Recent reviews by 1047 Siliex

I'll start of by saying this - Tales of Berseria is a good game. Not an excellent one, but a good one, and definitely worth playing if you like this style of game.

First of all, the story - I can't find too much fault with the story. It's strangely dark for this kind of game and I love the direction it took. That said, I found the story somewhat predictable throughout much of the game. No huge surprises (save maybe one that I won't spoil) but overall it was good.

Next, the gameplay. I'm going to split this up into a few sections.

Battling:
The battle system is neat. I haven't played Tales games (or even many JRPGs) before this, so I found this to be fairly unique. It took quite a while to get the hang of, but I liked it in the end. What I did NOT like was the apparent complexity of some of the ways to pull off attacks. The game still throws new types of things you can do in battle at over 10 hours into the game - at some point, it just seems silly. While by the end I managed to understand most of the intricacies and types of moves, I feel like the developers decided to just throw more and more and the battle system to make it interesting when more isn't necessarily better.

There's also the occasional problem of certain battles stunlocking you into oblivion. I only had this problem once or twice, but it's incredibly frustrating and it just seems out of your hands once you get hit once.

Final bit about battling - the bosses were cool looking and at first they're pretty fun, but it's very easy to end up just chaining the same combos against them over and over, turning boss battles into long drawn out boring fights that aren't horribly interesting. The battle system just isn't as interesting when there's a single bullet-sponge enemy that you just continuously dodge and chain the same combo against forever.

The overworld:
The overworld is pretty nice, the game is definitely good looking, but I don't understand why it takes until over halfway through the game to get access to the ability to move faster in the overworld - and then you can't even use it in areas you've been in since the beginning. You first have to seek out a specific point in each area that enables you to use it. This is a fairly minor gripe overall, however.

Dungeons:
Ok, here's my biggest issue with the game and the single biggest reason I don't think the game is "excellent". Dungeons are bland, uninspired, and there's no evidence anyone experienced in level design even so much as touched them. Environments are pretty, except that most dungeons are obviously made from one or two rooms that are reused over and over again. No new props, no new mechanics, nothing. The few "puzzle" mechanics that make an appearance are as simple as "press switch to open door" in most cases.

Most dungeons seem to exist at the length that they are simply to take up your time without adding any actual "fun" value. Enemies are the same throughout most dungeons and there's nothing to explore once you've seen a single corridor (and no, I'm not exaggerating here). The payoff is usually nice (story, an interesting boss battle, etc) but I really became bored with the dungeons throughout the game.

Supergiant has done it again. Amazing visuals, amazing music, amazing story. The story is not straight out told to you; if you don't like looking for clues you won't enjoy the story. You might not enjoy that the story leaves a lot to the imagination and theorizing. If you do like a bit of a mystery left at the end, then you will absolutly love this.

Combat is similar to Bastion's, and the turn() mechanic is executed expertly. There are a few OP ability combinations, but there is still a lot of room for experementing.

Overall, an AMAZING game.