Tales of Berseria is, simply put, one of the best entries in the series. Its dark and emphatic story and additions to its familiar gameplay turn this game into one fresh experience. Though it has flaws like a story with ups and downs or a linear design in all of its dungeons and map sections, this game offers so much content that will guarantee dozens of hours of entertainment. It is a game that every fan of the genre and franchise should try without exception.
There are some games out there that truly feel special, like something in the beginning just clicks and you know you're going to have a great time; Tales of Berseria does exactly that with it's opening act. I've always considered Tales of games to be a sort of 3rd pillar of JRPGs, right along Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, and due to this I have always considered their character writing to be the better of the three, and it really shows in here. Tales of Berseria is a tragic tale of revenge and coping with loss anyway that you can, and our cast of characters are a wonderful device to show how strong will and emotions can be. Their pain and personality shows throughout cutscenes, skits, and character interactions, and honestly is a great case study of showing rather than telling. While there is a bit of edginess to this story, for the most part Berseria does a great job of being darker without being so melodramatic. The game also mechanically works the best out of all the Tales of games I have played so far, and a feel getting rid of the TP system in favor of souls not only opens up more options for fights and characters, but keeps from a lot of battles becoming daunting hopes to recharge the item gauge so I can fill my TP again. Along with this, the camera changing to an overview perspective and more focus on extending combos through the use of breaking souls really helps both simplify and encourage experimentation throughout your playthrough. While I won't say Berseria is a perfect game, it definitely offered me more than I hoped or hyped myself to and something I already consider a classic in my book. If you had to play any Tales of game, this would be the one I suggest.
This latest Tales title is definitely on my shortlist of the greatest. Watching the story unfold as I travelled the world with a collection of folks from all walks of life was a lot of fun. Thankfully, the developers added some variety in the overworld maps and if the dungeons were more interesting and sidequests played a larger role then I could see this being a contender for one of the best modern RPGs.
Tales of Berseria will tantalize any JRPG fan with a narrative unique to the franchise while still entirely Tales. There's room for improvement on all fronts, but that doesn't stop Berseria from being the best franchise title in a while.
Tales of Berseria isn’t a reinvention of the series, but it delivers a more emotional story mixed with a great combat system to make this adventure worth taking. The game’s fantastic cast keeps things entertaining even during moments where nothing particularly noteworthy is happening in the plot, and the way the character’s develop throughout the game is endearing. The dungeons are nothing to write home about, but the game’s consistently-thrilling battles are able to pick up some of the slack.
Waren die frühen Tales Spiele zu SNES Zeiten noch wahre Kleinode des JRPG Genres, ist die Serie mit dem Sprung ins Polygon Zeitalter in meinen Augen immer mehr zu einem Fließband Franchise für mittelmäßige Standard JRPG Kost geworden, die sich nur für Hardcore Nerds lohnt, die wirklich jeden Scheiß spielen müssen. Immer mal wieder hab ich in die Serie reingeschaut - Tales of Zisteria, Tales of Xillia u.s.w. - immer haben mich die langweiligen Dungeons, die öden Gebiete und stereotypen Charaktere schon nach kurzer Zeit gelangweilt. Umso überraschter war ich, dass mich Tales of Berseria gleich von Beginn an ziemlich gecatched hat. Denn statt das Kommando über die immer gleicher Weltenretter Heldentruppe zu bekommen, kriegt man in Tales of Berseria einen Bunch von Dämonen, von Bad Guys, von Aussenseitern hingeworfen, die sich in der Regel auch nicht gegenseitig mit Nettigkeiten supporten, sondern vielmehr Spaß am gegenseitigen Bissigkeiten und Sticheleien haben und vor allem ihren eigenen Rache- oder Macht Motiven folgen. Also so gar nicht mit Welt retten uns so. Man ist eben Dämon. Dass die Dialoge dieser Truppe zudem überaus charmant und spaßig geschrieben und inszeniert werden, hebt das Spiel deutlich aus dem Einerlei der Tales Spiele heraus. Gut, man rushed am Ende durch die gleichen öden Gebiete und Dungeons wie in jedem Tales Spiel, sammelt random Items und Kristalle auf, und kauft die xte leicht verbesserte Rüstung im Shop. Doch die eigenwilligen Charaktere, wie auch das gute Pacing des Storyplotts motivieren auch das Ende der Story erleben zu wollen.
Alles in Allem ist Berseria tatsächlich ein Tales Spiel, das sich lohnt. Zumindest wenn man an gut geschriebenen Dialogen und charmanten Charakteren und deren Entwicklung Interesse findet. Natürlich rettet man am Ende dann doch irgendwie die Welt, doch irgendwie deutlich anders und inspirierter, als man dies vom Fließband Franchise Tales gewohnt ist.
