RPG Jamboree: Tales of Berseria (PS4)

When an anti-hero is at the center of a story, they’re often someone who does the right thing in the wrong way or takes an extreme approach while trying to do good. In Tales of Berseria though, its central characters are in some ways bad and selfish people, but even when it seems like their actions are justified, the game won’t take the easy road of marking them down as anti-heroes. At times borderline villainous but also never quite deep enough in that direction that they become morally detestable, this fantasy role-playing game chooses to spend an incredible amount of time looking at its flawed protagonists and ends up making some fascinatingly human characters who don’t behave in certain ways just to fit into a tidy narrative. Building up both sides of the central conflict as morally dubious makes for a tale with few clear cut answers on who people are and what they should have done, and to strengthen this approach even more, it even becomes a fundamental part of the game’s major themes.

 

At the center of this surprisingly textured story is Velvet Crowe, and when we first meet her, she actually seem to be the perfect picture of kindness and love. Living in an idyllic forest village and caring for her sickly young brother, her mindset is quickly disrupted when her brother is sacrificed for a ritual, and in her attempt to stop that ceremony, she becomes tainted and turned into the very kind of daemon the ritual was trying to prevent. For the next three years she is kept in a pit and forced to eat other daemons thrown in with her to survive, so when she is finally broken free of her prison, it’s not hard to empathize with her single-minded warpath. What makes her fury more compelling though is it isn’t quickly abated, Velvet starting to cool down to some degree but never fully rid of the murderous impulses the trauma cemented into her and lead to her warped view that her revenge takes priority over anything else in life. She won’t engage in wanton cruelty, but if burning down a port or carving her way through people is necessary, she won’t bat an eye, and even though she comes to better recognize the issues in that lifestyle, she doesn’t suddenly invert her perspective because she isn’t entirely unaware of her flaws or fully free of regrets even at her worst. Tales of Berseria is a rather long game that is fine taking its time slowly building up who a character is and slowly chipping away at unveiling who exactly someone is at heart, and an incredible amount of voice acting further helps all the character work shine even brighter. While Velvet is mostly a bit cold and distant, she also has a large range of extreme reactions, but her voice actress Christina Vee does a superb job realizing both the moments of heart-wrenching anguish and the subtler segments where a softer side slightly pokes through again.

 

Part of what helps Velvet’s actions avoid being inexcusable is the exact nature of who she is up against. The Abbey is a global religious organization who arose from the man who performed that earlier mentioned ritual. Aiming to protect people against the daemons emerging across the land, they are in some ways a clear force for good who have allowed for civilization to thrive in this embattled world. Unfortunately, some of their methods in doing so involving enslaving and suppressing the emotions of a race of nearly angelic beings called Malakhim while also covering up the fact that the people who turn into daemons can very well still be personable and kind even if their outward appearance is monstrous. Velvet’s motivations for going against the Abbey may be strictly personal, but she gradually gets a band of allies together because the Abbey’s extreme peacekeeping methods involve subjugation and massacres. One addition to the group, a exorcist with the Abbey known as Eleanor, is a good counterbalance to Velvet, as she first worked with the Abbey believing in their cover-ups because she did only see the good the organization did, but even some members who know the truth are seemingly fine with it, making it tough to tell who might be an unwilling arm who is trying to do right or the ones perpetrating the falsehoods. Eleanor is probably the most morally clean of the six characters who will make up your party, but even she starts to show that much of her motivation comes from her own desires and wants rather than lofty ideas of justice and moral superiority.

One of the first characters Velvet encounters is a good picture of why the morally dubious characters of Tales of Berseria can still be likable despite sometimes clearly doing the wrong thing. Rokurou looks like a traditional samurai but behaves in a casual and friendly manner, only really getting serious when it comes to trying to kill his brother Shigure to prove his superiority as a swordsman. Rokurou is a daemon as well, but despite this he almost always wears a smile and brings some happy energy to every conversation he’s a part of. While there are a considerable amount of cutscenes throughout this fantasy adventure, there are also smaller “skits” that you can uncover on your journeys where characters speak using lightly animated face art. The game does a great job animating 3D models with emotions and picking appropriate key images for these smaller scenes, but an interesting purpose they serve is fleshing out the group even in small ways. A good deal of Tales of Berseria focuses on the idea of charting your own path or the value of self-motivation versus things like supposed necessary sacrifice and social intrusion on one’s life, the Abbey in particular espousing a “rationality over sentimentality” mindset. While at first it can seem like characters discussing foods they like at length has little purpose, it also not only gives them time to show the nature of their friendship, but it plays into this idea of being able to enjoy things in life rather than solely focusing on the collective good.

