TLDR - Promotion

We all know about the infamous episode 6 in the Zesteria anime. The episode that Berseria appears out of nowhere. It was the subject of criticism in a relatively good anime. Many wondering why this was here. Well, don’t worry, I did some digging and research and I’m happy to tell you why this happened.

First things first we have to talk about the success of Zesteria. It was a financial success and the fourth best selling tales game at its release. Fun fact: ToZ was originally a PS3 exclusive in Japan. When the game was brought to the west, it was then ported the PS4, this is because there weren’t a lot of PS4’s in Japan as there are in the US. The company didn’t think that it was profitable to port the game to the ps4 in Japan at that time due to low ps4 sales. So for those of you that were wondering about the graphics and gameplay limitations of Zesteria, well that’s your answer. You’re playing a PS3 game on a PS4. (Which is now making me rethink about a whole debacle that occurred during the game in a new light. I’ll make a post about that later on).

Now we got that establish lets look at the timeline. Zesteria was released in 2015. It was a success. The anime followed in 2016. Then in that same year came the Berseria game. Then the second half of the Zesteria anime in 2017. At Berseria’s release very little information was known of the game. So why was Velvet in the anime?? It’s obvious, promotion. The super successful game’s anime was promoting the sequel game in the series. Honestly, it’s a very clever and smart marketing tactic.

The Japanese audience loved this actually. They were pleasantly surprised and ate up this approach to marketing. Not only that they were also treated to the games opening theme, which wasn’t released or revealed at the time. In fact Berseria became the new 3rd best selling game in the franchise at its release. Behind ToS and ToV DE. However, this decision was negatively received in the west. Mostly because the west didn’t have the same context or timely release schedule as Japan (everything got released a year later in the west). What was a surprise for eastern audiences was critiqued in western audiences.