Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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It's been a long time. I've been sitting on this impressions piece half complete for over a month, and finally felt like completing it.

Tales of Berseria (PS4) - Currently the newest entry in Bandai Namco's long running Tales Action JRPG. Screenshots weren't allowed.

Gameplay

• Tales games are often considered JRPG comfort food, and this is a good example of that. It has pretty standard setup, where it's towns & dungeons are separated by field areas you must explore. Enemies roam freely in dungeons & field areas, and upon touching them you'll enter a battle where you'll fight a group in fairly standard ARPG fashion.
• Battles take place directly in the environment (just with a circular boundary denoting the battle area, and if you press up against it long enough you'll build up an escape gauge that lets you flee most fights). Fighting is all real time though there is a meter that depletes for every attack you make so you can't just spam attacks. The meter can be extended in battle by inflicting status effects, defeating enemies, and dodging attacks at the last second (the last method actually produces an item in the battle area you need to pick up first though, and your party members can & will try grabbing it for themselves). The meter decreases if you are inflicted with a status effect or are KO'd. It goes back to default after battle.
• Each of the four face buttons has a four step combo mapped to it, and although the combo is the same across all four at the start, as you unlock new moves you can customise each one as you see fit. Each move (or arte, as they're called) has a different element associated with it (more powerful ones usually have two), a specific enemy class it's strong against (dragon, person, beast, etc), and a status effect in can inflict (stun, burn, poison, etc). By paying attention to an enemy's elemental affinities and class type, you'll need to tailor a combo best suited to dispatching it.
• Pressing the touch pad during battle will bring up a menu that pauses the action, letting you use items, give allies commands, and even customize your combos & change your equipment in the middle of battle. Other than a short waiting period regarding using items, there's no limit on doing this. You can only carry a max of 15 of each type of restorative item (and you can't use an HP regenerating item if you have any kind of status effect inflicted on you), so plan carefully.
• Each piece of equipment has a master skill that you learn if you equip it long enough (these are usually buffs such as granting you a 4% resistance to fire attacks, or 8% increased damage to undead enemy types, for example), so it's good to try out a variety of different equipment (even if it may not grant you a specific upgrade in general stats) so you can build up an array of permanent buffs. You can also use materials you find (or obtain by dismantling equipment) to enhance the equipment you do want to use, which improves it's stats & gives you increased buffs while wearing it.
• At some point you become acquainted with a band of pirates who you can send out on expeditions. They bring back food ingredients you can't find in shops (for cooking buffs, which I never used), items you can sell for large sums of money, cosmetic attachments (and the game's, very underwhelming, swimsuit costumes), and treasures (these tend to be little more than easter eggs referencing past games), so be sure to send them out as often as you can as there's no reason not to (doing it enough will open up a sidequest, too).
• The main quest is marked by a star, while sidequests are marked by a speech bubble with an exclamation point (these don't appear on the map until active though, so I didn't bother until endgame where I had unlimited fast travel so I could scour towns repeatedly to find any I missed). While some may be blocked off temporarily at certain story moments, no sidequest is missable so you won't be punished for waiting (though some quests won't open up until another is completed, so if you do all available be sure to revisit towns to see if any new ones pop up).
• Other side activities include Class 4 Administrative Zones (which are little islands with arenas on them, used to practice against a certain enemy class), Katz Boxes (you open these by collecting these little orbs that are scattered EVERYWHERE, and you earn cosmetic attachments/costumes & a certain secret location for doing so), and Code Red Hunts (there is a really powerful enemy roaming around each field area & dungeon, usually off in it's own little corner of the map, and it's worth your while to challenge them).
• At some point you obtain a magical hoverboard that lets you travel on foot a bit faster. You have to find a glowy spot in each region to use it there though, so it's mostly used for exploring past areas (enemies so many levels below you will automatically be defeated while riding, though you'll earn no rewards/exp this way). You can also buy items at shops that let you return to the entrance of a dungeon or warp you back to any town you've been to (unless one is temporarily blocked off due to story reasons), and later on in the game you can obtain "bottomless" variants of these items that don't deplete.