 

These skits are a wonderful way to better flesh out the party and the world at large. Tales of Berseria’s locations are admittedly not too creative in concept or appearance, and while it can sometimes hit on a pretty design like the Manaan Reef, the world mostly comes to life through the skit conversations as your band of misfits share the details of society and history they’ve gathered in their travels. The players gets two Malakhim in their party, one being a pirate named Eizen who is a font of useful information on the world that helps you better understand its magic and history outside of the Abbey, but the other is a very important contributor to the game’s most resonant emotional moments. Laphicet is the name given to a Malak that Velvet breaks free of his enslavement, the adorable young boy at first lacking almost any emotion due to the Abbey’s influence but his growth into a full-fledged individual is perhaps more important than Velvet’s own emotional battles. Laphicet is a well-meaning kid who often brings out the best in this group of ne’er-do-wells, and while they are sometimes a poor influence on him, he is the embodiment of the game’s proposed balance between selfishness and social trust. Velvet and the others certainly want the best for Laphicet but they don’t treat him like a baby or unwanted load, and his growing understanding of when to act on one’s own desires or work towards the group’s aims is given plenty of room to take shape.

 

The final member of your group of six playable characters feels a bit like the odd one out at first, as Magilou is an over-the-top witch who seems to speak only for her own enjoyment and tries to turn life into something more grandiose than it actually is. While clearly meant to be a source of levity before your group is established enough to draw comedy out of their in-character interactions, Magilou is another part of the game’s confidence in letting things take time to develop. The faint glimmers there is more under her performative surface won’t really start to produce anything until fairly late in the adventure, but the core cast and concepts still ensure you have plenty to focus on before the spotlight will properly turn to certain subjects. More importantly, Magilou does go from a ridiculous clown to a better fit for the group that can provide amusement, and even her unusual companion Bienfoo who starts of seeming like a cliche mascot character soon finds a robust enough personality that you delight in the comedy they bring to the table without them feeling out of place. In fact, a rather large supporting cast, many of whom tie to Eizen’s pirate crew, start to build up a sense of family where you’ll be eager whenever you get a chance to check in on them, to the point when I completed the game and finally set it down I actually felt I would miss many of the characters knowing they had nothing more to say.

 

Tales of Berseria is over 40 hours long though so there are plenty of chances to watch them interact and hear the many conversations that help shape them into surprisingly human figures rather than mere actors in a story, and because of the moral complexity of it all, it is fortunate that so much attention was given to ensuring the characters remain likeable while also making sure to confront the consequences of their actions that help keep things from being too accommodating to any moral perspective. While its finale may be a little contentious depending on what you might want out of it, Tales of Berseria is commendable for not taking the easy road and working hard to portray the narrative path it takes believably without fully sacrificing moments of humor and comfort. It is a role-playing game though and it is not merely trying to tell a story, and while a good deal of care and attention was put into a remarkably large script that only stumbles slightly on the subtitle accuracy in the side content, the battle system doesn’t feel as robust.

In Tales of Berseria, when you run into a monster out in the world, you’ll be taken into a fight with a small band of creatures. Up to four of your six party members can participate in the fight at one time, although you can swap in the other two to join mid-battle. Tales of Berseria is an action RPG, meaning the fight will involve real-time inputs to execute your attacks, and there is a bit of a combo system involved in how your attacks unfold. Different sequences will execute different techniques and you are free to customize which moves these simple button combos activate, although it can take some time for characters to learn a large enough move pool to really necessitate alterations. While you are free to control any party member you please during a skirmish, Velvet is clearly meant to be the one you focus most on, her combat flow more fluid than with other characters and she comes with her Break Mode fairly early on. Break Mode allows her to activate her daemon arm and more easily weather incoming damage while dishing out attacks, this great for getting in and laying on heavy damage without having to worry too much about your own safety. It also gets around pesky blocking that can sometimes be hard to break otherwise unless you use a specific sequence of attacks, so Velvet clearly shines while other characters are likely going to be your back up for when their magic or support skills might be necessary. They do, however, function wonderfully under the game’s control, the AI good for keeping them useful and relatively intelligent in how they approach a fight.

 

While the battle system has some room to be interesting, it’s held back by a few choices. Your attacks will use up Souls, these recovering if you don’t attack and you can gain or lose souls based on if you are landing the right hits or the enemy hits you with certain attacks of their own. The Souls are essentially a meter that makes it hard for you to successfully hurt a foe if you deplete, so you have to back off for a second and recover it before going back in. It’s not too compelling an element and often it will be a nuisance if you lose to many Souls as they can be hard to get back since your attacks are limited as a result. Generally though, many fights can be handled with an easy mix of mashing your attack buttons in a not-too-careful sequence and utilizing Break Mode if you can afford the fact it eliminates one Soul to activate. Some enemies do clearly resist certain techniques so you might hone your mostly mindless combos into more targeted choices and some larger enemies and bosses do require some strategy, but on the other hand some bosses crumple under thoughtless pressure while a random enemy pack like a group of armored werewolves can get you stuck in a sequence of stuns you have no real recourse for.

