After two or three years of existing on my Playstation 4 hard drive, I finally pushed myself to play through Tales of Berseria. Up to this point, I had put what I thought was a decent amount of time into it, but after almost sixty hours of grinding and exploring, the twelve that I had already invested seemed to barely scratch the surface. Like the other games in the series, Berseria is a long one. Granted, I probably added to the playtime because of my tendency to kill absolutely everything I come across, but that’s just the JRPG training in effect. Don’t blame me, I was raised that way.
Because of that, I always seemed to be roughly around five levels above the monster level, so the game was only mildly challenging on its normal difficulty level. That was completely fine by me, the last thing I want to do in a game of this length is hit a difficulty spike that halts me in my tracks. That said, I still think the game was a bit too long for its own good.
It’s hard to describe the plot of any JRPG in detail, as they tend to usually be an over-complicated mess of obligatory plot-twists and cliche archetypes, but Berseria’s basic synopsis is pretty simple: The main character, Velvet, is on a quest to avenge the murder of her brother, and she’ll stop at nothing until she gets it.
That’s the overall story, and the game practically beats you over the head with it. It’s not the most complicated plot and you’ll see pretty much every curve and twist coming a mile away. In honesty, while the Tales games were never really known for excellent stories, where they shine is in their character development, and thankfully it’s no different here. Tales has the very rare privilege of not annoying the shit out of me with all their characters. Sure, you’ll have your token cool guy, bubbly happy girl, weird kid, etc., and it’s no different here, but they’re inoffensive in the least, and somewhat like-able in some cases. By the end of the game, I can’t say I cared for them, but I didn’t want them all to die horrible grisly deaths, and for me, that’s saying something.
I’m being purposefully vague here, this game has been out for years and if you want a story synopsis, you can probably find a Wiki on it somewhere.
But enough about the setup. What did I actually think of the game? I… don’t really know. In all fairness, and for transparency, I pushed myself to play through Berseria almost exclusively, and that historically has affected my overall feelings for a game. I am a buffet gamer, I like to have all of my choices spread out before me so that I can have a nibble of this and that. Rarely do I sit down and play one game from beginning to end, and rarely is that game a lengthy JRPG. It does happen though, especially if I’m really enjoying it. Resident Evil Village was literally the only thing I played until I beat it, so it does happen, just not very often.
I did get burned out on Berseria, but I don’t think that’s entirely my fault. The game is long, and I found myself questioning just why I was doing certain things. There are a number of events and destinations that seem to exist solely for the purpose of padding the game time. Berseria meanders a lot, both in its story and its locations. Many times I had to travel to a specific location for no other reason than to watch a story skit or a cutscene, then it was time to leave again. Other times I was fighting boredom along with the monsters as I traversed some rather large locations that were nothing more than huge spans of barren landscape, where a simple bee-line to the exit was intentionally unavailable so that I had to wander in and out of caves, around pockets of water, up and over large rocks, etc. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but holy shit the environments in the game are some of the most generic and boring I’ve ever seen.
The developers knew this too, as they added a Pac-man-style “mini game” that consisted of collecting glowing orbs called Katz Souls scattered around the maps to trade in at hidden pink chests scattered around the game. I unlocked as many as I could, and they never really rewarded me with anything notable, mainly cosmetic items that were lame at best. They also provided multiple options to get out of the dungeons, whether they were warp points, potions that teleported the player to the exit, or even a hoverboard-type thing that lets you not only skim along the surface a tad bit quicker than you can run, but also instantly defeats any weak monsters it touches. A lot of these boring environments still have to be traversed if you need to get to a new area on the other side, or if there’s an objective or a Red Hunt you need to pursue. It really did make a long game feel even longer. I’ll have to boot up some of the other games and take a look but I really don’t remember the previous Tales games being so bland. It’s like they put all their effort into the story and character models and that was it.
The combat system is Tales, and that’s really all I need to say about that. If you’ve never played a Tales game, nothing I say is really going to make you understand, because they change a little bit with each game but always kinda feel the same. Does that make sense? No? That’s okay, it probably shouldn’t.
My main gripe I have with Berseria this time around is the equipment system is the most asinine bullshit I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s so convoluted, I really don’t feel like explaining that, either. Let’s just say you’ll finish a dungeon and have 15 sets of leather boots, all with different stats, all with different perks, and YOU get to sift through them and find out which is best for each character. You’ll be on it at first, keeping up with each item and its available traits. But over the course of the game, you’ll quickly get buried under a deluge of duplicate items, and you will also quickly get tired of digging through them to find out which is the best. It gets real old, real fast. After a while I just started equipping what offered the most Green stats and the least Red stats. Grind enough to stay about five levels ahead of the curve and you won’t have to worry about it too much.