Visual/Audio

• It's not pushing the PS4 to it's limits (it seems to be using a somewhat spruced up version of the engine used in Tales of Zesteria, which was also on PS3), but things are generally crisp, colorful, and pleasing to the eye.
• Stylistically I think it's quite a big step up from Zesteria. The previous game had generally bland locales & character design IMO, but despite taking place in the same world (just many years apart), Berseria generally has aesthetically better locale & character design, placing it closer to the charm that earlier games had.
• the in-game range of alternate costumes has improved since Zesteria, though disappointingly the best stuff is still locked behind DLC. While there is a swimsuit line you can obtain in-game (for example), all male characters unlock the same black pair of trunks, and all women unlock the same black one-piece (which is actually more modest than Velvet & Magilou's standard attire). It's not a huge deal, but I still miss all the unique stuff you could unlock in Abyss & Vesperia.

Story

• It actually has a pretty interesting setup for the genre in that to the world at large you are the bad guys. Naturally things are more complicated (and there are some great twists), but it's a great twist that sets it apart from it's contemporaries (though of course there are excuses as to why your appearance doesn't become widely known, so you can still waltz into most towns at any given point).
• The Tales series is known for the plentiful skits that pop up from time to time (where semi-animated portraits of the gang shoot the breeze about serious & silly topics alike), they're present & accounted for here, and as always help to flesh out the group as a likeable band that you're sad to say goodbye to at adventure's end.
• It does take place before Zesteria, and while you don't need to play it to enjoy this, there are a lot of nods to it (and since it was released first, they're presented in a way that it's assumed you've played it first), and I think the game's story is that much cooler if you have done so.

Conclusion

• It doesn't push the genre ahead in any meaningful way, but it's nice JRPG comfort food with a neat narrative twist & charm.
• Didn't take any screenshots, as like with Zesteria you're not allowed to in most situations (only those Class 4 Administrative Zones, those copy pasted training islands, allow you to take screenshots).

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So, having purchased Paper Mario: The Origami King at launch and having completed the first major chunk of the game (defeated the red banner boss), I have probably six or so hours in the game now, and I'd like to briefly discuss my experiences with it. Most of what I talk about won't be new to people, and I don't care if I change minds on it or not, but this is coming from the perspective of someone who has played (and hated) Sticker Star, and who also enjoyed The Thousand Year Door on the Gamecube.

PRESENTATION, MUSIC, AND ENVIRONMENTS

This is a flat out gorgeous-looking game. And has often been mentioned, the rudimentary paper look of previous games has given way to something more akin to the PS Vita game Tearaway, where your environments are ACTUALLY paper and they're finely detailed to look like they're made out of actual materials like cardboard and whatnot. Papery character outlines will crinkle after they've been folded up. The concept of origami is a new one to the world of Paper Mario, and is treated as a form of body horror for the characters.

Environments themselves are massive and detailed. I feel like I've been able to enter almost every building I've happened across so far (unless they're locked because you need to find their owner), and they all feel lived in and usually rewarding to visit. You'll enter buildings as shortcuts to find chests or get to enemies. Paper NPCs will be hiding in closets from their origami oppressors. Scope-wise, the locations are far larger than anything in Sticker Star or TTYD (whose environment's feel very basic and hallway-esque in comparison). Towns and field locations will often have tons of secrets hidden in them, and are laid out in a way that encourages the player to constantly explore them.

Musically, so far, this game has been pretty strong. Much moreso than previous Paper Mario game I've played. Especially battle themes.

I also really like the remix of Peach's Mario 64 castle theme in this game. And the weird vocal musical number that happens, like, an hour or two into the game.

NON-BATTLE GAMEPLAY

When you're running around these large environments, there are a few different things to do.
The most obvious addition is the fact that confetti is everywhere in this game, and you'll need to constantly be collecting it to fill up your confetti bag so that you can fill up the holes you encounter throughout the environments. You'll encounter simple environmental puzzles to solve in order to find chests that contains collectibles. You'll encounter different minigame activities (the most memorable of which so far was the card matching game I needed to complete to unlock a starman, which I then use to cross a thorny path to reach a chest). And you'll be finding tons and tons of hidden toads.

