Vesperia critique script
INTRO
Tales. Of. Vesperia. There is not a bigger disappointment for me in terms of JRPGs than this mess of a game. It’s got so much going for it, and so many good ideas, but it ultimately just runs itself into the ground and lets everything it does right go completely to waste. Where do I even start with this game?
I’ve been looking to get into the Tales series for quite a while. I remember playing the first few minutes of Vesperia on a whim years ago and it not really gripping me, but I ended up hearing a lot of really good things about it years later and was intrigued once more. In particular, I was told that its protagonist, Yuri Lowell, would really appeal to me. At first, I really bought into the hype and came to love a lot of things about the game. However, as the game went on, more and more cracks started to appear in it, cracks that eventually brought the whole thing crumbling down despite everything good that came before them.
I really, really wanted to love this game, for it to become an all-time favorite JRPG, but despite everything that endeared me to it, I believe it is very broken, on a deep and fundamental level. However, to explain exactly what’s wrong with it, I’m going to need to critique it in-depth. I guess I’ll get the good stuff out of the way first since there are a lot of things I want to praise about this game before I tear into it.
THE GOOD STUFF
An extremely common JRPG writing problem is that writers don’t really consider how all these people function as a group and what they think of each other. Many JRPGs have casts where you really only get a good idea of the relationship dynamic between the protagonist and one or two other main characters like their rival or their love interest, and half or more of the party is just kind of…there. You don’t get a sense that this is a group that lives and works together, that all of them are part of the adventure together. Sure, this isn’t a universal problem. The Persona games all solve this problem really well, and tend to put more focus on character psychology and development than most JRPGs do in general, especially in the Hashino-era games where completing each character’s Social Link that fleshes out their character and arc is a big part of the gameplay. However outside of that, I’ve rarely seen this issue directly dealt with. Vesperia — and the Tales series as a whole — solves this by having optional cutaway dialogue scenes pop up every few minutes or so that basically just show the characters interacting with each other like regular people. They poke fun at each other, ask questions about one another and the world, try and understand each other’s perspectives, and just generally communicate with one another like friends do. Sure, these cutaway dialogue scenes are just used for humor half of the time, but they give you a really good idea of who these people are, how they interact with each other, and how the group functions as a unit.
On top of that, the presence of these scenes also completely makes up for some of these characters being a little dull in and of themselves. Estelle, for example, is basically just the 90s Disney princess archetype — the sheltered child of royalty who’s full of energy but naive on account of having never seen the world, and wants “more” — but these scenes establish a really good dynamic between her, Yuri, and Rita that makes her a lot more memorable than she’d be without them. She’d just be a passable but forgettable character if all she had to her was that archetype, but giving her this fun little dynamic with the other characters makes her really stand out to me despite expecting not to care for her at first. The same goes for Karol, who’d just be a pretty annoying and mostly incompetent kid sidekick with a big ego if he didn’t have these cutaway scenes to humanize him and make him feel like a member of the team. It really helps with his character arc halfway through the game where he feels like he’s failed the party and tries to prove himself a worthwhile leader to them — without that dynamic being established, this arc would feel hackneyed, but the scenes make him legitimately endearing. I could continue and talk about how Rita’s just a know-it-all tsundere without these scenes, but I think you get the picture. The point is that it’s the relationships and dynamics between these characters that make them interesting, not their personalities looked at individually, which is probably the strongest point when it comes to the game’s writing. Even with all the missteps it takes in terms of its overall plot and themes, the cast is really damn strong and memorable on account of this.
Now for the really big standout in this game — Yuri. Goddamn. Lowell. In spite of everything that went wrong with his character later into the game — I’ll get to that when it’s time — he’s a really memorable protagonist who deserved better. He’s an antihero, but he isn’t the kind of brooding edgelord character you’d expect. Instead, he’s a laid-back, perpetually calm “gentleman thief” type who doesn’t really appear to take anything seriously. He cracks jokes, he never really shows anger or hostility to people even when they’re trying to kill him, and his entire fighting style is literally him being flashy and showing off. Of course, this is just his exterior — both in various scenes with him alone, and in a fairly on-the-nose optional scene where Karol has a conversation with Duke, the game makes it very obvious that Yuri cares more than anyone else in the story, and that in actuality he’s a deeply moral person with strong convictions and values. If it sounds I’m describing Dante from Devil May Cry, that’s because Yuri’s an extremely similar character to him, someone who on a deep and fundamental level gives a shit, but has mastered the art of appearing not to give a shit as a way to keep his head cool.
Another thing I really like about Yuri is his attitude towards the world as a whole and the plot — IE, what exactly he has to keep a cool head about. Over the course of Act 1, it’s made pretty clear what Yuri’s deal is in relation to the world around him and the other characters. He lives in a really unjust world that never seems to get better, and he sees no real solutions to change it, so he just kind of gives up and lives on the fringes of society, breaking the law to get what he and those he cares about need. He’ll always go out of his way to help people, but he only does on a micro level — he doesn’t really think anything he does can change the world as a whole. He doesn’t trust anyone who has even the slightest bit of authority, and he’s rude to pretty much everyone, even people he’s friends with, because he sees through all the bullshit. The world’s full of bullshit, but Yuri knows how to cope with it by laughing at how bullshit it is — not in a bitter way, but in a way that lets him roll with the punches. There is one person he does genuinely trust, though — Flynn. Despite the fact they both took completely opposite paths, Yuri knows Flynn is fundamentally dedicated to the same ideals that he is. He’s known Flynn for so long that he knows his heart is always in the right place.
