Tales of Berseria™

I went into Tales of Berseria expecting a competent but safe JRPG, and instead got one of the sharpest character studies the genre has produced in years. The setup is deceptively simple: Velvet Crowe watches her younger brother die at the hands of someone she trusted, spends three years festering in captivity, and then escapes with nothing on her mind except vengeance. What makes this work is that Bandai Namco actually commits to the premise. Velvet is selfish, impulsive, and willing to leave bodies in her wake. The game never softens her into a reluctant hero. Her enemy, the exorcist Artorius, is trying to save the world with a regime of cold rationalism, and the writing keeps you genuinely uncomfortable about whose side you should be on. That moral friction is Berseria at its best. The party you assemble around Velvet is the other reason this story holds up. Laphicet, a young Malak born into servitude, gets one of the better coming-of-age arcs I have seen in an RPG. Magilou provides comedic relief that lands more often than it should given the grim tone, and the skit system, which serves up optional voiced character conversations on the world map, is the closest Berseria gets to Disco Elysium-style flavor text: small, funny, occasionally devastating. The skits are worth watching. Do not skip them. Combat is built around the Soul Gauge, which replaces the older Technical Point and Chain Capacity systems from earlier Tales entries. Each character holds up to five Souls, and those Souls determine how many Artes you can chain together in a single combo. You steal Souls from enemies by stunning them, and enemies can steal them back from you, which means getting greedy mid-combo carries real tactical risk. When you accumulate at least three Souls, you can trigger a Break Soul: Velvet, for instance, unleashes her daemon arm and shifts into elemental attacks based on enemy type. The Blast Gauge sits alongside this, enabling Switch Blasts that swap in a reserve party member mid-fight for a free attack. All told, the system rewards players who read enemy patterns and manage resources rather than just mashing. Artes are mapped directly to face buttons and can be customized per character, so build variety is genuine rather than cosmetic. Six difficulty settings, up to Evil and Chaos tiers unlocked via hunt quests, give the combat plenty of ceiling to grow into. Where Berseria slips is in its dungeon design, which is linear to a fault, and in a handful of filler quests that exist mostly to pad the map between story beats. The visuals were already behind the curve at launch and have not improved with age on PC. The camera sensitivity with mouse input is high enough to be uncomfortable without a controller, so treat controller support as a practical requirement. The equipment system, which has you cycling through constant drops and upgrading gear at blacksmiths to unlock bonus effects, can tip from satisfying into busywork in the later hours. These are real friction points, but none of them break a game whose story has enough forward momentum to carry you through the rough patches. For JRPG players who have grown tired of the genre's default heroism loop, Berseria is a genuine outlier. It is a prequel to Tales of Zestiria, but zero prior knowledge is needed, and the connection actually enriches the ending if you know what follows in the timeline. At roughly 50 to 60 hours for a focused playthrough, it does not overstay its welcome the way some Tales titles can. Play with a controller, give the Soul Gauge system the three or four hours it needs to click, and you will find one of the most committed revenge narratives the series has ever produced.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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