LogFAQs > #962575673

For the record, the details I was talking about having been missed at the beginning of the game were the ones that led to you believing that Artorius was creating a false calamity that he could fix and therefore ascend to a position of glory... Unless I missed something on my multiple playthroughs, because I never had that impression of the man and never got a hint that I was ever supposed to.

It's been a while, but I don't really think the player is meant to have any real idea what his intentions and reasons are at all for most of the game, outside of the deliberately vague propaganda he spews for most of his screen time. It's not until the earthpulse memory events that we ever get any kind of complete picture of him, when it turns out that he's a man of uncommonly strong convictions in a world that has a heavy inclination to break people like that. He truly loved Celica and would have truly loved their son had he been born - that's something else that I don't think was ever supposed to be in question. Nothing that happens in the narrative prior to his sacrifice of Laphi was his fault.

Melchior is, to me, the true villain of the game, in taking advantage of that broken man at his worst hour. It's never brought up or even implied specifically, but I feel like you're supposed to be suspicious that he was even directly responsible for the malevolence outbreak that led to Celica's death, engineered for the specific purpose of molding Artorius into what he becomes, but even if he wasn't, he feeds the man a mountain of BS to set him on the path he takes from that point forward. Either way, Artorius is just another victim, another example of someone becoming what the world makes him.

I don't know, maybe that plays better with some knowledge of Zestiria, because their shared world is exceptionally bleak and vicious and depressing even by the standards of most JRPGs all things considered, and at the end of the day I don't think of Artorius as any sort of top-tier antagonist even with the added context. But I do think there are important distinctions to be made as far as what happenings in the plot he's actually responsible for. For one thing, it shouldn't go unnoticed that Velvet herself uses some deductive logic in the prologue that's disturbingly similar to the Abbey's detached brand of reason, and added to the fact that she was probably at least a little bit in love with him during that time it's not a stretch to imagine that in any timeline where Arthur doesn't kill her brother there's a nonzero chance she becomes one of his most ardent supporters at least for a while.

Which brings me to my next point - you've hit the part in the story where it starts to suffer juuuust a tad for me. The Abbey steams their crazy locomotive straight off the deep end with the Suppression, and it's a shame, because I think the conflict would be more interesting if they didn't take that last step into being wholly, irredeemably evil. The rest of the game has at least some shades-of-gray writing based on the facts that Velvet's group does some pretty bad stuff and that some of the Abbey's very basic principles are not without merit if they weren't taken to such extremes. But that all gets thrown out the window for the sake of having a much cleaner delineation of the good guys and bad guys, which I think is to the detriment of the game as a whole and Velvet's character arc. It doesn't ruin things by any means - Berseria is a top 10 (or at the very least, 15) game of all time for me and Velvet landed at #7 in my giant series character ranking - but I do think some potential was missed.

On a completely different note, you said that "Melchior is torturing Magilou [on the Hexen Isle] instead of killing her like a smarter villain," and I want to clarify that that's not what was happening. Melchior couldn't get past her. All that torture, the repeated shattering of her heart and so forth, was him trying to take down her defenses long enough to seal the rest of the group away. No wasting of time, no attempts to cause excess pain; Melchior is pulling out every stop he's able to and she still manages to hold him off. Just felt the need to clear that up because your understanding does a bit of a disservice to Melchior's cleverness and, much more importantly, to what I think is the single most badass scene in the entire Tales franchise.

I love her "hype man" moment in Meirchio so much, too. When the Berseria cast is firing on all cylinders, there aren't too many better ones.