TL;DR:

I absolutely love this game and it's characters. Fun combat, interesting and emotional story, great character development and top notch English voice acting. Highly recommended.

- - -

Gushy Essay Version:

Tales of Berseria is a game that I was not expecting to love as much as I do after my time with it's predecessor, Tales of Zestiria.

While I enjoyed the world and the characters that Zestiria introduced, I felt disappointed with it's relatively poor storytelling, and it's combat felt more frustrating than fun (partly due to somewhat clunky-feeling controls, and partly due to a lack of balance with the enemies and bosses) and a little more complicated than necessary with the way the game handled equipment and skills. As a result, Zestiria's shortcomings overshadowed a lot of the things that I otherwise did enjoy about it. Tales of Berseria was the exact opposite that respect.

While this game is by no means perfect (all games have their flaws), most every shortcoming or annoyance that I have with this game is easily overshadowed by all of the things that it does well; and the things that it does well I feel it does very, very well.

The story and characters in Berseria, while fairly cliche and trope-y in some respects (it's an anime-game, what you do you expect? :P ), are very well written and developed through all of the little dialogues dotted throughout the game (both voiced and not voiced). Even moreso through all of the little animated, visual novel-like Skits that come up as you progress the story and side-quests, achieve specific goals, or observe specific locations around the world. Not to mention the occasional anime-styled cutscenes and the vast number of regular in-engine cutscenes, which - along with the largely fantastic English voice acting - do a wonderful job of telling the story and expressing the range of thoughts, feelings and emotions of the characters in a way that truly made me fall in love with each and every one of them.

While sometimes trope-y, each one of the characters has a very well developed personality and a wide range of emotions that run deeper than just their first impression or the outward attitudes they project, which broaden and reveal themselves over the course of the game. Even though they all have their own personal goals and motivations for journeying together at all, a real understanding and bond forms between the various members of the cast as they travel, and as the characters are explored over the course of the game, be it via the story cutscenes, the plethora of optional visual novel-like Skits, or even the tongue-in-cheek after-battle scenes, they ultimately became one of my all-time favorite cast of characters.

The combat that you engage in I found to be very enjoyable as well thanks to how fluid the controls and combo-mechanics felt, including the freedom that the game allows for in deciding how you want to utilize and execute many of your various attacks and special abilities. I also appreciate how the game encourages you to utilize your most powerful abilties (including Mystic Artes) and gives you the tools with which to do so with relative ease, rather than locking them behind strict or overly complicated activation requirements. Beyond that, depending on difficulty and your own preferences, combat can be as simplistic or as in-depth as you want to make it.

Want a more challenging or complex experience when doing battle? Set the game to Hard (or higher, as more unlock), customize your attacks (Artes) to dictate which key/button uses which arte in a chain and when, and take full advantage of the elemental and enemy-type weaknesses that each of your different artes can exploit. Enemies will be stronger, hit harder and attack faster, and your parties healing spells will have reduced effectivness as well, which can punish you fast if you get too careless.

If you're not in the mood for a challenge, though, or maybe don't want to participate in the combat at all for whatever reason, just bump the difficulty down to Simple (which lessens enemy strength and aggressivness, and removes all elemental and type weaknesses and resistances) and proceed to button-mash your way to victory. You can even set the character's Control Mode to Auto and just watch your AI-controlled Party (whose combat behaviors are also partially customizable via the Strategy menu) do the battling for you. Most of the random overworld encounters can be avoided as well by simply not making contact with the enemies' overworld sprites, so if you're not interested in battling at all and just want to progress from Point-A to Point-B, you can do so.

Fotrunately, being able to avoid fights when you want to (in addition to the special fast-travel items that you can buy at shops once unlocked) helps to alleviate one of the things that did annoy me a little in this game, which is the backtracking that you have to do through several areas. Needing to backtrack itself isn't so bad, because there are usually story or side-quest related reasons for doing it, and you can often fast-travel to a town or out of a dungeon once you've cleared it unless there is a cutscene of some kind that you need to see along the way. The real issue is that some of the dungeons or overworld area maps are longer than they really need to be at times, which can make progressing through those areas the first time or on-foot feel a little slow and tedious.

Even so, that did not damper the enjoyment that the other aspects of the game gave me, and overall it has become easily one of my favorite games in a very long time. I highly recommend it.

