Current Events > Playing Tales of Berseria, any thing to keep in mind?

(+) Yeah! (+)

saspa posted...

Also I don't have a problem with Oscar either, although... this game really likes the brother sister angle doesn't it, with Oscar and Teresa and Vel and Laphi

Yeah Oscar and Teresa are implied to be a bit closer then siblings should be.

---

Rharyx211 posted...

Yeah.

As I suspected. Indeed it is a pretty weird decision, both her voice and design and just overall aesthetic. I mean wtf is she wearing, a skin-colored dress or...? What is even with that design.

A bit strange considering everything and everyone else is on point, and she has some pivotal scenes that are meant to pull at our heartstrings and further sympathize with Eleanor like in that ship scene with her scar.
---

Holy shit so found out I can chain mystic artes, this is such a game changer. Why the heck, in all the dozens of tutorials, did the game not mention this fact? I only just found out about it on a random topic.

So I can basically chain 6 mystic artes? Does it have to be in order

What other hidden mechanics are they not telling us? Anything else to watch out for?
---

AvantgardeAClue posted...

I have a copy signed by all the voice actors of the main party that Im proud of

Even for a JRPG that beginning was fucking DARK

Are you interested in Arise, TC? Magilous VA voices the main heroine for that game, go figure

@AvantgardeAClue
It's funny you bring that up. I'm still playing this game but it actually makes me mildly curious about the ps3 Tales game and if they were anywhere near as good as this one, to potentially try out. But I'm worried this game being so much better will ruin any enjoyment of previous installments.

As for Tales of Arise, I was looking forward to it but after skimming some of the images and trailers I'm a bit worried. Still cautiously optimistic it might be good.

Heck I'm fine so far with Berseria minus a few gameplay gripes that I've been listing throughout the topic. If they just fixed those and further added quality of life improvements, it would be all I'd need out of Tales .

Oh and of course, maintaining such great characters. I'm worried the characters won't be nearly as great as Berseria, because that's a pretty deciding factor.
---

Finally got the "skateboard" lol (it's really more of a mini hovercraft) and... yeah. It could be faster, considering. It also controls terribly, wasn't this game as recent as 2017? Even KH2's skateboard handled tons better...

The Aldina Plains are probably the most egregious example of "huge open field" criticism and the fact that you can't traverse it quickly is annoying, especially for backtracking. I guess I'd have to keep wasting denore bottles and inoph bottles but I also want to battle enemies, I just don't want to spend a few minutes watching velvet trudge through a large mostly empty area just to get to the next battle.

I really hope they kept this in mind when making Tales of Arise. Berseria has reawakened my interest in the Tales series for the first time in a while, so I hope Arise is to Tales what Breath of the Wild was to Zelda.
---

Also real talk I wish those little items and trinkets you pick up were all odorless fluid. It's the one crafting item that I can never find and yet you need 5 of them to upgrade a weapon, it's pretty annoying. What a weird oversight, like how are we supposed to get odorless fluids if we can't even buy them and when dismantling weapons they just give out balmy fluid or mellow fluid.

Instead it's a borderline useless item like "chipped copper coin" which is sold for like 10 gald :/
---

Yeah Odorless fluid becomes one of the most common materials to one of the rarest and most important for upgrading stuff.

It's dumb

Erm is the reaper's curse real? There are some days where Eizen keeps dying in battle, where his HP shoots to 0 just like that and I'm like wtf what happened. This one time it was a fight against some bees so maybe their stinger is an insta kill? But they don't KO anyone else... and if his HP was in danger why didn't he switch blast.

I'm really annoyed now that the AI don't use their BG, neither for switch blasts nor mystic artes. It's like, do I have to do everything?
---

With the AI being so poor, but the combat being pretty intriguing, this is the first time in Tales games I kinda would have liked to play it multiplayer with someone else controlling one of the characters, chaining combos and break souls and break artes and mystic artes and even switch blasts if need be.
---

saspa posted...

Erm is the reaper's curse real? There are some days where Eizen keeps dying in battle, where his HP shoots to 0 just like that and I'm like wtf what happened. This one time it was a fight against some bees so maybe their stinger is an insta kill? But they don't KO anyone else... and if his HP was in danger why didn't he switch blast.

I'm really annoyed now that the AI don't use their BG, neither for switch blasts nor mystic artes. It's like, do I have to do everything?

Lol, not real like that. The bees are actually prettt strong iirc, so Eizen getting nuked isn-/ too surprising. It does depend on your difficulty though. I've never seen the AI use a switch blast, but they use their Mystic Artes pretty often for me. I'm sure someone alresdy mentioned it, but did you enable MAs in the character settings under strategy?