I guess I should mention the permanent traits that could be learned from each piece of equipment, and I suppose they do help, especially toward the end when you have a pretty healthy stack of stat buffs, but they’re such minimal increases, you’ll never actually notice the difference. The battles are so quick and chaotic that you don’t even have time to think about that stuff, much less tweak your stats to match.
Speaking of battles, sweet silly stunloops, Batman! The early going is fine, but as you get deeper into the game and the monsters start hitting you with more status effects and special attacks, Velvet will get stunned, a lot. And unless you are really paying attention to your equipment traits and are stacking up on ones that decrease your stun duration, you will be pulling your hair out as multiple monsters will lock you into a stun loop, and proceed to take turns beating the shit out of Velvet until someone either comes to your rescue, you manage to break free and run away, or she just dies.
Had I really cared to go digging into the stat minutia, there may have been a way to mitigate this, but as it stood just from playing the game, there wasn’t a way around it. Velvet was basically just a punching bag for the second half of the game.
Which is weird. I’ve never played a JRPG where the main player-character was so fuckin’ weak. I mean, she was crazy weak! Velvet died a lot. Despite my giving her the best equipment I could find, upgrading it, giving her all the damn herbs that upped her stats permanently. None of it mattered, as by the end of the game I was going through the Life potions like they were candy. My teammates, on the other hand, held their own quite well, and only a handful of times did they ever go down. Sometimes I would just let Velvet lay there and watch the battle play out. Usually she would end up getting resurrected by someone, or they would just kill everything off themselves. So trust me, when I say grind for a bit and stay about five levels ahead, do it for your party members. They’ll carry you through the game if you let them.
I know it seems like I’m hating on this game like crazy. Truth is, I didn’t hate the game, not like I’ve hated some other JRPG’s in recent memory (I’m looking at YOU, Shining Resonance Refrain). But I can’t say I ultimately enjoyed it, either. When I finished Symphonia and Vesperia, I remember consciously thinking to myself that I really, really liked them. Hell, they’re the reasons I even bothered playing Berseria, Xillia, Zesteria, Graces f, and have Tales of Arise waiting for me on my Series S. But I didn’t have that feeling after Berseria. All I could think of was that I was glad I was done with it. There was just far too much bloat.
I do think the Tales “system” is/was getting too convoluted. What made the series great ever since Symphonia was that battle system. It was easy to learn and… well also kinda easy to master. But with every new iteration its gotten “deeper,” and not in a good way. The combo Arte system in this game is whack. I don’t even know why I typed that word. I never say “whack.” It’s not my kind of word. But that was literally the first word that popped into my head when trying to describe the combo system. Whack. You got martial artes and hidden artes, and some of them have elemental damage of one of the four types. So if you encounter a monster that is vulnerable to hidden artes but resistant to fire, you better not be using any combination of martial artes and fire. The trinity has been a staple of RPG’s since the beginning of time, but you usually have them listed before you. You use the fire spell on the ice monster, etc. But with the Artes, they’re set up on a different screen and good luck remembering which is which and what element they are. Each battle will basically devolve into mashing your buttons until you find a combination that makes your enemy’s numbers turn pink. I mashed buttons for sixty hours. Even after sorting my Artes and assigning specific elements to specific buttons, so that my Square button was nothing but fire, etc., I still never truly felt like I was in any kind of real control.
So you know what I did? I gave up control. I put Velvet on auto for the last area of the game, and I literally watched as my team of miscreants defeated the final boss without me ever throwing a manual punch. All I had to do was force a few health and resurrection potions here or there. And I don’t feel bad about that at all. It was literally the difference between me finishing this game for good and me just throwing my PS4 out the window. Besides, I spent almost sixty hours building these guys and gals up to where they were, so I feel like I set them up for success. The credits rolled and I couldn’t have been happier.
The ending of the game was touching, if a little bit cringy in a way that only JRPG’s can manage. I do feel like I might have been a little bit more moved if the third act of the game had been a bit tighter. But they repeat themselves quite a bit, and you can only hear them lament or preach about the same shit for so long before you just kinda don’t care anymore.
I don’t regret playing Tales of Berseria, and if you like JRPG’s and you have a higher tolerance for JRPG bullshit than I do, you’ll probably love the game and its story. Even with its pacing issues, it wasn’t bad. That said, I am hoping that Tales of Arise learned some lessons from this one. I’ll just need to take a bit of a break before moving on to that one.
