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Playing Vesperia as my first Tales game and god damn it's good. The combat is great, characters are good for jrpg standards and artes/skills give a nice amount of customization. Also bonus points for major FFIX vibes. The plot seems like trash but who cares about that anyway.
Symphonia: Pretty generic, but the plot was engaging enough to keep me hooked. Finished it.
Abyss: My favorite game, but maybe only because it was my first. Really like the shitty characters, and it was the first jrpg that made me feel like I was actually on an adventure.
Vesperia: I've heard people praise this game but it just didn't keep my attention, dropped it around the halfway point. Characters were fun but the actual plot slogged. I might pick it up again later.
Hearts R: Actually played this because I was unlucky enough to own a vita. Don't remember much about it, but I did finish it so that counts for something.
Graces: Remember the combat being fun, and some of the characters were memorable. Got the very end when the game stopped being so linear and stopped playing, just didn't feel like doing a bunch of side content before the boss.
Berseria: Pretty fun cast of characters and story, although the game really slogged from the middle to the end, I had to force myself to keep playing. Finished it.
Are Zestria or the Xillias any good? Was thinking of trying them next, though I haven't heard anything too good about either.
Symphonia: Pretty generic, but the plot was engaging enough to keep me hooked. Finished it.
Abyss: My favorite game, but maybe only because it was my first. Really like the shitty characters, and it was the first jrpg that made me feel like I was actually on an adventure.
Vesperia: I've heard people praise this game but it just didn't keep my attention, dropped it around the halfway point. Characters were fun but the actual plot slogged. I might pick it up again later.
Hearts R: Actually played this because I was unlucky enough to own a vita. Don't remember much about it, but I did finish it so that counts for something.
Graces: Remember the combat being fun, and some of the characters were memorable. Got the very end when the game stopped being so linear and stopped playing, just didn't feel like doing a bunch of side content before the boss.
Berseria: Pretty fun cast of characters and story, although the game really slogged from the middle to the end, I had to force myself to keep playing. Finished it.
Are Zestria or the Xillias any good? Was thinking of trying them next, though I haven't heard anything too good about either.
Xillia is quite fun Symphonia/Abyss/Vesperia style combat and you can play from two perspectives. I found the story interesting enough and Mila's a decent protagonist, the biggest problem is the PS3 is a weak-ass machine and around halfway through the combat framerates start to drop so much it feels like you're fighting underwater. No idea if emulators or BC is able to fix that.
Zestiria's got a watered down version of Graces' combat and one of the weakest "Tales of" stories, but it's less button-mashy than Berseria and once you get the hang of using the Seraphim properly the combat becomes much more satisfying. The MC is on the dull side but overall alright and an improvement over that simp Jude from Xillia. 30fps locked though.
I see that Tales of Berseria is 85% off on Steam right now. I'm afraid I will hate the button mashing combat, but I have nothing to play at the moment and still suffer from depression after finishing all Cold Steel games. Should I buy it? Or it's shit? Is combat at least tolerable?
I see that Tales of Berseria is 85% off on Steam right now. I'm afraid I will hate the button mashing combat, but I have nothing to play at the moment and still suffer from depression after finishing all Cold Steel games. Should I buy it? Or it's shit? Is combat at least tolerable?
I see that Tales of Berseria is 85% off on Steam right now. I'm afraid I will hate the button mashing combat, but I have nothing to play at the moment and still suffer from depression after finishing all Cold Steel games. Should I buy it? Or it's shit? Is combat at least tolerable?
If you do buy it I highly recommend raising the difficulty and playing as characters other than velvet when you get the chance. Her combat and soul break are extremely button mashy and it gets repetitive fast, no to mention takes the challenge out of most fights. The others though require more careful arte selection, timing, and blocking to be successful, which makes for more satisfying combat IMO. You can always switch back to her for tough bosses if you need to.
Ok guys, so I have been playing the series a bit past couple of weeks.
First I started finished (no ng+) Symphonia, had this on Gamecube back in the day but never really got far into it.
It was quite entertaining. I am kinda bad at the combat, I just never really got the hang of it, but it was never really too hard or annoying. The game did overstay it's welcome in the later parts though, just too much cutscenes, skits and annoying fucking puzzles. Having to navigate some platforms in pitch black is already shit, but it was also the first time in the game you could fall of ledges, this made it fucking infuriating, it wasn't hard, just annoying and fucking pointless.
