LTTP: Tales of Vesperia Playthrough

Finishing Final Fantasy XIII has left me wanting more RPG gaming.  After a few days respite, I was ready to dive into another game.  With nothing pressing, I had anything new plus my entire, scary backlog to choose from.  I'd like to play through Assassin's Creed 2 and Uncharted 2, but I was really still in the mood for an RPG.  Mass Effect 2 is a decent candidate, but I have yet to finish ME1, and I've lost my save.  So, even though I haven't been a fan of past games and have only played them briefly, I chose Tales of Vesperia.  A game many proclaim one of the best RPGs of the generation.

I'm but a mere 5 or so hours into the game.  I absolutely love the artwork and presentation.  I'm not a huge anime fan by any stretch, but I love the art style.  Voice acting is good so far.  I really dig Yuri as a character and his voice actor.  Not a whole lot going on in the story yet, and I haven't expected much.  The systems are also still unfolding.  I can cook now, but not much else.

For all the reasons listed above, I'll be continuing with the game, but it's more in spite of the combat system, certainly not because of it.  I've never like the action oriented, button-mashy feel of the battles from past Tales games, and this is no exception.  Your party's actions are totally out of your control as everything occurs in real time.  There's some rudimentary party AI settings you can mess with, but ultimately when a fight starts both sides run at each other and a blur of swords and skills erupt.

I know there are still some of the extra pieces of the combat system are yet to be opened, but I can't see right now how it's going to make much of a difference.  It just feels like a poor man's fighting game inserted in the middle of a cool JRPG.  And it's a mix of the battle systems and character development systems that attract me to the genre in the first place.  Looks like I'm headed towards some skill upgrades, equipment crafting, and of course the cooking.  So, there are other things to keep me involved.  It just remains to be seen if I can tolerate the combat for 40 hours.