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Tales of Vesperia is the second major RPG release from Namco-Bandai to debut on the Xbox 360. Unlike last year’s innovative Eternal Sonata, however, Tales of Vesperia is a more to-formula release than Eternal Sonata was. That doesn’t mean the game is without its appeal, only that it’s less innovative and experimental.

Tales of Vesperia is the tenth main title in the Tales series, and is, to date, the most appealing of the series. The anime-style graphics have the right look and feel, and are relatively consistent throughout the title. The combat is smoother than usual and, like its predecessors, is an action-based RPG that keeps all the action on the main screen, rather than switching to a special “encounter” screen.

The story revolves around Yuri, a former member of the Imperial Knights who quit when he became unhappy with how the Empire treated its subjects. Accompanying him is his intelligent dog, Repede, and Estelle (Estellise, to be more formal), a successor to the royal throne who has never been outside of her castle walls and never known anything less comfortable than a modern sofa.

Their society revolves around an ancient technology called “blastia,” which has properties that can be used in a wide variety of ways, including enhancing battle skills, but also mundane tasks such as maintaining the water supply of a city. Blastia to the world of this game is pretty much what petroleum oil is to our real-world society: a lifeblood element. And viewed as a parable of our society’s dependence on oil, Tales of Vesperia takes on an extra level of unexpected depth.

As the story gets underway, a thief steals the aqua blastia responsible for the lower city’s water supply, and Yuri pursues the thief to the castle of the royal family. He is unable to capture the thief, but there runs into Estelle, who accompanies him, eventually joining his party.

The action-based battle system remains challenging throughout; it is one of those rare games that is balanced well enough that you actually have to use the defensive moves to limit your opponent’s damage on you, while still allowing you to get in some offensive maneuvers at the same time. Estelle’s entrance into the game as an ally is a particularly well-designed element early in the game; in a battle with your first boss-level character, you have to survive your encounter with him long enough to cut him down to about half of his unrevealed hit point total.

Once you get to that point, Estelle enters and provides some much-needed healing spells so you can attack your opponent a bit more freely. You’ll still need some defensive moves, but you can attack with less hesitancy and take your opponent down much more quickly than in the first half of the fight.

Using this as an example without revealing more spoilers, let’s just say that further boss-level encounters are similarly well-designed, making the experience all the more satisfying when you come out the victor.

In the end, Tales of Vesperia is much improved from previous series installments, but still has a way to go before it can be considered on-par with the top RPG offerings available today. As a second-tier RPG series, however, it delivers a satisfying experience that offers plenty to appreciate in between the bigger RPG releases.

2K Sports’ NHL 2K9 for the Xbox 360 is a rather ho-hum update to the annual professional hockey franchise. The game still lacks the cinematic flair experimented with in NHL 2K7 but went missing in action in last year’s NHL 2K8. While rosters have been updates, there are actually not that many noticeable tweaks between last year’s release and this edition of the game.

The hockey game, developed by Visual Concepts, does play host to some changes, however. Most notable is the new commentary team, made up of Randy Hahn, Drew Remenda, and John Shrader of the San Jose Sharks broadcast team. While this freshens up the commentary with new voices, they are too often stuck with the same too-brief script of tired clichés that the last commentary team used, limiting the appeal of the new voices behind the lines.

There are also some notable upgrades, including new stick handling moves, more superstar moves added to the list from 2K8, enhanced skating engine, enhanced checking, brand new fighting engine, hit by puck collisions, blocked shots, user-controlled Stanley Cup celebrations, playoff beards and more than 1,400 new gameplay animations. But it’s all just window dressing on a package that, in the end, is still more vanilla than it is rocky road.

The heartbeat of any pro hockey game is its franchise mode, and unfortunately, there have been some troubles with NHL 2K9 in that regard; it seems that some users have discovered that if they play through more than a couple months of the franchise mode in one sitting, the game has a tendency to freeze up and result in lost data.

Also, if one manually saves their franchise immediately after a game-controlled auto-save, some users have reported that their save file gets self-deleted by the game. Although these problems are said to be limited and rare in scope by 2K Sports, they can occur and certainly become a problem for those who experience them. So far, in my testing, I have not been able to duplicate these errors.

The skating physics are improved from last year’s model, and the feel of the game is solid. Once you learn the controls, it is possible to be competitive in most of the games you play, though the AI is smart enough to win some from you even if you’re a series veteran, especially on the higher difficulty settings where the game physics and AI amp up and start playing as smart as you, and allowing fewer flukey goals.

Still, there’s really not much new in the way of expanding the appeal and features found in franchise mode, and the online play options are pretty much the same as before. When you combine this relative lack of real change or improvement to the series, along with the annoying lack of the cinematic presentation flair on display in 2K7 but since abandoned, there’s not much to really recommend this year’s model. If you desire up-to-date rosters, this is a serviceable entry in the series, but those who loved the 2K7 version won’t find a suitable replacement in this year’s model.