Board 8 > Tales of Berseria is pretty great

(+) Yeah! (+)

Laphicet > Magilou > Eizen > Velvet > Eleanor > Rokurou
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NOt sure if theyre my top favorite but pretty easy top 3
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Magilou > Velvet > Laphicet > Eizen > Rokurou > Eleanor

all are good except Eleanor
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Eleanor great stuff

I seem to like Laphicet less than most here do...
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Eleanor is great but I understand why someone wouldn't like her. I didn't at first either.
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Eleanor is great. Provides a much-needed foil.

Velvet > Laphicet > Eleanor > Eizen > Magilou > Rokurou
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Also, for a dedicated jobber, Zaveid is great too. And Artorius. And the wonder twins. Screw Melchior though that ass is OP.
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Zaveid is a cool bro.

Much cooler than he was in the other gaaaaaaame.
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Oh are we doing rankings

Magilou > Velvet > Laphicet > Eleanor > Rokurou > Eizen

none of them are bad though
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Zaveid's always been a cool bro

I think I like Zestiria Zaveid better, but both are great.
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Magilou > Velvet > Eizen > Laphicet > Eleanor > Rokurou

All great, though. Barely edges out Abyss for best cast in the series.
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I'm really glad Abyss seems to be well regarded now. Back in the day I know we had a lot of haters for that game, mainly Symphonia fanboys
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I do not like a single thing about Abyss
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Abyss is the best Tales game! Berseria came real close.
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I could spend several full posts talking about every aspect of Abyss I dislike, but this is a Berseria love topic and I'd like to keep it that way

Berseria side note of the day: LOL Hellawes
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LapisLazuli posted...

Abyss is the best Tales game! Berseria came real close.

Truth in this post.
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Abyss has always been a top 3 if not #1 Tales for me personally
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Abyss's load times kill it.

Ehhhhhh it's not THAT bad. And you could always play the 3DS version.
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Abyss is not great.
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I would say.....damn, Abyss is either my 2nd or 3rd favorite game overall.
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Please guys this topic is a safe space free from Tales of the Abyss. Keep talking and you may trigger* me.

*This will involve a 3-post rant about how I hate everyone and everything in the game except Luke and I only don't hate Luke out of pity for the toxic friends he got saddled with
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Got it memorized.
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I mean I wasn't gonna keep going but other people started chiming in.

I totally get why someone would hate it.
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Finally, I have wanted to announce to a town that I am a terrifying monster demon and they should fear me the ENTIRE GAME.
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One thing I love about this game is how consistently exceeds my expectations. Every scene is at least a little better than I would have figured. I've been on board with almost everything that's happened in the game and it's a good feeling.
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Melchior on Chaos is absolutely bonkers
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when I first saw Melchior, I was like "oh man, he's wearing a pirate hat, I bet he's actually Aifread infiltrating the church in disguise and nobody recognizes him because reasons" (like a Clark Kent sorta thing) (this made so much sense too, Aifread disappeared from prison at the time of Melchior's visit, but did anyone ever see the two of them in the same place at the same time??)

my other theory was that Melchior was a RIVAL PIRATE and kidnapped Aifread to cement his position as the true terror of the seas

I was pretty disappointed when none of that was true, he just randomly wears a pirate hat for no reason
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So many sidequests all at once

Also how in the hell am I supposed to beat Phoenix when he's 90 levels above me and his hitbox is nonexistent
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With DLC level boosts and crazy grinding I still had to drop down the the lowest difficulty to beat him.

It's crazy, becausr he's clearly a superboss but it's so easy to just accidentally get into that fight.
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all magic, all the time. just never get into his melee range. if you have aggro, run away from him in circles until he starts chasing someone else.
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I don't remember what level I did that fight on, but yeah I would definitely consider dropping the difficulty.
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Use an All-Divide, too. Fight will take forever but becomes much more winnable.
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yeah demi-melchior was SUPER annoying on chaos, especially in the second 25% of his health when he spammed the practically undodgeable giant gravity spell. he actually got easier after that.

for the guy we're talking about now: honestly melee sucks and the easiest way to take him down is to spam malak artes on him...eizen's earth stuff in particular i remember being really good. keep your distance and you should be able to dodge everything (he runs fast but he starts moves like the kick a fixed distance from you so you can avoid them). if you set all your ai to spam at range too they'll often combo with you to lock him down for a while.

when he gets lower he'll start casting himself, which is actually good for you because he only casts around himself, so you can nuke him while he sits there doing crown fire or flame vortex. he's still really fast on chaos so it's a pain
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I couldn't beat Melchior without an all-divide. Like his giant gravity spell would one-shot any member of my party even if they guarded through the entire thing, and it'd often hit multiple dudes at once. I might be underleveled - I've had the game on the highest possible difficulty for a while now (so Chaos at this point) and I think that decreases EXP? I've been able to overcome everything except Melchior and Phoenix without too much trouble though.

