2.5/5 ★ – Elesh's review of Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition.

Whenever I would talk to people who had been fans of the Tales series for longer than me, inevitably Vesperia would be recommended as the entry to play... so when I snagged Vesperia Definitive Edition for cheap I was excited to finally be able to play the game people kept telling me was among the Tales team's best work. Well, I've played it now. And let me tell you... it was a game that exists. This has to be the most utterly mediocre and unremarkable game I've ever played. I'm honestly not too sure what to say about the game because everything was just kind of there. The one place I do have some positives to note is in the game's presentation. While most of the visuals are what you expect from an early XBox 360 era JRPG... there were some absolutely gorgeous backdrops throughout the game - especially towards the end. And both the voicework and the soundtrack were quite good. Not the best the series has had to offer, but there were a few places where the background music was good enough that I would make a point of spending extra time there just to enjoy the tune. For example, I would return to Dahngrest every time I needed to shop because I loved the bgm for that town. But... aside from that, I really can't give much unvarnished praise. The premise of the story was pretty good, but the writing wasn't terribly interesting. The pacing was pretty good if you ignored all the optional stuff, but... if you ignore all of that, you lose a lot of the story from sidequests and skits. The game had the most absurdly picky requirements for story progression I've ever seen. There were a few places where the game would only progress if you flew to a specific non-descript spot in the sky or talked to someone with a certain character as your on-field character... but it was particularly bad when trying to do sidequests - I looked up a guide for one event out of curiosity and there's a specific series of like a dozen actions you have to take at one very specific point in order to get the right event, and even then the guide encourages leaving a safety save before it because it still might not work even if you follow the steps exactly. Some of the characters were decent - Judith and Rita were pretty good and Patty and Raven had their moments too - but none of them had any chemistry at all. Like, the skits in a Tales game are normally the highlight of the game... but not here. Most of them were chores to listen to because the characters just had no chemistry for the most part. Oh, but the game did have a controllable dog - that was awesome. I used Repede most of the game. Where the game's age showed most was the combat though... the combat was choppy, unresponsive, and highly unreliable. About 2/3 of the way through my playthrough I dropped the difficulty down to easy not because I wasn't able to beat fights but I just wanted to spend as little time on the combat as I possibly could. The animations were awkward, the abilities didn't feel good to use, it was remarkably common to miss skills that looked like they hit, and the degree to which everything that happened so reliably interrupted anything you tried to do was simply exhausting. It just was not fun. I don't regret my time with this game, because it wasn't terrible and it was a great look into the history of the series... but I wouldn't recommend this except to the most diehard fan and even then, just so they could see how far the games have come. In the end, this game really is just a shining example of mediocrity - it's not terrible, it has its some good stuff to offer, but at the same time...