At the end of Act 1, though, Yuri takes a more proactive turn. His decision to simply kill Ragou when he has the chance rather than simply accept the injustice and corruption of the system and laugh at it like usual is a huge change for him, taking him from a passive observer to someone actively trying to change the world for the better. He’d previously given up on changing the world when he left the Imperial Knights and diverged from Flynn in his path in life, but by becoming a vigilante, Yuri finds his own way to exact justice. The best part about Yuri’s vigilante killings, however, is how he never once shows regret, remorse, or concern about it. He’d spent years acting like he doesn’t giving a shit, why would he suddenly start acting like he gave a shit now? It’s not that he’s some sort of sociopath who doesn’t value human life or a moron who doesn’t understand the gravity of his actions — rather, Yuri is someone with convictions so strong that he never even questions whether he made the right decision. Every action he takes, he makes with wholehearted commitment to his beliefs. Of course, Yuri’s lack of regret or deliberation around his actions is a double-edged sword in terms of this game’s writing — though again, I’ll get to that later. What matters right now is that Yuri’s decision breaks him out of the slump he’d fallen into after he left the Imperial Knights — he goes from being principled but cynical to being genuinely idealistic. It’s a really compelling turn for a character I already really enjoyed.
Also, I’m just gonna be perfectly honest here — holy fuck Yuri is attractive. He’s gorgeous and sexy and checks all my boxes when it comes to attractive guys. Honestly a huge chunk of the cast are hot (especially Flynn, Duke, Estelle, and Rita) but Yuri really goes above and beyond in this department. Holy shit.
Flynn is a character I’m not going to spend nearly as much time on. To be honest, he’s an accessory to Yuri’s character, purely on account of the fact that Yuri’s the protagonist and he’s just a rival for him. That’s not an insult to Flynn’s character at all, though — sure, he’s “boring” and heroic in a much more traditional sense, being an honorable knight in shining armor who plays by the rules, but the game needs that kind of character to contrast Yuri as an antihero. What really makes Flynn stand out is, just like with the rest of the cast, his relationship with Yuri. Unlike most “goody two shoes vs antihero” rivalries, Yuri and Flynn aren’t hostile to one another. Sure, they butt heads over their differing methods from time to time, but they never fundamentally lose their mutual understanding of one another or shared ultimate goals. They started from the same point and never really lost sight of that original point, even as their paths in life diverged. Flynn even acknowledges that there’s a role for Yuri’s actions in how the two work together, with Yuri solving problems in an underhanded way so that Flynn can take the credit and advance his career, all while covering up Yuri’s technically-illegal vigilante actions in the process. It’s a really fun twist on the tried and true hero-vs-antihero dynamic.
One more thing on the writing — the gay stuff. The game’s intro is really similar to FF9, with the gentleman thief antihero winding up in the royal palace and escaping with a rebellious princess who wants to get out and see the world, and early on it felt like him and Estelle were going to be written together as a couple. I was pleasantly surprised to see the game essentially pair up Yuri with Flynn and Estelle with Rita. Now to be fair, the game sadly doesn’t go as far as to have Flynn/Yuri or Rita/Estelle kiss on-screen or anything, but it does explicitly reference Rita/Estelle being a couple in one of the cutaway scenes near the end, and Flynn/Yuri is both confirmed to be a thing by the people who worked on the game, and heavily implied in some of the cutaways. There’s a memorable one fairly early on where they pretty clearly indicate Yuri is bisexual and has a crush on Flynn, with one of the other characters (I forget who specifically) tease him about liking Flynn “that way” and him not denying it.
Now, before I move on to my criticisms, I also want to give some praise to the gameplay, the music, and the art design. This video is primarily about the game’s writing, but I want to address how good many of the aspects outside of it are and why I did enjoy my time with Vesperia in spite of its missteps.
At first I thought the gameplay was super janky in terms of how it locks you into a 2D plane to do anything in combat, and makes you hold a trigger to move in 3D. However, once you get the hang of that particular quirk, it basically opens up into being a sort of “character action” JRPG. The specific system where you map all of your special moves onto the different directions with the stick and D-pad and can create all sorts of combos with different moves reminds me a lot of God Hand of all things, which is always a comparison that should indicate quality. I mostly used Yuri throughout my playthrough of the game, but also made use of Flynn and Judith for some sections, and let me tell you, the shit you can do in this game is insane. There’s all sorts of crazy tricks and many fans have created whole combo videos for this game, including Donguri990 of DMC fame. Honestly, this game is worth playing just for the really fantastic combat system. I can’t wait to try some of the other Tales games to see how they hold up.
