Entry #664: Tales of Vesperia

 Tales of crashes and freezes.

 Tales of Vesperia has long been THE Tales Game, you know, the one stuck on X360 that a lot of long-time fans, such as myself, never got to play. I was hyped for this port, like, a lot, but in pure Namco-Bandai fashion... they screwed it up. It's sad, because it looked great on paper: Both English and Japanese dubs alongside all the extras from the enhanced Japanese-only PS3 version, just what could go wrong? Well, nobody tested this dumpster fire it seems, because every version of the game is prone to crashing, but the Switch version is EASILY the worst one. Reports for PS4/XOne crashes are very few, but one needs not look very far to find just how many people suffered this game. Namco-Bandai released a couple of patches which do make the game more stable, but I had the game crash once during my post-patch playtime, and I've heard reports that the post-game is still pretty unstable. As for me, I finished the main game, what I cared the most about, and had my fill with the game, and after reading so many reports about its crashes... I decided not to play it.

 As for the game itself, it's certainly very overrated, or maybe it has simply become yet another victim of its own age. The story is a mixed bag, every thread regarding Yuri's vigilantism and Yuri and Flynn's friendship was fantastic and fresh, even if the resolution to Yuri's solo-activities felt a bit underwhelming. On the other hand, a lot of the story has to do with 'Guilds', and it was just so... dull and boring. This makes the story have a lot of ups and downs, as far as my interest went, sometimes I was invested in seeing how the story would develop and others I was just going through the dialogue waiting for something interesting to happen. The rest of the story is made up of generic anime tropes, as per usual, as well as the repetitive Tales of tropes, so you have your Traitor and also your mandatory annoying kid character. This version of Vesperia also adds ANOTHER annoying kid to the party

 The combat in the game is pretty decent, but it's not as fun as I've had with other Tales of games. Customizing the CPU felt a bit more limiting than I expected, and the Healer would fail to use the most appropriate spells for the occasion. That said, I've always liked Tales real-time combat, and this is no exception. The Skill system sounds great on paper: Learn skills from weapons by using the weapon for a certain amount of time, but it translated into quite a bit of grinding, since it took a far too long to learn a few skills. As for the environmental puzzles, they are pretty simple affairs, nothing too memorable.

 Tales of Vesperia is alright. The story has its moments and the gameplay is alright. I think I would've enjoyed the game more had I not been scared of crashing every few minutes or so. As it stands, this is a bland port of a good game.
 6.5 out of 10