Tales of Vesperia - XBox360

[Demon Cleaner]

Tales of Vesperia is another XBox360 exclusive. Also watched the video review of this one, and read some other reviews, where it got some good critics. It's all in Cel shading and cutscenes are mostly anime. It seems to be one of the better releases of the Tales series, but on the visual side it looks like a PS2 release.

[Harrison]

Oh no! I love the Tales series. This means I will now eventually have to buy a 360 so I can play it. Although if this xbox "exclusive" is like the rest I expect it will eventually get released on the PS3!

[Demon Cleaner]

The game got released August 26th on the US market, but will come to Europe in spring 2009!!! And as the XBox360 isn't region free with games, we'll have to wait.

[Harrison]

Not all 360 games are region restricted. A good list showing compatibility across regions is http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-00-3-xbox360_compatibility_guide-49-en.html However that does show that the Japan and US versions of Tales of Vesperia are only compatible between those two regions, and not PAL.

[Demon Cleaner]

Yes, I know, but somehow play-asia has some strange selling/shipping restrictions. F.ex. I wanted to order Mercenaries 2. If you search for Mercenaries 2 you'll find several entries, NTSC/J, NTSC/U and even Region Free. However, the Region Free is the only one that plays on your PAL console. But now it gets weird. They ship every version worldwide besides the Region Free version where following is stated:


This item is not available for shipping to
# European Union
# Iceland
# Liechtenstein
# Norway

You can have a look at it here (http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-bp-77-1-49-en-15-mercenaries+2-70-2o7r.html). And that's what I don't understand, they would ship you the NTSC/J version, which obviously does not work, but they don't ship the working Region Free version? I don't get it.

I now got Mercenaries 2 for the PS3.

[Demon Cleaner]

ToV will now be released on the 26th of June, and will probably also come out for the PS3 with some extra content.

[Harrison]

It seems many cross platform releases are appearing like this. 360 owners are tending to get the first release, but the later PS3 released have a more polished bug fixed release with extra content later. And if there are PC versions they seem to end up with more than either console version.

The 360 definitely seems to still be enjoying quite a nice RPG lineup though, which is probably one of the only reasons I will eventually buy one.