Namco has been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the XBox 360 since the outset both here and in Japan, and was really the only party outside of Microsoft to lead the charge that resulted in one of the more surprising twists of this generation: the torrent of Japanese RPGs that are now rolling out for Microsoft's flaming white box. There's really only one major franchise of theirs that they haven't brought over, and it's clear that they've made the necessary investments and as it regards the HD gaming generation, Namco was ready to go right out of the gate. They've been rewarded for their investment, with record numbers for Tales of Vesperia.
Vesperia is their newest installment in a series so storied it has its own magazine, and the creators clearly know the kind of game they want to make right from the outset. The storyline itself is pretty well constructed but as typical as they come. The game makes a lot of the typical mistakes, it's got too much dead time in the cutscenes, too much complexity in meaningless battles, and so on. They've put a decent amount of work into constructing a colorful RPG world, and in order to add additional depth to the fully-voiced characters in that world, they've added a great many fully-voiced "interludes" between the characters that are initiated by a button press in the field. While the spirit of added depth is there just as it is in something like Bioshock, the Tales studio has missed an important element of what made the cassette tapes in Bioshock such an impressive achievement.
Now, I'm not going to turn this into another Bioshock slurping post, as I feel like it has gotten an unfairly good rap despite having quite a few significant flaws, but it did do quite a few things right. The tapes in Bioshock gave you a great amount of context into the world of Rapture and have a significant amount to do with the game feeling like much more than just your typical shooter. However, what the Tales studio failed to account for in crafting Vesperia was that the Bioshock tapes, when played, did not interrupt the game. You'd press play and go back to shooting up splicers. There's certainly no reason why you couldn't pay attention to the audio dialogue and still do your gaming, and as a result, there was absolutely no reason not to press play when you picked one up. The interludes in Vesperia are only available in the field, and when you press play, the game grinds to the halt and the field is overlaid with handdrawn anime renditions of the characters. There's no reason why I wouldn't be able to multitask and listen to their interludes during typical dungeon crawls, and cutscenes that put me into full passive mode for optional character color are just begging to be skipped.
A lot of Japanese RPG studios are trying to come up with ways to differentiate their big budget console projects, often by finding new and creative ways to give players insight and depth into the worlds they've created. This idea has a ways to go before it's matured, though, and developers like Mistwalker realize that while getting pros to write short stories giving context to the world is a good idea on paper, people don't exactly want to sit on their couch for a few hours reading fanfics on the screen. Hopefully their wakeup call comes sooner rather than later. Would you rather have more material on a game world packed in than you could possibly ever sort through or does all that stuff keep you from really getting into the game?
