For a Tales game, Berseria is in a bit of a weird position. Being the latest entry in the series, it falls under a lot of scrutiny as the series hasn't been particularly great for quite some time. It has had some good points, but also a lot of bad points. While Berseria probably is indeed the best Tales game since Vesperia, it still has a multitude of problems that shouldn't be ignored.
Berseria's story unfortunately still follows the same formula as the latest games in the series. In other words, it picks a particular emotion or feeling, in this case revenge and builds a story around it. Despite this, I felt that it had a fairly competent beginning and ending for the series. However the middle section falters a bit since it still strongly uses Japanese common tropes and really hammers them in way too hard. I believe that if the mid-section was more subtle to the lead-up, it would have been a much more satisfying story. Instead they like to constantly reiterate the problems the character has over and over in an overly blatent manner.
Characters however felt fairly good for me. There weren't any sickeningly overwhelming positive personalities this time in my opinion. Two characters come close to that, but not nearly as overwhelming oppressive as Graces was. Though none of the characters felt particarly close to one another outside of Velvet and another character, they formed a fairly decent chemistry the longer they were together. Skits are much better this time around as they put forth some more animation/images for emotion which really livens things up. Skits are also fully voiced as are "conversations" which are optional speech bubbles that initiate a conversation with a character in the world. There are a ton of both skits and conversations in Berseria.
I want to say I clocked in around 50 to 65 hours to finish the game, including side quests which I believe I earned all achievements for. The difficulty of the game is probably the easiest in the series by far with you unlocking Intense difficulty 6 to 10 hours in and then Chaos at the end of the game. I tried Chaos but it was a bit too tedius for my liking and stuck with intense after I eventually switched to it. There are upsides to choosing higher difficulties as potencites will sometimes only work with higher difficulties as well as things like better loot and more frequent dire foe encounters. I usually play normal, but I found it way too easy and ended up turning up the difficulty to hard and eventually intense.
The battle system feels like a cross between some light Graces and Zestiria. You have no standard attacks like old Tales games, which I sorely miss. Instead you have 4 sets of 4 combos. Usually it's best to make each button combo strong against something and changing them out for bosses as needed. Though for the most part I found myself spamming the same combo as it felt like stuns and other status effects were more common on that combo due to it being higher level. Whether or not arte levels have any effect on how frequently its effects take hold I'm not sure as the attribute Focus does increase the chance to cause and resist status effects.
Now besides combos, you also have an SG gauge that artes drain SP from. When you use artes, it drains the gauge. Higher focus will naturally refill the SG gauge quicker. On the other hand if you cause a status effect to an enemy during your combo, it will refill the SG gauge by 1 crystal. There are a couple other ways to refill this bar as well, such as getting a perfect dodge against an enemy targeting you and a SG gauge crystal will fly out onto the field for you or your AI allies to grab. Likewise if you get hit by a stun or status effect, you will lose an SG crystal.
One thing I do want to say is that I really do miss the old battle systems where you had normal attacks. It allows me to better create combos and continually hit the enemy I was fighting. Having only the ability to use artes, while it looks fancy, it doesn't allow me to connects hits frequently as I would be able to otherwise. The game also lacks large healing spell artes like Nurse which are present in older games that I miss as well.
At first I wasn't too sold on the battle system, but as I started learning new passives from mastering equipment, it started feeling a lot better. That doesn't mean I thought it was terrible either. Besides all those, every character also has the ability to Burst and each one is unique. It costs 1 SG crystal to use the Burst mode and Velvet, the main character, has Therion mode that she's invincible in. Her health starts draining and either by the end of a full combo or her health reaches 1 she will use a Therion specific ability and then exit the mode. Now if you're good at gaining back SG while attacking, you can literally go right back into Therion mode with next to zero downtime in between bursts.
I mentioned equipment mastery, which yes, it's back again. Equipment now has a unique trait that that can be mastered via earning grade. However equipment will also have 2 other non-random skills attached to them as well and as you progress through the game, you will gain more potencite that will also give equipment up to 3 random skills too. All this equipment will drop from enemies, which means you don't have to buy new gear that often. The extra gear can be sold or broken down into materials. These materials can then in turn be used to upgrade equipment up to +10 after you've unlocked the ability to get that far via potencite. Unfortunately there's no easy way to mass break down equipment like you can in say, Nioh, so it becomes a very tedious task to perform. Though this leaves you with a ton of gald to use towards other things. I will say that grade is significantly easier to obtain now thanks to dire foes.
Vanity equipment is still in full throttle, much of which is locked behind mini-game rewards and purchasing them with Tales coins. You have quite a few to unlock, including non-DLC swimsuits but they are far more modest than what the DLC swimsuits show. Besides that, you have default looking costumes that can change the battle music as well if you liked a particular battle track.
The music in general was pretty decent. Unfortunately I'm probably the last person one should ask to give their input on music, so I can't really give good input. There was a nice variety of tracks and a few tracks did manage to stand out during times that were more tense to help solidify the feeling of upcoming conflict. Sound is pretty much the same, it sounds good, although there was nothing amazing about it.
On the other hand graphics were alright. The designs of environments were fairly decent. Although there were plenty of textures that were complete ass and really contrasted against the rest of the environment where textures were alright, but not great. What was particularly nice about the environments though was if you played Zestiria and haven't erased it from your mind, you'll be going through areas that were in that game but are now completely different. That's not to say you need to play Zestiria prior to this as it's just a lore bonus.
In the end, I feel that Berseria is one of the better Tales games. Not up to par with Vesperia or Symphonia, but still a decently solid entry. Even though I feel this way, I believe they need to change a lot of things to really create an optimal Tales games going down the road. Unfortunately I feel that will never happen because Japan tends to develop with Japan only in mind and that often detracts from it being something I could really enjoy across the board. I do recommend the game and if I were to assign a price tag to purchasing, I'd say $40 max.
