The Tales Series Thread

Not seeing much love for these games around, but I'm well into them at the moment.

I tried Tales of Vesperia around 3 years back and didn't like it at all. Felt really slow & boring all round.

But earlier this year I completed Berseria and though that, for the most part, it was fricking brilliant. It's strengths are in it's humour, characters, pacing & cheesyness. The combat's BS, I just pop it on simple and button bash away, but it's a great chillax game.

Having completed that I'm around 30 hours in to Zesteria, and loving it so far. Read a lot of bad things about it, and it did take me 5-6 hours before I got used to the switches from Berseria, but again it's a great JRPG. Humours' still good (although more hit & miss than Berseria), combat's more interesting, music is shit-hot, and there's a good balance between exploration & linearity.

Phantasia will be next on the list.

I really like the Symphonia game, but don't really care much for the others. I've not tried the newest game yet, as I suspect it's much like the other recent releases and not like Symphonia at all.

Carnifex said:

I've not tried the newest game yet…

Click to expand...

Of course you didn't as it will be released in this year:


Note that a new trailer is expected at Taipei Game Show (cca a month from now).

They really stopped trying with the titles, didn't they? Vestiria, Vesperia, Berseria, Xilia....

Anyway, I liked Vesperia the best. It was so nice to have a main character who didn't have that stereotypical pre-voice change 12 year old boy sound (Troy Baker did the American voice for Yuri), and the writing in general was just a bit less daft than usual. The gameplay is pretty similar from game to game, and was as good as its been.

Just finished Tales of Zestiria, enjoyed it.

Awkward start which took some adjusting to after playing Berseria, great creamy middle which has an excellent blend of action, drama & humour, flagged noticeably towards the end though as some of the side quests were literally just bouncing from save point to save point unnecessarily.

Despite it's characters not being quite as good as Berseria, they're still great and the banter is still very enjoyable. Combat is always a bit convoluted for my taste with these games, but you can simplify it enough so it's just button mashing fun and doesn't get in the way.

I can see why some don't like it, the flaws it does carry are pretty big flaws. But Any experienced JRPG vet used to the SNES days of gaming will brush them aside no probs.

Berseria is better, but I'd play that first then this simply due to how the timeline flows. Definitely worth the £10 I paid for it.

4/5

For those who aren't a fan of the series, I hated Vesperia and both these Tales games were really enjoyable.