything with a neat little bowtie. Talk about ending on a whimper.

I think the biggest reason why it ended up such a mess was because of how they decided to structure the story. So there are essentially three acts, each of them telling their own standalone story with only a few plot threads to connect them. Now, where have I seen this before I wonder?

Just like in Gravity Rush 2, I think splitting the story, in this case, ended up hurting the overall quality of the story a lot. There were a lot of instances in the story where I had to question if the writers just forgot what they were trying to go for? But I’m pretty sure they were instead trying to go for a more character driven story. Placing the focus more on the characters, and giving us a bunch of interesting scenarios to explore their personalities, motivations, and ideals, to use as the main driver of the story.

If it was the latter, then I personally think that Berseria did a much better job in that aspect. It had the same amount of focus on character-driven stories that Vesperia had, arguably more because the characters were so much more developed in that game (which we’ll get into later). And on top of that, it also had a strong cohesive narrative, even though it did take a nasty dump every once in a while. Vesperia on the other hand mostly relied on its strong setting and worldbuilding, but not much else. It’s a shame because if they had just given a little more thought into tying all the plot threads together, they could’ve made a great and memorable story. The seeds are already there, they just forgot to cultivate them properly.

Characters

While most fans agree that the story falls flat on its face. They would always follow up and say that a lot of it is salvaged by its great characters. And while I can definitely see the appeal they bring to the table. I’m still a bit hesitant to be in total compliance with that sentiment. By no means am I saying that the characters are bad (except some). I think that they’re just alright. They’re simple, likable, relatable, and have very good chemistry with each other, making for some hilarious party interactions. They do lean a fair bit into stereotypical anime tropes territory, which could turn some players off, but I was largely fine with it.

However, despite all of that… I think the main problem I had with the main characters is that the game tries to make them be very “compatible” with each other, perhaps a bit too compatible. What do I mean by this exactly? Well with the way that certain characters are introduced and the dynamics they have with each other. There was a natural feeling that there would be a lot of tension between them. And while some of it was shown, a lot of the times it felt pretty fake, like the characters were too afraid to take get on each other’s bad side.

Take for instance my favorite character Estelle ಠ_ಠ. Oh there’s so much I want to say about her but in order to keep things spoiler free, and most importantly my sanity in check, I’ll save it for another time. So for the majority of the game, she was always the one that the party would follow. Whatever she wanted to do, they would do as well. That’s all fine and good, but a lot of the time she would act pretty selfishly and sidetrack the party to do the things she wanted. While most of it was a bit justifiable, it was clear in some instances that what she was doing was just hindering the party’s progress towards their goal. The party even called her out on multiple occasions for this, making her doubt and question herself (which is good!). But in the end, they would always just concede and go “Nevermind, we were just joking lol”. Making it seem like she was right all along (which of course she’s always right), she’s a Mary Sue after all. Like I know you all want to help each other out and be friends and what not. But aren’t situations like these the perfect opportunity to explore different perspectives. Have someone outright reject them, or offer an alternative solution. It makes the plot pretty predictable and makes Estelle an insufferable character. Other than that though, the rest of the time they were fine and did their job.

Now where the game really drops the ball is the villains… I swear it’s always the motherducking villains. Not really surprising considering that they’re a big reason why the story sucked. A lot of them are extremely cartoony and are given absolutely no screentime at all. A lot of most all of the time they are introduced just so the party can have something labeled as a “bad guy” to defeat. Like I’m not kidding, they get one or two lines declaring how they’re going to conquer the world, only to be defeated minutes later and disappear for the rest of the story. The only good “villain” of the story wasn’t even really a villain to begin with. It just so happened that he had a different way of achieving the same goal, just that the party didn’t agree with, so now all of a sudden he’s the bad guy. I guess it kinda surprised me when that happened, but I was more in the mindset of “Wow, I guess this is how it’s going to be now, weird”. They tried to give some justification on why he ended up this way, but it felt pretty lazy. You know why? Because they didn’t even bother showing it! They just go full expository mode and then expect you to care for him. Sorry, you’re going to have to do a little better than that.

Gameplay

I’m just gonna say it right off the bat. The gameplay is hands down one of the best I’ve ever experienced… once you’re about 25 hours into the game. “Now hold on just a minute”, you might say, “what do you mean it takes 25 hours for the gameplay to get good? Isn’t that kinda trash?”. And you’d be right, the time 25 hours you play to get there is incredibly suffering, but boy does it pay off.