Donguri videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H9NzyepEEc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjb4O6Eosm8
Other combo videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZZVIkmPDSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAFwMFBYbvs (he edited out arte menu swaps, but still)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc1BHJh56RY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJScojg1bkQ
A guide to the combat and some tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiD0hYWQ80
Another guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0-8sCDezGE
The soundtrack for this game can be kind of hit or miss at times, with a number of tracks that aren’t particularly memorable and just sound like generic background music you’d hear in any other Japanese game or anime. However, there are some absolutely fantastic standout tracks in the game — everyone who’s played it knows Fury Sparks, the Flynn/Yuri duel theme, but I’d like to give shoutout to a few tracks I thought were especially fantastic:
A Vow of Unity (Dahngrest town theme)
Cutting off the Dark Ambitions (Alexei boss theme)
Duke (Duke’s theme, of course)
Distorted Sword Light (Zagi theme)
Even if the entire soundtrack isn’t as memorable as these, it generally fits the tone of the scenes and works where it needs to work. It’s a little disappointing that a few climactic bossfights — namely the one with Raven/Schwann — didn’t have their own unique music, but aside from that this is just a really good soundtrack. I’m not going to put it in the same echelon as Xenogears, Xenosaga 3, the original Nier, or the first 9 Final Fantasy games, but it definitely deserves credit.
As for the visual design…Vesperia was made on a relatively small budget, and certain aspects of its visuals, especially the in-engine cutscenes, really show this jank. However, the character designs are all solid, being at the same time simple enough to be memorable, varied enough to make each character distinct from one another, and cohesive enough that everyone feels like they’re from the same world rather than a mishmash of elements that don’t work well together. A few design decisions are a little questionable — mostly the Levianthan’s Claw guild all wearing outfits that incorporate a contemporary suit and tie look into their designs (which can clash a bit with some of the other designs) but missteps like these are few and far between.
Where Vesperia really excels in visual design, though, is the town areas. Unlike with the cutscenes, they knew exactly what they were working with as far as budget went and made fantastic use of it. Usually, the world in JRPGs, especially in those that involve travel on a simplified world map, is an abstraction. Towns and cities are represented as small so you can easily get around them and visit important areas, background NPCs are fairly limited outside of characters who are either directly important to the story or offer side content, and only locations which are directly relevant to the plot or contain side content are shown on the map. The world and the specific locations you visit are a scaled-down abstraction of what they’re supposed to be in the fictional world. By locking the camera in its towns, Vesperia is able to go above and beyond the usual. The developers created skyboxes and background scenery that make all of the large city locations look much larger than they actually are in-game, with the area you’re exploring just being a small section of it. It’s a really nice touch and it’s a shame that the later Tales games completely abandoned this along with the use of a world map for travel.
CORE ISSUES WITH VESPERIA
Before I get to what I view as the game’s most fundamental and fatal flaw, I’d like to discuss a few other core issues with its writing.
The first thing that comes to mind is all the issues with the game’s worldbuilding. Most notably — this game suffers from a world that feels very, very small. Now don’t get me wrong, Vesperia actually does better than most JRPGs in a few areas — the way it designs the large cities, as I previously said, is the main way it does this, but the game is also careful to only have major cities in the world marked on the map to visit, while mentioning that smaller towns exist outside them a few times in dialogue. You do visit a few small towns, but the game doesn’t present it like those are the only small towns in the world, but instead that they’re marked on your map because they’re important for some other reason.
However, despite all of this, Vesperia does a lot of things with its writing that make it seem like the world it takes place in really is as small as the game abstracts it to be. The first and most noticeable case of this is around the beginning of Act 2, when the party takes Kaufman’s boat across the ocean to the continent of Desier. The way the characters talk about the boat journey — which I remind you, is a trip all the way across the world, as if they were crossing the Pacific — they make it seem like a quick, safe journey that they can make in a day. And even though there’s a big detour to deal with the ghost ship, they end up making it all the way across the ocean in a single day with basically no other such danger. Kaufman even says they make trips like this all the time. It just makes the game’s setting feel really tiny. A similar issue arises near the end of Act 2, when Alexei attacks Zaphias, one that actively conflicts with the game’s own methods of making clear that the in-game world is an abstraction. The overworld map shows the Lower Quarter of Zaphias as an enormous slum surrounding the city, bigger than even the rest of it, with thousands of people at the very least living inside it (likely even more given that the game’s world has mass production and seems to be post-industrial). However, a cutscene inside the Imperial Palace right before the bossfight explicitly says and shows that the entire population of the Lower Quarter can somehow fit into a single room inside the Imperial Palace, as if the Lower Quarter really were as large as the single street and block you can explore in-game. This is just so silly I don’t think I need to explain what’s wrong with it any further.
Vesperia also does that whole JRPG "there's a world-spanning empire that's been around for countless centuries and little to no other societies outside it“ thing which also makes the setting feel very small. Sure, the setting also has independent city-states, and the whole guild system, but outside from the elf city, those independent city-states and guilds are explicitly stated to have only arisen about 50 years ago or so. To be fair, it does justify this all-encompassing empire in-story, a rarity for JRPGs — The Empire was a remnant of the advanced precursor civilization, and until recently all the emperors were Children of the Full Moon, meaning nobody could challenge their magical might.
