Tales of Vesperia's Yuri's Vigilantism

You know...for all that Tales of Vesperia likes to spotlight it, for all it’s supposed to be a fundamental part of his character development and his adolescent edge appeal...Yuri being a vigilante doesn’t really seem to amount to all that much.  Really, his relationships, his personality, and his overall character arc wouldn’t change much without it--the whole premise of this protagonist is largely superfluous.

I mean, look at how things go when it’s finally discovered that he’s been killing bad guys on the sly.  Estelle finds out earlier than the rest of the party, but not early enough that it serves any purpose at all for her to--the extra day or 2 head-start she has on this plot twist doesn’t noticeably alter her dynamic with Yuri, nor does it have any tangible effect on her own character development.  And once Yuri’s dollar-store-Punisher shenanigans are discovered by the rest of the party...what comes of it, really?  There’s little reaction from any of them that amounts to more than someone making a Surprised Pikachu reaction post before moving on with their day.  Hell, discovering shortly thereafter that Judith is actually the one who’s been going around busting up ancient machine relics actually gets more of a reaction from the party than the knowledge that Yuri has been murderously taking the law into his own hands!*

Would’ve been a great opportunity to develop Karol, by the way.  A terrific chance to play into Karol’s role as guild leader, his issues of self-esteem, his uncertainty about what his guild is supposed to be...all of that could have been explored excellently here!  Having it revealed that his most valued and trusted guild member is a vigilante could have caused Karol to question whether or not he could allow Yuri to stay in his guild after this, and what the “justice” that his guild stands for really is (and whether there should be limits upon it; man, do I miss the fascinating perspective on Justice that Planescape: Torment’s Vhailor gave us on the concept).  It also would have been a great way to tie into Karol’s issues with self-esteem as he questions whether he’s qualified to lead a guild when his judgment of character may be deeply flawed, since he looks up to Yuri and many of his foundational ideas about the guild come from Yuri.  I mean, frankly, the revelation that the trusted protagonist has been murdering evil-doers in cold blood as a vigilante is the easiest, softest pitch that ToV’s writers could have given themselves for developing any of the rest of the party’s characters, but the fact that they managed to completely strike out on this matter with even Karol is an almost remarkable waste of potential.

I’ll at least grant you that Yuri being a vigilante does heavily figure into his relationship with Flynn, where it serves the purpose of creating the divide between them that makes them mirrors of one another.  And I’ll happily admit that Yuri and Flynn’s friendship, rivalry, and 1-subconsciously-roaming-hand-away-from-romance is actually pretty decently crafted, probably the best case of mutual character development and thematic chemistry that the game has.**  Honestly, a couple of Flynn and Yuri’s conversations are some of the rare moments of Tales of Vesperia that I genuinely liked.  But that’s a single cast member--and 1 who wasn’t even actually a party member in the original game!--among over half a dozen for whom Yuri being a vigilante has any effect whatsoever upon him.  Of them all, Flynn is the only one who ever seems to demand elaboration from Yuri about his actions and perspective, or challenge their legitimacy to any real degree!

Also, frankly, even Yuri himself doesn’t seem to get much mileage as a character out of being a vigilante!  I mean, really, where’s the storytelling payoff, here?  Do we ever get any real, tangible indication from Yuri of inner conflict, philosophical musing, emotional turmoil, slight remorse, anything?  Ohhhh, right, he sits and silently broods every now and then, wow, yeah, I guess I forgot that I never got past being fucking 12 years old so just sitting in a corner looking like someone’s Naruto OC is still really deep to me.  Yeah, sorry, but just brooding and never actually expressing himself doesn’t fucking cut it as character development.  Is he wracked with guilt over his homicidal actions?  Stewing in resentment at the imperfect justice of the world?  Trying to remember the lyrics to a song he used to like?  Wrestling with an urge to take his campaign of violent retribution even further?  Seething in hatred for that damned clothier who said non-buttoning shirts were gonna be the next big thing?  Just thinking really hard about crepes?  Yuri could be contemplating literally anything, we have no way of telling what!

You can’t just have a character silently mope and assume that it magically makes him some deep and interesting individual.  You have to prop it up with something.  Have your character show some emotion silently, a bowed head or looking with horror at his shaking hands or something.  Time the brooding so that it follows actions in a way that emphasize that the guy is reflecting on what’s happened in some meaningful fashion.  Something, for God’s sake!  

