This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
Dear Past_Sage: Don’t buy this, no matter how much you want to play Berseria.
Premise & Characters
As Sorey, an uneducated hillbilly with a Messiah complex, you traipse around a bland, poorly populated world to help cleanse people’s hearts of malevolence (read: evil). Through your journey, you discover a likable cast of characters and uncover surprising political intrigue & insights into character motivations, the result of which makes you reconsider what “evil” really is.
Oh wait, I just made that last bit up? Your party’s made up of Kraft forgettables with all the flavor of a cotton swab, and the plot is literally just “go kill evil things because they’re evil”?
Gameplay
Tedious, boring, and completely unnecessary, every gameplay mechanic serves solely to impede your progress. To illustrate the point I’m gonna talk too long about mind-numbing mechanics that nobody except Tales players will understand.
Titles are a waste of time. There is no value to leveling multiples up, so you have to stick to just one. And if you feel like switching to a new one for whatever fucking reason, you’ll face a significant combat disadvantage for a lengthy period of time.
There’s like maybe five real sidequests in the game – don’t expect any pre-final boss shenanigans, or even anything post-game but another dungeon.
Artes leveling is lol. In Tales games I like to aim for 999 uses for each Arte of the MC. Here though?
Grade system is stupid. The grade you’re given in New Game+ is based on the grade you farmed for your Lord of the Lands. But the only efficient way to level your Lords is with gald, rather than battle-earned grade. Essentially, grade as a resource is rendered invalid, and gald affects everything. I could even overlook this if it was a straight conversion, but no, you have to buy apple gels, run to a save point to drop them off, then run back and buy more, and keep repeating the process. So in the end, time is the primary resource you’re expending, which leads me to a good point to make, but not enough fucks left to make it.
Equipment is randomly generated. So there are no final weapons to look forward to finding, no special sequences or sidequests you need to keep in mind. You just have to roll the dice. And when the dice land on a number you like? Well then you have to boost the equipment via weapon fusion, which only requires you to fuse other weapons into your current weapon, while keeping strict watch on how this affects all its skills. Don’t worry, I scoured GameFAQs and found you only need 1,100 other named versions of the same equipment to acquire a Level 99 item fusion. Some people said it only took them 200 hours.
Don’t worry about any of the above though. Tedious micromanagement only becomes an issue if levels don’t matter in this game, which– Oh fuck. They don’t. What a game, huh?
The Good Bits
Zestiria is fully voiced – As I’m a filthy dubfag, I found solace in learning Space Dandy is actually tolerable when he’s not stuck in a shitty anime (Ian Sinclair may be a lazy VA but at least he isn’t a creepy sack of a human fleshbag like Vic Lasagna)
Field speed boosts are received in exchange for killing enemies – Probably the only good character/environment interaction in the game, I’d love to see this come back in Berseria
Cutscenes are skippable
The DLC is so poorly priced and bad-looking you’ll never be tempted to buy it
Ranking
- Tales of Vesperia
- Tales of Symphonia
- Tales of Xillia
- Tales of Graces
- Tales of the Abyss
- Tales of Zestiria
- Tales of Hearts
If Tales of Hearts didn’t exist, this would probably be my least favorite entry of the Tales series. But seeing as how I completely wiped ToH from my memory, only to realize after several deep wiki dives that I had in fact completed that shitshow of a game, it is Hearts rather than Zestiria that earns my enmity as worst Tales game of all time.
Zestiria fans, that is not a compliment. This shitstack gets a 2/10. And it only gets those points cuz at least the Alicia fanart is still on point.
At least we got the anime… Unless it turns to shit.
I have trust in ufotable. And I rly enjoyed prologue. Yep, it’s gonna be original but it’s not a bad thing. Also, D_S is shit person with shit taste. Just watch whatever he hates.
Excuse me, Terra-kun. I am well regarded for two things: my sexual prowess, my taste, and my ability to count
I’m gonna need a bigger bait ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
DS usually have poor taste from most people but I do agree with him on TOZ though not completely
Many things there are useless and forgettable, many things there been removed and been handled as if the sister/child/how the hell they called it again Studio that made TOG/TOH/other “Mini tales” was working on it (Remember that back in the day we had 3D view on the items we get on the inventory? (though tales never did it afaik) Games like TO took it one level below and just show them as art, now we don’t even got that and just see general picture for each item… that just make it look lazy… too bad TOB will have this shit as well
Well anyway back to the main thing. the plot have many holes and was poorly written, I suspect they took most of the inspiration from random things like the US avatar, Skyrim, AC games for Rose guild case
Many things could been explain better and the gameplay which try unique turn was boring over time
IMO TOTA had the best plot
TOV have the best gameplay but the plot is shit
TOG….. had nice plot but gameplay was similar to TOZ so for me as TOV and TOTA fan it = to shit
TOX had good plot (mostly thanks to 2) but 1 was rushed as hell and we can see many things been removed and the lovely TOV graphics was replaced for this Almost-PS2-shit
However the battle system (mostly in 2) was wayyyy better than TOZ-TOG games
TOS had good plot but for now it too classic and even have classic gameplay (means you have more hard time with the difficulty)
TOS2 was… ah better not even mention it
TOH…. Never played it but look nice
Anyway while I like TOZ as any other tales I played I really don’t like most of what they done there and really want to see game that will be more like TOV (Yes even the chibi world map!)
