Tales of Vesperia (SPOILER WARNING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED):
Finally done. Final time clocked: Around 52 hours ish. Some idle time here and there but still around the 48-50 hour mark otherwise. Um..hm..where do I start? Well, if you've been around chat, you've probably seen me bitching about it >_>. On the whole, I'm not very impressed with it. There were some things that they did which ended up better or at least should be objectively better, but at the same time, there were lots of other little things that just annoyed me to no end. Some of it is subjective, some of it isn't.
1) I'll start with the worst offender first. ToV tried to be cute with puzzle dungeons. As far as I know, outside of WA3 territory (and even some of those weren't that bad), these puzzles are simply like the worst thing ever. I am of course speaking of Heracles, Zaphias and Zaude. First, you must undertand that except for Zaude, the first two are done with your primary healer gone for the entire dungeon. You have some other characters who can be secondaries, but for the most part, they obviously aren't as good. So items and what not become very important to manage. There's cooking that you can use to expand your healing but that's only after battle and there is still a limit here. It's not a perfect way around it. Next, each of these puzzles have problems with the way they are managed.
Heracles is around above averagish for dungeon length. The puzzle here requires you to destroy 5 switches. The first two aren't a problem. The last three though is just all kinds of hell. There is a ladder near one of the switches which you are supposed to take. However, the brightness in this dungeon is bad so it is very easy to miss this ladder. Not to mention the ladder itself doesn't stand out. As a result if you miss it, you could be wandering around the entire deck of the aircraft for 40 minutes and still know not what you need to do. Then once you do find the ladder, the last switch is just a pain in the neck, since it requires you to BACKTRACK out of this dungeon to activate another switch that activates the lift so you can drop a box on top of the switch. Oh and if you fuck up, you have to restart this. All this time with no designated healer and monsters respawning. Zaphias' puzzle involves 4 moon gates and this is a big dungeon. AND it requires you to move back and forth to activate the gates. Oh and since you most likely don't know that you need to activate the gates in certain order and the clues themselves are crytpic, have fun wandering around for hours unless you're FAQing. Zaude is better since you finally get Estelle back. But the water puzzles here are just annoying. You likely don't know which block to push or where you need to push them. And each time you mess up, the game spawns unavoidable monsters that you have to kill. You can't even run away from them since the monster sprite doesn't disappear, meaning you have to kill these assholes. Likely twice since you would probably fuck up once. The best part about this? These three dungeons are right after one another. RIGHT AFTER ONE ANOTHER. Glorious. You know, most games usually have one shitty dungeon that everyone bitches about, but this really takes the cake. It's almost equivalent to XS3's 4 hour mech dungeon with stupid bosses nonsense. Who thought this was a good idea? And what the hell were they thinking?
2) There are some minor changes that really annoy me. First, magic lens. What the fuck happened? When you used them to scan HP in TotA, the text didn't suddenly shrink to this. But that's what happens in ToV. I can't express just how annoyed I am at this change because really, why? Why would you do this? What purpose do you have shrinking this text other than to make people squint? Way to detract the item's value and forcing you to waste multiple lenses if you want to check HP.
3) Skills. So some good and bad here. The good is that skill learning is much more obvious now. Instead of hidden skills via C.Cores in TotA, the weapons in ToV show what skills you will learn. The bad news? Well, not necesary a bad thing. If you liked the crystal stones system in FF9, then its right up your alley. I'm personally annoyed by it, because some of the skills that would be nice to have just end up not getting used ever because you don't have the capacity for it. Like the scan all feature with one Lens on Repede. Or better yet, the skill that shows you the damn HP bar so you don't have to squint to see how much HP the enemy has left. Then there's also skill capacity points being unbalanced. Something that Rita has which allows her to reduce the lag time after casting on all spells costs like 5 points. Meanwhile, spell charge and holding the spell costs 16 points or something on advance spells. I can understand liking the change - I just don't though.