Before I go on any further, I just want to give a brief overview of the gameplay system first. You, as a player, get to control a character in a party of four members in what can best be described as a hybrid of 2D and 3D action RPG. Basically, think of a side scroller beat-em-up mixed with some traditional 3D combat mechanics. It’s honestly a little bit archaic and obtuse and takes a lot of getting used to since it never feels smooth when you switch from playing in 2D to 3D. During combat, you get to use a combination of normal attacks, artes, and fatal strikes to fight your enemies with, which you learn naturally as you progress through the game. You can also equip skills to enhance your character’s abilities, which can be earned via leveling up the weapons you acquire. You can even switch between which character to play mid-combat, providing an extra layer of strategy for you to think about, though you do need to acquire a special item before you can do this.

With that out of the way, I wanna first talk about my criticisms with the combat system and a bit of the exploration. By far the biggest complaint I have with the combat system is the camera. You see because the game has to accommodate both the 2D and 3D way of fighting. The camera often has to adjust to the action at any given time. This a lot of times can cause the camera to go absolutely haywire and move everywhere, zooming in and out like it’s having a seizure, making it hard to control your character’s movements. The inputs are also entirely dependent on where your character is facing at the given moment with respect to the camera. Now in a game where having full control of your character at any given moment is paramount to success, you can see how this could exactly pose a problem. Too many times my character would be attacking an enemy, only for the camera to swerve when I made a slight movement, causing me to miss my intended inputs and either stop my combo prematurely or fail to block an attack. What I wish they could’ve tried is having the ability to lock your inputs in a single direction once you start attacking in a direction, that way when the camera suddenly starts moving, you can at least keep inputting your moves and have your combo keep going, rather than it just dropping halfway.

These camera issues can also lead to another potential problem where enemies disappear off-screen, or even worse when they walk in front of you, obscuring your view, thereby making it impossible to see what you’re doing. This can lead to the occasional cheap death, which is never fun.

Another criticism I have is the lack of transparency to the game’s mechanics. While they try their best to explain all the mechanics through tutorials, there’s still a lot of crucial information that can only be found hidden within the combat manual in the pause menu that is almost required to make the game function. For example, there’s a way to cancel your attack animations mid-combo, which opens up a whole new set of options previously unavailable, and the fact that this isn’t explained to the player up front is pretty damning. A lot of information is also hidden for no good reason at all. You can’t even see an enemy’s health bar at any given time, and can only see it if you equip a special ability that’s exclusive to ONE character. If you happen to not have that character in your party, good luck. Things like this should just be available from the get-go, it does nothing but make it an inconvenience for the player, as they have to manually check the health bars, which is just a waste of time.

Final criticism I promise, and this seems to be consistent with the experience I had with Berseria as well. I am of course talking about the staggering… oh god the staggering. Like no exaggeration, stunlocking is ducking garbage in this game, EVERY attack an enemy makes will cause you to stagger if you’re not blocking. And if you’re ever unlucky enough to get swarmed, you WILL get stunlocked to death. And don’t think that this is uncommon, enemies are programmed to be more aggressive to the character you’re controlling at the moment, and they also have pretty fast starting attack animations, so it’s incredibly hard to react to them. Now admittedly this is only a huge issue in early game mob fights, as later in the game you can extend your combos and essentially pull a “No U” card and stunlock them back, and get skills that essentially cheat the system and make yourself unstaggerable. But before you get to that point, it’s almost borderline unplayable. In fact, if you don’t learn a trick that lets you cancel your attack animations (like I explained earlier), enemies can actually recover from your attacks while you’re in your recovery animation and attack back BEFORE you can even block. Basically, you can get punished for attacking an enemy… what a ducking joke.

Now I can somewhat understand why they would do something like this, given the number of party members you have. It can be hard to make challenging mob fights if enemies have no real to threaten you. But all this did was make mob fights feel mindless and out of your control. It either ends up as you stun locking the enemy to death, or vice versa. There’s no middle ground where you have to think about how to approach a fight. And as a result, it made the beginning hours of the game pretty boring until you start getting more options for combat.

Okay, so that’s all the bad stuff out of the way. I know it sounded like I slammed on the game, but all of that pales in comparison to the enjoyment I found in everything else. The amount of options you get during battle are absolutely out of this world. Each character has their own unique set of artes to use, and chaining them together has never felt more fun. There’s an almost infinite amount of ways you can experiment with your combos. Combine that with the number of characters you can play as, makes it very appealing for players who love to go back and replay games.

This also makes a New Game+ run extremely enticing, since you can get certain perks that allow you to equip skills with essentially no cost. And since the skills are what allows you to have all those options, it really allows you to go absolutely bonkers with the combat system. And with the new difficulty mode added with it too… you’re going to need it.