Running around looking for toads sounds horrible, like Sticker Star nonsense. But... it's really not. It's fun. Part of that is just how much variety there is in terms of how you find them. ANYTHING can be a toad in this game. Various animals in your environment can be toads. Toads can hide under rocks and behind walls. Fish you catch can be toads (oh, yeah, there's fishing in this game! that wasn't in either of the previous games I played in the series). Things you buy can be toads. Sometimes it's just a matter of running up to something and hammering it to reveal the toad. Sometimes they're simply hidden. Sometimes there's an environmental puzzle required to catch them.

Some toads you find will be important and run back to town to open shops and services (so far, I've unlocked an item/weapon shop, a museum, a couple of accessory vendors, and a battle center where you can practice your timing in battle, and which also unlocks various items that will help the player on their adventures, including one that clues them in when there's a hidden toad in the area. Others will join your audience in battles, and, for a price, will help you in various ways.

Finding toads awards you toad points, which you can use to unlock art pieces at the museum. The museum also hosts 3D models you can find in chests throughout the environment, origami toad models you unlock throughout the game, enemy models more generally, music tracks from the game (which requires the player to fill in all of those holes located throughout the world, as I alluded to earlier), etc. I don't know if there's a larger reward to completing the museum at the end of the game, but, rather like in Animal Crossing, I'm finding the gradual development of my museum to be reward enough to consistently engage with the environments.

And there's so much to engage with, considering nearly everything in this game feels like it can be collected or reward the player in some way. It's all a bit skinnerian, of course, but it works well in the context of this game.

THE BATTLE SYSTEM

So, as people are well aware of by now, there's no XP system in the game. Battles award you with confetti and coins. This has been a sticking point for a lot of people, since they feel like this removes the incentive to battle, and... I don't know how I feel about that. You'll be spending money for a LOT of things in this game, including progressing the plot (via buying items, giving money to characters, etc.), buying accessories (think of a more streamlined version of TTYD's badge system), plying toads in your audience with money to help during battles, feeding money into a timer during battles to give you more time to line up rings properly, etc. This latter one I don't usually do during unscripted fights, though, since you stand to lose more money than you make that way. I guess there's not really any incentive to grind in this game, but I'm not finding that to be a problem so far, considering a LOT of the fights in this game are scripted anyway, and considering, even in TTYD, XP rewards level off quickly enough that I was quickly avoiding most non-scripted battles in that game as well. There are a number of RPGs where there's almost never any reason to battle enemies in the wild, like The Witcher 3, but it didn't destroy those games for me.

The reason people typically cite wanting a reason to battle, I assume, is because they're afraid the battles aren't fun at all. Now, maybe I'll feel differently later, but so far I'm liking this ring system a lot more than the "jump on an enemy's head; guard; wash, rinse, and repeat" system in TTYD. It's far less repetitive, at least once the game lets go of your hand, and stops giving you stupidly simple arrangements of enemies. There's actual thought that goes into fighting the enemies in this game. And, unlike Sticker Star and (apparently) Color Splash, these aren't driven by consumable items. Instead, it feels like a more interactive version of a JRPG with a grid system, like Trails in the Sky, where you want to try to hit as many enemies as possible with an attack. The primary difference is that you're arranging the enemies instead of changing your position on the grid.

Of course, this game does TTYD one better insofar as, as a certain point, in an Earthbound-ian twist, you'll actually be able to just hammer weak enemies in the environments and avoid the ring battles with them entirely. I get the feeling that backtracking to previously visited areas in this will be a LOT less of a nuisance than in that game.

There are certain enemies where your battles in them will be real-time and situated in the environment as well. You discover, for example, that a lot of the holes you encounter throughout the game are caused by these giant goomba mechs that are made out of what look like wire and paper-mache, and you'll need to bait their attacks and attack them with your hammer to defeat them.

BOSS BATTLES

Boss battles... I'm liking them. They looked boring in the footage, but, in practice, it's consistently engaging to use the ring system to chart a route to the boss. Crucially, every boss is like a big puzzle, so it's not enough to just run up to them and attack. Instead, you have to usually navigate to specific sections of their body to interact with them in certain ways to progress the flow of the battle.

