Yeah! It’s just nice to really savor it
tales of butthole
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alright who’s ready for part 2
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Me, obviously
alright alright so not long after you get through the opening cutscenes and wander around being a stereotypically aloof villager girl: this dude shows up mysteriously
the game kind of drops the ball and forgets at all to tell you the protagonist knows him until like five fucking scenes later so he just randomly shows up after you kill some hogs in the very beginning to do his Senpai shtick but then two cutscenes later it turns out he’s a bad guy! and then he does his:
“…Fool. I Could Kill You With Ease.” bit which results in
A) your little brother getting fuckin owned and merked like right off the bat and
B) your own self getting Demonized but not in the fun Monster Hunter Freedom Unite way and ending up stuck at the bottom of the well, which prompts your beast-ass girl to remark
“…the true Dark Souls starts here…”
that’s also when you meet
look, this part is a prison break. you come to these games because you want fun waifus and anime bf’s to hang out with and that’s what the game gives you basically immediately. in a rare inversion, both Magilou and Rokurou are completely useless and refuse to help you out in battle. this prompts lots of comments from Our Gal about Rokurou’s huge fucking sword he carries around but refuses to use or disclose why he can’t use at the same time
it’s probably some anime max-power-level-shit knowing these games.
but the immediate area that comes after the prison break is what sets up what got me posting about this game in the first place
the subtitle for tales of berseria could have been “hello I am Velvet Crowe and I am Fucking Pissed Off At Everything.”
velvet seeths with an amount of generic rage usually reserved for only the most generically handsome short brown haired dudes in videogames. the opening scenes after the jailbreak basically give you a frozen over town in the north that velvet and co. are trying to escape from, and how velvet doesn’t really give a shit if it means ruining the entire infrastructure of the place to get back at the church in the area.
this is also where the game introduces:
this special cinnamon role is Eleanor. later in the game she has to get down on some drakengard shit and make a pact with Velvet: but until then she’s a big fucking crybaby.
a lot of fans like to ship velvet and Eleanor for some anime reason, but I think the game is kind of set up to pointedly use velvet to take down Eleanor at every avenue. see: Eleanor’s deal is she refuses to believe at every turn that the church is fucked up, and that the world is as cruel and hateful as it seems. velvet has first hand knowledge that it is on both counts.
this isn’t me like over-extending to read into a characterization. I mean I would rather see velvet get down in Lesbians with Magilou anyway, cuz the dynamic is way more fun with velvet as the Goth Sub GF but theres a ton of points in the game where velvet and the rest of the cast outright admonish Eleanor for her naïve worldview
also now I have this outfit for rokurou
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i gotta get this one
I mean that boxart is the concept art by the person that designs most of the tales of characters.
Man I heard a 30 minute discussion of Tales of last weekend.
Y’all should keep an eye on the 500 games thread. @HOBO has a banger of a post coming about Tales of Rebirth that I did not write.
I got Renfrew to play Rebirth and that felt pretty good.
I like the series has very specific genre titles and more than that very specific demographics that are to be respected. This one is for 15 year old boys this one is for 13 year old boys.
So I can look at them with full clarity of heart and go this one isn’t for me. Now if they made a game for 33 year old American expats now we are talking about a video game for me. And that video game is called the anime dark souls I can’t remember the name of.
That Code Vein thing or whatever that’s coming out next year or something?
Any more half-knowledge and we’d have an episode of Retronauts. :airhorn: :airhorn: :airhorn: :airhorn: :airhorn:
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by the way the biggest thing I hate about these games is that they seem like really (extremely) good examples of modern games having poor asset control or even realization. areas go from very well put together to a certain kind of sparseness that even the most early of ps2 JRPG’s didn’t have. some areas in berseria look like they were assembled from textures that were just laying around with no thought to them beyond needing more places for the player to go through.
weirdly enough in berseria so far at least most of the areas that seem well put together or are fun to look at are ones that are way out of the way and off to the side.
Berseria (and direct predecessor Zestiria) have a lot of problems arising from the decision to make combat “happen” in the area as you’re exploring in. Even though there’s a transition effect, this means that most areas need to be VERY wide open to allow for the space of movement that’s normal in Tales battles. That probably led to a similar detachment from the aesthetics of the areas, too – you don’t need to put too much detail here, because it needs to be wide-open and cope with the all the combat effects, enemy models, etc.
Hey is there anyway I could get you to send me the PDF or JPEG of that Tales of Symphonia artwork? I absolutely LOVE it. And I want to make a poster out of it for my room please. 
i dont even know where i found it