Tales of Vesperia

Tales of Vesperia is a competent JRPG that suffers from a lack of focus: it presents a complicated protagonist with a narrative arc full of potential but builds the story around other unrelated subjects. It still offers some great moments and scenes, but could have been a much better experience with a tighter script.

The protagonist is Yuri, a young man that left knighthood after realizing that a police force works not for the people, but for those few in power. Yuri’s hometown, Zaphias, is marked by stark social inequality: “To lack nobility is to lack humanity,” a nobleman scoffs. This explains why no one seems to care that the local fountain in the Lower Quarter has erupted and may flood people’s homes.

These people are desperate, trying to solve the problem by themselves – no help is coming from the knights, after all – and they all tell Yuri that they had to sell their most precious possessions to pay for a mage to fix the fountain, right before the eruption. There’s bedlam and despair in the Lower Quarter, but if Yuri climbs just a few flights of stairs, he arrives at a perfectly peaceful square where a lady says it’s a fine day for shopping. In Zaphias, there are two worlds in one city.

And the knights not only refuse to help but also laugh at the people, mocking the value of the things they had to sell, laughing at the notion that anyone could consider that “junk” valuable. “If you can’t understand the value of ‘junk’, you’re worth less than junk yourself,” Yuri says to them, right after knocking the guards down. This is a strong opening that says a lot about Yuri, revealing how he cares about social warfare and is willing to fight and kill for the poor classes.

This is why he goes after the mage who stole from the people of the Lower Quarter. The cities of this world are protected from monsters by magical objects called “Blastia”. This mage stole a blastia from the fountain and Yuri follows him to a big manor in the richer part of town, but gets arrested while breaking into the thief’s house – the police, of course, are more interested in the crime that he, the poor person, has committed.

When Yuri tries to break out of prison, he meets Estelisse, a noblewoman who carries an important message to Flynn, Yuri’s friend who works for the knights of the Empire. The first part of the game, then, has Yuri and Estelle – as he prefers to call her – tracking down both Flynn and the Blastia thief, traveling from city to city while following their footsteps.

Yuri and Flynn are polar opposites and it’s a pity that they don’t share much screen time together, as Tales of Vesperia’s narrative is always at its peak when they are arguing with each other. For Yuri, the trouble with Flynn is that he doesn’t know the concept of turning a blind eye, or of doing something bad for the greater good. “A crime must be punished, and justice shall be served,” he says to Yuri, after discovering that he had to break out of prison – and so commit a crime – to catch the Blastia thief. The protagonist’s good intentions don’t matter, what matters is that he broke the law.

Yuri, on the other hand, has the heart of a vigilante. Some of the people he fights against are important men in society. They have money, status, power, and friends in high places: the very things that turn a man immune to the law. Both Yuri and Flynn recognize the problem, but honor blinds Flynn to the immediate solution, his plan being to change the system from within, rising in the ranks until he has the power to prevent injustice. Yuri, on the other hand, understands that until that day comes – and if it comes – people will suffer if there’s not someone willing to make justice with their own hands. He doesn’t believe in the system, in the law, and tells his friend exactly that: “The laws have always been the tools of whoever happens to hold all the chips,” Yuri says.

One of the problems with Tales of Vesperia’s story is that this theme remains a “Yuri vs Flynn” thing. Other characters rarely chip in or add to the discussion, especially when Flynn is not around. Even when they discover some of Yuri’s more drastic “vigilante actions”, they seem more bothered that he kept them hidden than by the actions themselves. The other issue is that the main plot eventually veers away from this subject altogether, going for the genre trope of “saving the world” that doesn’t quite gel with the protagonist’s main narrative arc: social inequality and the crimes needed to revert it are not the main themes anymore.

One of the main antagonists shares Yuri’s mindset, especially when, during the climax, they say, “At times, dreamers must suffer being branded as criminals. But I’ll suffer such burdens gladly.” This is a line that could have been taken directly from one of Yuri’s many conversations with his friends: the idea that he doesn’t care about being chased by the police and committing crimes because he knows that he’s acting for the greater good. In other words, Yuri, just like this antagonist, believes he’s a martyr that is willing to do the dirty work and be judged by it: someone needs to do it, so the world can get better, and he’s willing to take the blame and the responsibility.

The story works precisely when it is focusing on this subject, showing the problems of both Yuri’s and Flynn’s points of view. However, it often gets carried away by other themes and plot points that have nothing to do with the protagonist’s internal struggle. One of these points is related to Estelle’s power and, despite all the buildup and the spotlight in the middle of the game, it doesn’t really go anywhere during the final climax.

It doesn’t help that Estelle can, sometimes, be a tiresome character. When he meets her, Yuri says, “Guess she’s the textbook ‘little, naïve noble’,” and he’s not wrong. This is Estelle through and through. She’s an important noblewoman who just wants to help others. But she lacks resolve: her most repeated line is, “But I…” which she says whenever someone tells her what to do or where to go, which is often.  Her indecisiveness is part of her character arc, but the number of times this occurs can be grating.

