Dear Past_Sage: Don’t buy this, no matter how much you want to play Berseria.
Premise & Characters
Art as HQ as the game is.
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”?
Fabulous.
Gameplay
One of the many exciting dungeons you’ll be exploring~
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?
Fuck you, I’m not going to 9,999 for each goddamn Arte
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
There are 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
If you want your main character to look like he gets the shit kicked out of him by day and molests children by night, boy does Namco Bandai have the $9.99 special for you!
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.
Would’ve been nice if she actually got to be in the game.