Tales of Berseria

[FMW]

Reporting in regarding Tales of Berseria, a game I was given during the holiday gift exchange and have just now finished.  It's pretty good!  I hadn't played one of these Tales of games since the PS2 era, so I missed about a dozen there.  Coming back now the game has gotten way better!  It's still the anime JRPG.  It is all in on the anime.  But all anime is not created equal, and this is good anime.  Sexualization of children?  Not present.  People justifying doing illogical dumb things because of true love and/or their ideals?  Present, but they're the bad guys and you eat them.  Dumb characters you hate for being too stupid to be alive?  ...actually the central party characters are mostly adults and mostly act like it.  Nobody here is brilliant, but the crew is basically able to draw rational conclusions and problem solve.  It's surprising how many JRPGs don't have this.  Tales of Symphonia, my previous experience with the franchise, didn't have smart characters who can problem solve.  They just spent the whole game dutifully running errands and chasing maguffins as ordained by prophecy/magic/god/true love.

 

The combat gameplay is fun.  The six different playable characters are sufficiently distinct that you can keep the game fresh by swapping between them once battles start to feel stale.  Once you've rotated through the whole cast you get back to the first character and they'll have learned a bunch of new moves since last time so it's fun and new again.  It's a good loop.

 

The walking around gameplay blows.  You move waaaay too slow for the environments.  And the environments are not just large, but also bland.  AND there are a ton of shiny collectables scattered everywhere that are completely worthless.  The economy stuff sucks too.  Upgrading equipment is fiddly and takes forever, but is largely necessary.  Going into the menus to deal with all your loot becomes a long and hateful chore.

 

Still, it's an anime JRPG and it basically achieved being good anime and good JRPG combat.  Those are the most important parts.  I'm glad I played it.

 

It was a little weird how the main emotional arc came to a resolution and then the game kept going for another 10-15 hours.  I feel like a lot of that "tying up loose ends" and finale content was setting up for Tales of Zestiria, a game which this is a prequel to.  I haven't played that game so once the core arc for the characters developed in this game resolved then I was kinda just going through the motions.