I was really excited for Vesperia. I got into Tales of rather late compared to most people, and while I think most of the games don't manage to fully realize what they set off to do, I think they have great potential. Potential that was proven to me with Berseria, a game I thoroughly love.
Anyway, I really wanted to love Vesperia too, but by the end, I couldn't care about it as much as I hoped for. I don't think it was a problem with hype, as excited I was for the game, I didn't have massive expectations.
Positives? The game looks great, it definitely shows it's the age with some of the facial animations, but this is probably the best looking Tales of game and that's pretty sad considering how old the game is. The music is also decent, not good, to be honest. Tons of uninspired tracks. But it is still decent.
Most importantly, the battle mechanics, while a little bullshitty at times, were really good, this is easily the best Team Symphonia game in terms of gameplay, every character feels amazing to play as, except maybe Estelle, and you can do some great stuff with her; but the rest of the characters are so much fun. Patty, Flynn and Raven were my favourites, but by the end everyone had such a distinctive and fun playstyle, you can use every character and have a blast.
All of my problems with the game were rooted in the story, writing and characters. I don't even know where to begin. The story is so dumb and uninspired, it has no idea what it wants to be. A political drama, a ¨awake the four thingies to save the world¨, a ¨save the environment¨story a la FF VII... They half-ass everything they tried, and it's really hard to care about anything when the characters are just going around the world doing such uninspired tasks,, and each of the storylines end up blueballing the player in various ways with shitty endings and unexplained details (explained in sidequests apparently).
And the characters... let me start, they are likeable. But goddamn if they are overrated and have serious flaws. I feel I could write a whole pharagraph for every playable character and how they screw them up in some way when they have amazing potential. Just for starters I could mention how Yuri has noooothing to do with most of the plot and his personal storyline gets forgotten and ignored sooo bad for the plot, it's so frustrating.
Anyway, I don't even know how to continue these thoughts, just way too much to talk about in this 60-hour adventure. But the important thing is that I did have fun and I would suggest the game to most JRPG fans. Just, I am glad they don't do Symphonia Team Tales of anymore, they frustrate me in so many ways.
