i stopped and started at multiple intervals because that's just how my motivation goes these days but jesus the story and cast is really good

made a magilou journal

i think it does a lot of things that persona 5 sort of touched upon that i don't think persona 5 did enough with? like rejecting arbitrary distinctions of good and evil or big sanctimonious statements of morality in favor of having a bunch of flawed characters motivated almost entirely by self interest (and eleanor, their token catholic nun) shout down those

ARE YOU GOING TO PLAY ZESTIRIA.....

notions

uhhh probably eventually

zesty and bers are like opposites in a ton of ways and it's not great at all gameplay wise

but the cast is fun

i don't have zesteria but i do have vesperia so i'm going to play that first i think

nods

but yeah it's on the list of jrpgs to get through.

i feel like i should play zesteria since i did get the impression that a lot of things in berseria were retroactive references to future events in zesteria, like the big reveal of laphicet revealing his new name

but the actual story concept and premise doesn't grab me as much as berseria did even from a glance

Zestiria was like... I honestly didn't finish it myself because I felt like it had good IDEAS but it just never really got there?

zestiria is... very much like, some fun ideas but the execution was uh

..... uh.

And I hate to say it but I really feel that the main villain got a much, much better character arc in Rays than he did in Zestiria itself

like zestiria is fairly commonly accepted by the fandom to be like, an. okay game at best. passable.

the characters are hard carrying both the story and gameplay, even for a tales game.

berseria on the other hand most people agree is a+

Okay but the camera getting stuck in awkward places can honestly be hilarious

me weeping in HERE'S A FIGHT WITH THE SHITTIEST CAMERA POSSIBLE

but yeah like even by tales standards, where most people typically agree that character writing is the selling point of a tales game and not the plot/story writing, zestiria's (execution of its) story is a little ........

still, the cast is fun!

i know that there's tales kaworu

at least that's the vibe i got from the tvtropes page

Congrats!! It really was awesome. And yeah seconding most of what was said about Zestiria

Yeah mikleo and sorey are absolutely in love which is a farcry from the way artorius is as a shepherd

Sorey: I don’t want you to be a part of this bc I don’t want you to get hurt
And then others like mikleo were just actively used as tools in the past

That’s funny to me that people think of mikleo like that tho

Also yeah if anything I would just watch the anime..... zesty was changed mid game and iirc the director got a lot of backlash for the story ending up horrendous partly due to that. Berseria was basically a fix for a lot of what it was

Whereas the anime feels like what the game intended to be