There are more bosses than just the legion of stationary bosses that seem to guard the streamers. They're not really interesting personalities, which might disappoint some, but they're also not uninteresting. Primarily because the game does a good job of building up to them. The first boss in the game, the Earth Vellumental, has a decent-sized dungeon to run through before you get it, and you learn that it's revered like a sort of deity in the area via the optional narration booths located throughout the public area of the dungeon.

The colored pencil boss might seem stupid, but the build-up to it was really well done. You're traveling through this tower, encountering trashed environments, colored doodles, etc. and it's very clear that something has gone seriously wrong here. The toads are all terrified. And then giant colored pencil missles start violently burrowing their way into the building, forcing you to change how you travel through the tower. It's interesting. Do I miss not having interesting personalities like Rawk Hawk or Doopliss as antagonists on my adventure? Sure. The game would be better with actual villains than with monsters and sentient colored pencils. But the context in which you meet them is interesting enough that I didn't feel like they were necessarily bad bosses, either. I don't come down on Zelda dungeon bosses because they're not sarcastic and quippy, and I feel like the same sort of logic applies here. And, in terms of how you fight them, they feel much more explicitly like Zelda bosses.

WHAT I DON'T LIKE

The biggest flaw in the game, far and away, is the lack of interesting and unique NPCs to talk to. The Thousand Year Door is SO full of personality with regard to the inhabitants of its world, and I spent a good amount of the game laughing at the often cynical flavor of the dialogue I heard from its residents. There's... really nothing like that here. Almost everyone you meet is just a generic Mario character. Olivia is fine and cute and all that, but her dialogue doesn't really have a lot of flair to it. There's a lot of humor infused into dialogue and situations you'll encounter throughout the game, but it feels more like it's deliberately trying to be funny, whereas the humor in TTYD often arose organically from the situation you found yourself in. The game often makes me smile, but rarely gives me the deep belly laughs where I have to stop myself from choking eventually.

A lot of people seem to like the game's connected overworld (it's NOT open world in any sense I can glean; all of the areas just happen to be connected), but I find that backtracking can feel like a bit of a slog at times. Mario's movement speed should have been boosted a bit given the much larger scope of the environments here.

CONCLUSION

So, is it a good game? So far, I'm quite enjoying myself. It's extremely promising so far, and I haven't even arrived at the apparent overworld exploration segments yet! But it's not an RPG, and, honestly, it feels like an entirely different sort of game than TTYD was. It feels like a related but different Mario spinoff entirely. I kind of wish Nintendo hadn't opted to lump games like this in with the older, more explicitly narrative-heavy RPG experiences. It's hard, because, while I kind of wish this hadn't replaced the older style, I also don't want this style of PM game to stop existing either. It's very different.

I will say this: even if it's not what you wanted or expected, it's not a bad game. If you're a Paper Mario virgin, or if you're just open to experiencing something different from the older games, I'd say you should give it a shot.

@Arugula I'm tagging you because of the interest you showed about this game in the Nintendo Switch thread.

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@KratosMD I mean, I love FF VI, but that's mostly for the atmosphere, characters, plot, music, etc. The gameplay is serviceable, IMO, but if you crave variety I can see it disappointing. I feel like my recent exploration of the Shin Megami Tensei games have somewhat ruined my appreciation for older turn-based JRPGs as well. Mashing the A button to "fight" your way through endless mobs of randomly generated enemies just disappoints after experiencing the visceral, highly strategic thrill of the press turn combat system. Even something like Persona 5 (vanilla) felt extremely braindead with the random encounter combat (once you get a good spread of elemental skills, every battle becomes the same procedure over and over and over: using skills to target the weaknesses of enemies, and then launch into an all-out attack to take them out. Even those flashy cutscenes get old when you see them 50+ times per dungeon).

I also feel that Bravely Default does an amazing job of rethinking turn-based combat. The risk/reward element it introduces to every battle is amazing. Too bad that element was dumbed down a bit in Octopath Traveler.

Nice Sly 2 review, BTW. That's two glowing reviews in a brief period of time. I really feel like I should bump this series up my priorities list.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Ah, no, I hadn't linked Peach's Castle theme. But I shall do so now.