The size of the world isn’t the only issue with Vesperia’s worldbuilding, though. The biggest problem is how the game has certain facets of information be kept as a mystery or a secret to the characters for the sake of the plot, even though this makes little sense. The Great War with the Entelexeia is the most glaring case of this — the war took place only a decade ago, but almost nobody in the world outside a tiny cabal of individuals at the top of the Imperial hierarchy knows anything about it, with the general public only knowing that there was “some conflict with monsters a decade earlier”. This would make some sense if the conflict was generations ago and most people who witnessed it are dead, but it’s only been 10 years since it happened! It honestly feels like they initially meant for the war to be a generation or more ago, such that information on it could’ve been lost or forgotten, but they felt they had to change the timeline to make the story work and left it feeling incoherent. Now sure, the game does try and fix this problem by stating that the Empire covered every facet of the war, even to those who were fighting it — most of the soldiers believed they were simply dealing with aggressive monsters and not part of a larger conflict. However, it still doesn’t make much sense with what you’re presented in-game. The war only really becomes fully coherent once you read the spinoff manga Tales of Vesperia: The Empty Mask, which states that the truth behind the war was covered up so easily not only by keeping the soldiers in the dark, but because most of the fighting was done far away from major cities, and because nearly everyone involved besides the higher-ups died in the conflict. This makes significantly more sense, but they really should’ve made this more clear in the game rather than having to retroactively clear it up in a spinoff that came out years later.
The last big hole in the worldbuilding is…the Krytians and Judith. Strap in, because this is a long one. Judith seems like she might be an issue at first. She knows a ton of things about the world and what’s really going on in the story, but doesn’t tell the party about them. However, she has an actual reason for not doing, so and when the party finds out, they kick her out at first and later end up going to confront her about it. Judith being in the know and not talking is clearly meant to be a deliberate plot point for the sake of drama, rather than the writers falling into that trap of having an effectively omniscient character who hides important details for no reason other than as a contrivance to keep the plot moving. What’s the issue, then? Well, it’s Judith’s species, the Krytians.
The Krytians are a race of elves who have a deep connection to the world, and know a lot of things about it that humans don’t, but despite many of them living amongst human society, humans aren’t privy to any of the information they know about. Now, the game states that the Krytians are secretive and mostly keep to themselves, even when they live with humans, but like 90% of the world in this game is controlled by a highly authoritarian Empire that is willing to use forced labor and torture to get its way. It makes no sense that the empire wouldn’t torture the Krytians for information and then figure out all of their secrets, especially when an ancient civilization of these Krytians are the ones who built the Blastia, the magitech that everything in the world depends on and the Empire have tried to monopolize. You could write this off by saying the higher-ups already have this information and have simply covered it up and shut down any attempts to interrogate the Krytians, but…that’s not really what appears to be the case. Alexei definitely knows almost everything that the Krytians could tell him, but it’s made pretty clear that him and his trusted allies were a conspiracy within the empire that knew things that the rest of the empire didn’t — made even more clear in The Empty Mask, where Alexei outright purges others within the empire unaware of the truth behind the war and his ultimate plans.
That’s not the end of it, though. See, while there are a lot of Krytians living on the surface, a lot of them are also living in the city of Myorzo, inside the giant jellyfish Entelexeia. It’s unclear just how much these elves have contact with or even knowledge of the ones inside Myorzo. It’s stated Judith was born in Myorzo, but taken to the surface as a very young child, and raised in Temza, a now-destroyed city-state separate from both human society and Myorzo. Because of this, she only has a vague idea about the ones that live inside Myorzo — all she knows is the name of the place and that an isolationist society of her people which her father belonged to lives there. She also mentions that most of her information about the world comes from her communication with the Entelexeia, not from her father or her fellow elves in the city-state. Makes sense, right? Well, the problem is that you get to Myorzo by seeking out a Krytian who lives among humans and has the secret instructions to reach it. This implies that at least some of the elves living among humans know about Myorzo in detail or have even been to it, in addition to knowing things that the humans don’t. But it gets even worse. See, in one cutscene, Judith out and out says that her fellow Krytians in Temza didn’t know what Ba’ul was, or about the Entelexeia in general, but then later on, in the very same cutscene, says that these same exact Krytians were the ones that helped her to visit Myorzo later on to begin with. How can you have access to a city that’s inside a giant Entelexeia, one with insider knowledge on the world and the Entelexeia, but not know what the Entelexeia are?
In general, it’s just kind of a mess.
With that out of the way, I’m going to move on to some secondary narrative concerns before I address the game’s biggest flaw. No real order for them, just going to run through the problems where I see them.
Raven’s got a similar issue to Judith in that he knows who Duke is and the party is aware of this, but they never attempt to grill him on the topic. Now of course, Raven’s meant to be a suspicious double agent who everyone rightfully mistrusts from square one and who eventually betrays the party, so he’s not going to tell them everything, but they should’ve at the very least made an attempt to get info out of them. It just feels like they were acting stupid for the plot’s sake.
Vesperia has a recurring problem, primarily in Act 1, of throwing way too fucking much at you way too fast and being paced like a hyperactive kid on crack. It’s very similar to a manga I’ve been reading on and off, Vanitas no Carte, in that events just are resolved incredibly quickly and immediately moved on from with no room to breathe. The game just can’t sit still during this section, it has constant plot ADHD to try and keep things moving. This becomes a lot less of a problem after Act 1, but it’s really visible early on, especially during the first visits to Heliord and Dahngrest. It’s just this cluttered, messy, sloppy writing where everything’s happening at once, there’s no room to breathe, and nothing is fleshed out. To an extent, Zaphias also has this as an issue, but the pacing slowed down quite a bit after Yuri and Estelle escape the city. Everything up through the ruins of Keiv Moc is solid pacing-wise, but the moment you get to Heliord, things just become a tangled mess. The worst example of this is the massive, plot-important reveal that Estelle has the ability to use magic naturally, without Blastia magitech, but then immediatley after this gets brought up, Judith suddenly appears to spook everyone, and the topic is just inexplicably dropped, only brought up later on at the start of Act 2. It’s so awkward and feels hilariously contrived to stretch the plot out. It does get adequately explained later — Judith specifically attacked at that moment because Ba’ul detected Estelle using her power — but your first time playing, it just feels like really awful writing, and the party completely dropping the topic after the attack is still ridiculous.