I've heard they claimed that the release bug that made the AI basically useless (ie. A character would run up to an enemy, attack once, run away, stay still for 3 seconds, then repeat) was fixed, but some friends have encountered that problem despite it being "fixed". Maybe you're getting that bug?


---

Thekiller37 posted...

Lol, not real like that. The bees are actually prettt strong iirc, so Eizen getting nuked isn-/ too surprising. It does depend on your difficulty though. I've never seen the AI use a switch blast, but they use their Mystic Artes pretty often for me. I'm sure someone alresdy mentioned it, but did you enable MAs in the character settings under strategy?

I've heard they claimed that the release bug that made the AI basically useless (ie. A character would run up to an enemy, attack once, run away, stay still for 3 seconds, then repeat) was fixed, but some friends have encountered that problem despite it being "fixed". Maybe you're getting that bug?

I definitely have settings set to mystic artes. Used to have it set to "when full" so they'd do whatever came naturally, but after realizing they probably don't use switch blasts (since they barely use MAs in the first place) decided to just keep it at mystic artes in hopes of them spamming it.

Don't know if it's a bug, but the AI absolutely does that sometimes. I remember just spamming Velvet attacks while keeping my eye on the other 3 characters just to see what the heck they're doing, and... yeah. Eg saw Rokuro literally just standing there for a couple of seconds without doing anything. Same with Eizen, and was almost going to yell at the screen in anger.

This Eizen dying thing also happened in other circumstances, like when fighting a bunch of fairies in a different area. I honestly don't know what's happening, every time I try to keep him in the corner of my eye to see how/why he's fainting like that I get distracted by an enemy and have to demon claw them with Velvet.
---

Saw a topic suggesting the most ideal AI settings for the characters to kick ass, but was kind of skeptical at the amount of moves it asked me to turn off and lot of posts in the topic where saying that tc was absolutely wrong, so I don't know who to trust.
---

For Berseria, you don't really have to turn off Artes, unless the SG cost is too high for what you need/want.

There aren't that many Artes that knockdown or blow away enemies out of range like previous Tales.

Eizen is kinda a Glass Cannon. I'm pretty sure he has the lowest defense and average health, but makes up for it with the highest stun stat and a Burst Arte to take advantage of it

I don't remember all the Burst Gauge strategy options but in general, you definitely don't want the AI to use Mystics (if it's a option).

Only BG thing you want the AI to do is to Switch out members if they are about to die.

In previous Tales games I'd turn off the low level spells like Fire 1 in favor of the tier 2 and 3 spells like Fire 2 where the blast is stronger, so that spell casters just cast their strongest magic always all the time.

But with the battle system upheaval and change I don't know which to switch off in favor of them just spamming the strongest and doing break souls and recovering souls.

Eg what I now exclusively do with velvet is spam heaven claw/hell claw which keeps me in therion mode forever and increases my BG to boot and lets me keep spamming attacks relentlessly on enemies. I want the AI to do the same, start with artes and then break souls and rinse and repeat.

Also yeah, they definitely are doing the "hit once and then run away" thing as well as "run around aimlessly like fucking idiots until they get hit by a giant ogre's club and outright die"

I'm up to my wits end trying to experiment with the strategy settings for which is the optimal aggressive, relentless strategy attack, and not the "run around like morons" strategy which I'm not sure why it exists.
---

I also once again want to complain about the new unnecessarily large battle area and enemies running around chasing my fellow moronic party members who are running away and I'm trying to chase the enemies to hit them before my HP dwindles to 0 due to therion mode.

In previous Tales games there was a position strategy option. Isn't there any way I can get my party members to either stick in place or at least stay behind Velvet the entire time so that all enemies run directly into Velvet's therion hand and get consumed?
---

Wow so this game... Velvet actually gets called out on naming the malak Laphicet after her dead brother, and constantly comparing him to her brother and using him as a surrogate.

To compensate she gives him a new nickname, Phi to show that he's his own person.

I'm really impressed with the game for doing that. Sure it was obvious what she was doing, but I didn't expect the game to be actively aware of it and call it out.
---

Aha as I expected, that little girl we saw in Melchior's vision was Eizen's sister.

This game really likes to use that brother-sister dynamic...
---

Omg we're back in Velvet's hometown, the rustic village from the beginning of the game! What the... everyone's alive?

This is so obviously a trick of some kind, an illusion of some sort, and yet the party is claiming they don't detect any spells in the area...
---

Welp... as I suspected. I knew it probably, nay obviously, was a trick, but what really sealed it is Velvet's old friend Niko seeing her demon arm and going "I don't care you're a demon now as long as you stay here forever"

Still was pretty sad... that was a good segment of the game.

Eleanor: "wow. I didn't know you even had smile muscles"

Lol amazing
---

Gonna be taking a break for a while from playing due to moving,
---