This is the Mario 64 original:

This is the version in The Origami King:

It's an aesthetically pleasing remix, IMO.

And yeah, I played more of it today. I'm in the second unofficial chapter of the game now (new area, an additional partner character, new narrative elements, etc.), and the more I play of it, the more I'm sure I'm going to be very happy with it in the end. The pacing is great. I only played for an hour and a half or so, and I feel like a ton of things happened already. This new area is also particularly gorgeous.

@Thrillho Yeah, it definitely reintroduces some of the aspects of the first couple games in streamlined form. You have badges of a sort, but they're more limited. Partners can join you in battles, but it's not the norm, and they just sort of tack on extra damage here and there. I don't really mind that too much, though: the game isn't trying to be an RPG, after all.

I can see why classic fans would turn up their noses at it, but the game itself is fun regardless. In an ideal world, this new style of Paper Mario game would co-exist as a spinoff next to new RPG entries. They both have their charms, IMO.

@RogerRoger Thanks. The first hour or so of the game is a bit slow, but once it picks up, it's quite engaging. And as I pointed out to Foxy, the pacing makes the game feel like I've accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. If he doesn't mind the heavy integration of puzzle elements, I could definitely see your partner enjoying it.

I almost never contribute to the "impressions" part of the "user impressions and reviews thread," so I figured this was as good a time as any. Like TLOU Part II, this game has been mired in controversy.

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Replayed Mega Man 8 on my Switch recently via the second Legacy Collection. I have a lot of nostalgia for this game, as it was among the first games I was gifted on the PSOne as a child. Predictably, for the first CD-based game in the mainline series, the big innovation in MM's Playstation debut was the inclusion of animated cutscenes. This SHOULD have made the narrative more engaging than the simplistic static dialogues peppered throughout previous games in the series, but... ah, as anyone who played the original Resident Evil might know, Capcom's games in this era were known for their... interesting voice acting.

OK. There's no tap-dancing around this: most of the voice actors are decent for that era, but their work is COMPLETELY undone by whoever voices Dr. Light in this game, who gives their worst amateur Elder Fudd impression throughout. It really needs to be seen to be believed.

The heavily anime-inspired aesthetic does come through in certain ways, though. I PARTICULARLY like the catchy, instrumental opening theme to the game, which I will always allow to fully play whenever I first boot up the game (although, sadly, it's much easier to see this less on modern systems with their game suspending function).

It should be noted that, in what is still a semi-common practice with some Japanese games due to licensing issues, this was a replacement for the original Japanese opening, which was an actual, entirely different song. This sort of thing usually irritates me, but, for whatever reason, I actually happen to prefer what we Americans got instead.

The game is strange in a number of ways, from the weapons (you get a new basic weapon very early in the game that's... basically an explosive soccer ball that Mega Man can kick at enemies), to the level design/setpieces (including vehicle sections, which aren't unheard of in the series, but which are particularly prominent here: I never want to hear the words "jump" or "slide" ever again, to be honest), to the bosses (Clown Man takes the cake for me, although I guess this is the same series that, at its nadir of creative inspiration in Mega Man 6, hit players with the stereotypical Tomahawk Man, a design which has aged PARTICULARLY poorly, lol), to the aesthetic (while Mega Man has never been a dour-looking series, this one is particularly vibrant: backgrounds look like something out of a Disney princess film or something) to even the music. And that's not all a bad thing. I actually quite like the stylistic changes to the music in this game. I'll link a few tracks. It's very unsual for the series.

This game is sort of a black sheep in the mainline series, and it's not hard to see why, considering it goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from its 8-and-16-bit brethren. The enhanced presentation, gorgeous character animations, and sheer weirdness of it all makes it one of the standout games in the series, though, even if there are drawbacks (like most late-stage Mega Man games, it doesn't have the snappy pacing of early Mega Man titles). 6/10

@Rudy_Manchego Thanks.

I get why older fans would get frustrated with Nintendo's obstinate refusal to give them a Paper Mario game fashioned after the older entries, but I do hope this doesn't get permanently lumped in with rubbish like Sticker Star. The more I play of it, the more it feels like one of the best releases I've played this year.