Several weeks ago, I was in the mood for an RPG, so I dug out Tales of Berseria, which I bought when it came out, started, and never finished. Almost a year later, I knew I wasn't going to remember a thing about it and just started over. I just finished it last week and spent some time mopping up the last of the side quests and grabbing a few trophies. No way will I ever get a platinum in this game, some of the trophies require multiple playthroughs and who has that kind of time?
I liked it, but then again, I've liked all the Tales games I've played. I realized about halfway through that it was a prequel to another Tales game and the fate of some of the characters wasn't very cheery. Kind of like that "Aha!" moment I had about halfway through Rogue One, if you know what I mean.
Combat was, like most Tales games, a little overly complicated, and I resorted to button-mashing and hoping for the best as I seem to do in most Tales games. It works for me. There were still some moves and artes I was never able to pull off in the heat of battle, but I did OK.
The weapon and armor enhancement/dismantle system was a nice addition. Instead of mashing two weapons together like in a couple of previous games, you instead can enhance them with items you find while exploring or receive in battle. You can also dismantle excess weapons and armor, breaking them down into more usable components. Need more mythril shards to enhance that mythril sword? Got tons of excess mythril weapons and armor? Break 'em down and reuse 'em!
A couple of other things this Tales game does differently is Holy Bottles no longer make the monsters disappear off the map, nor do they disable combat with the monsters. The monsters ignore you, but you can initiate battle by bumping into them. And fast travel has finally made it into a Tales game! Inoph bottles warp you to places you've visited on the map and Denore bottles warp you to the beginning of a dungeon. And for once, Easy mode was even too easy for me. I ended up turning the difficulty up to hard and even chaos while I was doing the side quests at the end.
After that, I played some Pinball FX3 while deciding what to tackle next off Mount Backlog. My PS3 needs a desperate professional cleaning (I bet there are major dust bunnies inside and the disk drive may be on its last legs. GameBox Video Games will take care of it for me for a reasonable price later when I have the money), so I disconnected it and hooked my 360 up for the first time in over a year. After waiting for the inevitable updates to finish, I took a look around in my game library. Thanks to Games with Gold, I have a bunch of games I'd completely forgotten about, all of which look very cool. I had fun with Burnout Paradise for a while, It's not a game I would have paid for, but it's certainly entertaining for a couple of hours. And I dove into some of my pinball tables on the 360 - Pinball FX2 and Pinball Arcade. And then I hauled out the physical games. It came down to a choice between Batman Arkham City and Tales of Vesperia. Yes, another Tales game. Since I'm still in RPG mode, I went with Tales of Vesperia. All was going swimmingly until I forget to save at the last village I visited and didn't save in the forest when I walked by the save point on my way to a treasure chest. I was woefully under-leveled because I hadn't needed to grind in Tales of Vesperia (another improvement, by the way) and apparently, I do need to in Vesperia. The dragon slaughtered my party within seconds and I lost two hours of progress. I gave up and went bed. As soon as I finish this blog entry, I'm going back to it, though.
Happy Friday, Pixlbit Nation!
I saw a boxed copy of Tales of Vesperia the other day. I almost bought it until I realized I had the digital copy already. I kind of wanted the boxed copy anyway. I'm not double buying things though. That's a no no. Oh, and I still need to play it. Ahhh!
While not my favorite of the Tales games, it was pretty good. What I think I like the best about many of the storylines in the Tales series is that there isn't really any black or white. The bad guys aren't necessarily truly evil, they may think that the horrible things they're doing are going to make the world a better place.
Are there multiple endings?
No, the Tales games don't generally have multiple endings. Just New Game+.
Nearly bought Xillia the other day.
That's a good one, too.
Good. I was wondering about that.
I didn't know Berseria was a prequel to another Tales game. Do you know which one? I kind of got burned out on Tales games as they bog down the battle system and make the game too long and meandering. Last one I played was Zestiria and just couldn't get into it. My favorite Tales game is Legendia. Have you ever played that one?