I wouldn’t rate any of the Xillia games that high solely because of the god awful maps. A big giant circle? Oh, it leads to ANOTHER big giant circle of the same environment? On top of that, hidden items weren’t hidden at all since you just scoured the edges of each giant circle and crawl through a little hole. And what does Xillia 2 do to learn from it? Reuses the same exact fucking maps. Almost all of them.
The story for the first game felt like it could have ended halfway into it. The pacing just felt awful. Xillia 2’s story was dark and sad, but ruined by the flaws of the first game that were not fixed. Maybe I’d have a greater appreciation for the Xillia series had they been spread apart (but probably not since they reused so many shitty assets).
Things I disliked about Zestiria included combos not feeling like combos anymore, bad camera angle in some battles (somewhat easily worked around), armatization being so free, mystic artes not looking badass, and big environments for the sake of being big (at least they looked rather pretty in this installment compared to the Xilla series). On the bright side, I really liked the music (Go Shiina definitely helped here), the characters were good (most Tales of games seem to get this part right at least, in my opinion), and well, it felt fresh I guess. The story just felt complete.
I’d still say Tales of Symphonia and Graces are my top Tales of games though since Symphonia had a great story (I’m a sucker for plot twists everywhere) and Graces had easily the most fun combat to play throughout the entire game (plus I really liked how they had a childhood arc to tie into the story and add to development).
This sucks to hear since the main character in Tales of Berseria is hot. They have less than a year to make it better than this game.
As someone that played a lot of tales games and watched even more, i find Zesteria to be the worst of the bunch by far.
– Horrible combat system where you have no dedicated healer, can get 1shot out of nowhere, and you cannot even grind decently because of some stupid stamina.
– The smallest map in a Tales game ever
– Horrible characters, 1 character in your party knows exactly how it will end yet she refuses to say it making the whole game pointless to begin with. The one character that could have potentially been great in the story, was removed in the beginning.
– The whole game is 1 gigantic fetchquest. First you need 4 shrines to powerup and then suddenly a sidequest of gathering 32 (i think) orbs suddenly turns into the main quest.
All in all, fuck Zesteria.I bought the PC version just to support them but next time i will do research ahead of time. Currently it is at 1.5/5 stars on amazon JP with 2732 reviews.
I don’t get why they never done a game again with the artstyle of Vesperia. Even now that game blows a lot of others out of the water in beauty.
I nearly dropped it when the orb gathering turned into a main quest. Honestly, had to go to GameFAQs to confirm I was right about at the end anyway, cuz I wasn’t about to piss away another 10 hours or so on mindless retreads of boring areas.
I pummeled through and i still don’t know why, guess i just wanted my money out of it. Had the luck i “only” had to gather another 10 or so cause i did most of them on the way.
Where i just broke however was the DLC. It is a single 13 gigantic floor dungeon that is insanely boring and annoying cause your character is limited and it takes ages to kill anything. Then out of nowhere there is a conflict between 2 of the characters that was supposed to be the “drama” of the DLC.
I knew their had to be a catch when they offered it for free the first month.
I stopped playing the game after battle tutorial.
I don’t know Tales series’ battle system can be that shit.
wtf is so good about alisha, she’s just as bland and shit as the other characters.
Granted, but have you seen her thighs?
Well story wise she had major potential considering her status.
Imagine if she had to choose between her role as princess in her country or being the Shepard. Everyone would instantly think she would be incredible biassed to her country even as the role of Shepard.
Also, it seems unfair to call her bland when she showed more personality than like all of 1 note main cast when after the first part she is barely seen at all.
While this game has a crapton of issues gameplay wise, i think putting her as the main character could have at least made the story actually interesting compare to dude from nowhere who always follows the righteous path.
Alisha was the only character with potential to develop and grow due to her backstory, she was the only one with a semblance of conflict; everyone else is the exact same at the start and at the end of the story, especially Rose the Mary Sue.
>Titles are a waste of time.
Titles control the AI. For instance, if you want Edna to be useful, you give her a defensive AI so she actually heals.
Also, Rose > Alisha
I mostly meant that you will only ever use one title and there’s no value in leveling up the others because you lose combat efficiency while doing so, and the third one is objectively the best for all the seraphs so you have no reason to use the different ai options.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps4/167071-tales-of-berseria/reviews/163019
US release fucking when