4) Artes. Speaking of skills, the game gives you a couple of elemental skills which you can use to change skills like FoF changes. The differences being that you also need to use the Arte 100 times to learn it permanently (which gives you full access to the skill instead of just the Altered arte or the original version of the arte), and that you need extra skills to link Altered artes together. I can see how they thought this was a cool concept. Hey, you can get access to utilizing FoF type artes without needing to set up FoFs which was a pretty big mess until you got Sun cores in TotA. In actual practice...not as good. And another annoyance. For starters? The fact that you need the skill to link the alter arte together with your regular combo string means you need to expend CP towards it and these skills aren't cheap. The cheapest one I think is 12 points or something. Next, until you actually learn the arte, you can't go back to the original arte if you have the elemental skills equipped. Oh and if you haven't learned it, that's at least another 4 CP it costs you to set up the altered arte. Then on top of that, some of the alter artes require you to set up two or three different elemental skills together before it changes. Yeah. You know, in TotA, FoF changes weren't the most obvious thing in the world either. But there were only 6 colours with 2 of them just being a mix of the other 4, AND if you run into those rings and repeatedly use your artes, you would eventually learn which one changes. In ToV, this doesn't happen because you need to mix and match different skills (which suddenly amps up the different combinations you need to find the hidden artes), meaning unless you discover it by change or unless you FAQ it, don't expect it to happen like ever. Oh, and another thing, you would think these elemental skills would change the arte to its elemental form, but it doesn't. That doesn't annoy me as much as the previous schpeel though.
5) Overlimits. The game changes the OL system by giving the entire team one universal gauge. As a result, it charges up faster since everyone's attacks and damage they take helps to build up the OL meter. During the OL, you can choose how many levels to expend it. 1,2,3 or 4. Obviously, using 4 gauges means that nobody else can use an OL. Using 1 gauge means everyone else on the team can also use a level or two. And OLs are upped very much. You can spam artes infinitely since the recovery lag time is removed during OL. Spells in particular becomes REALLY powerful because the casting time normally associated with Tales mages is removed. In particular, Rita has a Arte later on called Tidal Wave which covers the entire screen. So OL1, spam Tidal Wave effectively ties up everything that does not absorb water. Another thing that I can see people liking it.
It annoys me though for several reasons. The first being the huge emphasis now being placed on OLs. Your big ass damage doesn't now come from trying to lock the enemy up or from using your combos or even your basic spells. It comes effectively from Overlimits and spamming the same move over and over and over again. Expect to hear a lot of AZURE AZURE AZURE AZURE or SHINING SHINING SHINING etc, depending on what arte you decide to use. So instead of one shift where, hey OLs are kinda useless, its now, OLs are pretty much your life line. Way to go guys. I liked it better when OLs were just like a nice fringe benefit instead of being this uber dominance on the main gameplay. Next, the different levels are supposed to represent different strengths of the OL. During a L2 OL, you can get a stat bonus equivalent to any skill symbols you managed to made when setting up your skills. During a L3 OL, you don't flinch and can use Mystic Artes. During a L4 OL, you're invulnerable and gain the strengths of all other OLs. Again, sounds cool. I find it less than endearing in actual practice. You would notice I did not talk about skill symbols under skills whe I was ranting. That's because these symbols are hidden. Yeah, so while actual skills you learn are shown, knowing what you need to do to create what bonus symbol is not. Again, don't expect to find these except through sheer luck or through FAQing. I went through the entire damn game and I didn't find one symbol until the end for Rita. So for the most part? Don't expect this to like matter ever. OL3 and OL4 sounds nice, but then you realize this means that only one other person can OL in OL3 while no one else can in OL4. Well that's not a problem as long as you're the player character right? Not really. It doesn't take long to figure out that standing in the back and spamming spells with no lag time is the best way to go. And if you use a OL4 on that, you're effectively wasting three bars that you could've wasted spamming more lagless spells. So all these options are effectively not very useful because your most optimum way of dealing with things later on is: let the AI be idiots and kill themselves while Manualing Rita and spamming her strongest spells with no lag time. You might think its different if you're using a melee character and for the most part, you would be right EXCEPT, the AI cheats anyway. See, all this talk about tying up enemies is basically absolutely irrelevant. Just like in TotA, bosses can break out of combos after a certain number of hits. Unlike in TotA, where this hit was like 50-60, it's now more like, 5. So...why you would go into OL4 and use a melee character is beyond me, since that PC can't even tie up enemies like they're supposed to do even if the bosses aren't in OL. Yeah, so any OL above L1 is effectively worthless. Oh and don't expect Mystic Artes like ever. Since you can't use it now without OL3, you can only get one person to use a Mystic Arte once per battle more or less and it takes pretty much the same amount of time as it did in TotA to charge up three bars of OL. Well, at least until you open up the casino and then get Limit Bottles for free.