TL;DR: I absolutely love this game and it's characters. Fun combat, interesting and emotional story, great character development and top notch English voice acting. Highly recommended. - - - Gushy Essay Version: Tales of Berseria is a game that I was not expecting to love as much as I do after my time with it's predecessor, Tales of Zestiria. While I enjoyed the world and the characters that Zestiria introduced, I felt disappointed with it's relatively poor storytelling, and it's combat felt more frustrating than fun (partly due to somewhat clunky-feeling controls, and partly due to a lack of balance with the enemies and bosses) and a little more complicated than necessary with the way the game handled equipment and skills. As a result, Zestiria's shortcomings overshadowed a lot of the things that I otherwise did enjoy about it. Tales of Berseria was the exact opposite that respect. While this game is by no means perfect (all games have their flaws), most every shortcoming or annoyance that I have with this game is easily overshadowed by all of the things that it does well; and the things that it does well I feel it does very, very well. The story and characters in Berseria, while fairly cliche and trope-y in some respects (it's an anime-game, what you do you expect? :P ), are very well written and developed through all of the little dialogues dotted throughout the game (both voiced and not voiced). Even moreso through all of the little animated, visual novel-like Skits that come up as you progress the story and side-quests, achieve specific goals, or observe specific locations around the world. Not to mention the occasional anime-styled cutscenes and the vast number of regular in-engine cutscenes, which - along with the largely fantastic English voice acting - do a wonderful job of telling the story and expressing the range of thoughts, feelings and emotions of the characters in a way that truly made me fall in love with each and every one of them. While sometimes trope-y, each one of the characters has a very well developed personality and a wide range of emotions that run deeper than just their first impression or the outward attitudes they project, which broaden and reveal themselves over the course of the game. Even though they all have their own personal goals and motivations for journeying together at all, a real understanding and bond forms between the various members of the cast as they travel, and as the characters are explored over the course of the game, be it via the story cutscenes, the plethora of optional visual novel-like Skits, or even the tongue-in-cheek after-battle scenes, they ultimately became one of my all-time favorite cast of characters. The combat that you engage in I found to be very enjoyable as well thanks to how fluid the controls and combo-mechanics felt, including the freedom that the game allows for in deciding how you want to utilize and execute many of your various attacks and special abilities. I also appreciate how the game encourages you to utilize your most powerful abilties (including Mystic Artes) and gives you the tools with which to do so with relative ease, rather than locking them behind strict or overly complicated activation requirements. Beyond that, depending on difficulty and your own preferences, combat can be as simplistic or as in-depth as you want to make it. Want a more challenging or complex experience when doing battle? Set the game to Hard (or higher, as more unlock), customize your attacks (Artes) to dictate which key/button uses which arte in a chain and when, and take full advantage of the elemental and enemy-type weaknesses that each of your different artes can exploit. Enemies will be stronger, hit harder and attack faster, and your parties healing spells will have reduced effectivness as well, which can punish you fast if you get too careless. If you're not in the mood for a challenge, though, or maybe don't want to participate in the combat at all for whatever reason, just bump the difficulty down to Simple (which lessens enemy strength and aggressivness, and removes all elemental and type weaknesses and resistances) and proceed to button-mash your way to victory. You can even set the character's Control Mode to Auto and just watch your AI-controlled Party (whose combat behaviors are also partially customizable via the Strategy menu) do the battling for you. Most of the random overworld encounters can be avoided as well by simply not making contact with the enemies' overworld sprites, so if you're not interested in battling at all and just want to progress from Point-A to Point-B, you can do so. Fotrunately, being able to avoid fights when you want to (in addition to the special fast-travel items that you can buy at shops once unlocked) helps to alleviate one of the things that did annoy me a little in this game, which is the backtracking that you have to do through several areas. Needing to backtrack itself isn't so bad, because there are usually story or side-quest related reasons for doing it, and you can often fast-travel to a town or out of a dungeon once you've cleared it unless there is a cutscene of some kind that you need to see along the way. The real issue is that some of the dungeons or overworld area maps are longer than they really need to be at times, which can make progressing through those areas the first time or on-foot feel a little slow and tedious. Even so, that did not damper the enjoyment that the other aspects of the game gave me, and overall it has become easily one of my favorite games in a very long time. I highly recommend it.