If I had to sum up Tales of Berseria in one word, it would be tedious.
If I had to do it in two, it would be infuriatingly tedious.

PC controls for this are better and you can actually map every action to a button of your choice. Good on you for letting me fix your awful default key binds.

One thing of note are the settings for camera movement on map screens and the like.
Maybe its just me but I always thought that when those are set to "Normal", that it means that up goes up and down goes down, left goes left and right goes right.
Apparently not because pressing the up arrow meant that I go down and the left arrow meant I go right.
So that option is either set wrong or I live in opposite world.

One of my biggest complaints with this game is how unbelievably slow your movement speed is.
Even with the items that give you 30% faster movement speed, you are excruciatingly slow to walk around.
This isnt helped by the fact that areas become bigger and longer the more you progress through the game.

They even introduce a faster travel option later on but thats not saying much when that alternative is marginally faster than your walking speed.
To even be able to use that alternative you also have to walk to a certain point of a given area to enable it.
Thank you for increasing my speed from snail pace to ant pace.

Even traveling around the world by warping to areas has become so much more limited.
You can warp to major areas like towns but thats pretty much it. No more direct warping to save locations you discovered.
We wouldnt want you to miss the exciting times you are going to have when you snail through mostly uninteresting areas and cave corridors filled to the brim with enemies.

To alleviate the issue of boredom walking around, you get the privilege of collecting Katz orbs which are strewn about the landscape without rhyme or reason and other shiny items in the environment.
I can only wholeheartedly recommend everyone to ignore every Katz orb they see. Its not worth the trouble to go out of your way to pick these up at all.
And should you truly care to get them for the Attachment unlocks they are for, there is an end game dungeon that has a chance to spawn randomized rooms filled to the brim with the damn things.
Its still tedious as all hell to collect them there but at least you will have about 600 of them lying around in one spot instead of the maybe 10 to 20 sprinkled around.

Now about those shiny items that you can also find. Those can be materials for upgrading equipment but most of the time will be pure trash items.
I call them trash items because they serve no purpose beyond giving you something to pick up and to sell for money at a shop.

You might say money is good, that isnt trash. But I was never strapped for money despite the fact that I never bothered selling any of them after I came to the realization just how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless it was to even bother with them and the minuscule amount of income they actually provided.

Of course you can still find the occasional treasure chests ranging from copper to silver to gold chests, giving you various items ranging from the same upgrade material you can find in shiny items or by dismantling equipment to items you can use during battles and equipment itself.
Once found those treasure chests get marked down on the area map and do refill on their own over time but are mostly not worth seeking out again due to the random nature of the item pools, making them not worth the trouble.
Another time wasting prospect for the most part.

Lets get to the crux of the situation: the combat.
For all the negativity Tales of Zestiria gets for its combat, it absolutely blows me away how this game gets a pass when the combat in Tales of Berseria is unfathomable magnitudes worse.

Yes, you do have more freedom of movement during battle right from the start but thats also where the positives end.
Every other aspect of the combat has become so much worse that I honestly couldnt believe it.

Lets lay some ground work first though. The amount of times you can attack and form combos is limited by your SC. This is the case in both Zestiria and Berseria.
In Zestiria it was hard capped at 100. In Berseria it doesnt have a number anymore and instead is called "Souls."

These souls affect how many attacks you can do in a row and start out at 3. These can be increased to 5 through actions during battle but can also decrease through actions during battle to only 1.
You can later increase these through upgraded equipment and even start battles with more than 3 souls.

The problem with this system is how it all works in combat. Everything goes both ways. What can happen to you can happen to your enemy and vice versa.

You can break a soul to do a special combat move. This means expending 1 of your 3 souls, leaving you with only 2 remaining. Which in turn means that you cant attack and form combos as well anymore.

To regain a soul you will either have to inflict a stun or status ailment to an enemy or kill an enemy.
You can also quick evade attacks with proper timing which throws a soul onto the battlefield for you or your team to collect.
However, if you get stunned or afflicted by a status ailment, you also lose a soul.

Being stunned is just the absolute worst nightmare because you cant do anything for 2 to 3 seconds, you take increased damage and are more likely to become afflicted by status ailments.
This can result in chain reactions of being stunned and losing a soul, getting a status ailment and losing another soul.
This can also turn into you being stunned, coming out of the stun and immediately being hit again for another stun.

All this greatly diminishes your ability to fight back and regain souls. You get basically overly punished for things that might be entirely out of your control.
What are you supposed to do about being juggled in attacks, being stunned directly after, coming out of the stun and then going right back into a stun or juggle again when you had no chance to react to any of it.
A single stun happening to you while multiple enemies attack you can also mean that you will die nearly instantly, depleting thousands of health.

I found that the easiest way to control fights was having spell casters on your team.
Spells usually result in attacks that hit multiple times and lock enemies in place for sometimes seconds and while one attack happens another spell can hit them, making them unable to perform any actions at all while also having the ability to stun and inflict status ailments to them.

This means that fights are focused on not allowing your enemy to do anything while you stun and inflict status ailments on them and then hammer down on them with everything you got.
Just hope that the enemy doesnt get the chance to do the exact same thing to you.

There is a significant different between how attacks and spell work in Berseria compared to Zestiria.
In Zestiria certain attacks and spells could only be interrupted by specific counters to them.
In Berseria anything can interrupt anything.

Even the most basic attack can stop spells from being completed. Putting increased importance on defending your spell casters from disruptions and disrupting the enemy from completing any spells of their own.

It might sound plausible and simple but good luck controlling up to 6 spell casting enemies that have not only thousands upon thousands of health but also cast faster, have insane spell ranges and inflict you with status ailments faster than you can tear your hair out in frustration.

Another aspect that is way more important in Berseria than it ever was in Zestiria is your equipment.
But since Steams character limit wont allow me to write much more I'll continue my review in the comments section.
Thank you Steam for inhibiting my ability to fully tear this game down.