Today I finished Tales of Berseria (2016) and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993)!
What can I say about LA? I’ve played the DX version to death—got all heart pieces, secret seashells and photo ops, no deaths. I’m glad I’m in the right community to say that I think the og monochrome 1993 release is the superior version. There is a ton of depth to the sprite work that is replaced with flat, garish colours on GBC. It really hit me during the final cutscene when oddly enough I was playing with the two-tone blue and pink ↓ palette. The sky and sea were blue but so was Link’s tunic, which suggested a green (I don’t know if this has any bearing on the conversation, but in Japanese 青 ao doesn’t distinguish between blue and green). Pinks worked for Link’s skin, hair, sleeves, the log he is clinging to life on. There is a lot you can do with a limited palette and I wonder what could have been if the half-step between GB and GBA couldn’t have been a system that only allowed games to make use of something like the GBC BIOS’s preset palettes.
I loved Berseria! It was my first time playing a Tales game all the way through, let alone past the opening hour. This game is definitely not without its flaws—kinda like its characters! Berseria’s world is often gaping wide open with not a whole lot going on in it. Huge areas with sometimes too many enemies and low-value junk strewn everywhere. When I pick stuff up, I don’t even bother checking what I got unless it came out of a chest. These problems are mitigated somewhat later on when you get a means of covering ground more quickly, and fast travel is often painless. Warding away enemies is also easy, more on them later. A few of these problems feel like mitigations unto themselves—like having items and katz spirits randomly respawn all over the map was meant to entice the player to explore featureless environments they didn’t have time to make more interesting. This game makes really nice use of colour and art but spaces are too big and empty. Dungeons often drag, and because an important character-building skit might trigger at any moment I didn’t feel safe putting on a podcast and beelining through them.
Which means the elements I liked are at odds with the environment traversal. I loved this game’s characters (except Bienfu) and their interactions with one another, learning more about their worldviews and watching them grow. Protagonist Velvet is driven by one thing: revenge. Her whole party is ostensibly bound together by such selfish aims. This facade cracks over the course of the story as the cast is put into situations where they could variously bail or turn on each other but choose to stick together instead. Every cast member is fleshed out enough to understand their motivations for standing by Velvet. One important emotional event around the 50 hour mark sees (vague as possible) Velvet at her nadir, and the way her friends snap her out of it is both touching and fittingly gruff. Even the unsentimental swordsman Rokurou wraps up his arc in a way that kind of got me to tear up. Great cast. Great voice acting! I played the game with Japanese voices. The writing is good but suffers from some very poor proofreading on a couple side quests which was so disappointing, because every moment a main cast member is talking is spent squeezing out extra characterization.
I can’t speak to how this entry’s budget compares to the rest of the series being it’s so far the only one I’ve completed. I mentioned the simple, cavernous dungeon design but I haven’t mentioned the animation. There is a huge overreliance on mocap to animate characters. Facial animation and anything that couldn’t be captured is much stiffer. These problems are frustrating against the quality of the character designs. I won’t die on this hill but I like Velvet’s design lol. It’s an anime game with horny fan service and some hot protags. I did not get any of the DLC costumes.
Combat is a mixed bag, but potentially much better if you take more time to understand it than I did. This is an action RPG and battles take place in arenas on a 3D plane with free movement. Four party members at a time, you can swap between active member and tag your two benched members out if your gauge is high enough. Everyone plays a little different but four-move combos are assigned to each face button and R2 triggers a context-specific special move or state. I unfortunately played most of the game as Velvet. She is op. As long as you can keep 3+ souls on her all you need to do is pull R2 to prevent all stagger and wail on everything until it dies. Once I got out of my comfort zone I discovered how much fun Eizen and Rokurou can be. Eizen’s draconic drive is only available if an enemy is downed or staggered, reflecting his occupation as an opportunistic pirate who strikes while his foe is down. Rokurou’s R2 is a counter and when I was fighting very aggressive bosses (the final fight with Shigure was the most fun I had with this game’s combat) this made combat super engaging in a way it otherwise never was. This game isn’t good at explaining all its convoluted mechanics. There are a lot of tutorial prompts and most of them are deployed within the first hours. More problems arise if you want to try someone new mid-battle by swapping out your main. Playstyle tutorials for characters you’ve never played as before don’t make themselves known unless you enter battle as that character. I had more trouble figuring out what artes to assign where on the face buttons. Using all four just seems like a lot, and perusing the lists of artes for a given character don’t make it easy to tell how best to construct a string. Maybe if I got a preview of how the artes looked in action? Many modern games do this, but God Hand did it too way back in 2006. Very late game, I realized there was a final page of L stick + face button artes I could set. I still don’t know if I got the ones I configured for Eizen to work.
I also don’t remember what semi-auto was supposed to mean. I beat the game ok? That’s what counts.
I keep hearing about how Zestiria is boring and not worth my time. The cast may have been carrying this one. I identified really strongly with Laphicet taking control of his life, Eizen just trying to live with his curse, Rokurou and Velvet’s (and Magilou’s) extreme family strife and Eleanor’s journey to become woke. I think there’s something special here that’s atypical for a JRPG cast. Strong 7 out of 10.
P3 fever got me good last night and I started up a game of Persona 3 Portable in Adrenaline. Maybe I’ll keep playing, and maybe I’ll have completed it by the time @captain starts his 1:1 day at a time run on April 6th!