6) Synthesizing. Man, this is some of the stupidest shit ToV pulls on you. You're basically not going to get very powerful if you only use storeboughts. So you have to keep on synthesizing. Unfortunately, ToV takes a lesson from RoF here and basically does some stupid shit like make you grind against low level randoms because the way they spaced the drop is effectively stupid. You could go for a long time without that bottle of Toad Oil. And while you will soon get new synths, it's the principal idea that's annoying. Think about it. You could be out for a weapon for a while and if that weapon teaches you a skill you really want, have fun backtracking. When you make a synth system, either make it like the Gust games where you can create it from several sets of materials, thereby avoiding this problem, or space your drops better or make the drops common in chests or easily accessible or something. The synth system also takes a noise dive when it comes to rare drops. Some of it requires specific weather conditions and ToV's weather system is also bullocks. You have no control over it and since you can't repeatedly use a Tent because of lolplotgimmick. So you basically are either forced to fight battles in between it which makes this process even longer than it should be or rest at an inn which sometimes doesn't tell you the condition that you need (like windy or snowing). And the worst part? Most of time, you're trying to make these things because of the skills they teach you. So it effectively shoots the skill system in the foot too. There's only a few weapons that can be excused for this bullshit because the skills they teach are really that damn good. The rest of it though, why?
7) Backtracking and sidequests. Some of the stupid shit I mentioned for synthing really rears its ugly head when it comes to backtracking. For the most part, I don't think you can. I remember missing out a Mace+1 for the longest time because the game wouldn't let me take a boat back to the harbor. This meant that I had to make the synth effectively before the dungeon, which I had real no way of knowing that I wouldn't be able to backtrack and grind against stupid randoms :|. Sidequests face the same deal with sometimes not even the slightest hint unless you manage to get it by change. The good news though is that it looks like things like hidden artes and some titles and even some weapons don't effectively get shut off with cut off points. That's at least neutral-ish
8) The world maps sucks. It's not TotA's world maps, but its not like its that much better anyway.
EDIT: 9) Oh also forgot. Sorcerer's Ring. There's also more bullshit they put into this. Hey, if you hit the enemy, you can stun them! At least from the scene. In reality, lolno. You can either have them freeze, have them stun or have them go aggro. There's no telling what will happen. You can hit them multiple times with it, so you can keep doing it until they are finally stunned. But really, why? This just makes the entire advantage sorta pointless since the half the time, its just easier and faster to run head first into the enemy instead of using the ring and HOPING that it stuns them.
I also have some of the worst luck in this game. Like taking the entire damn game to learn a new recipe off of Sandwich. I had Estelle cooking this thing from the damn start of the game to the end. Seriously, what the hell. Game isn't garbage, but I would be outright lying if I said I wasn't pissed at some points.
The game for the most part fixed the enemies so that Free Run is no longer auto win. And the character interaction for most of it is pretty good. There's some areas where I wish they didn't go for plot direction (waaaaaaay too much MYSTARY for like the first 30 hours/Raven's stuff), but its alright otherwise. The core plot is kinda junky, but the side plot between Flynn and Yuri as cliche as it was it, is pulled off beautifully. It's probably my favourite portions of the game when the two chew each other out (helps that their designs are sharp contrasts to each other, which also scores some symbolism points). So yeah, if that wasn't any indication, Yuri and Flynn are pretty cool. Estelle's pretty cool tool. Karol and Rita are okay. Judith's just there. And Raven...uh...I have mixed feelings on him. There's some scenes with him where he's great. And then there's some other scenes where its just lolwat. Especially the plot twist at that. Oh and his humour wasn't that funny :|. So he's kinda annoying at times, but not irratatingly so. I am not touching the villains with a 10 foot pool, because for the most part, they all fail. To quote Super, this villain cast manages to reach the levels of XS3 failure. That is suitably (and depressingly) impressive.
Overall, game's around a 5.5/10 for me. I've had more fun with some of my 6s. It's better than EB to me, but worse than things like S5.
FF13: So finally getting in on this after everyone's done. Around 8 hours in and on disc 2. Some of Gref's complaints are warranted (like Lightning basically being a bitch). Snow is also an ass and lamer. That hat just makes him look like KH2 Seifer and I am expecting him to start rapping any moment. The start of the game also pulls a FF7. No definitive opinions. Will play more and see what happens. If the rest of the game holds up like the first 4 hours or so after Chapter 2, it would be great. Otherwise, see Grefter.