 

You won’t have to fight too often to stay competitive with the foes you face and the foes who do require a bit more attention to overcome means the battle system isn’t a write-off, but the fighting does feel fairly plain. Strangely enough, the tutorials meant to teach you how the battle system works aren’t always triggered at the best times. Some appear at set moments, which makes it strange that the game decides to teach you a super move you can only activate by comboing into it during the first enemy who really has a strong propensity for guarding to prevent such things. That tutorial box doesn’t fully explain you need to combo into it either, and while other explanations try to appear when they’re relevant, this can lead to moments like the game explaining to me the obvious idea that enemies drop equipment while I was in a post-game dungeon. Perhaps odder though is the way equipment factors into battle strength, as there is an armor enhancing feature and different stats but you likely don’t need to pay attention to them unless you play on high difficulties or go for some tough optional content. Mostly you’ll probably focus in on the fact each piece of armor has a trait that can be mastered while its equipped, the characters gaining boosts to certain stats that become permanent so long as they fight well enough while wearing it. Even in the final battle you can get away with subpar armor since the focus instead seems to be on the gradual training of swapping in new armor for new permanent passive benefits, but at least one advantage to the battle system being rather mediocre is it won’t often impede your ability to take in the compelling story elements and abundant skits and side stories.

THE VERDICT: The excellently executed moral complexity of its main cast and the broader concepts of its ideological conflict makes Tales of Berseria’s narrative remarkably compelling, partly because it takes its time unfolding every element while also devoting a good deal of time establishing its characters through even small and amusing interactions. Writing-wise, Tales of Berseria thrives and places its endearing band of misfits into a complicated and layered conflict, the story-telling helping to cover up a pretty mundane combat system. While the action feels a bit lacking in inspiration despite its sometimes unusually deep systems, it helpfully doesn’t demand too much attention, instead letting the player focus in on a remarkable tale that is anything but straightforward.

 

And so, I give Tales of Berseria for PlayStation 4…

A GREAT rating. Some perplexing choices in the battle system structure and the generally plain combat options could have made Tales of Berseria a bit of a dull journey, but this RPG seems to be of the sort where the fighting is mostly there to give you tasks to complete when the real heart of the experience is in the captivating story-telling. You may not care too much for the areas you run through or the monsters you fight there, but they’re meant to inject a little bit of interactivity between watching the latest skit or speaking with people in the town to see the impact your group is having or learning how the Abbey is generally perceived. Tales of Berseria focuses its quality right where it should be, developing a deep cast of characters with moral conflicts you can’t quite easily pick apart and as a result it’s hard to fault the choices they make or reactions they have along the way. These are flawed characters who will make mistakes or have to live with tough calls, but rather realistically they don’t get bogged down on such matters as they aren’t merely hosts for moral concepts. They are three-dimensional personalities who justify things differently and won’t be clean-cut figures you can slot in as being in the right. Having characters like Laphicet and Eleanor in the main group still does feel important still, not just for having people it’s easier to identify as trying to do what’s right but because it influences the behavior of Velvet and others who might have gone down darker paths without these influences that instead keep them on that compelling moral tight rope. Tales of Berseria thus can construct characters who can make you sad, happy, laugh, or nearly cry, and even the sometimes unexceptional soundtrack will suddenly strike home with a well-placed emotional track that really draws out an already well-acted scene where the hours of work building up all these elements comes to a glorious head. The slow burn and less than tactical combat can make it a little tough to start with, especially since most characters start at the most extreme and it’s initially unclear where a person’s development might head, but the payoffs certainly are worth the time investment and there are at least enough moments along the way where things come together that you’re not just chasing a single satisfying culmination of all the groundwork.

 

There is a lot to examine and dissect in Tales of Berseria’s writing, even minor unnamed characters able to have ongoing stories in the background that rub up against the broader themes of individualism versus collectivism and rationality versus emotion. It is a shame the gameplay elements aren’t quite complementary, but they’re not outright hollow or completely negligible so they aren’t an outright stain on the experience either. The strength is in the story-telling and character dynamics that evolve from a mature and measured approach to building up personalities and addressing ideas and you’re given plenty of content that focuses on those elements. That uncompromising approach to developing its band of not-quite-anti-heroes feels apt, Tales of Berseria charting its own path and if you are willing to go along with it despite some uncertain elements, you’ll be rewarded with a robust and complex tale that makes it all worthwhile.