The times in Berseria when a monster can just kill you from full health by stun-locking you into a 20 hit attack when they feel like it is nonsense. Even if you block it you still take so much damage you might still die. And sometimes blocking doesn't even work!!! That really is Berseria's only trick to make fights more "challenging". You can coast for most of the game with mindless button mashing, barely engaging with most of the systems, until the game decides to drop a boss that can instakill you when it feels like it, with attacks that have little to no animation wind-up to help you dodge or parry. Am I underlevelled maybe? I'm not trying to avoid doing combat to level up. If I am underlevelled the game is not doing a great job of indicating it. Random encounter enemies in this current dungeon die very easily. To me that communicates that my level is fine.
I swear I am trying to engage. I take a look at enemy strengths and weaknesses and change my combo to use the moves they're weak to. I try to equip stuff that protects better. I've re-read some tutorials multiple times to see what I might be missing or if there's a system interaction I'm not doing properly. I do the combo into the break soul into more combo into break soul again etc. Whether or not the enemy flinches from attacks seems completely up to chance. Am I gonna get a soul back before the combo ends to break soul again? Who knows. I'm doing the status effect the enemy is weak to and sometimes the game just doesn't feel like giving it to me. Oops the enemy hit me once and now I'm either dead or down to two souls meaning i can do basically nothing.
Tbh I'm tired of saying "maybe I'm missing something". This battle system plays like trash and is not fun. The last Tales of game I played to completion years ago was symphonia and I don't remember that game feeling this fucking miserable.
