My Thoughts on Tales of Vesperia

 Hello. C J here. I’m contemplating what I’m working on next now that I’ve got the winter themed setting planned out and also the next year’s marketing planned on SoFurry. I need something else to focus on for a while. Something occurred to me earlier. I own a Switch. I know the Nintendo eShop has some good older games for sale. I’ve looked through it on occasion. I do need to replay Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team eventually. One other game there catches my eye though. Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition.

I played the original release back in the xbox 360 era. It was for that year one of the best things on the xbox 360. It is rather long and while the game alternates between open terrain and self-contained combat encounters with multiple enemies the game’s story is completely linear. It has a point though. It’s about the environment. It came out in a year where anything that was willing to discuss the environment or conservation was expected to sell in high volumes. Even so the game tried to make a point.

The point was the characters. These eight or so people are the only ones brave enough to face down the slow decline of the world they are in and want something better. I now realize that the line I just typed is hidden in the game’s dialogue. The team eventually form a Guild called Brave Vesperia, named after one of the starts in the sky above their planet. They want the world to live. Not the cities, the military fortifications or the feuding Empire and Guilds. They want the planet to survive. They ruin people’s lives doing it but they are in the right the whole time in a way that few characters ever question.

The main character Yuri is what I’d describe as Chaotic Good. He breaks the law often. Faced with a task at the game’s outset his first response is to break several laws in order to fix it and ends up in prison. He breaks out, goes through the game’s first dungeon, and then sets off on an adventure to fix what broke. Along the way he gathers allies, they player party, who also dream of a world free of both violence and also of greed. The main villain, Duke, is on their side the whole time. He actually saves Yuri’s life at one point. They are some very specific form of cautious friends but not allies.

In the end you win, but you have to fight Duke to do it. He has a different idea of how to fix the world. His idea of a fixed world doesn’t involve humans. He is convinced they’d all eventually break it again. You all are like him. You blame the Empire for overusing the technology that caused the plot in the first place. They will have to learn to survive without it regardless of who wins. In a three-phase final boss fight on a platform made of solid magic in the sky far above the land you fight him as he wields the sword that helped found the Empire. You win. He lives regardless. The Empire has to change and you’re not helping it because it’s not your job.

I liked this game. The characters are actually people who have feelings and are capable of making mistakes. The main character often assumes he has to act alone. He doesn’t. He learns that his friends are friends and that they work well together because they actually mater to each other. My favourite line in the game happens when Duke asks Yuri why they’re saving one of their comrades who is in danger. Duke probably expects him to say that he has feelings for her. The audience probably expects the same response. Instead he simply says ‘she’s one of ours.’ They don’t lose friends. This sounds a lot like the characters I write. I’ll continue thinking about this and see where it goes. Oh, and the game is gorgeous looking. They put work into every rock and stepping stone.

C J Mcpherson