I'm a huge tales fan (my favorite was Graces) and I want to know if it's worth it to buy Berseria at full price

I'm a huge tales fan (my favorite was Graces) and I want to know if it's worth it to buy Berseria at full price.
Steam sale is miles away and I'm craving a decent jRPG to play.

If you really liked Tales then go ahead, the game setting and characters are really enjoyable and you'll have a great time with it.

>my favorite was graces

if you like tales try cold steel, both are cliche

magilou's armpits

Spotted the TP spamming retard. Was Graces too hard for you?

It was ok, I bought it upon release, played through it once and haven't touched it since.

buy it on gamesplanet uk, it's 43% off

Tried cold steel, was boring as fuck. Reached chapter 5 and called it quits.

Graces had the most fun combat I've played in a Tales game since Vesperia, but the characters and story were so horribly gratingly terrible that I couldn't continue the game.

Seriously, most Tales games have a bad story and grating characters, but this was some next-level cringe.

you palyed whole game btw, there is only 5 chapters and epilogue
missed on cool epilogue

Future arc was decent.

Wtf, are you serious? I'm at the imperial capital. Is that really the whole game?

>I'm a huge tales fan (my favorite was Graces)
Stopped reading there.

Graces was pure combat kino

Just pirate

What about my steam e-peen?

Its a pretty good game, but if you value music over gameplay then Zestiria is the better choice.

Graces was proof to me that if a story and it's characters in an rpg are terrible enough, not even great gameplay can save it. I can only watch Richard pull some cartoon villain plan off, slowly fly away on a dragon while laughing maniacally while the whole party shouts
>YOU'RE MY FRIEND, RICHARD
But so many times before I have to call it quits

>music over gameplay

Christ I hope these people don't exist.

This. In a series where every game is horribly written, why not just rank them by combat?

>not playing Tales of purely for the combat
Man, first time I actually just skipped all cutscenes in Berseria. Shit was still worth it. Actually, it was more worth it because now seeing the cringeworthy story is was a joy.

Just skip the cutscenes like any normal people would

As a long time Tales fan who also liked Graces a lot (best combat, even if the story was kinda whatever) I thought Berseria was merely okay.

At its core the gameplay style is similar to Graces in that you have a branching path combo button and a "classic" arte button. This time you can also set the branching paths, not just the singular artes which is nice but you quickly find that the ones it defaults to are basically the best one and there's not that much to work with since most characters have a crappy arte pool. Especially spells are a bit lacking.

Now for the aspect that I think somewhat ruins the game: the soul system. You have a soul gauge (I believe initially it's 5 max but later 6 or more) that determines how many times you can attack in a row. Using your characters specific ability consumes souls, getting hit by stuns and other status effects also consumes souls. You MAY get souls from various things like performing a perfect dodge etc. but the main way is killing enemies.

There are two reasons I don't like this system:

1. It's a bit rng and often feels like you aren't in that good control of the combat flow, also soul amount being linked to combo length means that 95% of the time the game is REALLY easy because you are just eating through enemies but if you have bad luck and lose a bunch of souls to enemy gangraping or whatnot you go in the state of having only 1-2 and it becomes very very hard to recover because your character is so crippled. "You need souls to gain souls" basically.

2. Every character has a personal soul break ability that consumes souls for powerful attacks. Many of these are REALLY overpowered. The main character's especially lets you just mow down enemies and since killing enemies nets you souls it doesn't matter that the ability consumes a soul. Basically either don't use your "I win" button and have a really drawn out battle or use it and have a really easy battle easily destroying everything.

>now seeing
Not seeing*

It's pretty pricey but there's a shit ton of things to do, and the replay value is high.

It's the best Tales of game since Hearts R in my opinion.

Have you ever played Radiata Stories or the PS2 Devil Summoner games? You might like them, they're really good games overall and have similar combat (live action with menus, seperate battle screen, you control one character directly).

>you quickly find that the ones it defaults to are basically the best one
What the fuck? The default trees are absolute garbage.

The battle system is at its best when playing on Chaos, without Items and without Encounters. The system is pretty good but the game is WAY too easy if you play it "normally" so it doesn't show.

I used to think music more important than gameplay, but nowadays I consider them equally important. Good music is excellent at setting the mood and getting you invested in a game, its also good at distracting you from the flaws of the game.

Like Nier Automata gets an A+ in every category except combat which ends up at about an A, but because the music is so beyond good in the game its easy to overlook. Its hard to bitch about combat repetition when you have tears flowing down your face from a fucking soundtrack.

Well okay that was a pretty retarded thing to say. They are good in terms of "the combo flows well" but bad for utilizing enemy weak points and such. I did make my own to have a good setup of elements.

Yes. Played them all.
Had over 200 hours in Radiata and all characters recruited.
Loved King Abaddon too.

One of the more disappointing things is you can't inherit artes for second playthrough so everyone's final mystic arte is limited to last area / postgame only.