Tales of Vesperia: The Art of the Joyful Deconstruction

Feature by Harvard L.

The Tales series is by many regards Bandai Namco’s answer to Square Enix’s Final Fantasy. It’s a JRPG series with epic scope and a long line of mainstream titles connected more by common elements than plot or character, which is beloved by its hardcore Japanese fans, as well as a few dedicated Western players who stomached the convoluted localisation issues. In PAL regions the first game to arrive was the fifth one - Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube (the PlayStation 2 version was Japan only), and then the series headed to the PSP for Eternia (#2), then GBA for Phantasia (#1), then Xbox 360 for Vesperia (#9), 3DS for Abyss (#7), Vita for Hearts (#10) and then PlayStation 3 for Graces (#11). Things have mellowed out a bit with the latest titles getting multiplatform releases and with the re-release of Symphonia and now Vesperia, so I figured it was a good time to stop viewing the games as interesting singular entities and try analysing them as a semi-cohesive lineage.

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