I've never used anyone but Velvet so I might just have to use her as bait and have 3 casters spamming and hope for the best. I'm certain I'll have to tone down the difficulty though. I don't have the time or inclination to grind and my guys were doing almost no damage to him even when they were hitting.

Also Rokurou blocking Shigure's Mystic Arte was pretty damn awesome
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Man, the subtitles in these sidequests can get really bad. I was just in a scene where every 1/3 line had text that didn't match up with the spoken voice acting. I know this game had a low budget but come on.
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Sometimes that's done intentionally. They'll write a subtitle script that's fairly accurate to go along with the Japanese audio, then they'll write a dub script that changes things to match the lip flaps better.
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This Katz song is something out of Katamari
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This Zaveid fight is not fun. It's highlighting a lot of the flaws of the combat system.
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I don't remember that fight being too bad, but I was doing everything on easy at that point.
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I'm on Chaos so I didn't expect a cakewalk but it was just obnoxious. He recovered from attacks like 10x quicker than anything else in the game I've fought up to that point. At one point he was downed, so I used Water Snake Way, a Velvet move where she kicks them up, dashes back, then dashes forward for a second hit. It's supposed to combo into itself. After Zaveid got knocked up, he immediately recovered turned around and smacked Velvet for her full health before I was even done dashing back. That's just one example of many and it didn't help that he has no weakness and a lot of the combat strategy is exploiting weaknesses. I did manage to have an exciting photo finish win though which made it worth it.
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Berseria's biggest combat flaw, and the thing that causes Graces to still sit at #1 for combat, is that the Velvet's attacks aren't very efficient for dealing with smaller or very fast enemies. This is apparent throughout the game and ESPECIALLY against anything small that flies.
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It's a testament to this game's character writing that Eizen's stupid reaper's curse thing doesn't drag him or the plot down.
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Not in this game!
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LapisLazuli posted...

Berseria's biggest combat flaw, and the thing that causes Graces to still sit at #1 for combat, is that the Velvet's attacks aren't very efficient for dealing with smaller or very fast enemies. This is apparent throughout the game and ESPECIALLY against anything small that flies.

Meant to comment on this - Tales of Graces has what might be my favorite RPG combat ever, but only when you're about 80% of the way into the game. The CC gating early on is awful. You really can't do much or string together fun combos. Berseria was much smarter about this by having a relatively stable amount of CC (or whatever it's called). The numbers go up but it never feels like you're missing out on ability usage at any point in the game.
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I mean....you could always uh....but all the CC up DLC from the beginning like I did...
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Great Tales. At the very least, it feels like a "complete" Tales game in a all areas.

LapisLazuli posted...

I mean....you could always uh....but all the CC up DLC from the beginning like I did...

Man Namco has some awful business practices with Tales

Wonder when we'll get Tales of Beseria HD Remix Edition, now with environments that don't suck and including a new shoehorned-in party member
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Oh yeah Tales is a fucking dirty as shit franchise nowadays. I thiiiiink there ended up being a total of +10 CC you could buy in Graces for a total of...$10? 2 +3 packs and 2 +2 packs.

I mean, I'm sure that stuff is still up.

It was so fucking weird because it's awful in concept but it made the game so much better to play that there was no way in hell I WASN'T gonna buy it.
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Have been running around doing every sidequest and sideboss I can that's *not* Normin Phoenix. Think I'm just about done with everyone outside of the final main story stuff. Some quick comments:

1. I really like the random NPC dialogue, both voiced and unvoiced. It fleshes out the world a lot and the fact that they auto-mark every NPC on the map with an icon to let you know if they have something new to say or not is amazing. Why hasn't every RPG ever done this?
2. The Silva/Dragon boss fight was really fun. I don't know how I'm supposed to survive Meteor Swarm spam without abusing Velvet's 'never die while therionized' thing though.
3. Went back and watched some scenes on the Katz scene viewer. There are some really, really good ones there.
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