Tales of Vesperia hits Europe in June

Atari has announced plans to bring Namco Bandai's Xbox 360-exclusive Tales of Vesperia to Europe in June.

The latest in the long-running RPG series puts you in the role of Yuri Lowell, a former Imperial Knight, who lives on the planet of Terca Lumireis, where the people exist in an uneasy bubble of protection afforded to them by the Empire's control of an ancient technology, "blastia".

As you'd imagine, Yuri "will explore the complex relationship between blastia, the government and its people, setting foot outside the safe confines of the cities to explore a mysterious and dangerous world", according to Atari.

Then he will of course do some punching, using an upgraded version of the Tales of the Abyss real-time battle system, which now includes encounter-linking (bringing roaming enemies into battle) along with the old surprise encounter system, and special objectives within boss fights.

You will be able to chain together attacks, deliver commands to others in your party as you fight, and take advantage of Fatal Strikes, Burst Artes and a multistage Overlimit (see Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Symphonia). Later you can do some cooking, which is something of a series mainstay.

Tales of Vesperia has been out since last August in Japan, where it made a decent impression on the charts and picked up some impressive scores (35/40 in Famitsu), and also came out in the US around the same time, doing likewise.

For some reason we didn't take a look at it at the time, which is unlike us. Why else did we buy that US Xbox 360? We'll grab a copy soon and let you know what we reckon.