I'm not giving this a rating because I might come back to this later. My motivation for playing this game kinda just died so hard. To explain, I was playing the game and trying to understand the combat. My main issues stems from the combat. I think the break soul system isn't inherently bad but it lacks any polish. Being able to chain combos with the break soul moves is really fun but limiting them with the soul gauge is really punishing and forces the game into a sluggish action game. This wouldn't be a issue if getting souls in combat was reliable. THIS IS THE BIGGEST ISSUE! You have no reliable way to acquire souls in combat. The only way to get souls is 3 different paths

-Stunning enemies which is dependent on a random chance for your attacks to do. You can also get stunned yourself and lose your souls which if you go below 3, have fun. If enemies block your attacks, you can't stun them and your best way of breaking guard is with the break soul move which requires souls but you're breaking guard to get the souls.

-Killing enemies, but if you're fighting a boss and theres no little enemies to kill then your shit out of luck. It's not a very good way to get souls, but it does let you kill low level random encounters fast.

-Dodging at the right moment gives you a CHANCE at getting a soul to drop. Most of the time my team mates would pick them up too, stealing them from me.

Having 2 or less souls makes the gameplay miserable because you cannot do a single thing. You just have to pray you get a lucky stun. If you get stunned, you're just fucked. I also dislike action games with party members, this was also a problem with Ys. When you have so many party members fighting, two bad things tend to happen.

-Enemies cannot focus on one target, because there is so many on your team, they can't fight properly. You can see this in games even like elden ring, where you use your mimic tear and the boss just stops caring about you, and/or can't make it's mind up and the AI spazs out.

-It visually becomes nonsense. So many attacks and characters yelling in the background and spells going off makes trying to distinguish anything so god damn difficult. It becomes hard to tell what is even happening in the giant group fights.

I think the straw that broke the camels back for me was when I googled "tales of berseria combat" and the first result was someone on reddit asking for help with it. I also needed help so I inquired further and most people just said they didn't really know either and beat the game. I did not like this. Being able to just ignore the games mechanics completely and being perfectly fine is not fun to me. At that point, why not just play a musou game that would feel better to button mash through? Or even a turn based rpg that makes me have to use my brain. I did not get a good feeling from this.

Otherwise, the story is fine, it was building to something, but I was more focused on trying to understand this combat system that apparently others didn't bother with learning. Game looks better than arise stylistically. Animations is better than arise, it has more soul. Music is underwhelming and sometimes just not there? Where is it? I couldn't find it.

If you value some individuals over the masses, you will love this group. Otherwise, you will hate them but after getting to know more about them, you just wished if only things had never turned out this way and you could go on an adventure around the world with them.
The main story is really missing the mark for me but most of the skits are funny and interesting and cute, if only the game had a more relatable main story. Just one single point that could make the story MUCH MUCH better is to have GOOD villains. Magilou and Bienfu are just super duper fun to be around with. Velvet and Eleanor will treat you with love and care. Eizen has a moe gap whenever he talks about his little sister and his pure heart. Rokurou's main plot makes my blood boiled. And Laphicet is, I will be frank, annoying as hell.
Combat felt bad at first then it got better, but then it went staled. You kept doing the same things over and over so I just felt bored. Only Velvet and Eleanor feel good to play honestly. The others are either too unfulfilling to play or too clunky to play or both.
Walking through some dungeons are painfully long and boring, and the music played inside them makes your brain numb or makes you fall asleep like a baby. Themes and some other soundtracks is incredible though.
Weapon customization is insanely bad. It's not complicated but really clunky and waste a a lot of your time to recycle the materials and it's not even very rewarding, GOOD GOD.

Velvet's character arc and internal struggle is among one of the best things about this game. A lot of the characters are simply far too lovable, and the world building and setting were really intriguing, with the twist of the Therions and how they worked being an especially poignant twist that drew me in as I played the game more.

