Tales of Berseria Review [Minor Spoilers]
Gameplay
Now it’s finally time to talk about the gameplay. Since this is an action RPG, there is going to be elements of strategy as well as reaction timing, creating a fast-paced and frantic experience.
Unlike most Action RPGs I have played, the Tales series allows you to control essentially all the characters in your party in a single battle, albeit one at a time. This is a refreshing change for me as if allows me to switch to another character if I ever feel bored with a certain character’s playstyle, and helps keep the battle system fresh for a long period of time.
Tales of Berseria features a soul system, in which you work with a certain number of souls that acts like battle points, allowing you access to basically all of your essential moves. You can have a minimum of 1 soul to a maximum of 5 souls, and each attack, otherwise known as “artes” requires one soul, and the number of souls determine the number of artes that you can chain together in a combo. There are numerous types of artes that have both a chain bonus and a status bonus attached to it. The chain bonus, such as reduced souls cost, activates if you use the move after a combo, while the status bonus such as paralysis, has a chance to activate if you use that move.
The acquisition and depletion of souls depends on the statuses inflicted upon you or the enemy. If you are afflicted with a status effect, such as a stun, you lose a soul, on the other hand, if you inflict stun to an enemy, you gain a soul. The enemy’s souls work in the same way, so enemies become more dangerous as they inflict multiple status effects on you, and vice versa.
Characters can also use moves called break souls, which expends a soul in exchange for a powerful attack, and the extension of a combo. This coupled with the artes makes the bulk of Berseria’s combo game. Paired with the chain bonus and status bonus system, the combat mechanics all combine together to create a very aggressive playstyle, encouraging the player to chain long strings of combos together with artes and break souls, while utilizing the status and chain bonuses to do increase damage and further extend your combos.
This playstyle is where I believe the game is at it’s best, as the constant aggression allows for the combat to feel very smooth and fluid, while also incentivizing the player to make quick decisions based on both prediction and reaction so that they can keep their combo string going. It can be incredibly addicting to constantly be on the offensive, extending your combos to the limits and wiping out enemy encounters in a matter of seconds not just within big numbers, but with skill.
On top of all this, the game also has moves called mystic artes, incredibly powerful moves that have their own unique animations which occur in a cinematic, at the cost of a requiring a setup such as a using a certain number of artes in succession. These moves use their own points called Battle Points (BG), which can only build up when you activate break souls moves. This further incentivizes players to constantly use their break souls, instead of just using the same combos over and over again, as it can grant you access to incredibly powerful attacks that can come in handy in tough encounters. You can also use BG to switch swap between characters in your reserves, either to get out of a sticky situation or to extend a combo, further increasing the number of options you have at each given battle, and adding upon the aggressive playstyle that I mentioned earlier.
One area where the combat system I feel falls short on is during boss battles. Since bosses have more resistances to statuses, this makes it hard to gather more souls during boss encounters. In order to compensate this, the player has a tool that allows them to increase the chances of inflicting statuses by blocking for a certain period of time. This ultimately creates an experience where you are just holding block for the majority of the time, hoping to land a status effect on the boss so you can acquire more souls.
While I feel this system has its merits, such as encouraging players to think carefully about how to attack the boss and how to avoid it. I feel that it more often slows down the gameplay, as it often takes too long to get enough souls to start a big combo, making it feel almost completely different than when you’re fighting regular mob encounters.
I also feel that enemy status effect procs are much too prevalent, especially during higher difficulties. The chance of getting stunlocked and getting immediately pummeled to death in a matter of seconds is too high and can lead to a lot of frustrations, especially when the attacks are hard to see coming, as it either comes too fast or there is just too much things going on at the same time. My suggestion would be to have attacks that cause status effects to have bigger telegraphs, and for attacks that are hard to see coming to instead deal damage but not cause status effects. That way it will encourage players to look out for certain attacks, and have them react to it, rather than have them frantically run around or block constantly hoping not to get stunlocked.
Another point of contention is also the lock-on system, or more accurately the lack-of a proper lock-on system. The camera during battle is entirely static and doesn’t move at all unless you manually move the camera yourself, even when you are locked on to an enemy. This can be incredibly troublesome when you have fast enemies that are constantly darting off the screen, requiring you manually follow it every single time. Now maybe I have been spoiled by other action RPGs such as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XV, but I feel that it should be expected to have mechanics like this in action-heavy games, as the camera is the one element in an action game that can either make or break a game’s combat system.
Because there is a lack of a dynamic camera, that makes it so that this game also doesn’t have an auto-track system for character moves in between animations. What I mean by this is that after a move, if an enemy moves to another spot while you’re executing an attack, in most games if you are locked-on to an enemy, your character will automatically track to the enemy with the next attack, allowing your combo to have a smooth transition. If that is taken away, you’ll have a character that will just continue the animation, often completely missing the attack, making your character look as if they were hallucinating during the middle of the fight. Now granted this only happens if you switch character control to “manual” mode, and the auto-track system does come back when you set it to either “semi-auto” or “auto” mode.
But the problem then becomes that the auto-track system works so well that it becomes restrictive, more often than not you won’t be able to start a combo unless you’re right next to the opponent, which can feel incredibly jarring if you’re looking to start a combo, only to awkwardly walk across the battlefield because the enemy you locked on was on the other side. While I eventually found a solution to this problem by playing in semi-auto mode and switching targets once my main target was too far away, I still stand by the fact that this is one aspect of the combat system which definitely annoyed me, and I hope that this isn’t a recurring problem with other Tales games.
Now onto dungeon and level design
I’ll be honest, the level design in this game is nothing extraordinary, dungeons are incredibly linear and have almost no variety among them, save for a few easy puzzles that encouraged more backtracking than actual puzzle-solving. Enemy placement also feels weird as they are only placed in large rooms and in large numbers, separated by long narrow corridors. This causes the dungeons to feel uninspired, as it feels like the developers didn’t really put effort into placing enemies in more cleverly, and instead took the easy way out.
Travelling in areas can also become tedious, as the areas are often much too large for their own good, and you don’t get a way to travel any faster than your default running speed until much later in the game. This coupled with the amount of backtracking can leave you feeling tired after your trek across the vast lands of nothingness. The game could have made the areas much smaller, or provide a faster means of transportation much earlier in the game.
The equipment and upgrade system I feel was done very well in this game. Weapons and armor can be bought from stores or dropped from enemies after battles, each piece of equipment will have random skills attached to it that provide small bonuses to the character holding onto that equipment. Each piece of equipment also has a skill called a master skill, which after acquiring a certain amount of grade, points which are acquired after battle, will allow you to have access to that skill permanently. Weapons can upgrade with materials and acquire more damage plus other bonus effects such as increased damage on certain attacks. Materials can be obtained through picking up loot in the world or dismantling other weapons, the more upgraded your weapon, the higher grade of materials you’ll be able to acquire after dismantling. This overall incentivizes the player to try out multitudes of weapons, not just stick with one, and to not be afraid of dismantling old weapons for new ones. It also incentivizes the player to perform well in battles, as the amount of grade in battle is correlated to your performance in battle, all of which are things I really liked about this system. The game also encourages players to try out higher difficulties, as some random skills from weapons can only be obtained in higher difficulties, to compensate for the increase in difficulty. This is something I don’t see much in other JRPG’s, and I must commend Namco for it, as it provides more replayability compared to other games in the same genre.
(Continued on Page 3)
