vavicomvn

[intyalote]

team event day 1:

- boyang 4Lz!!! shame about the fall though, it looked painful.

- shoma… I take back what I said about hating the red costume if it gets you the 3T combo. just skate like that in individual and it’ll all be fine.

- nathan was very emotive and had good interpretation today, it seemed like he connected in a way he didn’t at nats, even the SS were a bit better. overall the score wasn’t too egregious relative to the rest of the scores at the event (ie he was overscored but only a little more than everyone else).

- hubbell/donohue in first is interesting. nikita twizzles flopped (was his back acting up?), but s/k had the best blues. still h/d deserved win though, their midline stsq fucks

- koko were… koko, but somehow got lucky and weren’t the worst. good for japan’s team medal!

- rikuryu robbed. k/f had nothing on them besides passport

- the last two pairs were so stressful but seeing s/h and m/g one after another really makes the difference clear. glad s/h got to keep their well-deserved WR but m/g being so close with that bland program when mishina can’t even skate does not bode well for the individual event.

[itsbenedict]

No Driver’s License: Session 32

No Driver’s License is a Madoka Magica game I’m running for five players, using a homebrew of Yaruki Zero’s Magical Burst system. It follows five magical girls as they deal with an upheaval in the world’s magic system caused by some strange new three-eyed Incubators. They have to figure out what’s going on, who to trust, and how to put a stop to the cycle of despair.

I post session logs and omakes weekly sporadically, both as a reference for the players and for anyone who wants to follow along with the party’s misadventures.

[adventure log- read from the beginning]

[session 31]

Last time on No Driver’s License, they went to the goddamn moon again, so I had no choice but to throw the old final boss at them, on the moon. They had a fight against said boss, but then the boss did a thing that sort of severely triggered one of Sakura’s trauma tracks, and... well, it’s...

So, as has happened occasionally before, the team begins this witch barrier split up. 

Makoto starts by trying to telepathically contact the team- since Seina’s established a telepathic network between them. Unfortunately... this seems to not be working, despite the connection being supposedly unbreakable. Failing that, she starts looking for an exit.

Now- Makoto has that ability to talk to animals, but... do these shadow puppets count?

...Apparently they do!

It would also be convenient if the shadow puppets were, uh, solid enough to ride.

Having reached the edge of this weird bowl zone, Makoto surveys the exterior.

Rewind a bit, and we shift to Ibara, who’s facing a similar situation. Same general environment, except instead of shadow puppets, it’s just a bunch of nicely-dressed white rabbits. 

Ibara sort of hangs around for a bit, and eventually draws some attention. She starts overhearing them murmur stuff about how she’s “uncouth”, and- with a successful Real roll, give her a big hand- she manages to listen closer.

They swarm her, but... they don’t manage to do any damage, both because they miss their roll due to Ibara’s ‘Fine, Then I’ll Avert Them For Thou’ ability, and because they’re just rabbits with nonmagical teeth that can’t really threaten her.

Ibara eventually decided on trying to just... jump out of there. She’s a magical girl, and it’s moon gravity, so... that should work, right?

Uh-oh.

Hey, how’s Seina doing?

So... she does!

So- Seina just leaves by climbing the moss, no problem. She didn’t really encounter it, but... the white dust was because she opened a door on a cat, and because the “story” of this barrier wasn’t written to accommodate a self-insert, and the lines for interacting with her weren’t written, it dissolved into ash the instant she directly interacted with it.

Who’s left? Yukari?

Yukari doesn’t fuck around with this kind of thing. She just... teleports out, like she does. Or... she tries to.

(Zero had noticed the pattern- everyone missing an ability, Makoto’s summoning and Ibara’s friction and Seina’s telepathy were all turned off- and figured, whatever, her own abilities aren’t too crucial individually, so it didn’t matter if she lost one- and did not anticipate that I might withhold her Basic Talent. Gehehehehe.)

Anyway, with that plan foiled, she’s forced to actually engage with-

So, she has no trouble getting out.

So- Ibara does a cool thing with her Visibility domain and does sorcery, cupping her hands like binoculars and magically making them work like binoculars. With that, she’s able to see that those other people are in fact her teammates- though she can’t see into the teapot’s spout from this angle.

So- to get from one teacup to another, they kind of have to make some pretty precise jumps to meet up. The cups are laid out... there’s the smoking one that someone jumped into the teapot from, then- going counterclockwise- there’s Seina, Makoto, Yukari, and Ibara. Ibara has the furthest to go, so she’s first up with the jumping.

