The series was released in two halves, with the first half or season releasing in 2016 and the second in 2017.
Opening Song (Season 1): Kaze no Uta by FLOW
Credits Song (Season 1): Calling by Fhána
Episode 5 only: White Light (Zestiria main theme) by Superfly
Episode 6 only: BURN (Berseria main theme) by FLOW
The instrumental version of White Light is used in the English version due to licensing issues.
Opening Song (Season 2): Illuminate by Minami
Credits Song (Season 2): Innosense by FLOW
Spoiler Warning: I am going to give a synopsis of each episode and my opinions at the very end.
Season 1 - Episode 0: Age of Chaos
While preparing for the 'Sacred Blade festival', an event during which the "one to pull the blade protected by the Lady of the Lake will become the Shepard", the royal princess Alisha Diphda
receives word of a strange mist unaffected by wind or rain hovering
over Guriel. After years of odd weather in the area and poor crops, the
princess is concerned for the people living there and sends her knight
Clem to assess the situation. When Clem fails to return, Alisha leaves
her mentor Maltran in charge of the festivities so she can personally visit Guriel. During the journey she is attacked by the assassins, Rose and Lunarre, but defeats them.
In
Guriel, Alisha meets up with Clem who has found an expert that believes
their woes can be traced back to the "earth-pulse" and invisible
spirit-like beings called "Seraphim". Before more can be learned, the
mist transforms into a tornado that obliterates the entire town of
Guriel, leaving Alisha as the sole survivor.
Season 1 - Episode 1: Capital of Seraphim
Alisha stumbles into an ancient ruin with a mural depicting the
"Shepard" (a holy figure of sorts), said to dwell in the sacred Capital
of Seraphim atop a hill, leaving only to guide the world of man. Aided
by Seraphim, he would cleanse the world of darkness and bring salvation
to all.
A sudden swarm of insects forces Alisha to flee the ruins through the crumbling walls into a chamber with two young men, Sorey (human) and Mikleo (Seraph).
Season 1 - Episode 2: Elysia
Sorey takes Alisha to his village, Elysia, to recover. Unlike Sorey however, Alisha cannot see or hear Mikleo or the other seraphs. Despite this, Alisha believes in their existence and begs for their aid in fixing the world. The seraphs scold Sorey for bringing a human to their home because "humans are unpredictable and dangerous when provoked", but allow Alisha to stay for as long as she likes.
Alisha departs the next day and is followed by the hellion demon Lunarre. Fearing for Alisha's safety, Sorey and Mikleo leave Elysia for Ladylake, the capital of the Hyland Kingdom.
Season 1 - Episode 3: The Sacred Blade Festival
With the help of a trader caravan led by Rose, the duo are allowed into
Ladylake where the thick "Malevolence" (negative energy) from the crowds
within start to physically weaken Mikleo. The duo manages to find
Lunarre, but he claims to no longer be hunting Alisha because the
'contract' has been handed over to someone else.
With little else
to do, Sorey and Mikleo attend the sword pulling ceremony. No one
manages to wrest the sword free of its pedestal, causing the crowd's
disappointment to grow, generating more Malevolence that physically
transforms into a water dragon hellion. With lives now in danger, Sorey
makes a pact with Lailah (the seraph of Ladylake) by becoming her vessel - the Shepard, and pulls the sword from the stone.
Season 1 - Episode 4: The Shepherd's Destiny
Using Sorey as a conduit, Lailah and Mikleo converse directly with Alisha. This technique only works with Alisha and no one else because she is "special" (it is never explain how or why). Sorey is given permission to travel the city, and sensing a powerful Malevolence in the aqueduct, go down to explore. The trio find the statue of a dragon which Mikleo claims to be symbolic of pure evil and the herald of destruction, as seraphs touched by darkness are transformed into dragons. The Malevolence they sensed earlier is quickly traced to a pile of human bones belonging to residents of Ladylake who rebelled against the ruling family. As Shepard, it is Sorey's job to purify these angry souls and defeat the ultimate evil - The Lord of Calamity.
Season 1 - Episode 5: Dawn of Chaos
Somewhere far away, on a remote prison island, a therion demon named Velvet Crowe initiates a prison break with the help of a Malak (a kind of seraph) known as Seres. They encounter a samurai demon named Rokurou Rangetsu, who helps the two ladies set the remaining prisoners free in order to cause a distraction for the guards.
The Berseria music track "Theme of Velvet" plays during this episode.
