This game shot up in price on ebay after Michael Jackson died, i bought the german version for 45pound about a month before that (the voices are all still in english), its damn hard..far harder than the first one..hopefully it will be avalible to download some time in the future, as very few people in europe got to play this..it was voted the number 1 most rare pal ps2 game.

I think the public would be more accepting of this game now than they were when it first came out.

I much prefer turn based combat over real time combat, i dont like the direction alot of jrpgs have taking by having real time combat (probably trying to apeal to a wider range of gamers) but for me tales of vesperia was let down by its combat, on paper it seems good but in reality you could go through the whole game more or less mashing the same button, so you didnt feel the need to approach combat with any real strategy.

The best example of real time combat for me was in FFXII where you still had to walk up to an enemy and attack him but you could also freeze the game in a similar fashion to turn based combat and bring up the menu and select spells etc. also for me the gambits worked really well, at first i thought "no way am i using that" "i want to be in total control of the combat"..but i soon learned that you just had to set them up in the order you wanted to do the things you would have done anyway ,saved alot of time stop starting every minute.

One thing i dont miss too much is the random battle encounters, the last jrpg i played to have that was lost odyssey,as always you dont mind them to start with, but much later in the game it starts to become a pain in the ass when you really want to get somewhere, even worse when you are just one or two steps away form entering a village and you get a random battle pop up..i like the idea of having enemies wandering around so you can choose to battle with them, then it goes into turn based combat (not real time combat) ive not played a jrpg yet that does this.(im sure there is some out there)

Indeed ,when i think of my top five games of 2009 my mind keeps on drifting back to the great games of 2008..games such as fable2, dead space, fallout3..however these are my top five of 2009
1.persona4 (ps2)
2.streetfighter4(360)
3.resident evil5(360)
4.prototype(360)
5.Valkyria Chronicles(ps3)
I loved the sense of power you got in prototype ,being able to pick a car up and throw it far far into the distance was satisfying.
I am already looking forward to more games in the first two months of 2010 than i was in the whole of 2009.

This game has a score of 8.8 on gamerankings out of 19 reviews so far..only 0.2 off the score Edge gave it.

Im surprised to see IL2 birds of pray in the top 10 ,i didn't think that would be the kind of game that alot of people would go for.