This is an average game as most of Tales of games are. The best of this game (as in the rest of the Tales series) is the acting voices. The worst is it's graphics (could be a ps3 game) and espacially the ground texture which is awfull. Plus, the facial expressions should have been better. This game doesn't deserve more than an 8. I also didn't like that they begun talking about daemons, malakhim, etc too straight as if you already knew what they were talking about. Also, some dungeons/labyrinths should have been shorter an less messy. When you are half of the game, they make you go to places that you already visited and I think this was a mistake because it breaks the rhythm of the game. It's not until you're finishing the game that gets interesting again. Also this game is full of dialogues (and many optional dialogues) that I think sometimes should be shorter (it seems like if the dialogues had to have a minimum of speaking time) and also most of the optinonal dialogues are not really relevant. My advices to fully enjoy this game: feel free to watch the optional dialogues with triangle button when you want to. About other dialogues with voices I recommend to go to speak to the people with this symbol on them (!) if you want to unlock other places (although to be honest you can perfectly skip that too). About the shiny things on the road, take some when you feel to (specially at the beginin to earn money) because most of them have a very low value. About gameplay, in my opinion the best way to play it is in semiautomatic mode and put the x button as a free technic so you don't have to think what to do. To sum up, great voices, good soundtrack, poor graphics, ok plot; overall: a good rpg but not great. I think the best you can do is to go straight for the main story.
This game took me almost 59 hours to beat doing most of the things I found in my way so it can take you 10 hours less if you don't spend time in extra things or thinking what weapons to improve. I started in difficult mode but soon I played it in normal mode and I only lowed the difficulty 3 times at the end to beat 3 extra bosses.
"Overly-sterilized fast-food gaming" is the metaphor that I came up with while finishing the game: It feels like it formulaically does everything a JRPG is supposed to do, but when you bite into the meat of it, it's very bland (like a very nice-looking fast food burger with a perfectly round bun, but with lackluster flavor). The only standout feature this game has is the storytelling: the quality (and sheer quantity) of writing and voice acting.
My favorite part of the game were the little clever quips and banter between the characters. I loved the many small-talk conversations they had that fleshed out the world and characters. The conversations rounded out the characters to make them very believable and complex. On top of that, whenever I had a potential plot hole or question in my head, it seemed like almost every time, the triangle-symbol conversation notification popped up at the bottom-right of my screen, where the characters addressed my question [with some excellently clever wordplay and intelligent humor to boot].
Plot developments also trickled into the story along the way in a calculated fashion, instead of everything being revealed at once. Some of these plot developments & explanations were really annoying to wait for, however (i.e., Who is this Magilou girl? What's even her story or connection to any of this?). But overall, I found it really cool to slowly discover truths behind the game's story.
Even though the text translation is quite bad (typos and translation discrepancies throughout the game; there's even a difficulty level they call one thing in the difficulty menu, but something entirely different in item descriptions! What??), the audio aspects of the translation are great.
Now here's the bad: The game mechanics themselves are extremely sub-par. Battles always felt so dry, lifeless and mind-numbing (once you got over the epicness of the Mystic Artes/Break Souls). (Perhaps some of that apathy/boredom comes with having already played multiple JRPG's in your life.) Movement in the overworld is also robotic and choppy. Tutorials are terrible: There are these HUGE blocks of text that describe different battle aspects, but there's hardly any in-battle practice where you can truly learn the functionality/meaning of different moves/items. This made me too nervous to branch out into using different characters in battle besides Velvet.
You could mostly cheese battles as long as you got a breaksoul chain going anyway, so learning many of the mechanics was never important to make it to the last boss of the game, on the hardest difficulty available without EVER moving down to an easier difficulty. (Sidenote, I hate games that allow you to change difficulty mid-game, and games that secretly lower difficulty of certain sections after you die enough times on them. How demeaning.)
Deciding what items to dismantle is a brain-numbing, plain-text dump of a nightmare. In the tutorial for dismantling, the tutor says you'll eventually become a natural at it. Nope! There's no way of knowing the monetary value of an item in the Dismantle menu. I don't think you can see the stat boosts it gives your characters while in the Dismantle menu either. It's therefore very difficult to determine which items you'd like to keep, sell, or upgrade. I ended up just dismantling pretty much everything that a character didn't have equipped at the time and crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. JRPG's NEED to stop this; they need to figure out a user-friendly way to upgrade items and how to determine which items are worth keeping (by showing their monetary and stat values in the Dismantle menu).
There's also item effects that make certain items more capable/powerful against certain "types" of foes: demi-human, person, undead, etc. I NEVER had to change my items to fit what I was fighting. I tried once, but the icons and names for the enemy types were not matching up; were there translation inconsistencies with the enemy types too, just like the difficulty levels? Seesh. I have no idea how major translation errors in major game mechanics like difficulty level and enemy types can slip through the cracks. Seems like the translation team was really rushed and focused a lot more on the audio/voice acting aspect of it (where we find the most quality the game delivers). Most of the item effects, you read and tell yourself "I have no idea what that means."
So yeah, decent at first, but after 90 hours of main story gameplay (I don't remember doing a ton of side stuff) and becoming bored of the cinematography and apathetic even to the dialogue and characters (the features I liked most), I am so done. If I were to rate a 1-10 on the "fun" factor, it'd be a 0-2. I have to credit/acknowledge the writers/translators for the excellent voice acting and intelligent humor, so that's the only reason I'm giving it more. I'm never playing a game from this stale, repetitive, boring series again.
SummaryPlayers set out on a journey of self-discovery as they assume the role of Velvet, a young woman whose once kind demeanor has been replaced and overcome with a festering anger and hatred after a traumatic experience three years prior to the events within TALES OF BERSERIA. Velvet will join a crew of pirates as they sail across the sea and...