Finally a Dragon

Hail to the spambots!

The wild ride through fantasy known as Tales of Vesperia is finally coming near its conclusion (for now anyway, all hail New Game+).  I've been gathering up and harvesting the not-so-helpless wildlife for all sorts of materials, since the last third or so of the game included all the wandering around and sidequesting behavior.  Gotta get them shinies!

I've finally gotten to a dungeon where the boss is a dragon.  It kinda stands out, since there have been little to no signs of draconic enemies at all in the entire game thus far, despite coming from a series that tends to have all sorts of dragons tearing around and burninating the countryside.  Abyss managed to keep them rare, fairly epic battles, while Legendia had a gazillion palette swaps (fire dragons, ice dragons, undead dragons, holy dragons that were powered by the sea, you name it).  It got me to thinking about how this game treated its rarer critters.  This dragon (spoilers) is part of a race called the Entelexia, which are quite similar to say, Final Fantasy's Espers, down to leaving a powerful magic crystal upon death, being rather noble-minded, and coming in all sorts of forms.  There fairly unique in style and characterization.  This games airship is actually just a small merchantman hauled by the rigging by an Entelexia that looks and acts an awful lot like The Legend of Zelda's Wind Fish.

It might be a bit too far off, but I wonder if this game is actually the Tales crew's take on Final Fantasy VI's War of The Magi, with the Tales-style storytelling and nuances tossed in.  There's a fair bit of animosity on both sides, humans are grabbing apatheia (Entelexia crystals, much like FF6 magicite) to power all sorts of machines, with some bad apples using them to power weapons and war machines to Take Over The World.  There's a a great many differences, but the parallels are very much present.  Just a thought, and I know I'm not the first one to think of it.

In any case, let's hope that things actually come to a nice conclusion, because soon afterwards, it's like to conquer the kooky netherworlds of Disgaea!