TALES OF B*

[GlamGrimfire]

it’s that fuckin time again can you believe it - that special time of the year we spent our time with our loved ones or in my case we spent our time with some pissed off roommates that hate both me and the media I consume

well there’s nothing I can do about it now. here’s the skinny on this game I bought and paid for with real money: I have friends in real life who know and understand I have a problem with buying only the trashiest game software.

and frankly theres nothing as bad as my fucking fifteen year on-and-off romance with the tales of series.

if you wanna know who you have to blame for threads like this you can answer that by staring at this cluster of Bright Eyed Anime Youth’s:

if U aren’t familiar with the tales games, they are the traditional final fantasy analogue of japan where theres tenuous connections between games at best, but a little more so than Final Fantasy. also all of the games mine from the same wellspring of random uses of north mythology to Spice Things Up A Lil. If you like words like “Yggdrasil” being pronounced by anime voice actors: it’s the series for you

also every tales game is usually very bad in their own special way and very frequently they are kind of bad entirely. the worth of the series comes through in the occasional release that happens to be actually pretty gate.
and they are all very overly melodramatic. if you think the high mark for teenage melodrama is in a Final Fantasy or uh, Naruto maybe, well boy
BOY
YOU GOTTA PLAY SOME TALES GAMES even though they don’t have dating sim elements

anyway i’m talking about TALES OF BERSERIA
and here’s the mostly fully assembled cast of characters. look at these plucky adults! some of these characters are a full 21 years old, which is like being 49 in JRPG years.

look at the almost even ratio of women to men. look at the fact that Tales of Berseria is a game that can be slotted into the category of Woman Wants To Carry Out Revenge Plot which is pretty fuckin rare for Japanese role playing games.

unfortunately Namco turns off PS4 share on all of the tales games for some reason so while I try to find an alternative I will let you know like all tales games you can play dress up, so the protagonist (her name is velvet and she is basically my last dnd character which is weird as fuck) so even though you cant date anyone the game gets an automatic 10/10 from glam because you can take her shredded dmc cosplay outfit off and make her look like a pirate

anyway tales of Berseria is a game about a very angry woman. all tales games are about how the church and god are evil. that’s good news for me, cuz I hate god and will suffer for all eternity but Berseria is a special game because instead of I dunno

being this fuckin idiot

here’s a direct quote from the protagonist of the last game, paraphrased:

oh no the church is great even though they literally use the entire race of people I grew up next to as tools in a never ending war and most people think i’m just fucking weird and see shit including the actual church how could they possibly be evil at all how did I not see this coming

anyway Tales of berseria is a super grim dark or I guess as grimdark of a game a series can get where one of the notable sidequests in an earlier title as apologizing for being rude to your mom. here’s a tip: never apologize for being too rude even if the reward is exp and gald.

this is our main gal: velvet

you will get well acquainted with her Bigass Claw and the fact that she is super mean and nasty to everyone she meets.
there’s a bunch of fanart of here being shy and demure that I don’t get at all because she lets out a cry of sheer rage any time you use her special attacks and repeatedly threatens everyone close to her. she’s like the tales version of Zero from drakengard 3

also she gets the best most melodramatic lines

this is the next guy here:

rukurou is also a demon like velvet and is supposed to be very apathetic. he is joined in her quest to fucking murder everyone cuz she shows him where his sword is at when he loses it. he spends most of the game: making jokes about how mad velvet is about everything, and talking about yaks.
rokurou has more yak-related lines than any jrpg character I have ever seen. also if you pony up cold hard cash he walks around the whole game shirtless

now there are still yet more characters in this vidcon, but here’s a special moment. every tales game usually has a mascot character that nobody likes: berseria steps up its game by including a character that is voice acted like a mascot character who’s only job is to be a massive piece of shit and dead weight for the first half of the game

this is Magilou, the Spritely Mage or alternatively the Literally Abusive Witch who’s one of the best characters in a game

[Mikey]

I really liked Tales of Symphonia when I played it a dogs’ age ago, but I’d barely played any JRPGs up to that point. I liked the melodrama, and I’m pretty sure one day while I was playing it I put up an Away Message on AIM that was like “Hanging with Lloyd, Collette and the crew!” in an effort to make people who were online think I was off doing something exciting. I was a real fucking dweeb and too old to be pulling that shit, y’all.

I’ve been vaguely interested in but haven’t played every installment since. I was interested in Berseria because of the Angry Female Lead but maybe I’ll just watch the Anime since it’ll probably take less time.

[GlamGrimfire]

let me get into the reason you should play berseria

[botagel]

I played a bunch of this game leading up to the hurricane that came through a while ago, and I want to get back to it later. I wasn’t really enjoying the combat, which is unusual for me and Tales, but I am really enjoying the character dynamics. Berseria does a really smart thing where you can definitely break the plot beats out into fairly standard Tales structure, but because of the perspective of the characters and their completely understandable quests for vengeance, freedom from oppression, and self-actualization (which will, honestly, probably get sidetracked in the third act) it feels fresh and fun.