All in all I would give it a 7/10. If the game had less interruptions in the later part it would have been an 8/10 for me.
Then I went on to Vesperia and oh boy...
The first impressions were fine, city looked cool and it sets up the situation nicely. But the combat, man, it just doesn't flow. I was already shit at the combat in Symphonia, but this is on another level. You get staggered so goddamn easily, which was also the case in Symphonia, but Symphonia didn't come with do many goddamn solo battles. I am now at the tower with the gears, and I had to fight about 8 dudes on my own, it took me goddamn ages because you have to run out and pick em off by running in and out and it takes fucking ages. Then you get hit once and there are suddenly 4 dudes around you, I have never been so close to throwing my goddamn controller at the TV. Anyway, I finished it and my controller ran out of batteries and somehow that causes Steam to stop responding and it would no longer pick up my controller after changing batteries. So I had to do the whole shit again, mad as shit but I did it, only to have the game have a crash 5 minutes later. Again before I could save.
Another fucking annoying thing is the party splitting all the fucking time upon entering a new town, Jesus Christ game I want to deck my dudes and little girls out in new gear, stop splitting up the party for no fucking reason.
Also not a fan of the invisible walls, at least block em off like you do other times, this just seems lazy.
So far Vesperia gets a 5/10 for me. And I was hesitant to continue playing but while typing this shitty rant I remembered I could set battle difficulty to easy, maybe I will do that and do that annoying part once more.
But does it get better? Is it worth doing it again?
Yeah, there's an early game fight where you're against a bunch of wolves or squirrels or something which is the game's filter, kind of like the spider swarms in PF:K. It does get easier to be in control of fights as you get more skills (the passive ones that you spend points to equip), your casters get long-lasting spells which stagger and have large AoEs, and you get more agility which lets you attack faster, reducing your end-lag so you can block.
Recently finished Berseria, originally started it back in mid 2019, set it aside for some reason and ended up picking it back up a few weeks ago, nearly two years from where I left it. I'd pretty much forgotten how to play in that gap and my recollection of the story was scattered, thankfully youtube videos managed to provide a condensed recap on the story to jog my memory, same with the battle system. Glad I chose to pick it back up as it’s largely been a return to form for a series that’s been disappointing me since the 360/PS3 era. Like most of the better Tales games, Berseria had a certain point where everything just clicked with me and I’ve not put it down since picking it back up and finishing it.
Couple of scattered thoughts from my time with the game:
In regards to its story, it was obvious early on there was going to be some reincarnation twist involving Velvet’s brother. The game initially had me thinking that Laphicet (the original) reincarnated as Number 2 (Phi) so it was a bit of a surprise later on when it turns out to be something else. It’s a good scene when the truth is revealed to you and the game really puts Velvet through the wringer. It also felt like Innominat was a bit of a visual callback to the Mithos/Yggdrassil aesthetic from Symphonia.
Found Velvet's ending particularly sad given that the game flip flops/deliberately obscures (on the part of innominat) whether Inno really is Laphicet or not, I know its supposed to be a new being with the old persons memories, but both Innominat + Seres sort of play up/with the fact that they are the original at times. I guess what I'm saying is that if Innominat is in some way Laphicet, the fate of Velvet is bittersweet, but it works. However, if that isn't the case, and Innomi is just some unrelated being with Laphi's memories, but without a real trace of Velvet's brother in there, that kinda undermines the intention of the ending, if Velvet is trapped in some eternal sleep going on adventures with some imposter, I dunno, the game really leans into Innominat=Laphicet in the final scene after Arhur dies with the comb and such, and the 4 souls you throw in the volcano are pretty clearly reincarnated as the Empereans at the end. While it seems the game can’t decide one way or another, the story hits much harder when taken one way over the other.
Story was solid overall though, I liked the developments over the journey and there were a couple of unexpected twists - illusion sequence with Velvet in Abell was nicely done. Good cast of characters, always feels a bit sad when you start killing off the antagonists in a Tales game as you know you're nearing the end.
