Tales of Berseria gets new characters and special attacks

The Tales games are good at two things: high melodrama and fast, flashy RPG combat. The former should be covered by the growing cast, including Oscar, "a strong praetor exorcist who fights against Velvet as she tries to flee from Titania, the prison island." There is also a lizard man called Dyle who appears to be a pirate, and also a demon. The debut trailer promises "A tale of Emotion vs. Reason", but I suspect based on the evidence it's 'a tale of a Pirate with a Demon Arm vs. Werewolves'.

Of greater interest, perhaps, is the 'Liberation Linear Motion Battle System' which will now give players free movement on the battlefield and camera control. You're free to set characters' 'arte' (combat moves), and string them together into combos. A new post on the Tales blog goes into greater detail, describing new 'mystical artes'—powerful attacks that let you exhaust your 'blast gauge' to deal huge amounts of damage.

Character switching will be a key part of combat. Switching out a character for back up lets you keep your battle resources up, allowing you to build combos and fill up your blast guage more efficiently. Fluid, combo-heavy combat is an iimportant part of the series. It's worth a look if you've enjoyed some of the other JRPGs that have made the hop to PC in recent years.

The future of the Tales once series seemed uncertain on PC after the troubled launch of Tales of Symphonia. Tales of Zestiria bounced back and Berseria might even arrive on PC alongside consoles. It's tentatively due in early 2017. Meanwhile, here is a lizard sailing a pirate ship like it's no big deal.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.