david.reviews: the game "Tales of Berseria"

★★☆☆: As a longtime enjoyer of the Tales series, I came into Berseria with high hopes (and shame on me for letting the community set those expectations so high) and it failed to meet them. The biggest weakness is the combat. Eschewing the series' Smash Bros-style control scheme, it instead lets you slot 4 moves onto each face button. This means to target enemy type and elemental resources there are up to 16 slots you need to memorize (and more if you play other characters). Either you're resetting them constantly to optimize every battle or you lean into the game's "choose for me!" button and literally just press X to clear every battle. There are other attacks (super, block, dodge) but a playable version of the combat felt so watered down that it just wasn't worth it. All of the other interesting gameplay decisions (equipment, etc) fed into combat. But if I wasn't engaging with that, then nothing else felt worthwile.All that said, the story was pretty good. I loved that we were…