It has been quite a bit of time since I played Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube, and I haven't played another Tales game since. But, today Major Nelson announced on his blog that there is a Tales of Vesperia demo available on the Asian and Indian XBL marketplace. So I fired up the good ol' japanese account and went to download the 200 something mb demo. Now I realized how much I liked the Tales games and how happy I am to be getting a Tales game on both the 360 and Wii this year.

Anyways, the demo is like most japanese demos that we don't get outside of the area, not originally intended for the regions they're put out in. Once again like Eternal Sonata and Ninja Gaiden before it, the demo is completely in English. English text, english voice actors. It starts off with your group coming up to some place in the world expecting there to be a barrier blocking their way only to find out that some dude riding a dragon knocked it down with a spear. Yeah, I don't know either but one thing happens after another and its revealed that you're main character has a warrant on him so you guys run away from the guardsmen. This is where the demo kicks in because you'll be doing your fighting here.

Fighting is more or less un changed from what I remember. Regular attacks are handled by just hitting B, to block you press X, to jump you hold X and press up (which is a bit awkward,) special attacks are combinations of a direction on the left stick and A, Y brings up your inventory and pauses the fight, while the Dpad sets your AI character's to defend, attack, ect.

A selling point of the game is its look. It looks like your standard Tales affair, but even better looking in HD. While it's not as pretty as Eternal Sonata, the cell shaded graphics are definitely a bit of eye candy. And like the other games in the series, it has a pretty good score to it.

As of right now, Tales of Vesperia is an Xbox 360 exclusive and will be released mid august.