10 Things I've Learnt From Playing Tales of Vesperia

Here's a list of ten things I learnt whilst playing Tales of Vesperia.

1. Villains Come and Go

Some games have main villains who are apparent right off the bat. Others make you wait a while. Some games however introduces an apparent main villain, kills them off and introduces another one. Some games do this more than once. Vesperia is the latter.


2. Japanese People Love Characters with Stupid Hair Colours

Estelle has pink hair, Judith has blue hair and Duke is gray despite him looking like he's in his early 20s. What is wrong with blonde, brown, ginger, black and gray (ONLY on old people)?


3. Beware the Pretty Boys

They always turn out to be homicidal. Always.


4. Being in Your 30s Means You're Old

Once you hit the big 30 you're suddenly and old person. Raven is 35 and he acts like a 50+ year old man and people treat him like one. Does Japan have a low mortality rate or something? Once you hit thirty does the little red jem on your hand light up and the Sandmen come and take you away to be killed?


5. It's Killing Us

Those magical McGuffin devices that make the world a nicer place to live in are, somehow, always destroying the world. Always. The only way to save the world is to destroy them all, preferably though some method that somehow manages to fix the damage they've caused. Isn't magic fun?


6. Rita is Broken

Yuri is broken as shown by the infinite combo but that isn't fool proof. Rita on the other hand is the most broken character I've ever seen in a game, even beating out Viola from Eternal Sonata. Blah Blah Blah Tidal Wave!


7. Cities Blow Up

Or raise up out of the ground and fly away. Either way cities are no safe haven from destruction, in fact there's always a high risk chance that one of them is going to blow the fuck up.


8. Fans are Complaining Arses

The game came out on the 360 and it was good. Very good even. A Playstation 3 version was released in Japan some time later. Due to some conflict over distribution rights it doesn't look like the PS3 version is ever going to be released outside of Japan. Cue fanboy complaining.

What's worse is that some clever spark took a look at the code of the 360 version and found that certain piece of code were written in as place holders for things that were then added as extra into the PS3 version. Cue the calls of the uninformed saying that the 360 version is "incomplete". This is how games are programmed people, there's code like this in most games these days. The 360 version is complete.


9. If It's Popular Enough You Can Milk It For More

Around the time the Japanese PS3 version was released so too was a feature length film called Tales of Vesperia: The First Strike. The movie is a prequel following the main character during his time as a knight which is mentioned a few time in the game. For the life of me I can't see the point of this other than to make more money. Sure it helps give more insight into the world and Yuri's life but I don't need to know about his past to still really enjoy the game.


10. Namco Bandai are Useless at Releasing Tales Games

Here's an experiment. Go to your local game retailer and look through the stands and try to find a copy of this game. Did you find one? If you did how many copies were there? Out of the four, FOUR, game stores in the city were I went to university I've only ever seen one copy of the game for sale that that was a used copy that showed up 2-3 months back. I had to buy this game online when it first came out.

Here's a second experiment. Now look to see how many other "Tales of" series games you can find. Did you even reach double digits? Well done if you did. The Tales series has a fan following in the west that is growing day by day but finding copies of games is stupidly hard unless you do it online. I'm still after a copy of Abyss and the GBA Phantasia. Some of the Tales games only get Japanese releases, those that do get released to the west aren't always released in Europe. Being a UK resident this is doubly annoying to me. Namco Bandai say they don't release all the games outside of Japan because they don't really sell that well. No shit, they don't sell well because you have to really look for copies of the games. Try releasing more of the series and distributing more copies and see how well they sell then.