Season 1 - Episode 6: Velvet Crowe
A ship arrives carrying praetor Oscar Dragonia, a high ranking member of the Abbey (an organization of exorcists). The Abbey had been pitting Velvet against other demons, essentially using evil to destroy evil, and demands that she return to her cell. Oscar further acknowledges that what has been done to Velvet and her brother by the Abbey leader, Artorius Collbrande the "Savior" ("Shepard" in-game), was cruel but for the greater good. A dragon then appears suddenly, which Oscar declares to be the result of everything Artorius is trying to prevent. Seres disagrees, saying Artorius forced her into servitude and she will rebel against him to regain her freedom, same as Velvet.
Oscar, against Artorius' orders, deems Velvet too dangerous to keep alive and looses an eye in the ensuing fight. Seres is also fatally wounded and willingly absorbed into her sister, Velvet. Rokurou and an escaped witch called Magilou then arrive to secure a place on the only ship remaining. The trio successfully slays the dragon and escapes from the Abbey via the ship. During their voyage, Velvet reflects on what her brother-in-law Artorius did to her and her family during the last blood moon.
Season 1 - Episode 7: Each One's Feelings
Back in Ladylake, Sorey, Lailah, and Mikleo are confronted by a tornado.
A black dragon makes its presence known to the trio before vanishing
with the tornado as suddenly as they had appeared. Lord Mathia Bartlow then praises Sorey for chasing away the dragon and invites him over for dinner.
Later
that night, Mikleo confides in Lailah that he feels distant from Sorey
ever since he pulled the sword from the stone. Lailah tells Mikleo of an
ancient relic hidden in the Galahad Ruins which Mikleo sets out to find
in the morning. Sorey meanwhile, leaves with Alisha for the town of
Marlind.
Season 1 - Episode 8: Rayfalke Spiritcrest
Sorey and Lailah break off from Alisha, and while climbing a hill are attacked by an ogre-like hellion. An earth seraphim called Edna, and a wind seraphim called Zaveid, arrive to join in the fight. However, Sorey grows angry with Zaveid for killing the hellion rather than purifying it. Edna also argues with Zaveid for trying to kill her brother Eizen - a giant black dragon. Sorey wishes to purify Eizen the dragon, but is told that such a thing is impossible with dragons. Edna then joins Sorey as a seraphim he can call upon, similar to Lailah, on the condition that he look for a way to cure her brother. Meanwhile, Mikleo retrieves the artifact - a bow.
"Sir Shepard is the very picture of morality and valor. But Sir Shepard, death can be salvation rather than a punishment." -Zaveid
Season 1 - Episode 9: The Plagued City
Sorey, Lailah, and Edna meet up with Alisha and Mikleo in the town of
Marlind. Together they battle a dragon causing plague in the area and
because the beast is still young, they are able to purify it.
Season 1 - Episode 10: Alisha Diphda
Alisha receives word that Bartlow has declared war on the Rolance Empire and prepares a small army of her own to stop Bartlow. Alisha is later attacked by an assassin whom she exposes as Rose and gains her aid in the coming battle.
Season 1 - Episode 11: The War
Alisha tries to ride into the middle of the battlefield in the hope of talking both sides down, but she arrives too late to stop the conflict. When she confronts General Landon, he has his men attack and wound her.
Season 1 - Episode 12: The Lord of Calamity
Sorey and Lailah spot a dark figure on the battlefield so covered in Malevolence that it could only be the Lord of Calamity, Heldalf. When challenged, Heldalf quits the field, leaving summoned hellions to deal with Sorey. Rose and a blind wind seraphim called Dezel arrive in time to assist. When the group meets back up with Alisha they are ambushed by Landon in hellion form. He is quickly captured, purified, and then taken back to Ladylake for a trial.
Season 2 - Episode 13: World without Malevolence
Rose, Sorey and his seraphim friends head for a new land called Rolance. On the way, some rogues try to sell Rose stolen herbs but she apprehends them. The herbs are then sold in the commercial city of Lastonbell where Rose meets up with her acquaintance, Mayvin the storyteller (a title, not a name). The captain of the Platinum Knights in Rolance, Sergei Strelka, tries to apprehend Sorey for being "too powerful" but ends up drinking the night away with the group instead. Rose then slips away under cover of darkness to assassinate a corrupt Bishop.
Season 2 - Episode 14: Wind Seraph, Dezel
Word of the Bishop's death reaches Sorey in the morning, and he accompanies Sergei to inspect a tunnel that was opened by an explosion near the cathedral. A gate bars passage but before leaving Sorey purifies the area.
