Current Events > So yeah. I finished Tales of Vesperia a while ago. SPOILERS

(+) Yeah! (+)

What I'd like to talk about are the characters, specifically Yuri.

I don't like him. For some reason I went into this game thinking Yuri was some rational, reasonable, practical mature person who thought logically all while still having human compassion. I was wrong. Yuri is a self-righteous prick. Through this journey, he doesn't believe he's changed or grown. Only that the circumstances around him have change, not himself. That's not true at all because he does indeed change for better or worst. A person doesn't decide he's going to murder people because his environment caused him to do it. You do it because you choose to do it. You built the courage to do it.

What I did not like about most of the characters is how secretive they were about themselves. The only person who was honest was Karol. Everyone acted like they were some big mysterious person and everyone even condoned it, especially Yuri. A LOT of the issues could have been resolved if only everyone came clean to each other.

Yuri is a White Knight. He puts down Karol and Raven a ton but tolerates a lot of the bullshit the girls say and do. Sometimes when Karol isn't so confident, Yuri basically tells him to man up and figure shit out. Whenever Raven makes jokes, Yuri is quick to be tightwad about it. And the worst thing is whenever the girls make fun of Karol/Raven, he quickly dogpiles on them with the girls.

Yuri's 23 in the game, his worldview and general feelings on the world and hierarchy systems don't change much. He opens up to the idea of good leaders but he won't go through some dramatic change like Luke from Tales of the Abyss during act 2, for instance.

A big part of why Yuri teases Karol is he knows he's an incredibly capable kid, so he tries to get him to figure things out on his own because simply giving the answer would rob him of the learning experience. But you're right that he lets the girls get away with basically whatever even early on once they showed they were competent.

The secretive stuff plays into the whole "every one of us has baggage" theme this particular cast had. And it's just part of the human condition, not being open and honest with people even as you get closer and trust each other more.

As for killing, the subgenre title for this game (there's a unique one for every Tales of game btw) is "enforcing one's own justice" and Yuri's justice was well. Punishing the unforgivably evil, as well as protecting the innocent from dirty dirtying their hands. And Yuri's words that his hands haven't been clean in a long time are true from his perspective.