The best JRGP on the X360 but it can't really rival the other chapters in the series...
Eternal Sonata was good, with a beautiful world, well developed, all-round characters, a solid story to back it all up and a fun and interesting battle system, but it was short, far too short for its own good and there was no freedom to it, too: you followed the story, period. You couldn't move freely around the world and couldn't go back to places you had already visited and cleared. A real pity.
Tales of Vesperia fixes all that.
Tales of Vesperia is a beautifully crafted, long, deep, wonderful JRPG in its own right. The world is beautiful, and it can be explored freely, characters are pretty well developed, the story is good and pretty solid, if slow at times and the battle system, even though it really looks like just an upgrade of the one from PS2 Tales of the Abyss, is easy to pick up and fun to play with, once you get used to it. Dialogues are for the most part voiced.
And character voices are not too bad. Also the issue with unreadability of written text is past history here (remember just how small those characters were in Eterna Sonata?) so even dialogues that are not voiced are pretty easy and fun to read.
Tales of Vesperia fixes the problem with skits too, since they are all voiced so you don't have to read them yourself if you're not up to it - you can just listen to them (or skip them of course).
There are also tons of sidequests and subevents to clear which add fun to the game and depth to characters, even though in Vesperia they are pretty hard to find since they tend to be separated from the main story flow, so that the player has to go and look for them himself and a few in-game minigames, too.
Now for a few words about the graphic and sound.
As one cas see for himself browsing through the tons of pics and gameplay sequences and trailers posted on the web, graphically the game is charming.
Like its predecessor Tales of Symphonia, it makes use of the cell-shading technique, which makes it look like an anime and it really feels as though you're playing through an interactive anime. Also the graphic is so polished it looks great even on an SD tv and fantastic on an HD one.
The soundtrack, however, remains pretty average, sadly reminding me of other Tales series games a little too closely (Symphonia, Abyss), with few original BGMs (Dahngrest) and a few glitches here and there (as when, in certain scenes, the music starts playing one theme and then just moves on to another theme pretty abruptly, cutting off the first one without really concluding it. That bugs me.)
Overall, Tales of Vesperia is a great game and the best of its genre on the X360 so far, sure to win the heart of hardcore JRPG fans and that of those who pick up the JRPG genre for the first time.
Only, compared to other Tales of series games and its PS2 predecessor Tales of the Abyss in particular, Vesperia can't be really said to rival with them in greatness.
It's a fine game, but it feels more dull and uninspired if compared to Abyss or Symphonia, both story-wise and system-wise. A pity, since, with a few tweaks of the story and characters here and there and more spice added to the system, it could have easily been an instant classic.