The end result of all of this is a game that’s part Soul management and part mashing the heck out of your controller, since keeping your combos going means you’ll keep pressing buttons. Fighting with any of the party members at any time, and meeting certain criteria-like pulling off two of a move in one fight while keeping your Soul Gauge high-will allow your characters to pull off even greater special attacks and combos. It’s possible to switch party members in and out of battle to deal extra attacks and keep a combo going. Velvet’s Break Soul, for example, draws out her therion claw-arm to rake through her opponents for massive extra damage.
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If stuck with only one Soul, the minimum, it can take a while to land a good enough combo going to earn more, but with a full gauge, it’s easy to wreck your way through all your foes and more than max out your bar.Īll characters also have unique Break Soul abilities, allowing them to spend part of their Soul Gauges to extend combos and add unique effects. The more Souls you have, the longer you can keep a combo going, which leads to something of a self-fulfilling loop. These Souls are won as you stun, defeat, or pull off special moves against enemies (and lost as enemies do the same to you). Liberation-LMBS incorporates the Tales-standard rock-paper-scissors system of Artes, the abilities that map onto your controller’s face buttons, but also introduces a Soul Gauge mechanic.
Berseria‘s take on the Linear Motion Battle System is dubbed Liberation-LMBS, and it’s simultaneously extremely complex and extremely “mash-X-to-win”. Running into any one monster will enter a fight with a group of them, though it’s easy enough to avoid encounters if you just want to walk through the area, or to run away from the circular combat area.Ĭombat itself is something of a mixed bag. Monsters wander freely across the overworld, and while encounters still take place in a separate combat segment of the game, the battleground takes place exactly where that monster was encountered on the map. Berseria also borrows Zestiria‘s encounter system, at the time an innovation for the series. Visually, the two games are strikingly similar-random fields, paths, and dungeons might as well have been transplanted from one game into the other. Though the stories are flipped, Berseria and Zestiria have a lot in common. Now no longer human, Velvet has no pretense of being a hero-she and her party of misfits shamelessly steal, burn, and slaughter their way through Midgand as Velvet seeks revenge for the death of her family. Her loss of humanity gifts her with unending hate, a weaponized claw-hand, and questionable taste in clothes (it’s rare that I change up a character’s default appearance, but Velvet’s busty-vampire-gone-through-a-blender look made me very glad for Berseria‘s Fashion options). After two cataclysmic magical nights result in the death of most of her family, Velvet finds herself turned into a therion, a type of daemon capable of devouring other daemons. Leading the group is Velvet Crowe, a young lady-turned-daemon and rare (for Tales) female protagonist. Berseria, however, takes place thousands of years earlier, and your party is a group of daemons, witches, misfits, and other rogues taking up arms against the first man to ever call himself a Shepherd. Zestiria, the previous game, takes place late in this Empire’s history and stars a human taking up the nearly-forgotten Shepherd role to beat back the Hellions. The history of the Holy Midgand Empire is one of a world corrupted by malevolence, where certain humans must take on the role of the Shepherd in order to save humanity from corruption. Tales of Berseria takes place in the same world as its predecessor, Tales of Zestiria, and though you don’t have to play one to play the other, the two games are opposite sides of the same coin. Tales games, however, also aren’t afraid to experiment, and Tales of Berseria-the sixteenth game in the long-running series-kicks that traditional hero narrative out on the street in favor of Velvet, an unapologetically villainous daemon-eater out for revenge. There are certain building blocks fans expect to see in most Tales games: a sprawling, epic, adventure, a wide and fantastical world, and a plucky band of heroes raring to beat back evil.