There’s never any significant outpouring of personal unrest from the guy.  No one around him demands anything emotionally of Yuri.  No troubled dreams to give us an insight into what’s really going on behind the carefully constructed wall of indifference, as there would later be with Tales of Berseria’s Velvet.  There’s certainly very little actual exploration into the intellectual side of the matter, the right and wrong of the matter of Yuri’s vigilante killings--it’s shocking to think that Tales of Vesperia came after Tales of the Abyss; they had a perfect blueprint of how to deal with issues like this with the personal story arc of Luke’s reticence to kill his opponents.

Yuri just gives his audience nothing.  He just withholds the entirety of his own character development from the rest of the world, and we’re never allowed any other means to see what’s going on in his damn head.

Hell, even on the really quite shockingly rare occasions that his companions actually insist on a discussion with him regarding the fact that he’s an unrepentant murderer, we’re still left in the dark about how he arrives at his conclusions and decisions on how he’ll act going forward.  An example: After the Don’s death, once they find Judith, Yuri talks about how the Don’s death taught him that when there’s a part that’s infected, you cut it off, doesn’t matter if it’s friend or family.

Uhh...how is that a conclusion he’s drawn from the Don’s death?  I guess maybe he’s referring to the fact that the near war between the guilds started from a mistake made by the Don’s grandson Harry, whose punishment for Belius’s death*** the Don takes unto himself?  But that was said to be an earnest mistake the kid made--dumb, but earnest; he was tricked by Yaeger.  It’s hardly applicable to Yuri going Chinese-knockoff-Robert-McCall on real, actual, intentionally malicious villains.  Also, if Yuri’s takeaway from the incident was that the Don should have eliminated his own grandson before the kid’s incompetence could cause a problem, that’s, uh, a bit concerning.

Or does this conclusion of Yuri’s come from the fact that the Don went to get rid of Yaeger before going to his death?  Makes more sense, but not to the degree that it’s actually sensible.  In this scenario, either Yuri’s deciding to follow the Don’s example in his vigilantism, which then doesn’t really connect to the Don’s death 1 way or another, or Yuri’s saying that the Don should’ve killed Yaeger long before the asshole had a chance to do something evil like this.  Which, uh, really sounds like Yuri’s advocating for a tyrannical dictatorship where the guy at the top has full dispensation to just execute any sap he deems a potential problem.  Well I’m sure Edelgard and Hubert are just thrilled that you approve, Yuri, but that’s generally not an attitude towards government that we like to see in heroes, bud.

Does Tales of Vesperia have a way to rebut this point?  Did I perhaps misunderstand Yuri’s statement entirely?  That’s fully possible!  But because no one in the game has the slightest interest in challenging the murderous vigilante in discussion at all, because nothing ever prods Yuri into doing anything more than scratching the very surface whenever he’s sharing any part of himself, we just have no way of knowing.  We never see how Yuri came to this conclusion, or any other.  If the game DOES have any better interpretations than my own, any more flattering way of looking at Yuri’s stupid adolescent-edgy point of view on the world, it sure as hell doesn’t feel like sharing them with us.

And even this tiny inadequate surface-scraping doesn’t really seem genuine.  It’s not like we ever see that he was particularly moved in any way by the Don’s death.  The most we got was a skit conversation where his companions said that it had affected him.  Certainly nothing about how Yuri acts nor anything he says to himself or Repede when alone, no dreams nor daydreams, no alteration of speaking manner nor tone, no penetrating emotions verbally nor facially expressed, give even the slightest indication that it’s weighing on him.  By that point in the game, I had long since become bored with ToV’s facile writing and uninteresting plot, and I think even I gave more of a damn about the Don’s death than Yuri ever demonstrates.

It’s just always inept, fumbling Tell, Don’t Show with Tales of Vesperia when it comes to its protagonist.  I am so sick of Yuri’s companions talking amongst themselves about how much Yuri suffers internally over the murders he commits.  Where are they getting this idea that Yuri even has a second thought about his actions, let alone feels genuine regret?  NOTHING HE SAYS OR DOES INDICATES THIS.  Stop projecting actual human feelings onto this easy-going psychopath, already!

