Tales of Vesperia PS4 Release of the Week for 1/7/19

It’s a new year, and thus a new year of weekly game releases! January is already booting up hot with quite a few highly anticipated titles scheduled for the month. The beginning of the month is a bit slow, but we have a treat releasing on Friday: Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition.

It may seem ridiculous to call a remastered game the release of the week, but here’s the kicker for this one: the original Tales of Vesperia NEVER released on the PS3 in the West.

If you wanted to play Tales of Vesperia in the West, you had to go Xbox 360. This was huge for the Xbox 360, as it brought on yet another exclusive JRPG to its library. Slowly but surely, more of those former exclusives are venturing to the PS4, although I don’t expect them to ever remaster Infinite Undiscovery.

Tales of Vesperia is a classic Tales of action-RPG with hundreds of hours to explore. This definitive edition does offer more than a simple upscaling from last gen to current gen. It’s all new to us PlayStation owners, but it’s still nice to get some additional bells and whistles. It includes a visual facelift, as shown below, and it will include the additional content the Japan-only PS3 version had in 2009.

As such, even if you did play the Xbox 360-exclusive from 2008, there are plenty of other reasons to pick it up and play it again on the PS4. If for nothing else, think of all the Trophies now available to you that have never been available (in the West) before. If you got that 1000 Gamerscore, then surely the Platinum will be no problem for you, correct? I thought so. Now I have your attention.

What is Tales of Vesperia?

Other than another Tales of game, Tales of Vesperia is about an energy source tapped from an extinct race of people and an evil group of people out to steal all of it. Sounds a bit like Final Fantasy VII when you simplify it that much, especially when you learn that a character is rather comparable to Aerith. But does she get brutally murdered like Aerith? Guess you’ll have to play to find out!

It also features its trademarked Linear Motion Battle System (LMBS) for combat, which is a hybrid of the typical JRPG encounter system and a brawler. The player’s controlled character is the only character on the screen while exploring the world, like you would see for a traditional turn-based title. When an encounter happens, the battle changes the perspective to the entire party and the various enemies, also like a turn-based title. But unlike a turn-based title, the combat turns to real-time action. Because of this style, Tales of games move quite a bit more quickly compared to other JRPGs.

But of course, with Tales of Vesperia, its version of the LMBS is slightly different from other Tales of games. It would get pretty boring if they were all the same, ja?

Is there a better way to start the new year than with a new (or at least new to you) JRPG? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition releases this Friday, January 11, 2019 for the PlayStation 4.