Magilou was great, her voice actress did a really good job pulling off that character imo, I had thought she would end up annoying me, but she definitely brought considerable levity to the game.
Party banter was excellent throughout, Tales' skit system is great for adding relatively cheap character development to the cast throughout the game, and it's really come into its own in this game with the character art moving about and animating amidst the casts various squabbles, etc.
Issues:
More so than any other Tales game I’ve played - what the hell happened with the skit subtitles in this game? Oftentimes, particularly towards the end of the game, the voice actors are saying one thing, and the subtitles state something else (and oftentimes it seems like whoever was doing the subs was given one take to listen to the spoken line and write down the jist.) Seriously, so many nonsensical / incorrect words in the skit subs towards the end. For example:
"That's a little Gruesome even for my standards"
becomes
"That's a little goose I'll even by my standards".
But hey, give us more money for our DLC costumes right? And on that topic; where were the good (free) alternate costumes in this game. Didn’t find anything worth equipping and was equally disappointed by the bizarre equipment cap placed on fashion accessories. Just, why Bamco?
As for dungeon/field designs - these were pretty uniformly bad/generic. It's literally like someone was handed 5-10 modular pieces to build each dungeon and they just slotted em together like so with no real thought put into it. Literally only the final dungeon (teleportation maze thingy) deviated from this methodology and it was the only dungeon that stood out as being different.
Similarly, field maps just feel utterly bland. I'll say one thing for WRPG devs, they usually manage to make their worlds at least look visually interesting. Here, the field maps just aren't particularly interesting.and I don't remember this being a problem with the pre-HD Tales games, I remember at least Abyss' dungeons being fun to explore. I think the smattering of Katz souls and random knick knacks dotted about the maps pretty much confirm that the team just has no clue how to make any kind of interesting content in these areas, visual or otherwise. Conversely, towns look on the whole pretty interesting/acceptable.
Hell, it's not like the Tales series is alone in this regard, I just cast my mind back to the PS1 era, take the FF PS1 entries - the explorable areas were all nice and tightliy designed, yet I couldn't make it more than a few hours into FF15.That is to say, I prefer the smaller, tightly designed areas of the pre-HD Tales games to the sprawling fields that have monsters/items scattered all over the place.
Oh yeah, music. Seems to be a longstanding thing with Tales, but yeah, most of the time it's just... there, I guess. It's not Dragon Quest 11 levels of MIDI fuckery, but there's not really many memorable tracks that come to mind. It's an aspect of the series that's always bothered me after I played Legendia, black sheep or not, the music in that game blows away most Tales soundtracks, though most do have a couple of standouts.
Kamoana's voice made me sad...
Overall:
Slightly mixed feelings on the ending due to the aforementioned issue, but I'm leaning towards the positive end of the scale. This is the best Tales game I've played since Abyss, no doubt.
I am intrigued of Bamco's habit of creating these prequel/sequel games, I ended up dropping Zesteria early on as it really wasn't grabbing me, but Berseria's sort of given that world an interesting enough history that I may go back for another shot soon. Was Berseria already planned prior to Zesteria, or was it a response to Zest getting something of a panning among the fanbase?
Funny, I'm still working through the game but I bought it in 2018 and almost immediately dropped it like you did. After getting kind of bored of Arise I decided to revisit Berseria... now that I got over the initial hump I'm really enjoying it and think I like it more than Arise. It's funny how Arise makes a great first impression then kind of falls on its face IMO, whereas Berseria is the exact opposite.
I found the English VA pretty annoying in Berseria and almost immediately switched to JP voices, though.
So, after looking around I might as well ask here. Does anybody know if there's a Destiny undub?
I normally don't mind English dubs and belong to the heavens that prefer them in general (unless I actually get a better translation to go along with it) but Destiny belongs to the sad category of them just straight up cutting content (skits) instead of localizing it. It's not the biggest deal as I'm going through the remake somewhere down the line and destiny is destiny afte all, but I'd be nice to know.
Edit: Nevermind, there are subbed youtube videos for the skits for both Destiny and Eternia. Will do.
