Tales of Berseria - Remastered

I came into Tales of Berseria Remastered as someone who missed the original 2017 PC release, and that context matters a lot for how you should read any take on this version. If you are in the same boat, the news is mostly good. If you already own the original on Steam, the calculus gets uncomfortable fast. The core of the game is genuinely strong. Velvet Crowe is a rare JRPG protagonist built around anger rather than idealism, and the story around her - a dark tale of vengeance, betrayal, and the tension between emotion and cold reason - holds up in a way that a lot of the genre does not. The cast of party members is eccentric in the best sense: a malak boy named Laphicet, a swordsman with an obsessive honor code, a shape-shifting witch, and others, each with enough backstory and banter to make long voyages across the kingdom of Midgand feel lived-in. The real-time combat leans on a customizable combo system called the Break Soul Arte chain, where managing your Soul Gauge while stringing together Artes from multiple characters creates a rhythm that rewards practice without demanding it. The remaster's additions are modest but useful, especially for a first playthrough. The Grade Shop opens from the start with a healthy initial balance, so you can tune the difficulty or stack XP bonuses before the opening hour is done. Characters move about twenty percent faster by default, autosave is in, a retry option appears after losing regular battles, and destination markers appear on the field to cut down on aimless backtracking. All previously released DLC - costumes, bonus items, character outfits tied to other Tales entries - is bundled in from day one. These are real quality-of-life wins that the original version simply did not have. The visual side is where critical opinion has been divided, and honestly the skeptics have a point. The PC version targets 60 fps and supports higher resolutions, and the character models do look cleaner. But draw distance is still short, shadow and light flickering persists, and the world geometry - flat dungeon corridors, simple town layouts - was never Berseria's strong suit and no amount of texture polish was going to fix that. Reviewers coming from the original PC release have largely found the upgrade too subtle to justify a repurchase, and that reads as fair. The original already ran well on PC. This is less a technical leap and more a convenience bundle. Who should actually play this? Anyone new to the Tales series who wants a story-first action RPG with a protagonist the genre rarely attempts. Anyone who bounced off Tales of Arise's more streamlined tone and wants something with more emotional weight and a rougher edge. If you are a returning player who has the original installed and patched, the new QoL hooks are nice but not transformative - wait for a meaningful discount before doubling up. For newcomers, though, this is a perfectly solid entry point to one of the series' more memorable entries.

Alex · Scout Team

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