So I've played about 5 hours of Vesperia now. Thought I'd give some impressions, as a skeptic of both the game and the Tales franchise in general.
Characters - A somewhat refreshing change for the franchise is the characters are not disturbed teenagers (well, a couple are teenagers, but not emotionally fragile and disturbed). On the other hand, they still follow some fairly standard anime conventions. The two friends, one anti-hero and one heroic rival are a fairly common anime staple. I can forgive that as the staple has resulted in some of the better anime out there though, and there's potential for the story in relation to that. I won't have a separate section for the story, because I'm not far enough to know anything about it. I will however syay it follows the annoying Tales habit of throwing you into a world with barely a cursory explanation so you don't know what people are talking about for the first few hours of the game at least (still barely know what Blastia are).
Visuals - Eh, it's pretty bare bones, but at the same time it's trying to mimmick an anime, which is usually relatively simple in design to make the animation easier, so I can see why they kept it from getting overly detailed. There are certainly some very beautiful moments in both the game and the anime cutscenes. I wish the game would pick something though, as it seems to switch from in-game, to anime, to CG for its cutscenes. Kinda schizophrenic, but whatever. Not really any complaints here.
Audio - The opening theme (called Ring a Bell by Japanese and English singer Bonnie Pink) has a catchy melody, which is to be expected of a Tales game. The battle and world music is usually pretty generic, but there are times where it will supprise you with some nice sweeping instrumental songs. The voice acting is good overall. Certainly an improvement on past Tales games, if not up to the industry's best standards. It's good enough that I have no burning desire for a Japanese voices selection so I'd say that's a fairly good compliment from me.
Gameplay - As with every 3D Tales game, it inches the gameplay forward one more notch above the previous efforts in Abyss, which inched it forward from Symphonia. Luckily the formula worked pretty well in the first place. It's pretty good overall, and button mashing will only get you through the trash fights. Micromanagement of your party's preset abilities is required for some of the tougher bosses.
My one huge complaint is with the 4th boss fight in the game. A boss named Gattuso, who from a cursory glance around the internet is the hardest boss in the game by 2X over. It's incredibly frustrating, and it took me 9 tries to kill it. I'm no Tales newbie either. He would be enough to stop many people new to the series from playing the game ever again. IMO that's a major design issue, and something devs need to catch.
Overall I'd say it's better than the relatively low bar set by previous 3D entries than the Tales franchise. If the plot fleshes out as I go and the characters do as well I could see it having a signifficant advantage on its older brothers. We'll see.
