The Tales series is a long-running franchise developed by Bandai Namco. Previous entries include Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Vesperia, and this game’s “sequel”, Tales of Zestiria. I’ve never had the chance to play a Tales game until now. Berseria has been on my wishlist for months now, just waiting for a heavy enough discount to feel like picking it up. When it was included in the Humble Monthly, I felt like it was time to try out the Tales game and see what it was all about.

Spoiler-Free

Presentation

Tales of Berseria overall looks great. It’s light on the system requirements on PC, so you should be set on running it. In battles, attacks have flashy effects that look great, especially when you have a lot of attacks going at once. It’s too bad the environments are incredibly generic. There are only a few unique areas in this game; excluding those exceptions, every cave, plains, mountain, beach, and town look the same with no defining features. The bland environments only get worse with the music. Now, don’t get me wrong, the music in this game is pretty good; the problem is it the soundtrack is too short. You will quickly realize that almost every “open-world” area has the same exact music and every town has identical waltzing tunes, and it gets grading very quickly. Having very few unique songs or traits for areas makes the whole world of Tales of Berseria forgettable at best. There are also some slight pop-in issues—nothing too major, but it’s worth mentioning.

It is not all bad, however. Throughout the game, there are a few fully animated cutscenes that look fantastic, it is a shame there are only a handful of them. The game is also fully voiced, with the exception of some small optional dialogue. The voice actors do a good job all together, and it just helps bring the characters to life. Berseria gets so close to having a fantastic world, but reusing the same engine from the last game seems to have taken its toll on how this game’s environments ended up.

Story and Characters

One of the strongest aspects of any Tales game are the characters, and Berseria is no exception. All the main characters are fantastic, and they all stand out in their own way. Everyone is well written, and the game takes advantage of the writing with an abundance of optional “skits” that play out to help flesh out the characters even more. Watching these characters bounce off each other is awesome and never gets old. You never knew what random topic they would talk about next.

Many of the side characters also get a lot of dialogue, and they get the same treatment as the main ones. Every character has a motive and a reason to be where they are in the story. The main plot is also very good, with only a few hiccups here and there. There is a bit of padding throughout the story as the party goes on different errands for people that really should be optional, especially since this game already took more than 45 hours to beat. The lore of Berseria is also very intriguing, and I was always interested to see what other small bits of information I could figure out about the world you are playing in. The good mix of fantastic characters and interesting story and lore helps you want to keep playing Berseria, and what kept bringing me back was finding out what happened to these characters next.

Gameplay

The gameplay can be split up into two parts: overworld exploration and the battle. Overworld exploration is simple, you move around to get where you’re going. I have two big issues with the overworld. One, there are far too many enemies. It gets annoying having to stop and fight an enemy every ten seconds because they are all over the place. Most of the time, I just avoided them and still didn’t feel like I was underleveled in any way. My guess for why they are there is for padding, which this game already has lots of. My second issue is the speed you move at. You move at a leisurely jog that is crazy slow, and there is no sprint option. About halfway through the game, you do earn a faster form of movement. Problem is, in order to use it in an area you must find a special marker in the overworld to activate it for that area. Most of these marks are at the end or exit of the area, meaning you rarely get to use your faster method of travel unless you are backtracking. So, you’ve better get used to your slow jog.

When you touch an enemy in the overworld, you engage in a battle. You can have 4 party members fighting at once, and you can switch between them on the fly. You attack your enemies using Artes. You can link your Artes together in different combos. You can also map different moves to each button and change where they appear in a combo. Your combo is limited by the number of “Souls” you have. You start battles with 3 souls and can increase it to a maximum of 5. So, if you have 4 souls, you can only use up to 4 attack combos. You get souls when you kill enemies, stun them, inflict a status condition, or exploit their weakness. You can also lose souls if an enemy does the same thing to you. You can also use a break soul, where you lose one soul in exchange for a special ability. You win the battle when you defeat all the enemies.

The main problem with the battle system is that it is hard to get in the flow of things. Since your combo potential is limited by the amount of souls you have, it makes it risky to lose souls. If you take the risk, however, it seems almost random if you are going to get a soul back. I would hit enemies with their weakness or try to stun them but it never seemed to work. So most of the time, I would try to fight enemies without risking the loss of souls. This worked fine, until enemies started to take away my souls, which led me to use break souls more often. After I started risking battles more, it became more fun. So don’t be scared about losing souls like I was.

That doesn’t fix another big problem with the battles however, which is the repetitiveness. After the 20-hour mark, battles started to get more and more tedious, and the abundance of enemies in the overworld didn’t help either. This is where I started to avoid most enemy battles, and except for a few boss battles, I didn’t feel like the game got any harder because of it. With all that being said, overall, the battle system is fine. If you like repetitive combat, then you will enjoy it much more than I did. It’s adequate for the game, but when I felt that avoiding combat was the best approach to playing the game, something has gone wrong.

Conclusion

Tales of Berseria is such a mixed bag of emotions for me. The environments are uninspired, the combat and music can get repetitive, and the fantastic animated cutscenes are too few and far between. The saving grace for this game for me is its story and characters. At a certain point, the only reason I kept playing was because I cared about the next chapter of the story. The characters were so well developed that just seeing them interact was enough to keep me going.

If you care about interesting environments, gripping gameplay, or an amazing soundtrack, you may want to look elsewhere. But if you care about the characters and their stories, where everything else takes a backseat, you might want to try Tales of Berseria.

There is a free demo on Steam for this game if you want to try it. I warn you however, that it takes place in the middle of the game and can be a spoiler if you care about the story. However, it is a good representation of the combat and other mechanics.

Spoiler-Full

This will be a very short section since I don’t have much to talk about. I talk about big spoilers for the game so read at your own risk if you haven’t played the game yet.

[spoiler title=”Click to view spoiler section”] This will be a very short section since I don’t have much to talk about. I talk about big spoilers for the game, so read at your own risk if you haven’t played the game yet.

I loved all the characters, my favorite being Rokurou. I enjoyed Eizen’s and Rokurou’s conversations with Laphicet the most. Magilou is just a curveball character, and Bienfu was just so weird. Zaveid is interesting since he is one of the main characters in Tales of Zestiria. Berseria is a prequel to Zestiria, taking place 100 years later. I haven’t played Zestiria, but I have seen the references between the two games, and there is some very nice attention to detail.

I also liked the ending, where Velvet and Laphicet are stuck in eternal hugging. It’s ridiculous when you think about it, but it makes a lot of sense within the context of the story. Velvet in general is a great character, since she is more of a villain. In fact, your whole group is full of villains, yet you feel like the heroes. It really makes you wonder where the line is drawn.
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Anyways that’s about it.

Thanks for reading,

Andy