The Story:
This game tells the story of a young man named Yuri Lowell, who one day gets arrested for stealing something from a noble to give to his poor friends in town. While escaping the royal castle's prison, he comes across a noble young woman named Estelle who asks him to help her escape the castle. After returning to town, both discover that someone stole an aqua blastia (the town's water source). Both leave the city and set out on a quest for Yuri to find the thief and for Estelle to see the world.
I find this story bad. For the first two thirds of it, barely anything happens aside from long winded exposition about every detail regarding how this world's primary resource, blastia, works, and for the most part, it ends up being unimportant. I didn't really remember it by the end of the game and it still made no difference to me. At the beginning of the last third, a plot twist finally gives us a villain. It's really disappointing, though, as this villain is a character that was barely in the game and has nothing to do with the story; the game just suddenly tells us he's the villain because he wants to take over the world. No build up, no foreshadowing, nothing. This is terribly paced and poorly done storytelling.
As for the characters, they have strong personalities, making them likable enough, but the overly expositional script hurts their development severely, since all they talk about is blastia. At the final third of the game, the story starts pretending their bonds are strong because of what they've been through, but it doesn't work because we never saw these so called bonds grow. Most of the character interaction comes from skits, and they're still not all that good in this game.
Overall, it's a bad story with good, but still thin characters.
5/10
The Gameplay:
This game is the perfection of the 3D Tales formula started in Symphonia. It has the best world map of the series, and the real time battle system from Abyss returns, now better than ever. We still have basic attacks, Artes that consume TP, and the Over Limit gauge, but now we have the "Encounter Link" mechanic. If multiple groups of enemies are in close proximity when a battle starts, the battle will contain all the enemies, which will make grinding for EXP easier.
The skill learning system this time around is taken straight from Final Fantasy IX. Weapons have skills that can be used when you have them equipped, but if you gain enough Learning Points in battle, you can learn them and keep using them even without the weapon equipped. It's not original, but it works.
Overall, the gameplay builds up on the working formula of Team Symphonia's previous games while adding in some new things.
9.5/10
The Audio:
As always, we have Motoi Sakuraba doing the music. After making great soundtracks in previous games, it's disappointing to hear such a bland soundtrack in this game. The tunes are technically well written and I do like some of the battle themes and the victory fanfare, but the soundtrack is too unmemorable and generic to be called anything special. The vocal song is....OK, I guess. The voice acting is very good, we have Troy Baker as the protagonist and the overall cast does a good job bringing life into the characters. Though, sometimes it's hard for them to shine when they have to read the boring script that was given to them.
6/10
The Graphics:
After trying a different visual style in Abyss with negative results, the artists returned to the cel-shaded style from Symphonia. I'm all for that, but very few things were improved to make use of the 360's capabilities. Cutscene animations are...good for a previous gen console, but since this is a 360 game, I was expecting something better than this. The backgrounds also don't look all that impressive either. The game that followed this one, Graces, was a Wii game and it had more appealing graphics and more detailed animations, so what's this game's excuse?
Fortunately, the anime FMVs, once again made by Production I.G, look fantastic as always.
Character and monster design is as appealing and varied as ever.
7/10
Overall, Vesperia has enough good stuff in it to be a very good game, so it's not like it isn't worth playing or anything. But it certainly falls short from the standards Team Symphonia set with their previous two games, mostly because of the story.
Final Grade: 7/10
All i can say is, i hope Team Destiny's assistance in developing Xillia helps to bring us a game that really impresses people. I'm hopeful, since Graces was a great game. See you next review ;)