Well if you aren't above emulation and have a strong computer you could try Tales of Symphonia on Dolphin. Honestly it was my favorite gamecube game when I was a young teenager but now I don't want to try it again or else it might destroy my childhood memories like .hack did. Also what the native american raptor said. I stopped playing the entire series after Tales of the Abyss because I hated everyone so much.
Recently finished Berseria, originally started it back in mid 2019, set it aside for some reason and ended up picking it back up a few weeks ago, nearly two years from where I left it. I'd pretty much forgotten how to play in that gap and my recollection of the story was scattered, thankfully youtube videos managed to provide a condensed recap on the story to jog my memory, same with the battle system. Glad I chose to pick it back up as it’s largely been a return to form for a series that’s been disappointing me since the 360/PS3 era. Like most of the better Tales games, Berseria had a certain point where everything just clicked with me and I’ve not put it down since picking it back up and finishing it.
Couple of scattered thoughts from my time with the game:
In regards to its story, it was obvious early on there was going to be some reincarnation twist involving Velvet’s brother. The game initially had me thinking that Laphicet (the original) reincarnated as Number 2 (Phi) so it was a bit of a surprise later on when it turns out to be something else. It’s a good scene when the truth is revealed to you and the game really puts Velvet through the wringer. It also felt like Innominat was a bit of a visual callback to the Mithos/Yggdrassil aesthetic from Symphonia.
Found Velvet's ending particularly sad given that the game flip flops/deliberately obscures (on the part of innominat) whether Inno really is Laphicet or not, I know its supposed to be a new being with the old persons memories, but both Innominat + Seres sort of play up/with the fact that they are the original at times. I guess what I'm saying is that if Innominat is in some way Laphicet, the fate of Velvet is bittersweet, but it works. However, if that isn't the case, and Innomi is just some unrelated being with Laphi's memories, but without a real trace of Velvet's brother in there, that kinda undermines the intention of the ending, if Velvet is trapped in some eternal sleep going on adventures with some imposter, I dunno, the game really leans into Innominat=Laphicet in the final scene after Arhur dies with the comb and such, and the 4 souls you throw in the volcano are pretty clearly reincarnated as the Empereans at the end. While it seems the game can’t decide one way or another, the story hits much harder when taken one way over the other.
Story was solid overall though, I liked the developments over the journey and there were a couple of unexpected twists - illusion sequence with Velvet in Abell was nicely done. Good cast of characters, always feels a bit sad when you start killing off the antagonists in a Tales game as you know you're nearing the end.
Magilou was great, her voice actress did a really good job pulling off that character imo, I had thought she would end up annoying me, but she definitely brought considerable levity to the game.
Party banter was excellent throughout, Tales' skit system is great for adding relatively cheap character development to the cast throughout the game, and it's really come into its own in this game with the character art moving about and animating amidst the casts various squabbles, etc.
Issues:
More so than any other Tales game I’ve played - what the hell happened with the skit subtitles in this game? Oftentimes, particularly towards the end of the game, the voice actors are saying one thing, and the subtitles state something else (and oftentimes it seems like whoever was doing the subs was given one take to listen to the spoken line and write down the jist.) Seriously, so many nonsensical / incorrect words in the skit subs towards the end. For example:
"That's a little Gruesome even for my standards"
becomes
"That's a little goose I'll even by my standards".
But hey, give us more money for our DLC costumes right? And on that topic; where were the good (free) alternate costumes in this game. Didn’t find anything worth equipping and was equally disappointed by the bizarre equipment cap placed on fashion accessories. Just, why Bamco?
As for dungeon/field designs - these were pretty uniformly bad/generic. It's literally like someone was handed 5-10 modular pieces to build each dungeon and they just slotted em together like so with no real thought put into it. Literally only the final dungeon (teleportation maze thingy) deviated from this methodology and it was the only dungeon that stood out as being different.
Similarly, field maps just feel utterly bland. I'll say one thing for WRPG devs, they usually manage to make their worlds at least look visually interesting. Here, the field maps just aren't particularly interesting.and I don't remember this being a problem with the pre-HD Tales games, I remember at least Abyss' dungeons being fun to explore. I think the smattering of Katz souls and random knick knacks dotted about the maps pretty much confirm that the team just has no clue how to make any kind of interesting content in these areas, visual or otherwise. Conversely, towns look on the whole pretty interesting/acceptable.
