George Floyd died for this? :/

 

God Bless Pepsi

While we’re on the subject of me being horny for fake women, apparently I forgot to finish my Berseria review the other year. Game’s a 10/10.

As you probably inferred, I did not, in fact, protest my boredom by capitulating to the allure of the write. We went to a casino instead.

 

Here’s several other (recent!) drafts I never finished:

• “Odd Taxi Is an Overrated Piece of Ass Garbage”
  • It’s like an 8 out 10, but I’m ashamed of my Sankaku search history, so I’ve gotta give it a 1.
• “Crusader Kings 3 Is the Worst Anime I’ve Ever Played”
• “Wet Egg Pussy Is Tight as Fuck”
  • Note: With the release of Wonder Egg Priority’s “Tokubetsu-hen” special, this ended up being a very incorrect take.
• “A Comprehensive History of Goblins in Anime 1945 – 2020”

I’ve got over 200 of these fucking things, so maybe I’ll go through and see what’s postable as an Archives version. I know you’re starving for my sagacity, but Salaryman x Pandemic was not a productive collaboration. Also, I’m lazy as fuck.

 

 

 

Racism Is Bad the Anime

I’m gonna spoil the story here cuz if you play the game and get your hopes up, it’s only gonna hurt more than knowing what to expect.

If you don’t want spoilers, because you want to preserve the “narrational purity” of the game, then just think of the plot as dollar-store Star Wars and you’ll be about 95% of the way there.

 

 

 

Characters

All the standard stereotypes are here, but they’re better than normal cuz the characters are older so there’s less chuuni cringe. That being said, I was not terribly impressed.

 

The Mascot: Hururu

Hururu is great, but his name is localized to Hootle so whenever he hururu~‘s the subtitles say “hoot”. This is problematic because it annoys me.

 

The Beach Volleyball Autist: Kisara

Kisara is an onee-san type with obvious yandere potential that the game then goes out of its way to deny. Boo.

Her most interesting characteristic is that she only has armor on her front half so you have incentive to put her on the front line.

Normally I would appreciate this design, but I was able to augment her personality with the bikini DLC, so it kinda fell by the wayside.

 

“Cheer Up, Emo Kid”: Shionne

Shionne likes to eat, but she’s skinny, and that makes up about 90% of the comedy in the game.

She’s also immortal, but that plays 0 part in the story so I’m not even marking it as a spoiler. Wasted_potential.exe

 

The Rest

IDK, they exist, I suppose?

 

 

 

(Poor) Game Design

Some of the most heated discussions around this game concern the predatory DLC practices. While previous Tales of games had similar DLC, Tales of Arise is a bit different in that the gameplay highly encourages you to throw your hands up in frustration and buy the assist. It’s only $12 for 40 levels! Do you really want to spend 15 hours grinding to that point naturally, or does an hour of wagie work sound better?

I could go into a rant about exactly why developing your game under the assumption that everyone is using the pay-to-win DLC could lead to gameplay imbalances that negatively affect the player experience…

But that’s not nearly the worst part of this game. The fish-gating is.

 

Fish-gating

Yup, Tales of Arise has a fishing mini-game.

Why the fuck are the Japanese so fucking obsessed with fish? Every goddamn fucking RPG I come across this bullshit.

In Arise, two achievements and two titles are gated behind this hobbyist hackery. For the record, those are the only cheevs I didn’t get, other than the one that you get for knowing how to fucking dodge counter.

Worse, it’s play-to-win. Under Bamco’s normal business model, I would be able to just throw $5 at my screen to get the dopamine mines running again.

But here, if you want to catch the best fish, you’ll need the best rods, and you can only get the best rods by catching other fish. It’s a vicious cycle where you are rewarded for how well you do in the minigame, and literal gameplay content is locked behind the fishwall. Unacceptable.

 

 

 

A shit lolcalization from the retards at Keywords Studios

Here are some of the dumbest lines I captured when I was awake enough to click the screenshot button in time:

 

 

 

Other Stuff

Sidequests are an afterthought

Nothing in the game is missable, which is nice, but there’s no real point to tracking anything down, whether it be sidequests or hidden items. At its core, the game only cares about its main story, which makes everything else feel lifeless.

 

Mob battles get too grindy to be fun

Maybe learning the battle system would have made my experience better, but when I play J-RPGs I just wanna sit back, mash buttons, and admire the assthetics I paid extra $ for.

Making every battle a mini-boss you gotta punch on for a couple minutes is tedious, and in order to get good drops you have to constantly be fighting battles and ignoring overworld chatter (which can be lengthy commentary on story events) cuz otherwise you’ll “drop the combo”.

 

Feels like there’s 20 hours worth of game missing.

The game keeps hyping up this second world that you’ll get to explore. So when you finally lift off your home planet, it’s reasonable to assume that you’re at the halfway point, rather than right before the final fucking boss. Based on character interactions and how one-note they are, it feels like quite a bit of content was cut in the name of “streamlining”.

It took me 40 hours to finish everything, although when I reached the final dungeon I did say “fuck it” and blitzed that shit with a cheat table. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

The game starts off with a bang – slavery! murder! and dare we hope for… rape?!

Yet it ends with a whimper. Imagine ending things with a fucking spirit bomb of all things. Also, there was 0 rape, rendering an entire girlboss’s existence pointless.

 

Speaking of Almeidra…

There’s this entire sequence of the game where our girl gets captured and an angry mob tries to burn her alive.

But trick’s on them, she played Mirror Force right as they were getting super racist, so their racism backfired and liquefied them.

This is apparently the worst thing ever (?) and one of the characters (Rinwell) attempts to kill her, but then another party member (Law) stops her cuz “violence won’t solve anything!”

The party then proceeds to slaughter their way through a ship of pacifists (they literally just want to chill in the ocean till they can return to Space Berlin) and beat Almeidra within an inch of her life. Then she gets stabbed and dumped in the ocean.

 

On a positive note, at least the headpats are nice.

 

 

 

tl;dr – 7/10

The game starts off by insisting it’s a hard-8, but it ends up being a soft-7. No penis jokes here, Crymore is a family-friendly website.

 

Updated Tales rankings, good taste edition:

1. Tales of Berseria [10/10]
2. Tales of Vesperia [10/10]
3. Tales of Symphonia [9/10]
4. Tales of Xillia [8/10]
5. Tales of Xillia 2 [8/10… I think? I forgot where I rank this tbh]
6. Tales of Arise [7/10]
7. Tales of Graces [6/10]
8. Tales of the Abyss [5/10]
9. Tales of Zestiria [2/10]
10. Tales of Hearts [1/10]

If you get nothing else out of this post, then get this: Tales of Berseria is a good game for bad people. So play that instead and shower me with praise for my great recommendation. <3