Dahngrest is just a mess as well. They show up and you’re suddenly being bombarded with tons of information and narrative hooks regarding the Guild system, Karol, the Don, and the Blood Alliance, but suddenly there’s a massive monster attack, and the barrier around the city goes down, and Flynn suddenly shows up out of nowhere — way too much happening at once. On top of that, the city appears to be operating as usual during a full-scale monster attack for some reason, which really robs the scene of any tension it’s supposed to have. Then just barely after all of this intense stuff happens, all of a sudden the barrier is fixed and we’re back to tracking down the Blood Alliance and dealing with the Don. On top of that, the party and Flynn both completely ignore the presence of saboteurs disabling the barrier, too — the same saboteurs which attacked both Yuri and Flynn in Capua Torim, who later turn out to be working for Yeager as part of Alexei’s vast conspiracy.
The problem crops up one more time, coincidentally right on the second visit to Heliord at the start of Act 2. You make a brief stop in the city while trying to track down Phaeroh, and then all of a sudden an entire subplot starts involving forced labor and weapons trafficking. However, within the next 5 minutes, the whole mess is resolved super quickly. It just comes out of nowhere with the party accidentally stumbling into it and gets resolved as quickly as it appeared. Even more bizarrely, the entire scam of people being falsely promised noble titles and in exchange for unpaid slave labor that Heliord is using gets brought up in Act 1, but the party does nothing to investigate this. Seeing as their investigation into it in Act 2 occurred simply because they took notice of it while passing through the city one night, it makes no sense for them not to have looked into it then instead of later. I get that the writers wanted to have Cumore and Yeager’s plan to create weapons for Alexei’s attack on the Entelexeia be properly introduced here instead of earlier, but they could’ve introduced some contrivance to keep the party from investigating further and at least just had them take note, making their second visit to the city more deliberate. However, this too raises issues because the first visit to Heliord is already kind of a mess.
This all adds up to make what should be important and momentous events feel less important or momentous, and feel routine. I get that the game’s engine and presentation innately limits it — 99% of the cutscenes are done in-engine and can’t all be visual masterpieces and as previously mentioned cities have to be small abstractions as is common in JRPGs, no problem there. The issue is that the writing leaves no time to breathe, just rushing right past events that should be treated with more gravity, and so I can’t take them as seriously.
Now we have a problem that, from what I understand, is kind of a series-wide issue in the Tales series — the locking of important characterization and plot details behind missable side content.
You know how 99% of RWBY fans pretend image songs aren’t canon because they’re too lazy to listen to them? Don’t tell them about Vesperia. So much vital characterization and plot details are locked behind not only listening to the cutaway scenes that pop up, but also in sidequests which are tucked away behind backtracking to areas you would never normally backtrack to, and behind interacting with barely noticeable little things in the environment that you’d have no idea to interact with if you didn’t know it was required for a sidequest. Want to know the best part? For a huge chunk of them, there’s a very tiny window to get the sidequests, and if you miss one, you miss it permanently. There’s no quest log for sidequests either, or in-game tips to tell you where to go next — I only know about the ones I ended up doing because I looked up a walkthrough for one section and noticed how many of these little sidequests were marked off. A bunch of details about the final boss and ultimate antagonist, Duke, are hidden behind one of these stupid sidequests, and without his sidequest, most of Duke’s character and backstory go unexplained.
Now, you do get a sense of the party members personalities from the main game, and they have really fun interactions in the cutaways as previously mentioned, but there’s a ton of depth to their characters that’s hidden behind the sidequests. Persona 5 has a similar issue locking most of its character development behind the social links — an issue that the previous two Hashino games didn’t have — but those are all very clearly signaled to you, and especially in Royal, you have plenty of time to do them. It’s not blink and you’ll miss it like Vesperia. Can you imagine if the entire story of MGS3 was locked behind backtracking to ultra-specific spots on the map and using the codec? Can you imagine if The Boss’ final speech was locked behind that in some way That’s basically Vesperia. I almost completely missed out on the entire sidequest for Raven because I didn’t backtrack to a rather forgettable and annoying dungeon from the first third of the game at a very, very specific point then walk off into a specific clearing and click on a fucking flower, Same goes for Judith’s two sidequests that elaborate on her past and reveal who her father was. Oh, and you will not believe how many sidequests are locked behind sleeping at an inn, a thing you don’t need to do 90% of the time. This whole issue is easily the worst thing about this game, I have no idea how anyone could find this remotely acceptable, and apparently every other Tales game has this problem.
