Tales of Vesperia - Mega Discussion Thread

[mrstickball]

Soriku said:

This is my favorite part of the opening.

Also, you died at the first boss, stick? :P I saw a vid of a dude that sucked really bad but still beat him XD That boss has good AI though.

I died once, because I didn't realize how much damage he was doing to me by not blocking.

Spoilers to follow.......Lots of 'em:

 

The scene leading up to the boss fight was pretty awesome, I think. He has around 5,000HP, and one string of his attacks can easily take out 25% of your HP if not blocked. That was my issue - I wasn't blocking properly, which reduced the damage from his attacks.

At any rate, once I realized that the boss would take *gasp* actual strategy, I realized I couldn't go easy on him. I chained a ton of combos on him, and blocked about 100% of his attacks. I had to heal once in battle...About half way through, Estellise joins in as an NPC extra character, and at that point, he was a pushover.

 

Review stuff with spoilerish content.

The game itself is shaping up real nicely. Much better than Eternal Sonata. I'm getting MUCH better at chaining attacks, and defending. It's very complex...

Story>

Story is pretty good thus far. It's somewhat by the book for a JRPG, but it's fun...I'm about 2hrs in and it's shaping up pretty good by the 2nd town.

Encounter Links>

Oh man! It's like Blue Dragon's Encounter Ring on crack cocaine! After leaving the first major town, and getting to the overworld, your greeted with lots of monster/enemy parties in the overworld. If you initiate a monster battle, monsters have a second (or two) to join in on the fight - very similar to Earthbound. After about 10 minutes of grinding, I got stuck in a 3-party monster battle - there were about 14 monsters to fight vs. my 3 party members. It was INSANE! One of the most frenzied battles I've ever had to deal with. The payout from the battle was incredible though.

Sythesizing>

Haven't been able to synth anything yet, but I'm building up a nice inventory of items. It would *seem* (and can someone confirm this?) that your max combo in a battle may effect the loot drop rate. I attained a 11hit combo in the said encounter link battle - I got like 5-6 synth items and 2 regular items. I'm a sucker for systems like this (such as KH's system, Alchemy in Secret of Evermore, Lost Odyssey's Ring Assembling, and FFXII's system of obtaining rare/cool items from monsters as opposed to gil). In 2hrs I have around 50 items from about 10 different enemies. Most monsters have a regular and rare drop.

Combat>

Very deep. I'm a Tales newbie, but the combat is oh-so beefy. I've gone from barely stringing together a 3hit combo, to getting a max of 13 hits for 1,000 damage in about 2 hours. The LIMBs system (or whatever it is) works very well, and is easy to target and attack enemies. The combo progression works like: Normal Attacks>Basic Artes>Arcane Artes....And it would seem that as you level up, you may unlock new normal combos + the increased damage and combo output from new artes. I can see why and how you can get those insane 30hit combos later on in the game. Combat is NOT about button mashing. It's about as strategic as you can get - It's far more about timing, and stringing together a proper normal combo, and finishing with the proper artes for max damage.

Overall, the game is heads & shoulders above Eternal Sonata. I enjoyed Eternal Sonata (but admit it's sucky faults). ToV craps all over ES in virtually every way, except maybe for music - and even then ToV's musical score is good.

Right now, ToV is as good as Blue Dragon was for me (and that means it's very good).