I'm a series fan and from the things that bother you with Vesperia it sounds to me like the rest of the series probably wouldn't be your thing either, but regarding the overblown praise for Vesperia that's always come off to me as people just really liking that game's main character more than anything. Personally the mage and the princess of that game were the only parts I really liked, (and only because they're really easy to read as being lesbians) but both the gameplay and writing of Vesperia is really messy, honestly, and I personally don't think it deserves as much praise as it gets. (To be entirely fair to Vesperia, and I'm really not trying to bash it, inconsistent writing and gameplay is kind of a staple of the franchise, just that it manifests in different ways in every installment, and in Vesperia's case I find that its problems are really widely overlooked by the series fans.)
I enjoy the Tales franchise as an anime RPG series that consistently has a decent balance of female to male characters, and I'm a person with high tolerance for anime stereotypes so I can mostly enjoy the writing and characters. It is unfortunately probably one of the least messy longer-running JRPG franchises in terms of treatment of female characters, but it does still have annoying instances of revealing outfits, female leads being subservient to the male lead for no other reason than that he's the male lead, and that... I don't really know how to describe it, but that type of anime writing about how "girls should be," you know. Every single female party member bantering about their weight and appearance and having to act like babysitters for the male characters regardless what their actual personality is. That type of stuff.