It’s easily the first must-have JRPG of 2017. While it may take a while to grasp, Tales of Berseria also has one of the most satisfying combat systems I’ve seen from a JRPG in a while.
The story links between Berseria and Zestiria are sure to please longtime fans, while newcomers can easily follow the series of events. With everything from combat to story Tales of Berseria feels fresh, fast paced, and exciting.The darker tone for the story is a welcome change and works wonders, while the cast manages to be as memorable as any others you’d find in a Tales game.
Some of the supporting cast isn’t quite as good however, like the Normin creature name Bienfu who ends up being more grating than anything. Voice performances are also spot on across the board for each of the main party members, with each actor doing a lot to make their character unique. Skits are more engaging than ever before, as they feature animation that really injects personality into each of the characters. The anime art style looks marvelous, even if the game isn’t as graphically powerful as other titles on the PS4. Presentation wise, Tales of Berseria is better than the series has ever been. Her tale is definitely tragic, and you can understand her plight, even if her methods are questionable. Despite this, she manages to grow and become more than just the vengeance filled hero.
Bad things have happened to the world and Velvet, hardening her and making her emotionally cold. Even though she’s much different from most protagonists, Velvet manages to be one of the most memorable main characters from the series in a while. After a terrible event takes place, her entire life is taken away from her, causing her to want nothing more than revenge against the man that ruined everything.Įven with just the basic setup, Tales of Berseria adopts a much darker tone than normal. The story revolves around a young girl named Velvet who lives a quiet life in a small town. Because of this fans will see some commonalities and links, yet it’s a game that stands completely on its own. Tales of Berseria actually takes place in the same world as the previous game, Tales of Zestiria, but is set in the distant past. Luckily, this proves to be great change of pace for the series, along with a few other tweaks to gameplay. It doesn’t feature the happy go lucky tale of friendship that we’re used to, instead opting for a much darker tone in terms of both story and character. Might have to do a playthrough down the line in Spanish (It'll be cool to have Tales of games dubbed in Latin American Spanish one day, too).Tales of Berseria is cut from a bit of a different cloth than most games in the series. I switched to Spanish to take a quick look and was very pleased with it.
Props to Namco for their Latin American localizations lately. None of the spells that wrecked me in record time were used at all. I'm surprised just how different the fight was, actually. I had to lower the final battle to moderate because I was sleep-deprived and didn't feel like going through AI tactics just for one fight. I played on hard and it took me around 76 hours with my thoroughness. Time constraints? It's really jarring because it was fine for the rest of the game.Īnyway, I beat the game last night and am doing some of the stuff that triggered after the final boss, then I might go back to try and finish Zestiria. It reads like the audio was fed to a speech-to-text machine or something. I'm really curious what the heck happened with the last stretch of the English localization.