Season 2 - Episode 15: Each One's Principles
Rose spends the day trying to locate her trading partner Guren to no avail. Knowing he went to visit the Bishop days ago, Rose is forced to accept that Guren is likley no longer alive. To ease her anger, Dezel sets out to destroy the church in Lastonbell. Lailah, Edna, and Mikleo rush to stop him, causing severe damage to the surrounding buildings. Dezel gives up and explains how he has been watching over Rose since she was very young; in the game he was out for revenge and using Rose as a vessel.
Season 2 - Episode 16: Revenge
Rose leaves with her assassins guild, the Scattered Bones, to seek vengeance on Prince Konan, a man to whom she was once engaged. Meanwhile, Sorey is on his way to Pendrago when Mikleo brings world of Rose and her mission. Sorey rushes to stop her.
Season 2 - Episode 17: Justice at Hand rather than Ideal beyond One's Reach
Prince Konan turns into a hellion as his castle collapses from the battle with Rose and Sorey. Assuming Prince Konan to be deceased, Rose and Sorey ride through a malevolence infested forest while debating the ethics of killing. From their discussion, Rose begins to view all the work she has done as an assassin as pointless and breaks down.
"Killing of any kind is wrong no matter the reason. The world is in chaos. It needs less darkness in it not more." -Sorey
Season 2 - Episode 18: Negotiation
The group arrives at the residence of Doran, emperor of the Rolance
Empire. Sorey talks with him in private and is told how a Mayvin
storyteller (implied to be Magilou) broke their oath to share the story
of a past Shepard (Artorius) who tried to rid the world of malevolence
but was thwarted by Velvet - someone so consumed with rage they brought
about the current era of chaos. He is also informed that Alisha has been
put under house arrest. Worried for Alisha, but seeing the malevolence
in Pendrago as the more urgent issue, Sorey leaves at once. Rose
accompanies him and asks to be made his squire - something that would
allow her to use his seraphim. However, if he were to die, she would as
well (this is a condition unique to the anime).
In the Pendrago
church they find a deceased dragon leaking large quantities of
malevolence into the area. Despite being told it was impossible to
purify dragons, Sorey tries anyway and succeeds, bringing an end to
Pendrago's ceaseless rain.
Season 2 - Episode 19: Ladylake
Alisha uses a sort of telepathy to contact Sorey asking for assistance at Ladylake, where tornadoes have appeared. Having escaped house arrest, Alisha rides for Sitole intent on rescuing the people there. When she arrives, a malevolence mudslide nearly consumes her, but Zaveid manages to dispel it. Alisha then receives word that Maltran has been crucified in Ladylake.
Season 2 - Episode 20: Purification
Alisha and her subordinates sneak into Ladylake under cover of darkness. Instead of going for Maltran, Alisha runs to her father - the king of Hyland. When she gets there, Lord Bartlow assassinates the king intending to blame it on Alisha. Servants within the castle witness the event however, so rather than face imprisonment, Bartlow commits suicide by leaping from the palace balcony. At that same moment, Sorey purifies the dragon at the center of the tornado.
The song "Rising Up" from the video game plays during the dragon scene.
Season 2 - Episode 21: The Ideal World
Dezel battles Symonne (a seraphim) who declares that her master, the Lord of Calamity, is close to ending the world. This prompts Sorey to head for the northern land to find Heldalf. He is joined by Rose and the Scattered Bones, Alisha and her subordinates, Sergei and the Platinum Knights, Gouldman and the Blue Storm Knights (from the same area as Sergei), volunteer soldiers from the local area, volunteer seraphim called Normin, and finally Zaveid.
Season 2 - Episode 22: Northern Land
Sorey learns that the northern land is a wellspring of power because earthpulses connect the world to it. The extreme north is not effective in spreading Malevolence, so Sorey is surprised to find many dragons over the mountain peaks. He is quickly confronted by Heldalf and Symonne in dragon form.
Season 2 - Episode 23: Be like the Wind
Sorey and the others pursue Heldalf to the town of Meirchio where they meet with Grimoirh, a Normin scholar. They learn that Innominat
and the five Empyreans were the strongest of seraphim, to the point
that they were once worshiped as gods by mortal men. Heldalf is
traveling to what is left of their shrines.
That night Sorey
dreams of meeting Velvet in a sunny field. She repeats a question the
Shepard from her own time often asked people: "Why do birds fly?" To which she answers that "they fly because they want to. They fly for themselves and not for anyone else."
