I saw a boxed copy of Tales of Vesperia the other day. I almost bought it until I realized I had the digital copy already. I kind of wanted the boxed copy anyway. I'm not double buying things though. That's a no no. Oh, and I still need to play it. Ahhh!
Tales and more Tales
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 On 03/16/2018 at 09:47 AM by Ranger1 See More From This User » |
Several weeks ago, I was in the mood for an RPG, so I dug out Tales of Berseria, which I bought when it came out, started, and never finished. Almost a year later, I knew I wasn't going to remember a thing about it and just started over. I just finished it last week and spent some time mopping up the last of the side quests and grabbing a few trophies. No way will I ever get a platinum in this game, some of the trophies require multiple playthroughs and who has that kind of time?
I liked it, but then again, I've liked all the Tales games I've played. I realized about halfway through that it was a prequel to another Tales game and the fate of some of the characters wasn't very cheery. Kind of like that "Aha!" moment I had about halfway through Rogue One, if you know what I mean.
Combat was, like most Tales games, a little overly complicated, and I resorted to button-mashing and hoping for the best as I seem to do in most Tales games. It works for me. There were still some moves and artes I was never able to pull off in the heat of battle, but I did OK.
The weapon and armor enhancement/dismantle system was a nice addition. Instead of mashing two weapons together like in a couple of previous games, you instead can enhance them with items you find while exploring or receive in battle. You can also dismantle excess weapons and armor, breaking them down into more usable components. Need more mythril shards to enhance that mythril sword? Got tons of excess mythril weapons and armor? Break 'em down and reuse 'em!
A couple of other things this Tales game does differently is Holy Bottles no longer make the monsters disappear off the map, nor do they disable combat with the monsters. The monsters ignore you, but you can initiate battle by bumping into them. And fast travel has finally made it into a Tales game! Inoph bottles warp you to places you've visited on the map and Denore bottles warp you to the beginning of a dungeon. And for once, Easy mode was even too easy for me. I ended up turning the difficulty up to hard and even chaos while I was doing the side quests at the end.
After that, I played some Pinball FX3 while deciding what to tackle next off Mount Backlog. My PS3 needs a desperate professional cleaning (I bet there are major dust bunnies inside and the disk drive may be on its last legs. GameBox Video Games will take care of it for me for a reasonable price later when I have the money), so I disconnected it and hooked my 360 up for the first time in over a year. After waiting for the inevitable updates to finish, I took a look around in my game library. Thanks to Games with Gold, I have a bunch of games I'd completely forgotten about, all of which look very cool. I had fun with Burnout Paradise for a while, It's not a game I would have paid for, but it's certainly entertaining for a couple of hours. And I dove into some of my pinball tables on the 360 - Pinball FX2 and Pinball Arcade. And then I hauled out the physical games. It came down to a choice between Batman Arkham City and Tales of Vesperia. Yes, another Tales game. Since I'm still in RPG mode, I went with Tales of Vesperia. All was going swimmingly until I forget to save at the last village I visited and didn't save in the forest when I walked by the save point on my way to a treasure chest. I was woefully under-leveled because I hadn't needed to grind in Tales of Vesperia (another improvement, by the way) and apparently, I do need to in Vesperia. The dragon slaughtered my party within seconds and I lost two hours of progress. I gave up and went bed. As soon as I finish this blog entry, I'm going back to it, though.
Happy Friday, Pixlbit Nation!
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