Everything in Arise's combat system is designed to frustrate the player. The fights with regular enemies are nothing like the boss fights. The end of the boss fights with the damage sponge bosses usually turn into them spamming ultimate attacks over and over again in a loop with wide AOE effects. Turns into you racing to try to build up your boost gauge, keep the CPU AI alive and end the fight before you run out of stuff to keep your party upright. One or two hits from a boss is enough to take your entire life bar. Many of their attacks one shot you.
They make you use healing CP to get items in the dungeon and make it difficult to refill it like it's a Persona game forcing you to leave the dungeon and sleep at an inn or campfire to regain them just so you can teleport back to the beginning of the dungeon and run back through it to get back to where you are. There's no time mechanic like Persona either it's just an obstacle they put in your path to frustrate you and waste your time. It doesn't really change anything it just consumes time. You either have to flee from all the fights or just do them and it's not really rewarding because once you reach the enemy level experience points aren't worth it and you're not really earning money from the fights either.
Money is purposely kept in short supply and CP restoring items are excessively expensive. The money for which contends with sometimes needing to buy new equipment.
Berseria at the very least has none of those issues. It doesn't feel like a game designed on a level to frustrate players into buying DLC packs to rectify flaws they knowingly baked into the game. I'm not constantly babysitting the AI team mates and guzzling life bottles to keep them alive. Healing has never been an issue.
I know people will say there's ways to get around the money issues with mini games. Still doesn't change the fact that in a normal playthrough for people who don't even care about going out of their way to do that they've purposely created a scarcity of money that doesn't exist even in previous games of this series then make sure they display there's low cost DLC for a couple bucks to buy in-game money with real money. In normal RPGs usually fighting battles nets you decent money.
Lastly they sent reviewers an ultimate edition package that contained DLC that mitigated all those baked in flaws simply by claiming the DLC.
I'm just not seeing it breh. I was immensely more frustrated in Vesperia's combat, even when I got the gist of it.
For all the complaining about CP utility, I'm seeing too many ways to mitigate that to have that be an issue with me. To me, it's akin to most dungeon crawler RPGs where you just get your batman prep time on before trekking into long, "difficult" dungeons. I just beat whatever the next dungeon is after being the 5th lord and had no issues with CP management, even when getting lost in there a bit and re-fighting monsters unnecessarily. Only "issue" I have with CP is the inconsistent amounts that it costs to open the unlock areas with characters unique perks or healing folks on the road. Sometimes it'll be like 21 points and others, 50+ and it just seems to be variable and inconsistent.
And the whole bosses spamming Mystic Artes thing is funny to me, considering that's like a damn Tales staple it seems. Least here, you can actually perfect dodge a grip of the attacks that come out of them, if not outright run to other points of the screen and outright get missed clean. Ain't not a damn boss I fought so far that was worse than Captain Raven's ass was with it in Vesperia. If you did down him before doing it, which was hard as fukk, you just ate that damage. And blocking them didn't do jack shyt unless you were over-leveled. Same with damn near all the later game bosses' Mystic Artes and how they'd spam them.
Maybe there's a world of difference between the normal/moderate modes on here versus normal on Vesperia, cuz Vesperia's normal mode seemed like hand holding easy, yet the next difficulty up in hard mode felt like it was meant for New Game Plus, as the balance disparity between the two was extreme. For example, first boss in Vesperia, he only has like 8K HP and you're dealing about 200-500 max damage within the start of the game artes/combos available to you. Yet in Hard mode, muhfukka had around 56K and you still doing the same damage as normal. That is an insane jump in HP. I've felt nothing to that level here whereas the main story path creatures are either so over-leveled than you with slight-moderate "grinding" and following the main path vs. how shyt was in Vesperia. I'm playing on Hard mode here and only a few select main bosses kilt me more than like 2wice and even then, upon just re-thinking my strategies a bit and reading their moves better, I was able to conquer them typically without much hassle. Only if I was severely under-leveled (like 10-20+ levels) did I feel odds were insurmountable and practically each situation was side content bosses, so they were optional and typically you weren't posed to fight them yet.
The money issue is also a non-issue with me, since you can sell so much stuff and just fish n shyt to get more money in light amount of time. I get that not getting money from monsters is not typical in most jrpgs, tho I did always find it funny that you would get money directly from killing monsters in pretty much any game. Seems more sensible than you'd only get it from bounty rewards or some shyt (and maybe just get money from human enemies, lol), if you going to put a speck of realism in a fantasy situation, but that's whatever really.
Berseria's difficulty was a neat, built-in dynamic adjustable one with those Granites or whatever those bounty items were called. As it was, that was pretty much always on the player to decide where they wanted to be with that or not, so I can see how that could easier to contend with than just the couple you have here (albeit you can still adjust those at any time too, just in a more traditional sense).
I will say that it's funny that in the ways that this game is just like most old tales games with how bosses mostly get down and how the combat ultimately delves into, cats on here are like, "ah, it's just another tales game", but harp on the "negatives" of that and seemingly be whatever with it in the older games. Yet, in the ways that it changes things, cats on here seem to overlook the positives that comes with that, like actually being able to dodge a mystic art and magic altogether with the perfect dodge and get a rebuttal (I know Berseria, you can do it's lesser version of perfect dodge against most attacks, but didnt' seem to work on Mystic Artes and it was jankier overall with how its movement system is comparatively; great for its time tho) with it as well and how your healing spells don't have to be shared with your attack spells magic points pool, so it's more just a matter of using healing, when needed vs. pick n choosing between the two.
). Game definitely long enough tho. Enemies seem pretty much the same as other tales games IMO. I will say the lack of variety in them as far as actual types instead of just some color palette swaps and select different abilities is smh-worthy. Cast and story seem straight to me thus far. I do think some past games have more....fantastically, fanatically and frantically exuberant
characters than here tho, in both good and bad ways, so while older games cast stick out more, sometimes wasn't always in the best ways. More humorous and entertaining, at times tho. Kinda trades off IMO
, as they at least seem more realistic and thus relatable here
, albeit still anime trope-ish
dichotomy be damned.
All these "No, its' nothing, don't worry, I'm fine --" convos are getting redundant.