And speaking of side content, I’ve mentioned this already, but it’s really worth noting how Alexei’s character really only gets to shine in the Empty Mask spinoff manga. This is a bit of side material which was released several years after the game and was never officially translated into English. We only know what’s in it thanks to a very slow and as of yet currently incomplete fan translation. I don’t mind side material with important information in it, but when you’re dealing with something as important as one of your main villains’ background and motivations, it’d really be useful to put that in the game itself. The same thing goes for Raven’s character as a whole — there’s a lot of details about him that really only make sense after you’ve read the manga. He’s one of the deepest character in the whole game, but only because he has this manga to really explore the fractured sense of identity that defines his character. Without it, a lot of things he does and says seem mysterious or inexplicable, and not in an intriguing way, but a befuddling one. Most notably, shortly after he survives his apparent death, Raven says he “always considered himself an optimist”, but before that, he acted extremely dour and even stated that he had the explicit intent of dying. This seems like really poor writing, but the manga reveals that this is referring to Raven’s original, long-forgotten personality as Damuron Atomais, showing that he’s come to terms with his fractured sense of identity. I don’t know if the manga was making a last-minute retcon to fix this, but I want to give the game the benefit of the doubt and assume that the manga is simply showing us stuff that was always the intent for Raven’s character but never fully shown in-game. If that was the case, they really should’ve integrated this content better.
The last major issue with Vesperia I’d like to cover before I tackle the elephant in the room is that there’s no solid through line for the narrative in Act 2. All the events in the story are connected, yeah, but from the protagonists’ perspective, they just kind of stumble through them. Everything up to Barbos’ death at the end of Act 1 has a solid through line — the stolen Blastia and the conspiracy between Barbos and Ragou, as well as the search for Flynn — but after that point, things get a lot looser for the next Act. The immediate hook at the start of Act 2 is the party trying to figure out what Estelle’s mysterious ability to use magic without Blastia is, and why a talking monster attacked her and called her a “Child of the Full Moon”, but at the same time, we’re following Yuri’s quest to root out evil and injustice in the Empire through vigilante killings, which really doesn’t feel thematically connected. This is despite the fact that the injustices Yuri discovers are being perpetrated as part of the overarching plot with the Estelle and the Entelexeia. As a result, a lot of the storyline in Act 2 ends up feeling really contrived. I’d still say the messiest part of the plot is the aforementioned first visits to Heliord and Dahngrest in the first act, though.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM WITH VESPERIA
So, we finally get to it. The biggest problem with Tales of Vesperia, and the primary reason I decided to put in effort in critiquing the game. The reason that, for all its positives, I think the game is ultimately a gigantic failure.
As previously stated, I absolutely love Yuri Lowell as a character. I love his personality, I love his style, I love his characterization, I think he's a fantastic protagonist, and nearly everything in the first half of the game to do with him is really solid. However, I can point right at the exact moment in the game where things completely derailed. It’s when the party is in Halure and Ioder tries to prevent Yuri from infiltrating Zaphias to stop Alexei, and it seems like Yuri is going to take another life for the greater good — but then he stops, and simply doesn’t. Keep in mind, up to this point, Yuri has been portrayed as someone who is absolutely rock-solid in his convictions. Even when confronted by Flynn, even when exposed to the party, he has remained completely without remorse, regret, or internal conflict over this. Yuri believes that if someone stands in the way of justice — his sense of justice, not the law’s — that he has the right to end their life. Following that, Yuri absolutely should have killed Ioder, and showed no internal conflict over the question whatsoever. The same goes for the later clash with the mind-controlled Estelle — he should’ve tried to kill her first thing, knowing she was too far gone, and she should’ve broken out of her control and prevented him from killing her only after he tried that. It could’ve created a lot of drama both during and after the clash, and forced Yuri to confront the consequences of his actions and the flaws in his convictions. But no. None of this occurs.
I should mention that a minor problem with Yuri’s arc up to this point, one which I previously neglected to mention, is that Ragou, Barbos, and Cumore are all Captain Planet-tier cartoon villains with no ambiguity about whether killing them was justifiable. I get that the game up to this point has been trying to focus on the question of “is it justified to kill or break the law to enforce one’s own sense of justice?” and not something like “is it right to kill these specific people when they could be reformed instead?”, but by not providing nuance to these characters and then having Yuri refuse to kill less outright malicious people who nonetheless conflict with his sense of justice, the game actively sidesteps difficult moral questions in what’s supposed to be a story about morality.
This refusal to kill Ioder and Estelle transforms Yuri from this morally gray vigilante antihero into a character who’s just as unambiguous and upright in his character as Flynn, losing a huge part of his appeal which I explained earlier. From this point on, Yuri is just a generically heroic character, and even though he keeps all the other personality quirks that make him entertaining to watch in the cutaway scenes, he completely loses the ambiguity he had before. The game pussies out of actually exploring the consequences of his actions and the downsides of his approach to justice in any way, shape, or form, because the moment Act 3 begins, the game drops its entire main fucking theme. Yuri's whole character arc, and the game's main theme it's connected to, are dropped completely and never see a proper resolution — unless you count the little friendly grudge duel with Flynn in Aurnion. The entire theme of justice and Yuri’s morality that had been driving the game up to this point is completely forgotten, and Yuri doesn't really develop as a person or face any sort of adversity from the other characters as a consequence of his actions. The story instead completely refocuses on this theme of heavy-handed environmentalism, with human technology causing an apocalyptic catastrophe, and Duke as a sort of environmentalist extremist who wants to sacrifice the entire human race in order to save the planet from the apocalypse. While this plotline first appeared in Act 2, with the Entelexeia, the Blastia crisis, and Estelle, it was a secondary concern at best, and after the story about Yuri and Flynn’s differing systems of morality and senses of justice, no effort is made to connect one overarching plotline with with another. It’s almost a complete clean break between the two storylines with entirely separate themes, with the loss of Yuri’s moral ambiguity and metamorphosis into a much more generic hero near the end of Arc 2 that forms the beginning of the end for Vesperia and the squandering of all of its potential. The game has the classic setup for a story about different ideas of justice — the lawful enforcer and the chaotic vigilante — but in the end, doesn’t actually do anything with that tried and true dynamic, instead completely going off the rails into a completely different storyline.
