While this is a Japan only announcement it will definitely give American PS3 owners a ray of hope — It was recently announced that Japanese PS3 gamers will be getting a demo of Tales of Vesperia on July 13th.

For those of you Xbox 360 gamers sitting there scratching your head, yes, this is the same Tales of Vesperia that was released for your console on September 17th.

Hey, at least the PS3 is catching up, right?

Read (Kotaku)

Part of the rather extensive Tales Of series that includes such pieces as Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Legends, Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Eternia, Tales of of Vesperia seems to be a lot like Bandai / Namco’s shot at the Final Fantasy series with a series of generally unrelated stories with only a few connecting threads among them.  In fact, you’ll even be using a battle system developed for Tales of the Abyss that was revamped and refined specifically for Tales of Vesperia.

And this time around, you’re hanging out on planet Terca Lumireis, a planet where a kind of magic seems to have taken the place of technology for the most part, so that you’re looking at a planet with feudal-age technology that still has giant fountains.  Mages replace scientists here, and are counted on to keep the system running.  Made up words abound–the magic technology keeping the planet running is called “blastia”, “blastia” is made up by a kind of subetheric substance called “aer”, and there’s several different kinds of “blastia” keeping the planet running like aque which handles water, and bodhi, which is used by soldiers to enhance their combat skills.  Anyway, the whole game starts when the poor side of the capital city’s aque blastia is stolen, causing its fountain to run amok and start flooding the whole area.  Naturally, no one else seems to care, because it’s not THEM about to die in a flood.  A former Imperial Knight, Yuri, goes off in search of the mage hired to keep the water running in the first place and breaks into his house, winding up in prison.  From there, Yuri discovers that there’s a conspiracy going around in the highest echelons of government focused around a young woman with impressive healing capabilities that can be channeled into summoning a beast with the ultimate power to destroy all life as we know it.  So it’s really only a matter of time before someone tries to either kill the young woman or harness her power, so Yuri’s got to try and keep the girl alive, and save the world.

I know, kind of a convoluted plotline.  But that’s okay, as this is very clearly a Japanese RPG.  You can tell from the aforementioned nonsensical storyline and the opening that’s a very pure anime.  Also you can tell from some of the voice actors–both Wendee Lee and Dee Bradley Baker are involved in this one.  You probably recognize Wendee as Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, and there’s a whole laundry list of places to recognize Dee Bradley Baker from.  The Japanese have a downright gift for making the purest nonsense entertaining and even fun, so you won’t CARE that it doesn’t make any sort of sense because you’ll be too busy enjoying it.

But don’t expect to have a lot of fun right away with Tales of Vesperia–it’s another one of those games where you’ll spend a lot more time watching the game than playing it, especially in the first half-hour or so.  Thankfully, the cut scenes and anime bookending is just plain old beautiful to watch, so you may be able to live with the fact that you’re not so much a character as a passenger for a good long while.  Action buffs, however, will be spectacularly irked by the focus of QQ over pew-pew if you get my drift.

This is not to say that Tales of Vesperia is a particularly BAD game, it’s really more of a NICHE game.  If you’re looking for a movie that takes a couple dozen hours to play through and offers some interactivity, you could do a whole lot worse than Tales of Vesperia.

The console’s jump in popularity is attributed to the release of Tales of Vesperia, which debuted at number 4 in the software chart. The PS3 sold an embarrassingly low number of 10,000 units; the Wii was comfortably in the top spot, moving 38,000 units.