If anyone failed these rolls, they’d land on the plains below the teacups- an ever-shifting landscape of pages and writing. No telling what’d happen if they fell down there.

(the answer is nothing, actually, it’s totally harmless ground, and their paranoia was unwarranted, but let’s pretend it was actually lava or something for the sake of tension.)

Seina and Makoto each pass rolls to jump one teacup clockwise, while Yukari- with her 1 Fury- elects to let Ibara throw her rather than make the jump herself. Ibara succeeds on this roll and then on her own jump, and then does so again. That puts Seina at the flaming teacup, and the rest at Seina’s teacup.

Yukari and Ibara make it just fine, but, uh... Makoto gets a crit. Which means... she overshoots the teacup. And the teacup she’s aiming for... has a giant fire burning inside it.

Thankfully, Makoto also has one of those single-use jetpacks, which lets her course-correct and land on the rim.

So, they’re poised to enter the teapot via the spout, but they take a little time to prepare.

So- finally, it’s time to enter the boss lair.

So they all enter the spout, and... well, they’re going to need a combat map.

At the edge of the spout, right before it opens up to the teapot proper, they can see a figure crouched in the darkness, which hasn’t noticed them yet. It’s Kimiko. They start making some plans re: how to deal with that.

That’ll happen on Makoto’s turn, perhaps- it’s Yukari’s turn first, and she opens by firing a Shotgum at her- one of those crafted weapons that has a payload of Sakura’s Toothsome Taffy. Ibara follows up by hitting her with the GLOO gun, which inflicts a penalty on her attempts to escape bindings.

So- it’s Makoto’s turn, and she decides to enhance the seed-throwing attempt by Camouflaging it so it’s not noticed when she throws it. It’s a good idea, but... whoops, she rolls a crit, and so the resultant stone mansion that occupies the last two zones of the spout is completely invisible.

Of course, this presents an obstacle to the players, too, since they can’t see the walls that now protect Kimiko.

Kimiko’s turn, and... she tries to escape. She fails the first roll, even though she acts like she has it under control, and there’s a mysterious clicking noise. On the second attempt, the mysterious clicking noise does whatever it was supposed to accomplish, and Kimiko vanishes from the taffy. Cost her a couple moves and some HP, though.

And then... it’s time for me to do something I’ve never properly done before, as a GM.

For whatever reason, though, wherever Kimiko went, her actions this turn are not visible to the party, and the turn passes back to Yukari. Yukari, in classic form, gives herself a shit-ton of Support Actions (with her Prophecy and crafted Acceleration Bracelet) and goes in to take a look at the room.

And also-

The ground erupts into a cyclone of coins, courtesy of Kimiko’s Money Money Money Money Money Motherfucker ability.

Yukari backs the hell off, and passes the rest of her actions to Seina, who heals off some of that damage.

Bypassing the hall of coins takes some doing- if they reach the invisible mansion, they can use its second floor to avoid the coins in those zones, but getting there... oh, they have a magic item for this. An Antimatter Wand that annihilates matter in a ring around the caster! 

So Seina uses those Support Actions to move up and reveal the map:

So... well, it’s still the party’s turn, and now Makoto is going. And... the thing with that is, she has a plan. You remember the Dis Astranagant? The sniper rifle they set up to do massive damage, and then got all crits on crafting so it was way the fuck too overkill to use? Because it has a range of 1 with an AoE of 1 zone around it, so no matter what, you’re going to hit yourself if you fire the ridiculous nuke gun?

Weeeeeeeell it’s not quite so “no matter what”. Because Makoto’s mansions... they block Ranged Attacks. 

Makoto fires.

So, the mansion took the blast, and her breaky-heart armor took the resultant auto-attack from the coins below (once the mansion broke), so she’s currently fine.

It is now the turn of superbosses, though, because Emiko gets to steal the turn when she’s attacked. Emiko’s up to bat!

Their defenses disabled by the coins and backblast, Emiko... gets to do a lot of punching. Like, a lot of punching. Seina takes a ton of hits, and Makoto takes even more hits than that. And in the middle of all those zillion combo rolls, Emiko scores a couple crits, which give her Main Actions. Which she uses to start punching the fuck out of them, again. 

Makoto goes down, knocked out of magical girl form from near full health to 0 in less than a single round.

Like I said- I’m no longer fucking around.

She lifts a lighter above her head- and that flame allows Kimiko to teleport to her as a free action. 