Hell, it's not like the Tales series is alone in this regard, I just cast my mind back to the PS1 era, take the FF PS1 entries - the explorable areas were all nice and tightliy designed, yet I couldn't make it more than a few hours into FF15.That is to say, I prefer the smaller, tightly designed areas of the pre-HD Tales games to the sprawling fields that have monsters/items scattered all over the place.
Oh yeah, music. Seems to be a longstanding thing with Tales, but yeah, most of the time it's just... there, I guess. It's not Dragon Quest 11 levels of MIDI fuckery, but there's not really many memorable tracks that come to mind. It's an aspect of the series that's always bothered me after I played Legendia, black sheep or not, the music in that game blows away most Tales soundtracks, though most do have a couple of standouts.
Kamoana's voice made me sad...
Overall:
Slightly mixed feelings on the ending due to the aforementioned issue, but I'm leaning towards the positive end of the scale. This is the best Tales game I've played since Abyss, no doubt.
I am intrigued of Bamco's habit of creating these prequel/sequel games, I ended up dropping Zesteria early on as it really wasn't grabbing me, but Berseria's sort of given that world an interesting enough history that I may go back for another shot soon. Was Berseria already planned prior to Zesteria, or was it a response to Zest getting something of a panning among the fanbase?
I could forgive a lot of the game's flaws simply because of how good that party banter is. It's a solid 8/10 game for me, and the longer I'm away from it the more I want to replay it.
I started playing Arise last week. I'm playing on one below the highest difficulty you can start with (ex DLC), which I think is moderate? For context, the only other Tales game I've played is Berseria, which I'd give a 3.5/5 or so to (combat was pretty meh, story and characters were pretty good, level design as others have mentioned was terrible).
Couple of thoughts on Arise.
Battle system- huge step up vs Berseria for me. Maybe I'm getting old, but Berseria actively hurt my hands with all the button mashing. Though I'm playing on Steam, I use a 360 controller for this sort of game. Arise is a big step up - the flow is much better, you're not just praying for a break so you can do any damage at all and replenish your AG like Berseria. A lot easier to use other characters than main (looking at you, Rokurou) in an effective way in Arise as well.
Writing/story - mixed bag. Story is actually pretty good! I thought Berseria was also, to be clear. Let down a bit by the writing of said story and interactions between characters being a little too childlike for my tastes (again, something I thought Berseria did well). The story has a relatively simple premise but I liked the way they've managed to bend the same core idea in a couple of different ways in each of the regions. Good framework, somewhat let down by the details (writing).
Crafting - I'm pretty mixed on crafting in games, and this one is overall fine/uninteresting. I like the idea of rewarding exploration especially and crafting systems are a decent way to do this. More similar to Strange Journey (ie, really used for weapon upgrades) than anything else, and I don't feel like they try to hide the key items behind intense grinding like a lot of other games do. It's serviceable and doesn't get in the way.
Game feel - I actually think this is it's biggest strength. There is a ton of ways to make progress (unlocking titles, finding owls, training grounds, side quests for boss monsters, fishing, etc). I always have something at least a little interesting to push my team forward if I don't want to headlong the main story. Does not feel like a huge waste of time the way that lots of JRPGs do (while I loved Nier Replicant ver 1.xxx, holy hell were the quests irritating).
Production values - I have a 1060 so nothing fancy, but the game for the most part runs super smooth for me on High settings. Definitely a lot of texture pop in but at the end of the day it's just not that big of a concern for me. Overall it looks great.
I'm roughly lvl 30 and stranded on an island solo - guessing I'm about half way or a bit more through the game. Overall I'm leaning towards a 4 or maybe a 4.5/5 and think it's a better package than Berseria for me personally, mainly because it doesn't actively feel like it's giving me arthritis to play.
Just finished Zestiria, this was my 2nd attempt to play it and I ended up enjoying it for the most part. For context, I got the game way back when it first came out and ended up dropping it early on in the first big city.