Even the overall character arc and story beats could have been maintained without this whole vigilante thing.  The arm of the law is already reaching for Yuri long before he commits his first murder, because the necessary circumstances of the plot still involve his being arrested, escaping from jail, and “kidnapping” Estelle (at her request, but try telling THE MAN that, amirite).  He takes stands against injustices without having been duly deputized to do so, and he opposes those who are technically working within the scope of the law when they do something morally wrong.  Yuri is already and unavoidably a guy working outside the law to do the right thing, the Chaotic Good that mirrors Flynn’s Lawful Good.  So the juxtaposition upon which their (90% yaoi) relationship is based would still be entirely intact without the vigilantism, AND Tales of Vesperia’s overall (morally shaky) theme of taking justice into your own hands would have still existed in adequate capacity.

And the final fates of those that Yuri kills could have been very easily altered to still work within the game’s needs.  The first guy actually getting away with it would have been way better as a test of their conviction to doing the right thing when the villain may still walk away Scot free, AND still sealed in the message that working within the law has its limitations.  The Cumore situation requiring vigilante justice didn’t even make sense to begin with, so him being defeated, detained, and arrested when Flynn gets there would have been a way more sensible way of going about that--and it still could have easily reinforced the idea of the law’s limitation, since Cumore still only would have been stopped in time thanks to the unlawful heroics of Yuri’s team.  And since you immediately after get the scene of Judy’s revelation and flight, you still have a climactic moment where the party is confronted with the idea that 1 of them has been doing “wrong” things to accomplish a greater good all along, and give them all the opportunity to come to terms with that to develop their moral perspective accordingly.  I mean, the game largely squanders that opportunity, but it’d still be there, regardless.  You don’t even lose the ability for the rest of the party to be upset with Yuri, since he knew about Judy’s side hustle already, and so the (again, largely wasted) opportunity to have Yuri justify taking justice into one’s own hands is still there, just in the form of his defending his having condoned Judy’s doing so rather than his defending his own killing.

The game is already inextricably about doing good in spite of the law.  The events of the story are already independently in place and will occur almost exactly the same way, with very little adjustment.  Yuri’s vigilantism (inasmuch as it is separate from the actions of the party as a whole) does not actually impact the way the story of Tales of Vesperia happens.

So what’s the point, then?  If it doesn’t have any lasting impact on how the cast at large sees and interacts with him, and it doesn’t actually do much of anything for his character, and the story doesn’t require it to accomplish what it needs and wants to, then what purpose does Yuri being a murderous vigilante actually serve?  It’s not necessarily something I don’t want in the game, but if it doesn’t actually do anything, then all it is is just some self-indulging grandstanding by writers whose minds are still stuck in middle school and who have no idea of how to take advantage of the very opportunities that they’ve arranged for themselves.



















* This is terribly incompetent timing on the part of the writers, incidentally.  As the environmentalist version of a vigilante herself, her presence could potentially have allowed for a lot of characterization and exploration of Yuri’s vigilantism through the fact that she, unlike the rest of the party, has the capacity to identify with what he’s doing.  And that, in turn, could have led to more nuanced and fulfilling conversations with the others on the matter.  But that’s all just thrown out the window, because the plot demands that Judith run off on her own immediately after Yuri’s actions have been exposed, and by the time she returns, the moment for exploiting this potential has long since passed.

I mean, sure, Tales of Vesperia completely drops the ball on appropriately using the characters that DO stay in the party to any meaningful purpose as regards Yuri’s vigilantism, so there’s no reason whatsoever to assume that it would have done anything useful with Judy’s potential on this matter...but it’s still stupid to pace your plot out in a way that denies you opportunities for character development, even when you’d just squander those chances anyway.


** Although I’d argue that part of that is largely because Tales of Vesperia keeps dropping the ball when it comes to exploring Karol’s depth of character and potential, giving the kid a half-effort every time the writers work with him.


*** Also muddying the issue is the fact that Belius’s death is really mostly the fault of Estelle’s inability to hesitate for a single goddamn second before hurling healing spells at anyone who’s so much as nicked themselves while shaving.  That battle wasn’t really going particularly badly before Estelle went and drove Belius berserk.  Belius’s death is more the fault of the bad, dumb luck of a bad, dumb princess than anything Yaeger could have planned; really, she was just 1 accidentally stubbed toe in Estelle’s presence away from it, anyway.