Yes, I have Legendia for the PS2. It's the first game I played after my dad died, and weirdly enough, one of the characters was named Moses, which was my dad's name. I didn't know that before I started playing it.
Berseria is a prequel to Zestiria . It's a stand-alone game, though.
I really liked Zestiria. I'm sorry you couldn't get into it.
Vesperia is one of my favorites. Yuri is charismatic and so are some of the other characters. Id like to play Berseria but i didnt like Zestiria. I loved Graces though.
Glad to hear from u. Been wondering about cha
Oh also the dog in Vespiria rules.
See, I really liked Zestiria a lot. I have yet to play a Tales game I didn't like (although the sequel to Tales of Symphony is definitely my least favorite of the franchise by far). What didn't you like about it?
And Berseria has a completely different vibe to it than Zestiria. A lot darker.
I don't know, I just couldn't get into it. I've been burned out for a few years since completing Graces, but I thought I was ready. Maybe if I got a little farther I would have been hooked. I'm gonna check out Berseria maybe though, it does look good.
I'm not saying I hated Zestiria, in fact I think about it a little fondly. It just didn't hold my attention.
I hate achievements requiring multiple playthroughs. Night in the Woods does that and I just think, while it's short, the game does not change enough the third time to warrant that.
A lot of rpgs do that. It's stupid. And my thought is if the game doesn't have multiple endings, what's the point?
Even in the multiple endings case, I don't feel the need to replay EVERYTHING. NitW kind of makes sense because you can choose which friend to hang out with in each episode and there are things still to find in the town. But then it also has an achievement that would require four different playhthroughs just to change one tiny thing (what head a character puts on a robot) and just ... Why?
In its defense, this is not necessary to complete the story, it's completely optional, supposedly you don't have to finish the ENTIRE game each time (but there are enough unskippable scenes to get to that point imo)and you can see all the meaty stuff in two playthroughs, but ... I would prefer being able to 100% a game without restarting it.
I got almost all the way through Vesperia before my 360 decided it couldn't take life anymore. :( I really liked it, it was one of the best looking games in the series and Troy Baker was great as Yuri. My favorite game in the series is still Symphonia. I do have Berseria but I got sidetracked on that one.
As far as losing progress, that happened to me the first time I played Final Fantasy VI on SNES. It was in the Cultists' Tower. It takes a really long time to get through unless you have the Moogle Charm (I didn't), you can only use magic and half the time you're bouncing spells off of your party members because the enemies have Reflect on them, so the battles are really slow, and at the top, you have to fight a boss that, when you kill him, he blows your party away with an Ultima spell. You're supposed to use Life 3 or drain away all of his MP (I did neither.) It took me an hour to get to the top, 45 minutes to beat the boss... and I died. I was really mad. The strategy guide I was using didn't warn me about the Ultima spell for whatever reason. And there are no save points in that dungeon, either. So that was two hours gone. If Samuel L. Jackson were there, he would have washed my mouth out with soap.
Victor Ireland, of Working Designs and Gaijinworks, put it best: "Saving your game is your best, and only, friend."
Oh, I know all about saving. I usually keep several save files going and rotate between them, just in case I do something stupid and want to go back and try something different. The hour was late and I was lulled into a false sense of security because the rest of the monsters in that area were pretty easy. Apparently, that was one of the harder bosses. It killed my party five times before I managed to defeat it, and I had two dead party members at the end of the battle. The walkthrough suggested level 16 for the party, I finally beat it with level 21 party members.
I have really enjoyed the Tales series after getting into it with Symphonia on the Gamecube. I've played that and it's sequel Dawn of the New World. Then when it switched over to the PS3 I played all those such as Xillia 1 & 2, Graces F, and Zestiria. I also got to play Phantasia for the GBA. I've been a bit of a Tales nut since then and fell in love with the series. I'm hoping the Switch gets a Tales game. That'd be pretty sweet.
Symphonia was my gateway Tales game, too. I also have Tales of Legendia and Tales of the Abyss for the PS2, too.