I play a daft number of JRPGs, and recently a lot of these have been Tales games. This is because Bandai Namco is determined to remaster as many of these beloved titles as possible, and ensure that anyone with a modern console can play as much of the series as their hearts desire. The latest in this procession of anime style delights is Tales of Berseria, which is actually one of the most recent entries. It was also a game I didn’t play back in 2017 though, so I was more than happy to jump into it.
Our hero this time around is Velvet, a teen girl whose family was made much smaller during an incident that shook the world to its core. Demonic werewolves that can’t be killed by regular means now roam the lands, and it’s not exactly ideal. Despite the situation Velvet is now pretty happy living with her little brother, harvesting boar meat and living as quiet a life as possible in her tiny village. Even with stress like her brother’s illness and people saying she needs to comb her hair more, it’s a light and lovely opening until the drama really begins.
I was expecting a bit of a twee and lightheaded experience especially in the early game, but Tales of Berseria had other plans. Velvet loses everything as the wolves swarm the village and shake up her life yet again, and a betrayal means she also ends up infected with dark powers and is thrown into prison. This young girl full of life becomes obsessed with vengeance, and years later gets to start a journey to enact this dark dream. Berseria certainly has more of an edge than many other games in the series, but thankfully there are some characters that also bring the levity.
Above all else, what Tales of Berseria impresses with most are the cast of characters you meet and party up with. These are an absolutely classic bunch that can hang with some of the best the genre has to offer, with the highlight absolutely being Magilou. This colourful witch has it all, but especially the comedy. She’s absolutely not just comic relief though, with some surprising depth behind the daft persona. You just can’t go wrong with any of the party though, and that’s a real JRPG rarity.
When I play a Tales game I do it for the combat, and Berseria has some of the best in the series’ long history. Each of your face buttons can have different fully customisable combos assigned to them, and you can use them as long as you have the soul points to do so. You’ll gain more of this by stunning enemies, and can also use them to block and dodge to keep yourself alive. Instead of using soul points on basic attacks you can sacrifice a whole chunk to unleash your dark side with Break Soul, which allows you to unleash a ridiculously powerful combo and always feels good.
There’s just a whole lot of hidden depth to the combat too, with new artes (the skills you assign to combos) each having different strengths. If you really want to get clever you can even switch up your combos mid fight, to ensure you deal extra damage to specific enemy types. As is always the case in Tales games you can play as other party members too in the action based combat, and they have totally different Break Soul abilities like magic cancelling and damage reducing effects.
Now anyone who has played Tales of Berseria before is probably well aware of the fantastic characters and delightful combat, and wants to know more about this remaster. Well the term remaster is a generous one, because it’s rather difficult to tell the difference between this version and the original release. It grants you access to the grade shop sooner (which is essentially a new game plus feature that lets you mess with lots of systems) and adds some handy quest markers, but that’s really it. If you own the standard version of Berseria it’s hard to really see why you’d upgrade to the remaster, but newcomers might as well embrace the small extras.
Outside of being a bit of a lackluster remaster, there’s not a lot to complain about with Tales of Berseria. Velvet’s outfits are particularly embarrassing, with so many being entirely threadbare for embarrassing fan service reasons. The visuals are pretty underwhelming in general too, and are just a tad too bland and dated looking. There’s also more backtracking than I was expecting, which wasn’t ideal.
Tales of Berseria Remastered is one of the high points of the Tales series, with some of the best combat and characters you’ll encounter. The remaster is admittedly a bit of a dud when it comes to additional content and improvements, but you should still go out of your way to play it if you missed it the first time around
