Tales of Berseria

/

Misc

  • It feels like there’s a lot of incentive to explore, between the shiny objects, herbs, and katz souls

  • It’s kind of funny actually, seeing katz souls strewn around the world to guide the player, kind of similar to how one would use coins in a mario game

  • Mastering equipment skills is fun, but it makes it feel like the stats and random skills on gear are kind of inconsequential. No matter how good a piece of gear is, it won’t help you later once you find something better. Mastering a new skill though, will help you forever

  • I’m not really a big fan of how you spend your katz souls. I don’t mind using them to open chests and get cosmetic stuff, but a lot of these chests are just empty, and it’s pretty insulting to spend like 100 souls and get nothing for it

  • You get so many pieces of gear and random item pickups, that it feels like chests are kind of inconsequential. They don’t seem like they’ve even tried very hard to put good items in them - most of the time it seems like they are no better than randomly sparkly items you pick off the ground

  • This character card minigame that’s all over the place is completely indecipherable, I have no idea how this game is meant to work, and I have no idea who most of the characters are

  • Basically everything about the Geo Board just feels really random and made up. Like they needed an excuse to make the player able to go faster on the map, so they just did the first idea they had?

  • It’s really weird that when you interact with a geotree thing to unlock the geoboard in an area, there’s no fanfare or messaging of any kind, just a little animation. Would it really be that hard to have a little “Geoboard unlcoked in [AREA_NAME]” message?

  • I kind of wonder sometimes how much farming of SP and katz souls the game expects the player to do. I feel like I do way more of both than the average player would, and yet I’m constantly behind


UI/UX

  • They’ve managed to streamline a lot of the traditional JRPG menu flow and remove some superfluous elements. It’s absence fells conspicuous at times, but it’s nice to have things cleaned up a bit

  • Removing normal attacks entirely was a really good move

  • Creating your own arte flowchart is a little overwhelming. The ability to use “your choice” to autocombo is nice, but I’m not sure people would even understand how to use that properly, if they are overwhelmed by the flowchart to begin with

  • It’s neat that whoever lands the last hit in battle gets bonus exp, like there’s some real tangible value in being the one with the glamour shot on the victory screen

  • It’s a little weird that all of the menus default to Velvet (or just the person in slot 1?). I guess it’s a tradeoff - you save an input every time you want to change velvet’s kit, you lose an input every time you want to change someone else’s

  • It’s a little annoying that highlighitng an item in the “all” category doesn’t remove it’s newness indicator until you navigate away from it

  • This game handles NPC dialogue the same was as Dragon Quest XI, and I’m a fan. Only some NPCs have dialogue bubbles indicating you can talk, and only some of them again have a special one, indicating those NPCs have important information. It’s a great way to have a lively, populous town, while simultaneously filtering the player to the important information

  • Using marquee text for skill descriptions is a really efficient use of space, but holy jeez is it annoying to try and read

  • It’s nice of them to put a newness indicator on equipment items that are mastered

  • The random skill system has some kind of weird effects on how equipment works in this game. Most notably, the fact that you end up with a ton of low value gear, and no good way to quickly tell them apart (even in shops)

  • Available skits aren’t really signalled so well, the prompt can be pretty hard to see sometimes, especially if no skit name is being shown any more

  • There are these cool items called Potentite that unlock new game systems, but the actual items have so many different names that it’s hard to tell sometimes when something is actually a potentite (I’ve seen Glacite, Ventite, Ignacite, Acerite…)

  • The game does a really bad job of signaling the player’s HP level. I find myself almost never actually looking at it, and usually that’s fine, until suddenly someone is at 1 HP or even dead, and I literally had no idea, not even voice tells

  • There are a lot of little dialogue scenes where your party members are talking, and you can see their name and hear their voice, but you don’t see the character on the map, or see their portraits at all. It’s very awkward, and sometimes it’s hard to tell who is even talking

  • Sometimes area maps are navigated up and down vertically by using L1/R1 to up/down levels, and sometimes by smoothly moving up/down by holding R2 and moving the right stick. I’m not really sure why there are two different methods, and what dictates when one is used over the other

  • There’s a weird delay or something before the first message comes up after a battle ends, and because I subconsciously feel like I need to hit X to advance, I semi-frequently end up missing the first post-battle message entirely

  • It’s nice that this game puts little gold stars overtop of where you need to go, but they don’t really do much to actually guide you there. If the star is in another area, or even just another subscreen of your current area, it can be pretty tricky to tell where it is

  • This game has the same problem a lot of RPGs have where, it uses small icons for a lot of things, and characters with the same hair colour are really easily confused at that size. At any given time, at least half your cast is blonde, telling them apart is so hard

  • Having a gear upgrade system makes equipping newly acquired gear a lot less desirable. If you find a new item in a dungeon somewhere, it needs to compete with upgraded stats on old gear, AND, equipping it means you’re losing the enhancement bonus you got for upgrading the old piece

  • There doesn’t seem to be any way to tell the BP of an ally not in the current battle. This REALLY sucks if you’re trying to use a swap strike, because it means you have no idea how much BP the person you’re switching to has, and therefore if you will be able to swap back out of that ally (assuming people will want to swap and automatically swap back, which is something the game’s tutorial SUGGESTS you can do)

  • The concept of chaining together battles to gradually earn a higher multiplier on grade is kind of cool, and I like that it adds value to easy low-value fights, but it feels like in practice it doesn’t work super well

    • Up until you get it, the clear option is to group fights together into one, to get bigger rewards. Now you want to break them up to build your chain. Feels conflicting

    • It’s kind of disheartening if your chain breaks, and makes it feel kind of like fighting at that point is pointless (you just cleared the area out how are you going to rebuild your chain?)