[VastleCania]

Is Magilou like the ghost of christmas present in scrooged?

because if she is i will have to play this game

[GlamGrimfire]

Basically yes

[VastleCania]

okay

nice

[Mikey]

Fuck, Clint, that was a deep cut straight from the dome. Bravo

[VastleCania]

Not to ruin the illusion of me being like, just incredibly well versed in pop culture, but

I watched the movie yesterday, plus if i was going to have a crush on anyone in a movie it would be that fairy

[thecatamites]

what’s the dialogue pacing like for these?? i think what’s been putting me off more recent jrpgs is that like they figured the little character moments were what people really wanted but the way they developed on that was to just prolong them all as much as possible.
A: Hey, B!
[B: turns in all directions, looks at A, hops, exclamation mark appears above head]
B: Could it be… A…?
[A: climbs up ladder, pauses, hops, emits laughing emoji bubble]
A: Ha ha ha! You haven’t changed a bit!
[B: Hops, pauses, emits sweatdrop emoji, disspirited noise]
B: You…
[A: sweatdrop emoji, disspirited noise]
A: Could it be… You really don’t remember…?
[pause]
[A & B: sweatdrop emoji]
[pause]
[B: exclamation mark, pause, moves away, moves forward again]
B: Can it really be… A?
[A: Hops, laughing emoji]
A: Same old B!
[B: sweatdrop emoji, disspirited noise]
B: …
[B: exclamation mark, pause]
B: But is it really A?
[B & A both hop, pause]
A: B…
B: A…
[A & B: pause, hop, hop, pause, excited emojis, disspirited emojis, face down, pause, face each other]
golden sun 1 has a 5+ minute cutscene about mending a roof in the opening 30 minutes alone. i like only the prissiest rpgs but i’ve been burned before…

[GlamGrimfire]

compared to traditional JRPG pacing so far tales of berseria has been getting in a cab in an 80’s movie only that cab has the bomb in it from speed so the plot cannot go beneath 65 miles an hour.
while there is a lot of talking - it is mostly b/c all of the skits (and a LOT of npc dialogue) is fully voiceacted.

ill get into this in a longer post, but the plot beats of berseria move at a very quick pace so far. you gather the whole party in just over 6 hours and you’re already pretty much well acquainted with everyones motivations by then, leaving tons of room for the game to just have a lot of cast members riffing on eachother endlessly

[Tuxedo]

Back when I played every JRPG I must have went through like 10 Tales games, and even with my then lower standards, Eternia was the only one I considered not unpleasant

I can’t believe this series is still going

Anyway the most important fact about Tales is that Tales of Phantasia GBA spectacularly mistranslated Ragnarok:

[creep]

just last night i was stricken sleepless in bed and thinking to myself i should make a post about the franchises amazing custom genre labels and also how nightmarish i find the whole sprawling mess (answer: very)

berseria is apparently an “rpg of discovering your own reasons to live”

[shrug]

I “played” through part of Tales of Symphonia (?) By turning on AUTOFIGHT and watching Predator with the director’s commentary on while my numbers went up.

I did not get far in Tales of Symphonia.

It might have been the last jrpg I tried to play?

[Fish-Man]

That is a skirt made of books.

[sleepysmiles]

i’m here for it

[GlamGrimfire]

a’fore I kind of get into the contrivances of the rest of the game: I actually really like the combat system in this one. previous tales games have almost had combat systems that are just a worse Ocean of Stars. generally from symphonia onward they were pretty in fun!

the combat system in this game is meant to be played by Real Gammers ONLY and requires that you really put it on the absolute hardest difficulty, where the game becomes a “I can press buttons and win probably” to “I am not a devil may cry cosplayer and I have been unfairly thrust into the actual world of Devil May Cry”

see

berseria does what every JRPG should do: it gets rid of these

and instead replaced them with a stock counter of “souls” that starts at 3 at the beginning of every battle. these are tied to a special attack Velvet can do that uses her Bigass Claw Hand to deal tons of damage + use a special elemental skilled tied to the combo you did or the weakness of the enemy.

the thing is, if you use that attack right off the bat on a difficult counter it leaves you only being able to string 2 hits together at once. you have to collect more souls in combat by exploiting enemy weaknesses to get more attacks, or killing enemies in the middle of a combo to pick up whatever souls they have. it’s like a fuckin weirdo action game version of the Press Turn from shin megami tensei.

BUT THEN

the game also let’s you pick up additional souls by guardian towards the enemy at the last second like some weirdo metal gear rising shit, only now you’re all hot 20 year olds and not a crusty robot in heels

skill in this combat system especially on hard can leave you clearing encounters with 5 or 6 enemies in like 10 seconds or less which means combat is fast + breezy + fun when you get good at it, which is the opposite of maybe every other tales game

later in the game you get the ability to quick switch other characters in and out for special combos and it’s all pretty wild. if you fuck up you’re kind of ineffectually hoping you can pull off enough parries to build your souls up when you whiff shit. it’s all Good Times and I don’t even enjoy JRPG combat

sometimes battles happen in areas that look this good

most of the time they don’t. sorry

[botagel]

I really dislike the combat because the souls don’t actually do anything interesting for you; most fights are about finding a way to engineer a combo route to hit weaknesses so you actually do damage, and not getting hit. Getting hit makes you lose souls, which means you can’t do full combos, which means you need to pause and rearrange your combo strings or deal with being stuck at one attack in a string and not having any fun until you can dodge enough attacks to get a soul back.

It’s not hard, you’re just punished for Poor Play by making fights way longer and more tedious.

[Godamn_Milkman]

First, my wife tries to get me to play these games, AND NOW YOU GUYS!? I have no reprieve from Tales in my life except for work.

[GlamGrimfire]

actually its just me