I'm halfway through the final dungeon in
Tales of Berseria so I'll finish that up tonight. Did all the side-quest outside a couple crazy grind ones over the last two days. Near-final thoughts overall:
Going back through all the areas in the game again doing the sidequests it really strikes me how gorgeous and varied the locations are. The towns are all boring as fuck and every damn cave looks identical, but the fields and their usage of color looks incredibly nice.
Also the cast at this point after the last 10-15 hours of story and another 6-8 hours of sidequesting has grown on me a lot. It's not an A-game cast, but it's at least an acceptable B level cast. I think if I replayed the first 40 hours of the game again now I'd probably enjoy it more outside all the field running since the cast has grown on me. Going back doing sidequests and encountering skits that were supposed to have taken place 30 hours ago in the plotline, I'm less bothered by the angst because I like the cast now. It just took me a loooooong time to warm up on them because of all the angst.
The battle system has also grown on me a lot. There's some great innovative ideas here, my favorite being how character change is handled mid-battle. I love how instead of pausing the game and going to my artes setup and changing the artes around to match up to a particular enemy type, I just fight and use the d-pad to switch to the character that I now is strong against that enemy type/element. So I setup my characters where like Rokurou & Velvet are my fire & wind and beast characters, Elenor earth, neutral & flying, etc.. and then I change around without stopping the flow of fights and take out the enemies. Also the characters get a TON of artes which makes me happy, and the last half of them bring the flashy effects stuff that I was annoyed was missing and making battles look too plain in the first half. I also like that most of the characters play well. I mean that's been a staple in Tales for a while, making multiple fun playable characters beyond just the MC, but here almost everyone is a blast to play. I also like how based on equipment, magic casters can be physical combat users or vice-versa outside of like Velvet/Rokurou who are only physical. Everyone else has a good mix of physical and magic.
On the downside of battle, free run is stupidly broken as always which is how I beat enemies 20+ levels higher, the system is pretty mash friendly, I don't like how hi-ougis are handled and one downside of the battle system is the occassional big boss that constantly dizzies the entire party and while the battle system is very fun Heart-ish, when everyone is down to 1 SG and can't do anything at all and there's really no way to getting back the battle system suddenly does't work and becomes very unfun. Also bosses block waaaay to much for a Tales game, which is why I mainly use Elenor and her break soul to guard break and start combos.
I think outside of not having seen the ending, I'd say Berseria has an A- battle system, a B cast with a very angsty cold unfriendly lead so ymmv, a B story, D fields/dungeons/towns, D+ equipment/loot/skill system, C pacing mainly due to fields and skit interruptions, A art/animation, and F music. It's very polished and in a lot of ways it feels like the opposite side of Zestiria where unlike Zestiria which was a mess of a good game, Berseria is a polished game with some very bad design decisions. In end I think both are pretty much C games overall and a wash, maybe Berseria is a little better.
The problem is imo Zestiria/Berseria is very striking that Tales Studio has many talented great individuals and still maintains a very strong budget (Berseria feels distinctly higher budget than any jrpg that's not FF; it's like generational budget difference to Falcom's games and I wouldn't be surprised if Berseria had more buget than Persona 5 even), however some of the higher up decision makers are bad and need to go and are sinking the ship. Since Xillia, the push toward unfun giant scale sized areas that you boringly run forward through for hours, the getting rid of traditional location shops for leveling a single shop, to make loot/equipment less distinct and useful and have tons of loot with random stats that are barely different, to have bizarre skill systems, to purposely push lots of tedious backtracking as if that is still acceptable in 2016, all of these are decisions someone is thinking are a good idea or at least a "don't rock the boat, let's keep doing this because hey that's how Tales has always been" and that is a huge problem. The studio needs a major shakeup and needs to re-examine how to make fun games again. A game with a battle system like Berseria that actually has a fun world to explore like Xenoblade or something and fantastic music like Go Shiina titles would be extremely enjoyable and bring the A game that Tales has been missing.
I'm hopeful, but not optimistic as NamcoxBandai's been running their various franchises to the ground Capcom style over the last 3-6 years. But maybe they can get their shit together at some point.
Who's gonna be playing the Dark Souls III DLC?
Reviews have criticized it for being too short but I'm looking forward to it anyway.
I've learned because of how Souls/Bloodborne DLC is integrated into the world and single save slots, to just wait until all the DLC is out before playing the game so I can naturally go through it on my first run at the appropriate points. Replaying half the game or more in new game+ just to get where the DLC start is, is a bit tedious for me. Though the intense difficulty of Bloodborne's DLC at NG+ was very memorable. Hardest piece of Souls I ever played, but fair and incredibly satisfying, especially the boss fights.