    • It feels like it disincentives exploration, since you want to stay where all the enemies are to keep your chain up

    • Do you really lose your battle chain if you beat a dire foe???

  • There are a bunch of battle abilities with arbitrary requirements that don’t have any real way of tracking whether you’ve fulfilled them or not, so you kind of just have to guess, and if it doesn’t work, you have no idea why (ie. Mystic Artes, high level R2s)

  • There are multiple tutorials / skill descriptions that refer to “x hits” being a requirement, but this it’s referring to “unique skills used in the combo”, and not the actual hit counter used in the game

  • I don’t understand why there’s no star displayed on the world map to indicate your story objective. Are you supposed to just guess where it is?

  • You end up getting so many equipment abilities, that you kind of can’t even appreciate them any more. 40 hours into the game, I have no concept of what abilities I’ve learned, and I certainly can’t perceive whether or not they are having a measurable effect, because I’ve slowly built up little buffs from the start of the game

Combat

  • It’s cool that grade points earned in battle have a direct, immediate benefit to the player now (ie. they power up your skills so you can master them). It puts a constant emphasis on the player to try and perform well in battle

  • Using sidestep as a way to increase your max combo length is a really great way of encouraging the player to think about defense, in a series that has historically been pretty easy to button mash your way through

  • The ability to use the R2 transformation move as a combo extender, that then also ends in a big combo ender, adds a lot of momentum to combat that’s pretty fun

  • You’re pretty well rewarded for being familiar with your moves, because it leads to more stuns, which not only lets you do more damage, but also gives you spirits so you can do longer combos

  • It feels like you could be rewarded more for landing killing blows with your R2

  • The strengths of the game’s spirit system also backfires a bit, too. If you lose souls, you are severely kneecapped in battle, so if you’re getting stunned, it leads to a really big “lose more” situation. The feedback loop is huge

  • This is the first time I’ve ever felt like I was actually fighting against my own party. If they get kills, it means that I don’t gain souls, making the fight harder. If they get the last kill, it means I don’t get the bonus exp for my current character. It really sucks to line up a kill with the R2, miss entirely because my ally killed the enemy first, and then be stuck on 2 souls when I didn’t even mess up at all

  • It’s pretty lame that if a Dire Foe attacks (and they are likely too strong for you, at least early game), you are forced to run and lose all credit for the fight you just finished, even if it was a huge chain fight that took a while to finish

  • I find that I semi-frequently get caught in break mode. Either I’m struggling to finish a combo and get the finished off, or I’m stuck on the wrong side of the battle field with nothing nearby to hit, all while my health is just slowly draining down to 1

  • It’s pretty annoying that when your allies use their mystic artes, it just completely interrupts the battle, so your chains are usually going to break, and if you were guarding, you’re probably going to get hit

  • Getting stunned is so incredibly punishing that it just feels unfair at times. It seems like you pretty regularly get straight up killed off of getting stunned once, and I just don’t understand why your health is so low

  • It feels really unnatural trying to time sidesteps for the moment when you get hit, when every game ever has trained me to try and dodge just before you would have gotten hit. I think part of it is also just the fact that the thing you’re timing is a control stick flick rather than a button press, and the difference in latency between the two doesn’t help either (ie. One is analogue, one is digital)

  • There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to when or how an enemy is guarding. I’ve seen enemies “guarding” WHILE they were attacking, I’ve seen enemies start guarding in the middle of a combo - no strong sign of when a guard is happening really detracts from the feel of an effective action game

  • It feels like the game doesn’t really give you a good enough understanding of how the SG cost of artes works, and why you should guard

  • The way the player applies status ailments to enemies feels way too out of the player’s hands. It’s effectively just random, meaning you have limited ability to use them strategically, or purposefully aim for them. 

  • Status ailments being very random, but also being a way the player earns spirits, seems like an awful connection, given how important spirits are. It feels like you get them at random, making it hard to purposefully go for them. Especially if you find yourself stuck at 1 or 2 spirits, it feels like you don’t have a way to struggle back other than to keep attacking and pray

  • The element/type of attacks is so important, I wish that I could space out a bit more against enemies that I overlevel, but if you aren’t hitting weaknesses, you’re not doing appreciable damage. It doesn’t help that multi-type moves only need to hit one resistance to be useless 

  • So many of the abilities in this game have crazy movement attached to them, sometimes I wish I could just stand still, use some attacks, and reasonably expect that if one connects, the next one will combo instead of it being a 50:50 chance depending on how your attacks jerk you around the battlefield

  • Sometimes it feels like it takes so much effort to do things “right”, and if you do it wrong then your efforts don’t count for shit, I come away from some fights with this feeling that I wish I could go play a different game where things just kind of work, and even the not-perfect option is usually good enough in most situations