As I played through it again, I remembered getting ticked off at being assailed by the tutorials (there are many) in the 3~ hours I had to play a game after work when I originally tried to play through. But the main annoyance with this game is its equipment fusion system, where you can't transfer the skills on your current weapon to a better one when you find/buy one, which undermines the typical flow of acquiring and utilising new equipment in an RPG. Luckily, you can get by without spending much/any time on a lot of these systems, at least on the standard difficulty setting, although the sheer number of tutorials and even skits dedicated to them would have you think otherwise.
Playing Berseria first will help get over the initial hump of Zestiria, Zestiria is not a tremendously well paced game, particularly in the beginning, it really doesn't put its best foot forward. However, having backstory knowledge of how its world works from Berseria will get you more invested as well as explain some of odd presentational issues early in the game. For example; you'll be walking around town and see an unruly kid, there will be a cutsene and all of a sudden, that kid becomes a goblin, then a moment later he's a kid again. You'll see townspeople fighting each other as monsters, while nobody around bats an eyelid. These aspects and what's going on is simply better explained/presented in Berseria than it is in Zestiria. That said, the Berseria connections are a bit front-loaded until the tail end of the game kicks in, with Edna, Zaveid and malevolence being the main callbacks to Berseria.
Skits are great fun once again, not quite on Berseria's tier in terms of portraits/artwork bouncing around and such, but there's a lot of funny moments across the game.
It's cool to see the Armatization from Berseria return as a combat mechanic, but I found they were all a bit clunky to control compared to normal combat.
I'd have liked to see a little bit more from the Eizen situation. Innominat got a tiny late game shoutout, but overall the ending felt a bit.. rushed, I guess. Like, if Zestiria had been made after Berseria it might have tied things up better than it did & it would've had better connectivity.
One thing I liked that deserves a shout out is I think almost every enemy in the game has a few voiced lines of commentary/battle tips from Lailah & the gang when you first encounter them. This is a definite rarity in the genre and haven't seen another Tales game do it either. I'm not talking generic "oh its weak to ice" shit here, there's full on jokes and inter-party groaning as the battle kicks off, it's good stuff, almost like a mini-battle-skit.
Ultimately, it's not a bad game, when it gets going, I would strongly recommend playing Berseria first to conjure up some initial buy-in for Zestiria's world on the player's part, and do be aware, the Berseria buy-in power does fade into the background somewhat as things progress. It has certainly got its issues, but I've played far worse RPGs than Zestiria. I certainly won't recommend it as one of the better Tales games, but, in the past, I saw many people saying Graces was shit, I finally got around to it and ended up really enjoying it. Even if it didn't grab you at launch, post-Berseria, could be worth another shot.
Technical issues
Now, onto the technical aspects for anyone that might care to play; the port has issues, is locked to 30FPS without the fan patch and insta-crashes if your audio device frequency is set too high. I had a hell of a time diagnosing various issues, even after installing the fan patch, in hopes of saving others the time I wasted on that, I'll lay out my notes here just in case anyone ever fancies playing it:
-Fan patch does not play well with any framelimiting software you may have installed. I for instance, have MSI Afterburner+RivaTuner Stat Server set to enforce a global FPS cap on just under 165FPS (my monitor's max) to avoid some games boosting their FPS to the moon on title screens and such. Any such FPS limiting software you have needs disabling for the fan patch to behave properly, failure to do so will kill the framerate. Let the fan patch handle it.
-Fan patch offers 3 framerate limits for Battles/Field Exploration & Cutscenes. These default to 60FPS. You don't want this, Cutscenes will exhibit weird... keyframing (for lack of a better term) issues at 60FPS, picture characters flickering into incorrect positions and T-posing for a fraction of a second just before a camera switchover. These cutscenes weren't designed for 60FPS, and the visual glitches are incredibly distracting, do yourself a favour and use 60FPS for battles/fields, but 30FPS for cutscenes. There are a handful of moments where you'll get a cutscene during/at the tailend of a battle, and the game thinks its in "battle mode" and thus you may encounter the visual oddities, but this is like <5 times during the whole game in my experience.
-Audio frequency needs setting to 44KHz, even with the fan patch installed, any higher and I got distortion (extreme audio distortion in FMV cutscenes). Just set it to that and be done with it.
edit: beat it by spamming Infernal Torrent and Life bottles. Not my ideal style of gameplay, but oh well. I think I'm just bad, because I can only play Alphen!!!