Or you can just sit back and take a more casual approach, the game’s combat doesn’t require full knowledge of how it works for you to enjoy it. You can just go into a fight, do a few combos and maybe perform an ultimate move, and it’ll all feel satisfying regardless. That’s one of the beauties of a good combat system, in my opinion, it caters to players of all different kinds of levels. Casual players can take a more defensive approach, blocking attacks and retaliating with their own, while experienced players can take a very aggressive approach, overwhelming enemies with long chain combos and destroying them before they can even fight back.

Overall, the combat has a pretty rough start in the beginning, but then it really starts to pick up once you get near the end.

Graphics

Although Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition is released on multiple platforms. The technical performance between them is largely the same. Here’s a simple graphic that outlines the technical performance of each port.

The improved graphics this time around really shows how beautiful the game looks. Environments pop right out with very bright and contrasting colours, making it very pleasing to look at. The character models, while looking a bit old due to the fact that they’re just slightly touched up versions from the PS3 port of the game, look surprisingly fine for the most part, and is a considerable improvement to the models in Tales of Berseria, which looked very plasticky in comparison.

The one part that did disappoint me a bit though were the graphic models for the skits (in-game cutscenes kind of). These were, as far as I know, taken straight from the PS3 port with no work done with them. And they really show their age. While they’re not terrible, a lot of them look like they were drawn by different fan-artists that just whipped them up in a single night. It’s especially baffling because they actually have much better graphic models in the game itself already. Why they couldn’t all just be of that quality? Was it really that demanding to make a few extra models for the skits? Just a huge waste of opportunity there in my opinion.

Sound and Music

I’ll admit, when I first listened to the opening song. I wasn’t sure how to exactly feel at that moment. It felt…kind of bland and misplaced? Like it almost belonged in another game. Little did I know that that would be the sum of my thoughts on sound and music of this game…kinda meh?

For the music specifically, I think my biggest gripe with it was that it felt a bit too safe and boring like it played it by the books. It got the job done that’s for sure, but there was no real attempt to make the soundscape unique to the game. No real risks were taken in terms of the melodies, and instead, it blended a little too well with the rest of the instruments, making it sound very monotonous, with little to no flare. It’s a shame cause I really tried to like the music, but none of it really captivated me.

The voice acting, for the most part, was fine, I listened to the dub version while playing this game, and it’s very obvious that it came from the PS3 days of JRPG’s. A lot of it felt pretty stilted and wooden, with very little subtlety in the character’s tone of voice to make it sound more akin to the Japanese counterparts. While I would’ve forgiven it just for that fact alone, I simply can not because the game was actually re-dubbed, which meant they didn’t take the chance to fix any of it. But I suppose there’s no real incentive to fix it anyway since most of the old fans are attached to the old VA work. What can you do I guess…

Conclusion (TL;DR)

P.S Before I dive into my final thoughts, I just wanted to point out a few things that I couldn’t really fit in with the original review.

• The Definitive edition actually added two new playable characters, one was in the original but was never playable, and the other is a completely brand new character that’s been interwoven in the main story. Obviously since I didn’t play the original I can’t really comment on whether or not these additions were a good thing or a bad thing.
  
• The sound mixing is a little bit shotty sometimes, and from what I’ve gathered, this is an issue with the redubbed voices. The redubbed voices for some reason are mixed with a much lower volume than normal, making some of the dialogue hard to hear at times because it was so soft.

I know that throughout most of this review, I focused more on my negative experiences with the game rather than talking about the more positive ones I had. However, despite all that, I really want to emphasize that I think that this game is, for the most part, good, even great sometimes. The game has a solid, albeit simple story that meanders every now and then. It’s got a great cast of characters that’s easy to love and connect with, even though I think that they did play it a little safe, and it’s got a great combat system that’s very fun to mess around with, with its only minor downside being that it’s slow at the beginning, along with a beautiful world to explore. Because of all those reasons, I can definitely see why this game is considered a fan favorite among many Tales fans, and would highly recommend for you to check it out if what I said in this review appeals to you in any shape or form.

The reason that I focused more on the negatives is simply that that’s just what stood out to me more when I was playing through the game. This is typically the mindset I have when I play games that are just on my personal margin of being good. I tend to see what the game tried to go for, and that could either be a success, a failure, or somewhere in the middle. I also try my best to understand what makes this type of game appealing to other players if I don’t have the same opinion as them.

While I unfortunately can’t put this game among my absolute favourites, I did greatly enjoy my time with it. And after having seen the new trailer for Tales of Arise. I’m happy to say I am pretty excited to play it whenever it comes out. Hopefully it’ll be the best one yet!