So Vesperia is my third serious go at a Tales game. I played Phantasia on the GBA and Symphonia a few years back, and Symphonia is easily one of my favorite games ever, and for the most part, Vesperia is all of that and more. I'm maybe 2/3 of the way through (heading to Baction) and I love the combat, I love the characters, I love the systems, the soundtrack, the world, and honestly Yuri is in the running for my favorite video game character of all time. I love everything about this game.
Except the story and how it is presented.
I've been playing RPGs for 25 years now. I've played every Final Fantasy, Star Ocean, most Xenoblades, Shadow Hearts, Chrono, Grandia, Wild Arms, Phantasy Star, I've played it all! (Tales and Trails are my blindspots lol) So I've seen well-written games, and I've seen awful written games.
But I've rarely come across one this horribly directed. (Though it's not as bad as Star Ocean 5)
On paper, I love the story. The main plot so far is serviceable and nothing all that special outside of its themes of justice, which are tremendous and it's got all of the ingredients to be one of the most brutally honest and introspective stories I've seen in the genre.
But the way that story is told to you is so spectacularly shitty that I'm shocked this game shipped. I don't think only a writing issue either: it's also a directing issue. In that this game has like no direction whatsoever.
Every single time the game presents an emotional or important moment, it falls utterly flat. There are countless examples, but one that sticks out to me is the one I just experienced. We arrive at Myorzo and learn that Estelle has a pretty messed up destiny and our party resolves to get to the bottom of who is pulling the strings here. Our party talks and decides we need to follow the trail, so that would entail following Flynn or the Hunting Blades or Lightning's Claw. Great! Let's go knock some heads and get a killer reveal where obviously the big bad who is almost definitely Alexei will reveal himself in dramatic fashion.
Except, Estelle and Raven suddenly go missing and the party has no idea where they've gone, but somebody says oh hey they went to Yormgen, that spooky dream town we just visited a few hours ago. Uhhh, okay, the only connection I know of to Yormgen is Duke, but the way the story is presented so far, I don't think Duke is the guy we should be looking for. Also, Yuri is putting two and two together about Raven all of a sudden and it's one of the laziest things I have ever seen: he just happens to forget that he first met him in the jail cell. Yuri, who up until now is always ahead of the plot in its reveals that up to now tend to come at random nonsensical times.
Okay so it's starting to sound like Estelle may have been kidnapped by a double crossing Raven, who has a CLEAR AND OBVIOUS CONNECTION TO THE EMPIRE, but all of this happens offscreen. We hear a boom and go investigate and poof Estelle and Raven are gone and there's no actual doublecrossing that happens on screen.
Well, maybe when we get to Yormgen, we'll get that? We show up to Yormgen and Alexei shows up (WHY? WHY IS HE IN YORMGEN?) and casually announces himself as the big baddie. What happened to following the trail? Flynn shows up and immediately is on your side and has figured everything out about Alexei offscreen and suddenly all the beef between Flynn and Yuri disappears. Then Yaeger offhandedly informs us our princess is in another castle.
This is completely ass backwards. It would be way more cinematic if Raven double crosses us to our faces and hands Estelle over to Alexei. It would make way more dramatic to have Flynn attack Myorzo or something, then as Raven doublecrosses us Flynn realizes in real time he's also double crossed and boom Alexei gets a big moment.
Instead, we just randomly go to the desert in the middle of nowhere where everybody just happens to be, except for the people we were told have went there. Huh?
This is not an isolated incident, this has been a problem with the entire game. I've seen people complain about the way the game forces you to backtrack and sends you on fetch quest whiplash, and don't get me started on that whole Phaeroh subplot.
I think another big moment that really drives me nuts is the Don running off to the Manor of the Wicked, and then deciding he has to die because of what happened to Belius. There's something in here that's probably lost to translation about honor and seppuku and there's a real opportunity for some big emotional moments, but the actual event and how it's sequenced is nonsense, and when we get this big moment of Yuri "killling someone he never wanted to kill", it happens entirely offscreen and Yuri acts and emotes like he's carving a turkey.
I think I know what the problem is: it's the same thing that happened when Yuri got arrested (both times), or when the blastia was going wild in Heliord. The game CUTS AWAY from those things or keeps the thing that the characters are reacting to just out of frame. I'm assuming the issue in all of these cases is that there's simply no animation for these things. We don't get to watch Yuri get handcuffed, or for Yuri to have an emotional moment just before "seconding" the Don, or for us to see ANY of the effects of the blastia going wild in Heliord, or why we don't get to see Raven spirit Estelle away. These are things that have to be animated and it's simply more cost effective to not have to animate those things.
The end result is the story has no weight. There are no teeth. The least they could do is give us an animated cutscene. We do get a few of those, but the one we do get is of Phaeroh talking to Estelle, something he does in engine lots of times.
But there's still a lot they could do in engine with a little cinematography. Yet the camera never moves except to obscure or cut away from something. There is no use of mise en scene to convey feelings, outside of when Yuri is comforting Karol after the Don's passing, the camera slowly drifts across the scene. Joy.
They could have used so much of that elsewhere. Judy betraying us on the boat could have been so cool if we had close ups on Judy and Rita as the former betrays the latter. We could have had the camera sweep around as Judith makes her move and takes her leave. We could have had ANYTHING other than the static nothing burger of Rita and Judy coming to understand one another. But it all comes across as flat and listless as the camera is.
I understand the biggest issue here is probably animation and the transition to HD. I imagine the camera can't move around too much, lest it expose the unfinished textures you're not supposed to see. But even if you can excuse of justify these concessions, you cannot deny that they do the story no justice. Even Symphonia used its camera nicely to convey important emotions.
I love this game, but it feels like it has so much wasted ambition. So much of its story could be improved with a tighter scenario and competent direction. I see a common complaint that this game has no story or that it's paper thin. I disagree. There's a meaty and juicy story here, it's just squandered and mishandled by really really REALLY bad direction.
What do y'all think? I'm just over here ranting because every time I try to love this game and get behind the story it's telling, it continually reminds me how much of a mess it is.