Sorey then awakens to a blood moon in the sky - something that is
almost mythical in Zestiria's time. The group rides out under a red sky
full of dragons which Dezel wants to destroy, but Sorey insists on
purifying - a task that costs Dezel his life.
Season 2 - Episode 24: The Chosen Answer
Sorey confronts Heldalf at the Empyrean shrine and receives visions of the past. He learns that Maotelus, the leader of the Empyreans, is a white dragon and that Heldalf was once a ruthless king so reviled by a past Shepard that the Shepard sacrificed his niece/nephew to put a curse on Heldalf, hence his current state.
Season 2 - Episode 25: The Legend
Sorey forms a pact with Zaveid in order to have a seraphim of every element. With Zaveid, Edna, Mikleo, and Lailah using all of their powers in a final confrontation against Heldalf, Sorey plunges the two of them into an underground river. Malevolence drops to non-existent levels around the world and Maotelus congratulates the surviving seraphim on their success.
Alisha becomes the Queen of Hyland and brokers a peace treaty with Rolance. Lailah continues to be revered by the people of Ladylake and sets off on a new adventure with a new Shepard. Edna becomes a guardian of the land, with Zaveid serving as her bodyguard. Her brother Eizen has regained his senses, but remains as a black dragon. Rose continues work as a merchant and Mikleo finds Sorey alive and well. Heldalf was purified and left in a town where no one knows him.
Thoughts:
There are rumors that Namco Bandai (game publisher) had originally
wanted to adapt Tales of Berseria into an anime, but because of animation
difficulties or cost, they went with Zestiria instead, which is a
shame. Chronologically Berseria comes first and a lot of what happens in
its narrative adds weight to the events of Zestiria. Both the
protagonist Velvet (The Lord of Calamity) and her nemesis Artorius (The
Shepard) are anti-heros and tragic villains in their own ways; it does a
much better job than Zestiria of exploring the darker side of human
nature and subverts your typical revenge/redemption plot in a creative
way. Zestiria by comparison is rather basic - not that a generic good
versus evil story can't work, it's just that I found Zestiria's story
and cast too straightforward and predictable to hold my interest.
Unlike
some of Namco Bandai's past efforts at adapting a Tales game into an
anime, it is clear they threw some money behind this one. The animation is
clean and crisp, although not without the occasional oversight, like the
buckles down Mikleo's side missing. The backgrounds can be a little
bare at times, and the heavy use of 3D effects for backgrounds,
fire/water, and moving objects such as wagons becomes distracting after a
while. They could have done a better job of getting the 3D effects to
look like they fit within the world, especially with how often they use
them. As is common with Tales adaptations, the anime does a really poor
job of establishing its main cast and explaining how the world operates:
Earth-Pulse, Aer, Exosphere. Why would a new viewer have any idea what
these terms mean or how they impact this fantasy world? The series just
assumes you already have prior knowledge or that you'll be interested
enough to stick around until they (hopefully) start to make sense. Even
as someone who has played the game, there are still things I couldn't
make sense of. Like to humans are the seraphim invisible but physically
present, or are they like ghosts you can pass through? In episode 7 for
example, Alisha hands Lailah (whom she can not see) a cup and I couldn't
tell if the cup had vanished from Alisha's perceptive or if it appeared
to be floating in the air.
The first half/season of the anime follows the game's plotline closely but then starts doing its own thing in the second part. I assume this was done so that those familiar with the video game could see something new rather than just re-experience the video game's story. However, this change trivialized several character arcs. Sorey for example, never has to face the reality that some people are too corrupt to purify or that death can sometimes be a mercy rather than a punishment. This fact is emphasized heavily with Eizen, Edna, and Zaveid in both Zestiria and Berseria. Eizen had accepted the inevitable - that there are some things in life you can't control or do anything about. Then Sorey pulls a deus ex machina and just purifies a dragon, despite all past Shepards failing at such a task. Anime Eizen then lives happily ever after. His sister Edna doesn't loose a brother and Zaveid's presence in the anime is totally pointless (his dragon girlfriend also died for nothing). Pacifism and restorative justice in plots is good and all, but there is a zealous naivety in the show's writing that is frustrating. It preaches that killing, no mater the reason, is bad because there is always another way. But then it kills off its villains in a roundabout way - through suicide or hellion transformations, so that the plot never has to actually engage with its own message or contradict it. The viewer is never actually shown why or how the 'bad guys' can be rehabilitated, forgiven, or generally kept out of trouble. That said, the show is relatively good for a piece of media with such heavy religious undertones. It probably wont interest most adults, but is safe and inoffensive enough for most children.
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