Coo, coo

We will find him!

So, here we are again with another Tales of Berseria post! This time, our journey was filled with ambushes, doves, and a dire situation!

We arrived at the capital city on our search to find Arturias. We found him, giving a speech to the masses about a new world and striving for one without fear and such. Velvet, and myself, were unable to let go of the fact that this man killed her brother. I amazed at the parallels of the story of Tales of Berseria and Berserk.

Both stories featured a protagonist that looked up to a man that would later become a villain. Both stories feature an antagonist that did and unspeakably horrible act that would later result in a united world full of peace. Both stories feature a world that is happy with the state brought about by this antagonist and finally, both feature a protagonist that has lost an arm as a result of actions perpetrated by the antagonist.

To be honest, these elements are truly adding to my enjoyment of the overall game, although the time it is taking to get Magiquinn baby to join our party is starting to wear on my cousin.

We are currently 16 hours in. I told them it would take us about 20 hours before we got everybody, but if things keep up, Elanor will take even longer to be convinced that this perfect world is not so perfect.

Regardless, we spent our time running through the city, having a fun side conversation in which Velvet confesses her sins to a priest and makes him fear for his life. Hey, all she had to do was confess, right?

Our encounters faired well, besides an earlier encounter where we literally got jumped by a gang of snakes and axe beaks (which we have now come to realize are in fact a Tales staple). We had to exhaust almost all of our life bottles in order to stay alive and once we survived, we were certain we would not have another close call like during this play session.

We had another close call like it during our play session.

As we began to wrap up the night, ready to travel on and complete a series of sidequest set upon us by the assassins guild, The Bloodwings, we had one last fight to close out our session. We wrecked everything on the map, using our Mystic Arts just to say we did and save and quit, but something strange happened. Once the arena was cleared of all enemies the win screen did not show. A Dire Beast did instead…

These beast was 10 levels higher than us and came equipped with snakes that could not be killed. Able to one shot each of us without fail, we had to adopt the strategy of having one person distract the snakes, while the others focused on taking out the beast and the AI controlled Laphicet (Ray switched to Rokurou and Shell had to do something life related) would focus on heals.

After a grueling bought and doing our best to recharge our Blast Gauge, that we foolishly expended earlier, we were eventually able to get off Velvet’s Mystic Art, bringing the beast closer to being felled. Still, we had to be careful and we were down to our last few life bottles.

I’ll say this, I was not expecting Tales to be hard until we unlocked the intense difficulty setting but currently, encounters like this make me really wonder how we are going to survive late game, but I am looking forward to it.

After barely beating the beast, the game informed us that every time we beat one of these guys (or gals, who knows), later version would become stronger. Great. We barely survived and not only can these beast randomly show up whenever, but every time one loses the rest will get the knowledge on how to become stronger against us? I feel like I’m in a Claymore manga!

Either way, we finished up and decided to reflect on our play. We will be trying again later tonight and hopefully get Magiquinn baby to become a perma party member so that she may rain a flurry of spells on our future foes!