Seina is now a motionless gold statue, and is instantly out of the fight. This is why you do not want to be at Range 0 to Katou Kimiko.

Ibara, though, has that Avert bonus to resist attacks targeting her, which- contrary to how things usually go- hasn’t been turned off for a damage boost. So Kimiko misses the petrify on her.

Still, she has an action left, and crits on MMMMMM, coining the zone and dealing two damage to both of them.

All this fighting gets the attention of the Queen, though...

The Queen brings the axe down on Emiko, for four damage, but Emiko’s not too bovvered. Then, she tries to use an ability:

She targets Emiko again, but she makes her save. Heart is actually her highest stat! Her Fury is pretty low, actually, but she has an ability that lets her substitute Heart for Fury, in classic shonen protagonist fashion.

So... the situation is pretty dire, here. All Kimiko needs to do is land a Melee Attack on someone to take them out of the fight for two turns, and Emiko’s physical damage output is bananas enough to ruin anyone who tries to take her on alone. And it’s just Yukari and Ibara left, right now.

They would need to do something really fucking clever to win, at this point. Some absolutely fucking insane munchkin bullshit.

So... here’s the thing. Yukari has been saving something. She has been saving the fact that she’s never specified that Baton Pass only passes Support Actions- it can pass Main Actions, too. She’s just never done that, because using her main action for Prophecy to give the target a ton of Support Actions has always been the better play.

So- first, Ibara dumps a big classic fuck-you wallop onto Kimiko for 14 damage, no big deal. But then- remember, Emiko stole the turn, meaning that she took her move before all PCs did. So Ibara’s turn here is the last turn of the round, and now it’s a new round, so Yukari can immediately go again, and then Ibara can go after that.

So she backs up into a mansion tile with Yukari to block the blowback, and then fires the Dis for another 13 damage.

And Ibara still has Support Actions.

It’s a good thing I brought someone along specifically to prevent this from happening.

Who the hell...?

Well, I’m sure that’ll be resolved in a totally satisfying way later. If I recall, this character’s presence is... not something readers of these recaps could have predicted, as her identity may or may not have been erased from the record.

Next time on No Driver’s License: some stuff with the cannibals and this new girl is approximately resolved, and they actually get to properly fighting the witch.

[mizume]

Mizme Finished Berseria (Zestiria 2.0?)

Holy hell this game is such an improvement

After Zestiria, which as we’ve mentioned really just serves as a 40 hour advertisement for Berseria and the anime adaptation, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect out of the followup title.

Well, nothing too complicated: Berseria is an incredibly vast improvement over its predecessor with just a handful of small hiccups.

Going straight into a classic breakdown and then finishing with a handful of gripes.

Combat and Gameplay

Berseria made a significant overhaul to the button layouts of the LMBS combat system but there was really just two very simple changes that returns LMBS to its proper fast paced form:

1. We’re not limited to a 4 hit maximum chain

2. The branching pathways for arte inputs are completely customizable.

What does this mean in Tales of terms. It means you can set each individual node of your arte trees to any arte you know and the revamped soul system functions much more similarly to Xillia’s base AP system then Graces or Zestirias AP/SP systems respectively.

What does this mean in laymans terms. It means you have so much more control over your combo construction and combat feels more reminiscent of Xillia, meaning face paced intensely reactive battles in which you have (near) complete control over what you’re doing.

I’d like to take a moment to explain the new LMBS and go into why its such a significant improvement.

In this new system, artes are determined by a maximum count of Souls. Starting with 3 and gaining up to 5 Souls dictate your maximum current arte chain length. Chains can be cancelled using Soul Breaks, the new LMBS battle gimmick for Berseria. With this system, each character has a unique Soul Break arte and the arte chain returns to the 0 position. Souls can be gained in the heat of combat by inflicting stun and other status ailments or by landing a finishing blow on enemies.

What this means is we now have an insane system in which you can use 5 artes, Break Soul cancel, use 4 more artes (assuming you don’t regain the expended soul withing those 4 artes) Break Soul cancel again, perform 3 artes and finish with a Mystic Arte (which restores Soul and expends Blast gauge, a carry over mechanic from Zestiria).

The sheer amount of variability is incredibly reminiscent of the free for all LMBS of Xillia and by extension its predecessors Vesperia and pre Vesperia tales games.

