Played all day and got up to the final dungeon and my enjoyment of the game has done almost a 180 and I had a really good time today and couldn't put the game down. I don't love the cast, but at this point it feels like a normal good Tales game. Gonna take a look at the side stuff available now and do some questing before I do the final dungeon.
My problem with the entire narrative really was Velvet. I just found her to be the most unlikeable angsty MC ever and I couldn't stand her party interactions because all she does is be a jerk to everyone or have crazy out of character mood swings. It's like how some people can't stand Luke for the first 30 hours of Tales of the Abyss (Luke didn't bother me because he was just pompous and naive, but Velvet's combination of a tsundere trope angst character just really rubbed me the wrong way), or how some people can't stand Lightning (Velvet to me really feels like a huge clone of her trying to appeal to the Japanese audience that loves Lightning even though Western audiences dislike her; Velvet and Lightning have that same cold, unfriendly group leader attitude). When Velvet finally drops the angst and becomes a normal functional human being that you'd actually care about, it instantly fixes everything wrong with the cast dynamic.
It doesn't help that the support characters aren't there to pick up the slack as well and sometimes make it even worse. A lot of the playable cast are really one dimensional. Magiru is probably my least favorite Tales support party member ever. Her slapstick sarcasm jokes non-stop with zero actual character development until the endgame gets old after 10 minutes of her introduction. Rokurou seems like an alright guy, until 50 hours later in the game it's apparent that he just has his one shtick and that's all he does the entire game. Like Magiru, he has very little character development and there just isn't much to his character. Aizen is a little better, but he's another tsundere trope whose often fairly one note angry grimace emo shinigami, at least he lightens up a little.
On the plus side, Lafeed is fantastic. Easily the best character in the game. If you tune out Velvet's angsty ramblings, he can pretty much be the main character of the game. He's got a full good character development arc, is very likeable, and jut gets better and better. Elenore is a bit dull, but she's not a bad character and she develops which is nice since a lot of these character don't develop much.
I feel like maybe if the cast had 2 more characters there'd be enough good characters to fill out the cast to counter some of the one-note characters although Velvet would still be Velvet.
The sub-antagonists while nice to have around, are just too shallow and one-note as well (but that's always been a Tales problem outside of some major antagonists that are occasionally well developed).
I've never had much of a problem with the story other than there wasn't much too it for a lot of the game, just "chase guy X for revenge / go collect stuff", but that's usual for Tales. Now that the story's picked up in the last 20-25% it's pretty good. One thing I've enjoyed the whole game has been all the connections to Zestiria, because unlike most people I don't hate Zestiria, it's just an incomplete game similar to MGSV where you can tell the 2nd half was cobbled together to release in some shape but tons of plotlines are underdeveloped or disappear. Anyhow, in retrospect Berseria definitely improves my opinion of Zestiria as I feel like when they wrote Zestiria and created the world & lore they spent a lot of time making it and you don't get half of it in the game of Zestiria, now with Berseria's extra worldview info it adds, you can see a better picture of the world they created with Zestiria and a lot of the plotlines there that fell apart have more weight now and you can see where they were meant to be going.
Usually Tales games fall apart in the last 20 hours or so, but I'm finding Berseria to the be the opposite where the best part of the game is this last 15-20 hours. Until I got to this part, Berseria had killed the Tales franchise for me and I wasn't going to buy anymore Tales games because I felt like the series just isn't for me anymore. But now with this good endgame, I'm looking forward to the next Tales announcement, I just hope they never try another ultra-angsty lead again and I also hope at some point they finally go away from this Xillia-Zestiria-Berseria direction of awful huge fields. Graces is still 10x more fun to actually
play than any of those three partly because the battle system, but mostly because it doesn't have huge empty fields to backtrack across the entire game and instead has traditional Tales dungeons, and towns and short road connectors. Would also be nice if they can have music too in the next one. In Berseria it literally sounds like some elevator music is playing in the back from some other game while you are playing the game. Outside of the one theme track it doesn't have anything memorable.
Berseria's main writer is Naoki Yamamoto from Bandai Namco Studios, who worked on Hearts, Xillia 2 and Zestiria (he also did some some sub events/lore for Xillia and Graces). The other ones who are not as involved in the writing are Yuuta Hase, also from Bandai Namco Studios, who never wrote anything afaik but was Zestiria's director, and Masaki Hiramatsu, a freelancer who worked on Rebirth and Symphonia 2. The track record of the latter is pretty bad but I doubt you can blame him for anything in this game.
Oh hmmm, earlier in the thread someone had said the lead writer was from Rebirth & Symphonia 2. I didn't like Hearts either outside the battle system and haven't played Xillia 2, but I really liked the Zestiria cast. Hmmm. When I do play Xillia 2 I hope the cast is more fun like the Zestiria & Hearts cast, than the Berseria cast.
One really big issue I have with the writing in this game that doesn't exist in any of the like 18 other Tales games, is that someone made an executive decision to lengthen every dialogue set substantially. Skits which were always about 30 seconds long and a few lines and then a punchline are essentially mini-cutscenes and go on for anything from 1-3 minutes. Also talking to NPCs instead of giving you 1 or 2 lines of dialogue now every NPC goes on for 6-10 lines if you press circle next to them. The end result is that while I still watch the skits because I like skits and don't want to miss anything, in Berseria unlike other Tales games I avoid talking to NPCs because I don't want to read through 6-10 lines of dialogue every time. Even Kiseki which fills its world with rich NPCs doesn't give them 6-10 lines of dialogue, it's still 1-3. When you're running around an you just wanna talk to all NPCs and hear a few lines, it drags when the NPC dialogues are so long. And the skits being so incredibly long this time around means when you get past an event and you've got several new skits, it's literally time to stop doing everything, stand still and watch 5-8 minutes of additional cutscenes through skits compared to having a couple short funny skits. Also when you're running through dungeons or towns and the game constantly stops you to do a 1-3 minute forced skit it just feels incredibly disruptive which I've never felt before in a Tales game. Berseria was clearly made with a decision to have LOTS of content, which they thought also meant making skits and NPC dialogues 3-4x longer than normal and I feel that single decision really detracted from my enjoyment of the game and the narrative. Hopefully they don't continue in this direction with future games. It reminds me of Disgaea 4 when N1 decided to start doubling the length of their pre-stage cutscenes and it made the game drag when you just wanted to get into battle and play the map.