But that’s not even the worst of it, somehow. This whole problem is further exacerbated thanks to the fact the game also creates some absolutely fantastic thematic parallels between Yuri and the game’s two main antagonists that would’ve made for a truly amazing story if they’d just been used right.
This exchange right here is illustrative of Vesperia's biggest problem:
We see it yet again with Duke in the optional 3rd phase to his bossfight:
Alexei and Duke both, in their own ways, are basically the logical endpoint of Yuri's beliefs, and a complete dark mirror to him. Despite this, the game does nothing with this, not bothering to explicitly draw the parallel between them or even answer the question of “why is Yuri justified in enforcing his personal morality through violence, but not Alexei or Duke?” Yuri is simply shown dismissing Alexei and Duke’s justifications for their actions out of hand, even though he himself makes almost identical justifications for his own — yet neither Yuri himself, nor Flynn, nor any other character see the similarities between Yuri and those he opposes. The topic is never raised, not even once. The game just expects you to accept that when Alexei or Duke do something unlawful or morally questionable based on their personal views of justice, they've got "crazy ideas" and need to be stopped because Yuri "doesn't give a damn what they're doing this for", but when Yuri does the exact same thing as them, he's just "deciding his own sense of right and wrong". The game just says these things with no context or setup or elaboration on any supposed difference between their values. They all want to change the world through violence in order to fit their personal views of morality, which conflict with society. There is really no difference between what Yuri does and what they do, especially what Alexei does. In a game with competent writing, this be a godsend for the narrative, as having your antagonists be a perfect mirror of your protagonist is almost a guarantee for gripping and deep storytelling. Vesperia fails even at this, both by losing the plot from the end of Act 2 on, and by never even questioning the actual difference between Yuri and Alexei or Duke, let alone exploring it.
I’m just completely baffled by how this game features such perfect parallels that it never actually does anything with. The real crime of Vesperia’s plot is that the writers had literally every piece they needed to tell a great story, but somehow manage to never make them fit together. This whole setup would've been absolutely perfect if they didn't suddenly pivot to the environmentalist theme 2/3 of the way in, and actually explored the question of Yuri's morality and what makes him any different from Alexei and Duke. Alexei and Duke being dark mirrors to Yuri appears almost comically obvious, but the fact these parallels are never even brought up in-game makes me question whether they were even intended at all. A game that was seriously interested in exploring the theme which the first 2/3 of this story appeared to be about, the theme that the entire game was marketed on (its tagline was “RPG of Enforcing One’s Justice”), the theme that everything revolved around up to to that point — would have gone all-in on these parallels, but it never even remotely tries. Were these parallels a complete accident, then or was there some change of plans halfway through development in terms of the story that saw this abrupt derailment at the start of Act 3?
And speaking of intent — this derailment retroactively ruins a lot of what made Yuri interesting even before the plot derailed. Remember how it seemed like Yuri was so strong in his convictions that he never showed any regret or internal conflict about those he killed, both before and after he did it? In the context of his plotline and theme of justice being completely dropped, this goes from a fascinating character trait of his that gives his character a lot of nuance, to seeming more like the writers getting lazy and treating Yuri’s vigilante killings in a blase way, almost like they were an afterthought. Did they even intend to characterize Yuri like this, or was it yet another complete accident? Did these people even know what they were doing when they wrote Vesperia?
To fix all of this, the game would need to completely jettison the environmental themes. The plot points surrounding the conflict between the humans and the Entelexeia, the Blastia problem, the Adephagos, and Estelle’s Child of the Full Moon powers can stay, but they’d have to remain purely as plot mechanics rather than the thematic focus of the story. The way the game implements them thematically are just so completely out of whack with what it’d previously been about that there is no way to cleanly integrate the two together. Instead of focusing on them, Act 3 would need to be rewritten to surround the consequences of Yuri’s actions and the conflict between him and Flynn. There are several ways this could be done.
One idea is that Vesperia could’ve explored whether Yuri’s vigilante actions can actually have any permanent effect on the world if all he’s doing is killing individual bad actors, and whether Flynn is actually able to make lasting change by changing the system that produces these bad actors from the inside. People like Ragou, Cumore, and Alexei ended up the way they were primarily because of the structure and class divisions of the Empire. Instead of merely killing abusive members of the hereditary nobility, wouldn’t it be a better idea to abolish the idea of hereditary nobility entirely and create a republic, or at the very least to decentralize or balkanize the Empire so that these systemic problems are less of an issue? This sort of “individuals vs system” conflict could lend a lot more credibility to Flynn’s point of view, and provide another angle under which Yuri’s actions are questionable. Act 3 could take place after a time skip to several years later, when most of the individual bad actors from the first two acts are gone, but the same problems keep repeating themselves, and Yuri ends up going on another vigilante killing spree, only to find that he’d only made the world a worse place, and slipping back into the apathetic mindset he had at the start of the story. it’s pretty clear that Alexei is meant to represent the ultimate and goal of Yuri’s ideals — taking justice into one’s own hands and inflicting violence on the world to try and change it — so Act 3 would make many references to Yuri becoming like Alexei and failing, only ever leading things to ruin. He would have to confront himself and Flynn in order to redeem himself and save the world from the impending threat of Duke.
