LogFAQs > #968992253

Played a little more last night to prevent myself from falling asleep. What a weird day yesterday was - I don't even remember forgetting that detail!

I took out the wyvern in Pletzerback Wetland. Apparently this was somebody Zaveid knew, someone he'd made a pact with on "a previous journey" in the same area many years before, probably back when Reneed still existed and that place wasn't nearly uninhabitable. I'm not sure who this could be since Zaveid wasn't playable in Berseria. It's not Velvet, who was sealed away and had her therion form. It's not Rokurou, who was also a daemon to begin with. It's not Eizen, who we killed already (RIP). It's not Laphicet, who's now Maotelus. It's not Magilou, who's buried in Trizolde Cave. And Eleanor wouldn't make any sense. Looking it up, it was one of the wyverns from Lothringen (yeah, back before it was "partial"), the one he'd stopped Velvet and Eizen from killing in that whole fracas. Easy to forget that part of that sequence given everything else that transpired. Anyway, this fight unlocks Zaveid's ultimate Mystic Arte, which I've yet to see.

After this, I hike back through Rolance to Loegres, and there I see Sergei who says the two sides have agreed to peace, but the details haven't been worked out yet because politics. What he says sounds uncannily realistic. The conservatives are refusing to budge on their principles and aren't willing to negotiate. The progressives are trying anything they can to gain political power and drown the other side out. Seriously, this sounds like OUR world. It sucks being a moderate, I guess. I have people ask me how I can support both outlawing abortion and a situational death penalty. And that's because I think logically, not politically. Logic would indicate that nothing really needs to change with this treaty aside from border control measures, so there aren't any further skirmishes or battles.

After this, I head into the woods by Lastonbury to check on the two remaining kids and tell them we killed the bad guys. Unfortunately, by returning to the same place and constantly recalling the death of her friends, the girl becomes hellionized again, and Talfryn (one of Rose's assassins, the guy in the hat who got away) is trying to calm her down. Sorry just goes and purifies her instantly, but it's too late. The other kid is dead, and this one... may or may not be. Sorry rues that he wasn't actually able to save anyone, but Rose talks him down by saying if he hadn't managed to purify her the first time, she could've killed many people. She always knows what to say, and never needs comforting herself, after all.

Also, Berseria was CLEARLY being planned when this late-game NPC dialogue was written, and it's unclear what was added later in this game to tie in. Like, Vortigern is there, but it's in a desert and looks like a dried-up wall; this may have been added later with the thought to make it a major dungeon in Berseria. A random NPC in Loegres talks about seeing an old map of what became Glenwood, and how different it was, and how "a lot of guesswork" had to go into it. That last part we know to be untrue, but that's what time will do. People aren't aware of this stuff. There are a lot of tie-ins, including Zaveid mentioning Melchior, the grave that's probably Magilou's, the wyvern... they really tied the two games together at this point, but it feels forced. It doesn't feel natural. It just feels like they tacked a lot of stuff on and that's probably why a lot of people ended up confused. I think I figured out the secret to not outright hating Zestiria: Play Berseria first.

Now, I would by all means consider this a mediocre JRPG, and especially a sub-par Tales game. The first two thirds of the game is devoid of anything exciting or interesting; the buildup is thrown away to replace Alisha with Rose, and the lack of conflict or tension for too long a period makes it boring. It only starts to get interesting when the Dezel/Symone drama unfolds, but the writing is so uneven after this - there are parts that are great, particularly the climax (in no small part due to "Rising Up"), but other parts that are downright terrible (the entire Lunarre thing in Loegres, as well as how confusing the Symone thing is) - that it isn't as engaging as it could be. It honestly feels like they KNEW Berseria would have to exist as they built this part, so that in turn shows issues with the writing of this game.

I also gotta say that the battle system is really boring by now. Armatization has long lost its novelty, and that mechanic makes it easy to overpower foes with their weaknesses, making it harder when you're not linked up. It's imbalanced. What's worse is the skill system - you have no real way to control what skills you have on your weapons, but at least you're not getting hundreds of 'em like in Berseria. I'd prefer a mechanic that could let you choose skills to add to weapons for a fee. You'd have to pay a blacksmith each time instead of getting each skill for free ONCE when you encounter the normin it's tied to, using a very unintelligently-designed UI. You can't even check how adding those skills affects your loadout! There's a lot of back-and-forthing there and it's obnoxious to figure out. If you're designing a game, you should play this one to see how NOT to do a UI. But yeah, the normin should simply unlock the ability to add that skill to a weapon at the smith; each weapon has one innate skill and three other slots, just as it is now. Just pay 500 gald for the first column skills, 1000 for the second, 2000 for the third, etc. Also increase the gald output by 25% because 256,000 for the last column isn't easy to come by. That's all I have right now and it's endgame, where my gald total is usually in the millions.

So yeah, this game is pretty mediocre. And, going into the grand finale, I'm thinking it's just a 5/10 game. That's higher than I've seen some people give it. There's nothing particularly WRONG with it - I don't outright hate any of the cast, but I don't really like any of them either. It's mostly ambivalence. I don't care what happens to any of them. I don't care who wins in the end. There's nothing that's made me wholly invested in their story, what little of it there is. There hasn't been enough drama or tension between party members. Really, the only fun part was Edna and Lailah trolling Mikleo on the regular.

We'll see how the finale is, of course. I haven't quite seen the Chernobyl-level disaster people speak of yet, just a few shoddily-written parts like... the Scattered Bones execution nonsense. Like WTF was that shit? Was that written by the same 6 y/o that wrote the terrible scene in Marlind where Rose was whining about how Sorry had to leave? This is why you need someone to read over your work. I'd be extremely critical of this, and also ask "What about the FUN scenes? This party seems all business. When they aren't so serious, they're great, but those moments are rare." I blame Rose.