I’ll keep coming back to this for years to come. Mechanically it’s one of the most tightly designed, fluid games which encourages speedrunning whilst still being friendly to the casual player. It goes balls to the wall in how it asks you to tackle and experiment with its gimmicks and mechanics/physics, despite their simplicity. It’s fast paced and your decisions come on the fly, but it’s never in the sensory overloading way. The game is smooth, quick to let you reset and perfect your run and walk back your mistakes. It’s made with the same understanding of its playerbase and demographics that Celeste was, so despite the intensity or perceived difficulty, it never grates. The amount of tech you can pull off by the end is as impressive as it is fun. While I’ve seen the story be ripped into online, I’d like to say that’s some of the point. The developers wanted it to be cringe in the way it was what you’d think was cool in middle school, and I think that it sticks the landing due to a full blown commitment to camp. Not that it’s what you play the game for, there’s a skip button loudly placed in the top left of your screen. But I think it’s a case where you can embrace the cringe or easily ignore it. Most overblown critique. It’s not like people pretending Fire Emblem Engage’s story was actually good, when it lost the entire campiness midway through.

My wife: i like sonic
Her sister: i dont
Me (full of wife’s penis): mmhghhfff
The chairs:
Her dead husband:
Egg man: i hat that hedgehog

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.