I didn't like Tales of Berseria very much at all.

The story is very melodramatic and the characters are fairly standard JRPG fare. I didn't find a lot to like (or really even understand) in any of their motivations. Feels like the characters were designed and then shoehorned into the story, rather than having an actual part to play.
The world itself is pretty generic with a group of people that are "demons" who arbitrarily have supernatural abilities and are hunted/enslaved by humans. This is conveyed with a lot of jargony lore, which people in game talk about as though it makes sense (similar to FF13), without much that is compelling or even understandable going on to make me care.

Combat doesn't stray too far from what has been established in past Tales games.
The game presents a bunch of combat options (custom combos, exploiting weaknesses, guarding and guard breaks, etc...) but engaging in those systems isn't that necessary or rewarding, so combat just ends up feeling very spammy.
This is on top of the fact that the combat itself lacks impact and feels floaty and unresponsive.
I found myself feeling like I was missing something fundmental, but also spamming my way through fights without any problems.

The world is high contrast and can be visually appealing at times, but is mostly fairly boring and generic. The few dungeons I played also were just unengaging, with puzzles that didn't make much sense or have much coherency.

Similar to my past experiences with Tales of.. games, I ended up just not having much reason to continue playing, so I dropped this one pretty quickly.

Reviewed on Sep 08, 2021


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