This is the problem with flat characters such as Estelle: the fact that they are one-note means that this note is going to be present in their every scene, so in a long game such as Tales of Vesperia – or any JRPG really – it can get quite repetitive. Tales of games are even known for their hundreds of skits, the small moments of party interaction when they talk about recent events or speak about mundane things, so there’s a lot of Estelle here.

The other party members don’t fare much better. One of the first to befriend Yuri is a boy named Karol, whose main trait is his cowardice. Yuri, then, will make jokes about it all the time, teasing him about monsters and making him yell a bit too much. Karol also functions as a source of info dumps, as he’s knowledgeable about the world, and his arc has him amass a little courage to lead. And this is all there is to Karol. Rita, meanwhile, is textbook Tsundere, the character that has an aggressive, hostile demeanor but actually possesses a heart of gold. She’s into studying Blastia… and this is Rita. The game hints that she has a crush on Estelle, but unfortunately, it never gets anywhere.

There’s also Judith, who has two main traits: her secret goal and her looks. This means that her scenes will either be about her body or her hidden agenda. The issue here is that this agenda has no good reason to be kept hidden, especially after she gets to know everyone, as it brings more harm than good to the party, keeping them in the dark needlessly. There’s a scene where they confront Judith and asks why she has kept everything a secret for so long, and Judith… well, she remains silent and they never bring it up again. Even when Yuri confronts her about her motivations, and she refuses to answer, he just channels his inner Frodo and drops the subject. “I plead the fifth,” Judith says one time, using a common American expression that references something that makes a lot of sense in their world, the Constitution of the United States.

The worst offender of the group is Patty, who is an added character in the Definitive Edition of the game. She’s a fourteen-year-old girl who looks like she’s much younger and displays an ambivalent personality in terms of maturity: while she has a very childish demeanor, she speaks as if she was wise – but usually with platitudes, such as, “Lies and rumors are insidious things.” She dresses up like a pirate, has the habit of speaking in a shiver-me-timbers kind of way, and has the most cliché of premises (amnesia), which leads to some nonsensical twists. Patty also takes a while to finally become a member of Yuri’s party, coming and going all the time, which gets repetitive. The jokes usually involve her love for Yuri and how it’s inappropriate for her to hit on him all the time (which is awkward, to say the least).

But Patty really suffers from the inevitable consequence of being a later addition to the story: her lines and scenes only pad the game. She can’t really affect the course of a conversation in a main cutscene because she was never there when it was originally written. Therefore, even though she speaks in almost every cutscene she’s in, she either just repeats what other characters have just said or says one of her platitudes about the themes being discussed at the moment. In other words, she only makes the scenes she’s in… last longer.

And this is a script that could have used a little trimming. Characters, for example, are constantly talking about whether they should stay together or if one member has a good reason to leave to go somewhere. If they leave the party, it’s temporary, and there’s another scene with them explaining why they’ve decided to come back. But, more often than not, the characters will just decide to stick together after these discussions, which makes them pointless. They may reinforce how each character has their own motivation to be there, but they quickly overstay their welcome and get tiresome.

Finally, there’s the matter that the final third of the game focuses on an environmentalist theme that has little to do with what came before, asking the question: is humanity willing to forego their technology – and all the practicality and security that comes with it – if it’s the only way to save the world? The problem is that Tales of Vesperia has three major storylines (Yuri’s vigilantism, Estelle’s power, and Technology vs Nature) and they are all isolated, rarely adding to each other. And, since the last third of the game focuses on the Technology vs Nature part, the other two storylines are left without a proper climax.

Regarding gameplay, Tales of Vesperia is also plagued by repetition. Just like other recent Tales of games, after touching an enemy on the map (and sometimes the corridors are so small that there’s no way to avoid them), there’s a separate battle screen with real-time combat, where we control a single party member.

There are two main points about combat. First, there’s a bit of experimentation regarding artes, which are basically special attacks that use the game’s equivalent of MP. We must find a combination that allows one arte to quickly follow another, creating a combo, but the problem is that it takes a while not only to unlock those artes, but also the skills that allow more combinations of artes (as there are three types of them). This means that the first half of the game will be about button-mashing and the constant use of the same basic arte.

Then, there’s the fact that these artes are also color-coded, and if an enemy is hit by attacks of the same color enough times, their shield is broken and they can receive a major blow that instakills common enemies and deals massive damage to bosses. This encourages us to use the same artes over and over again to break this shield, which can get old quickly.

Late in the game, when we have already found a good combo for a character, there’s no reason or encouragement or benefit to not use it a thousand times, mindlessly. It’s even worse with a mage character such as Rita. Their artes – spells – take a long while to cast, and can be interrupted by enemies, leading to a boring and frustrating experience in the first half of the game. But then, near the end, she becomes a mindless killing machine that allows us to spam just one spell that hits everyone on the screen immediately. In other words, the last hours of Tales of Vesperia may be just Rita saying repeatedly, “blablabla Tidal Wave, blablabla Tidal Wave, blablabla Tidal Wave, blablabla Tidal Wave…”

Despite being plagued by repetition, Tales of Vesperia is still a good JRPG with an interesting protagonist and some engaging discussions. But it could have used a bit of trimming and the ambition to merge its main storylines in exciting ways.

February 17, 2023.