Takes of Vesperia is great because:
The cast is great aside from mallet boy. This means a lot since it's Tales. Yuri is one of the most refreshing main characters in an rpg, western or Japanese. A vigilante who acts on his own accord and comes up with his own gray-ish decisions is great, and a long time coming in RPGs. Yuri is still, in my opinion , the most memorable main character in a game from last gen, aside from vincent in Catherine and Shepard and mass Effect. His character transformation - into someone truly never truly good, nor truly bad - is refreshing and for a jrpg, inventive.
Vesperia does away with a lot of tropes that have been common in jrpgs since FFVII. Namely romance. Usually in a Tales game the main character swoons on the female lead and it becomes one big love story soap opera. Not in Vesperia. In Vesperia, Estelle and Yuri are just travel buddies, or brother and sister and Yuri sticks by her. ToV doesn't fully embrace tropes, but instead warps them. For instance, Estelle is a runaway princess and runaway princesses in jrpgs, especially Tales games, pigeonhole that character as clumsy, stupid, and defenseless. Estelle is smart and has comedic sharp wit. She doesn't give a fuck, and she don't need no man.
The games pacing is incredible. 50-60 hours into the game, you're still getting regular new content to break the pacing up. Once you're starting to get bored, something happens to make the game feel new again. Especially battle-wise. It's battle system feature set pacing is incredible. You're getting new abilities and strategies constantly. The world is also vast. You go through an incredible amount of locations and dungeons. It has old school traditional rpg pacing written all over it.
The battle system, as said, has layers upon layers that continuously build on each other. You go from grades to Overlimits, to burst artes, to mystic artes. The battle system isn't button mashy in Tales fashion because the characters have longer pause animations. Yuri for instance does a really long pause after his animations, which factors into block timing, evasion, combos and basic defense. If you mash you'll lose your opportunity to combo, and in Vesperia you need to block against enemies or they'll chew you up. The environment interaction in battle is also a change of pace for action RPGs and some of them can create for some highly creative battle scenarios.
There's an in-depth weapon customization system.
There's a ton of side quests.
There's a vast new game+ mode.
It's incredibly polished. Most of the jrpgs last generation had awful polish. Blue Dragon had those fucking awful battle frame rates, the game was piss easy. Lost odyssey was flawed as hell. FFXIII, we won't even go there. Ditto to the rest of the genre on consoles last gen. tales of vesperia, however, had the level of polish, creativity, and scope of previous generations jrpgs.
tales of vesperia was not only the best jrpg of last console gen, I'd say it was the best traditional rpg of last gen as well, including handheld RPGs. I'm starting to think I'd put it over DQ9 because unlike DQ9, TOV doesn't have flawed class systems.
And I say this as someone who HATED Abyss, found Symphonia average, hated Phantasia and Destiny. I HATE Tales. But Tales of Vesperia is the real fucking deal.
And that's real talk.