Another way the game could’ve explored its main theme and concluded Yuri’s character arc is the practical question of whether Yuri killing most of the people who were working with Alexei prevented Flynn from investigating or interrogating them. if Yuri hadn’t killed them, Flynn might have discovered the conspiracy and rooted it out before Alexei was able to do anything, showing the flaws in Yuri’s method of justice and making him question his own morality. His killing of Ioder and attempt to kill Estelle would’ve initially showed flaws in his before that and this would’ve completely brought it crumbling down.
To really make either of these solutions work, some aspects of Duke’s character would have to be reworked to bring him more in line thematically with the original plot. One idea would be to try and make him a dark mirror to Flynn in the way that Alexei is a dark mirror to Yuri, rather than keeping him as simply another dark mirror to Yuri like he is in the current game. Whatever changes are made, though, what really matters is that all the promise and potential that the story showed doesn’t go to waste like it does in the game we got. This, ultimately, is why Tales of Vesperia is such a disappointing mess to me. Because the entire thing that drives the plot for the first half of the game, the entire thing that makes Yuri such a compelling protagonist, is all completely wasted in the end.
SOME OTHER MINOR PROBLEMS:
Now I’d like to cover some really minor problems and poke a few plot holes. I don’t really consider this all that worthwhile criticism like going after the worldbuilding, core theme and narrative problems, etc. but it is worth noting this stuff.
Yeager calling his base “the manor of the wicked” is really, really fucking silly. I get that many of the secondary antagonists in this game are cartoonishly evil, so you can better sympathize with Yuri when he kills them remorselessly, but Yeager was later revealed to have a lot more going on with him. I guess it could be him self-deprecating with that, or trying to play up his image, but it still sounds goofy and not in a good way.
Most of the dialogue from nameless background NPCs is really, REALLY on the nose and unnatural-sounding. The nobles in Zaphias and the knights in Heliord are the worst offenders of this. The game wants me to take its plot seriously, and succeeds in the main story, but these little bit characters feel really goofy, almost like they’re in a parody or pastiche of a JRPG.
Why the fuck did Estelle not recognize the Dein Nomos when she first saw Duke wielding it in Keiv Moc? Yeah, they say the sword changes shape depending on its user, but when Duke is using it, it looks identical to how it appears on the statue of it Zaphias Castle, the statue Estelle mentions being very familiar with when her and Yuri access the secret passage. She of all people should’ve recognized it immediately. Hell, the sword should’ve been recognizable to at least one of the others, especially Rita who’s a Blastia expert, and Yuri who trained as a Knight in Zaphias Castle.
Why the hell did Alexei go through the entire arduous process just to create a fake Dein Nomos when he could have simply taken it from Duke? It’s not like Duke is hard to find, as he frequently wanders into cities and appears in very public areas, where he stands out. Wouldn’t it be simpler to overwhelm a single guy with all the resources and manpower Alexei has as the most powerful man in the Empire, instead of engineering this entire long-term conspiracy involving Barbos, Ragou, the Tower of Ghasfarost, etc., a plan which would have backfired and started a massive unintended war thanks to Barbos’ own ambitions had Flynn not intervened? It’s such a clear case of plot-induced stupidity and it makes no real sense for this mastermind Alexei to act like this.
How the hell did Rita, the super-genius Blastia expert and archmage, feared and respected by every other mage in the city of Aspio, not know what the Sword Stair — the second largest, and single most famous Blastia in the entire world, right in the middle of the capital — was? This is just absurd and baffling. There are so many ways they could’ve written that as to deliver exposition about the Sword Stair without making Rita look like an idiot.
Again, these aren’t big issues. They’re just CinemaSins bullshit, they ultimately don’t matter. However, I wanted to be comprehensive, and they bothered me while playing the game, so I figured I’d point them out anyways.
CONCLUSION:
I’m sure I don’t need to repeat how Vesperia is a disappointment, or how I think Yuri and the potential his character had a deserved a lot better. I really, really wanted to like this game. After I finished Act 1, I skimmed online for some reviews and started noticing people pointing out exactly that core problem of the story derailment, and was assuming they may have just misjudged the game and that I’d make up my mind when I got to it. The further I got in Act 2, though, I started to see the cracks forming, and when I started Act 3 and saw everything crumble, I was crushed. I really wanted to love this game, for it to be one of my favorites, for it to be as good as its protagonist felt at first, but it failed me.
It’s because of this that Vesperia has become kind of an obsession for me in terms of trying to critique and analyze what worked and what failed about it. It’s mediocre, yeah, but it’s that special kind of mediocre that it’s just fascinating in terms of analyzing why it fell short. For me, that kind of mediocrity is only really apparent in media that had some factor that really drew me to it, some factor that made me really want to like it, and which made me give it a chance even after it ran itself into the ground. That’s what Vesperia is. A train that hooked me from the start and fascinated me with how it derailed and wrecked.