Tales of Berseria Review by Todd Lewis

Tales of Berseria excels at everything but one thing: the combat. If this game had the combat from Vesperia, it would easily be an 8. This game has decent characters, the storytelling is amazing because of the dialogue and banter between the characters, the weapon skill system is typical tales, which isn’t bad. The tales formula works here. It’s everything you expect, until you get to the combat...dang. The combat pretends to be complex by having enemies with weaknesses and you, the player, are to exploit them via combos. It comes off as one of the laziest ways to make combat interesting because you’re just gonna be switching moves in and out and in and out and it becomes tedious. It’s also too easy and you have to unlock the hardest difficulty to even care about weaknesses but since the weaknesses are not even interesting, who cares?! The combat is just not satisfying. It’s cool when Velvet gets her arm out to do some rad combos but she herself is a bland character. She’s supposed to be a badass but she doesn’t bring much to the table and the other characters carry her essentially. I would rather read the manga than stomach this battle system further. It’s so good too, tales formula-wise, but I can’t get behind the core gameplay and It’s frustrating. Bottom line: everything outside the combat is good. Battles don’t feel fluid or natural. They feel forced, awkward, and tiring. At the worst, the combat is just plain boring. Vesperia had attack canceling and combo chaining. What happened? Sorry Tales, I will not be returning to the series unless Arise does something different.