Explain this Tales of cancer now

The casts aren't cardboard cutouts, and have far greater symmetry. Because of that, the skits are infinitely funnier and better. The combat, though sometimes simplified compared to newer iterations, is more fun, difficult, and rewarding. There are indeed real maps, real dungeons (complete with puzzles to solve god I miss those so much) and very little corridors "maps." Pre-PS3 era Tales games had assloads of miss-able sidequests that rewarded you with costumes and skins for your characters, leading to replayability and extended lifetime for the games themselves if you were going for completionism. No DLC, no cutscene-simulator gameplay, etc etc.

I can't recommend older Tales enough. They were really good, especially the ones made by Team Wolf. The instant they got on PS3, it was all downhill.

The one point I can't really trump up is the story. Tales games have almost always had pretty shitty recycled stories, but it's just accepted as par for the course. Their last foray into putting effort into a real story was Tales of the Abyss, or so I feel. It had a mixed reaction. Anyways, you don't play Tales for the story.

I would honestly expect someone who played Tales of Zestiria to enjoy Tales of Berseria significantly more since it basically did every single thing better than Zestiria.
Zestiria had maybe 2 characters that were of any interest whatsoever, had the moral complexity of a Legend of Zelda game, was riddled with obvious rewrites and retcons at every turn, and made basically no gameplay changes whatsoever aside from the combine gimmic that somehow managed to further reduce the complexity of the combat.
Berseria had significantly better characters, to the point where the best ones from Zestiria were still either worse or on the level of the worst character(s) from Berseria. Berseria also attempted to have some nuance to its writing. They ditched the bad, "Legend of Zelda but a JRPG" plotline that managed to make Zestiria's story as painfully vanilla as physically possible, and went with a theme I've rarely seen explored in JRPGs where you're essentially the villains for the vast majority of the game. Maybe I just haven't played enough JRPGs if thats actually a common theme.
Easily the worst parts of Berseria are the length of its dungeons which unnecessarily pad out the length of the game, heavily implying that the developers don't know how to properly pace an rpg so it doesnt get too grindy, and the part where the game becomes a filler episode, because somehow the developers thought, "hey I know what people like, filler episodes! We should add one of those in!" The story still isn't particularly remarkable compared to Tales of the Abyss but its still an improvement over Zestiria's.
Gameplay is still about what you would expect, though the soul breaking mechanic makes it easier to chain into larger combos which feels particularly satisfying at times, the only issue being that it can get old with its dungeons requiring way too much walking to get around.
If you played Zestiria and then tried to get into Berseria hearing that Zestiria was shit and somehow expected that another installment to the same series would somehow just be a completely fucking different game, not even of the same genre, then I don't know what to say. Maybe Undertale is more your cup of tea :^)

tl;dr pretty much this

Berseria is actually decent, though the beginning is shit gameplay wise, it does pick up when Velvet finally gets more party members but it fucking falls on its face in the final dungeon and even before that the backtracking is a nuisance. Who thought forcing someone to backtrack the big dungeon this much just to get the final stuff was a good idea?

Seriously, it's not fun to find a thing and put it in a pedestal when almost everything in the dungeon looks the same and the damn thing isn't marked on the map while the way anywhere is littered with easy enemies that take way too long to kill on Hard. Even if you drink the bottle to remove them, it still takes way too long to navigate. It's not fun in any way.

Besides that and combat being too mashy, all's good. The party is actually good and it makes me sad that Zestiria got ruined by Baba's extreme waifufaggotry because that could've been a similar experience in this regard were everyone not concerned with doing nothing but praising Rose once she joins. You can't make this shit up, I hope Baba's next project fails if he has any.

Do you think anyone falls for this Holla Forums? Complaining works. Not really on Holla Forums's Holla Forums, but in general it does. People made a shitstorm about that one Berseria scene and Bamco explained stuff, even posting on twitter about it. Even I didn't care for that one, but they still at least said something.

Anyway, does anyone have that screencap with "act edgy" from Holla Forums which I saw before? Seems this one did take it to heart, though lately all of them try that once they encounter any resistance to their "opinions".

If one of those is either Edna or Rose your opinion goes straight to the bin.

Apart from NPC's, Edna was the only character worth shit in Zestiria.

About the only characters I liked were Zaveid and arguably the Lord of Calamity purely because he "totally isn't Ganondorf."

Nice strawman faggot

This. If you don't just pirate it to try it yourself, but actually rely on some shitty score site, fuck off.