Tales of Vesperia

Crucially, you'll need to block regularly, an action which halves the damage you take from an enemy strike and, while the system is not without its clumsiness, the to-and-fro patter ensures fights are engaging. Later in the game you gain access to an overlimit, triggered by filling a gauge through both taking and dealing damage, which allows a character to attack incessantly for a short amount of time. These long chains of attack are both fun to execute and watch. Fights are graded on factors such as the amount of damage taken, the amount of TP remaining at the end of the battle, your effectiveness at blocking, and so on, and the emphasis is always on perfecting techniques for better rewards.

As new artes unlock naturally during play (as well as being learned from special weapons), extending the length of potential combos, there's enough of a long-term reward structure to keep things interesting. The system really blossoms during boss fights, where the freedom that comes from 360-degree movement around a battlefield facilitates positional tactics. It's kind of thing that action games have been doing far better for years but, still, the integration of these systems into a JRPG is uncommon and the experience is all the richer for it.

Elsewhere, Namco takes the mid-budget graphical approach, approximating a cel-shaded look (faked through the clever use of shaders) that falls just short of the quality of Eternal Sonata's similar aesthetic. Without motion capture, the character animations are stiff and awkward, and the pregnant pauses in cut-scene camera cuts are only just rescued by the quality of the voice acting.

Nevertheless, the game's wonder is in its incessant supply of micro challenges and diversions: the Fable II style character titles that you're encouraged to collect; the poker games on Nam Cobanda; the perks that smooth progression in a similar way to LEGO Star Wars' red bricks; the encyclopedia of monsters whose pages you must fill by scanning every enemy you encounter; the item synthesis challenges; the cookery mini-game and nine legendary (and optional) Giganto monsters provide the game's biggest challenge as well as its most rewarding achievement.