About 4-5 hours in now and this game is pretty bad. Outside of the art, 60fps and great fast loading there's almost nothing positive going for it. It's just a really boring game. Same problem Xillia had but even worse so far.
Not only is there no sense of going on an adventure/exploration because every location is completely lifeless and uninteresting, but there's a bunch of backtracking between boring fields already, and the characters...man, the characters....
I've never seen a Tales cast this bad in the history of Tales games. Even ToS2 wasn't this bad (the talking panther was better than any of the three main party characters in Berseria so far). The main cast is this somber lifeless group, there is no fun at all, which does.not.work with Tales. The skits are boring, instead of playful, the cutscenes are boring, the antagonists are emotionless one-note characters. The only energetic character is witch girl and instead of being fun energy she's just incredibly annoying.
I feel like they wanted to make this dark & serious Tales, the opposite of a normal Tales, but they just completely missed the mark by removing all the fun. There's no charm and the cast is growing on you because it's all so emotionless. I mean so far
they don't even have victory quote skits really, which are like a major series staple. Maybe they'll mumble a line after battle in 3 seconds and that's it. Then again victory quotes are FUN skits between FUN casts and since there's no fun here I guess they felt victory quote skits would be out of place.
It's crazy, the whole game feels dead, bland and boring. Lifeless fields, lifeless towns, lifeless cast. Even the battle system feels incredibly boring/bland and the only Tales-ish flash is in Soul Break attacks. Combat system feels pretty shallow. So far it's my least favorite Tales battle system, even less fun than Legendia's grappling so far. Hopefully it'll get better as more of the cast joins. I don't really care for the dagger-ish quick low-impact jab combat style of the first two playable characters.
So far it's definitely the second worst game in the entire 20+ game lineup after ToS2. Gonna give it like 5 more hours to fix these issues or it'll be the third Tales game I shelve after ToS2 and Xillia.
Everyone figured they had to make a better game than Zesteria since they'd learn from that and make improvements. But this game is so much worse than Zesteria in story, characters, exploration, music and battle system so far. The only improvements are 60fps, quick loading and getting rid of the dumb skill system. But at least in Zesteria I was interested in the cast and exploring the world map and I looked forward to the skits. Thank god you can press O to FF through the skits since they're so boring here.