The combat is clunky. There isn't any denying that. Having to manually test out and switch attacks isn't ideal, and and some enemies did feel a little tanky towards the end, but it wasn't anything too disastrous. I hear a LOT of complaints on this game regarding the map size and walking speed. I'm in the minority for this, but it wasn't honestly a bit deal. I enjoyed it for what it was. Heck, I've played slower games.

This was honestly my first Tales of entry that I properly finished. I'm very intrigued to see the others now, but I'm glad I started with this one. It was a great game through-and-through, and I definitely regard it as a JRPG Enthusiast's Must-Play!

This was really really good. Berseria easily had one of the best stories and some of the best characters I’ve seen in a game recently; the overall message and themes heavily resonated with me.

Velvet is an all time protagonist, and her internal conflict and struggle was for sure the highlight of an already stacked story. She feels like a very realistic portrayal of trauma and despair and her deeply self destructive nature illustrates those traits well. Her dynamic with the rest of the party, them pursuing their own struggles just like she does, creates a deeply fascinating cast that I love to death. I really do want to give shoutouts to every character in the group but I feel like I’d be here all day talking about each and every thing I love about them. Every character had a nice arc and a satisfying conclusion that highlighted their way to live. I do want to bring up as strong as Velvet was, my favorite of them had to be Eleanor. I definitely saw a lot of myself in her.

As for gameplay, I’ll skim over that but I would like to bring to attention I thought it was the lowlight of this game. It felt kinda clunky to me, maybe that’s just a product of me never playing a Tales game before, but it did bring me out of it a bit. The combat was probably what my biggest issue was in regards to it; I mostly found myself using Velvet and just button mashing my way through a lot of fights. I realize I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had learned to get better by using other characters but I never really felt motivated enough to do so. There’s definitely a lot to like about what I saw but as it stands I wasn’t all that huge on it.

Really the gameplay really is the only thing holding this back from being a 10 for me, but man that story and those characters are something I’m gonna be thinking about for a long time. I picked this up on a whim, started this on a whim, but I’m so glad I did and I wouldn’t be surprised at the end of the year if this was still one of my favorites. Way to start the year right. Velvet Crowe, I was moved.

Lo he intentado pero no he podido. Los 'Tales Of' no son para mí.

Este concretamente se nota cutre en ciertos aspectos: menús cutres y poco intuitivos, música algo mediocre, un sistema de combate raro y aburrido...

Demasiadas aspectos negativos que no pueden ser compensados con la
exagerada sobresexualización de la protagonista (y en mi caso esto incluso le resta).

There are the 3-star games that are "just okay", and 3-star games that average out from epic highs and equally epic lows. This is very much the latter. Loved most of the plot, best party in a Tales game bar none, and Velvet is a great protagonist. But it's also bogged down by an ending I didn't care for, oversexualized female character designs, and numerous mechanical annoyances.

The combat system is much-maligned, even (especially) among Tales veterans, who often find it "too easy" and "button mashing". This was also my opinion at first, but after engaging with the systems for what they are (instead of just "this is not like other Tales games"), I ended up finding a lot of joy in Switch Blasts, Break Souls, Mystic Arte chains, and derivative artes. I mostly played as Eleanor, who has tremendous AoE and a fun capacity to juggle enemies, and any time I was inflicted with a status effect I got rid of it by Switch-Blasting to someone else. Swapping in and out and perpetually changing playstyles made things more enjoyable and chaotic.

I still found the vast majority of the bosses quite easy-- way too easy, really, like they weren't scaled to Hard difficulty. I'm not sure if there is a way to scale it to a challenging sweet spot, to be honest--the way the combat works creates a snowball effect where the more staggers you (or the enemy) inflict, the better combos you can pull off. That meant that mobs were almost invariably more challenging than bosses, and most of the difficulty with bosses came from not being able to collect souls as easily, and having to chip away at their health until you perform one big combo. Bit repetitive. I don't think it's a coincidence that the final boss fight is the only dual boss fight (as far as I remember) and also one of the only tough ones.