Dec 29 2008
Tales of Vesperia - My First Experience with Tales
I’ve been wanting to try out a piece of the Tales franchise ever since the second Tales of Symphonia appeared on the Wii. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t realize how clueless I was about the series. I had no idea so many Tales games were out on the PlayStation 2. I blame Kingdom Hearts for that.
But anyway, recently while tinkering around on my Xbox, I noticed that one of my friends was playing Tales of Vesperia. I’m sure that I edited a review for that game, so I should have known that it was in existence, but sometimes reviews kind of gloss over me while I’m scrutinizing for comma splices. Either way, I’m well aware of it now. It’s time to see if I will even like the franchise, even though I’ll probably purchase Tales of Symphonia just to play an RPG on the Wii. So yet again, yay for free demos on the Xbox.
The game won me over for several reasons. 1) The graphics are absolutely beautiful. True, it doesn’t have the “realistic” graphics of a Final Fantasy series, but the anime-like style with bright, vivid colors is stunning. Who needs realistic graphics with these around? 2) The dialogue cracked me up. I love that there is a pushy character who messes around with her partymembers in the name of science. 3) I liked the idea of real-time gameplay with a party system. I may not hate turn-based gameplay as much as I used to, but I still love hack n’ slash. This hack n’ slash looks to be more manageable than the mechanics of Infinite Undiscovery, so Vesperia gets a bigger thumbs up just for that.
Vesperia has definitely been added to my wishlist and Symphonia has become a higher priority. I’m excited about finding a new RPG franchise without the Final Fantasy label.