The only clunk in the road is the awkward remapping of attacks. All the face buttons have been rehashed to attack commands in order to allow the player character to be in a constant free run state freeing them from the 2D axis as a default. This necessitates that we maintain the 4 arte node tree from Graces/Zestiria. While the new system is incredibly gratifying, I feel that retaining the directional inputs combined with the 4 attack buttons and removing the node tree entirely would have been incredible. Absolute freedom of arte inputs is the only thing stopping Berseria’s combat system from standing with Vesperia and Xillia2 as the best and cleanest combat in the Tales series.

It’s almost as though what i’m saying is the more we emulate older LMBS systems the better the game works because we know that the system works. How strange. Bring back classic LMBS i’m begging here Bamco.

The Plot

So, this is a bit of a mixed bag for me. The first half and last fourth of Berseria’s plot are carried by solid world building, good character driven story, and Velvet being metal as fuck.

There’s a chunk in the middle where it strays just a bit. Can you guess where that is, yeah its where all of the Zestiria allusions start coming out.

Berseria interestingly has the same weird problem that Zestiria had albeit to a much lesser extent. It, in a strange roundabout way, felt like a Zestiria sequel. There are so many allusions to Zestiria in the back half of the game to the point where I guess its assumed that you’ve played and finished Zestiria. This in it of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it feels odd coming from a game that isn’t meant to be treated as a proper prequel. 

For example as Scrubbing and I have discussed: Xillia2 harkens back to Xillia1 constantly, but that’s to be expected. Its in the title, Xillia2 would imply and assume that their core audience has played Xillia1. Berseria isn’t titled Zestiria2. The plot should be proper and function as in independent being without assumption that you’ve played Zestiria.

Now i’m not talking about small easter egg stuff. I love that stuff and it made me incredibly glad to find them. Small things like the town that would later become Lastonbell, Lothringen tower that would later crumble and become the City of Lohgrin. That stuff is great.

What i’m referring to are major callbacks and emotional pulls that only work if you’ve played both games. The Edna reveal, and the Maotelus reveal at the end are the two that come to mind immediately. Those moments really don’t make any sense unless you’re aware of the context from Zestiria.

It’s a very minor gripe, and ultimately it actually retroactively defines Zestiria’s world building much more clearly and makes it stronger as a result. 

I few things that deserve mentioning since I bitched about them so much in the last review: 

Berseria’s villains were standard fare. They’re an incredibly improvement on Heldalf but Artorius is a villain subtype we’ve seen much better realized in past Tales games and Innominat 100% feels like young Yggdrasil right down to “but sisterrrrrrrr”.

The retcons and explanations of how malevolence works feels like a double edged blade. On the one hand it again retroactively makes Zestiria’s world building so much stronger (which mind you is still ridiculous). But at the same time, having such a basic “good vs. evil” mechanic in the world build feels very very limiting. Its much better explained but still feels clunky. These are things that Zestiria should have simply done properly in the first place.

In the end, Berseria’s plot is solid and driven by a good narrative with the proper twists and plot building that Zestiria so desperately needed.

The Cast

OH BABY HERE WE GO. Berseria’s cast is great. That’s basically all that needs to be said. It finally feels like we’re playing a Tales game. We’ve got a great set of characters here each working under their own motivations with goals and backstories that influence their decisions and free will. 

I think I can say that Velvet has shoved Yuri off his pedestal of being the most metal Tales protagonist to date with an absolutely incredible and over the top drive for revenge.

One of the key themes in Berseria is “to choose ones own path” and it shows here. Its incorporated in different ways for every character and it manifests as something that feels organic and smooth. Its a heavy contrast to Zestiria where it always feels like the party is together simply because they have to be.

If I have any complaints at all here it would be Magilou, simply because the incorporation of her backstory feels very jarring. It kind of comes across all at once with little explanation similar to the weird and jarring plot reveals in Zestiria. Aside from that, Eizen’s Creed, Rokurou’s conviction, Eleanor’s search for her own truth, Velvet’s quest for closure, and Laphicet’s growth as a person are all recurrent themes that are incorporated into the main storyline. It feels great. It feels like we’re playing a Tales game.

Conclusion

Berseria is a game that retroactively makes Zestiria better. But is perhaps ultimately made somewhat worse by its connection to Zestiria (jury’s out on that one to be honest)

It’s good that Bamco has finally found an iteration of this combat system that feels like it actually works, and the plot and world building feel like a proper return to form for the Tales series.

Just a handful of things stop this from being within my top tier of Tales games, most of which involve the strange nature of Zestiria and Berseria’s development. They really do feel like they were intended to be a single game, like notes got lost during development and ended up with wrong development teams.

A great beginning entry to the series and a good JRPG all around.