Spoilers!!!
Tales of Symphonia tells the story of Collette, the 'Chosen' of the world of Sylvarant, and her friends Lloyd and Raine, who set out to regenerate the failing world by praying seals scattered throughout the land at temples. Once Collette has prayed at all the seals, she will awaken as an angel and heal the world. However; once they get to the last seal it turns out that the angels aren't angels, and are in fact a shadowy organisation of mortals endowed with the power of the 'Cruxis Crystals'. It's then revealed that there is another world; Tethe'alla, that is linked to Sylvarant by mana flow. The two worlds are competing for energy- one is always in decline and by regenerating one world, you would kill the other. Lloyd and party set off to Tethe'alla to find a way to break the link between them and find out about the 'angels'.
The story is quite engaging intially and to the middle section, and has moments of real pathos, like when a character is showing off the Tethe'alla bridge which he proudly explains is powered by 10,000 energy crystals called Exspheres. What he doesn't know is that a human life was used to produce each one.
So the gameplay is typical console RPG fare; travel between towns, go through dungeons and beat the boss, level up and learn new skills and then buy better weapons and armour from your battle winnings.
What isn't typical however, is the battle system which operates on a realtime basis. Once you enter a battle; you directly control one character, while the other three are computer-controlled. You can set up fairly complex strategies for them such as guard settings, all-out attack, reserve magic, heal and support, or general attack. You can also set them to target enemies who are targeting your lowest health players, or to follow your lead, or to do their own thing.
Play as a melee fighter and it plays like a fast, simplified beat-em up- with standard attacks and blocks, and special moves via control stick and c-stick shortcuts. While this sounds too simple, it's quite satisfying to time when to attack or run out of the way of the super-death move, and there are various combos to try for.
Or you can be a long-range attacker and sit back and cast spells while the cpu characters get stuck in. This isn't as fun as playing close attack however; and while computer casters are autonomous during battles (you set which moves they can use), they can be commanded to perform a specific spell, which makes actively controlling them slightly redundant. Added complexity comes from Unison Attacks, where you combine your characters' special moves to produce various compound attacks which deal major damage. Also; out of battle, aside from the bog-standard weapon/armour system (although there are some clever rings/charms) of knife>sword>big sword>magical sword>Demonic Blade of Ultimate Destruction: there is a system called EX Skills.
Your characters can learn these from special crystals they find, and equip them. They have 4 levels, 1 is basic health/defense/attack etc increases, 2 is stronger versions of these, and some esoteric stuff, 3 and 4 are more powerful and some only work in conjuntion with others. When you set your four available slots, after a few battles with them, you may learn an Ex Skill on top of the increases from just the stones alone. Obviously the more good combos you have, the better skill you'll get. I had Genis the 'black-mage' type on heavy mana regen, heavily increased magic attack, and low health regen.
Altogether it works well and is a fun and fast-paced system, meaning that hacking through waves of enemies never gets too monotonous. Up to three other players can control the other characters in battles. I haven't been able to try this feature, but I assume it would add another layer of depth and fun as you shout out for help, or berate someone for not covering you etc.
Also fairly novel is the cooking system; instead of being limited to your standard potions/herbs, you can learn recipes. They are composed of two or three main ingredients and a few extras that will increase the food's effect. 'Tenderloin Stew' for example needs a type of meat (there are many, also many fish types), carrot and onion. Other vegetables and black satay sauce can be then be added. Recipes restore HP or TP (technique points; magic basically), cure status effects or increase defense/attack/resistance etc for the next battle. This means timing is also involved, you want to power up your squad right before you see the boss. (This may require saving often and seeing when a boss appears so that if you die, you can do better next time with a little home-brew style powerup!)
The towns that you visit are quite empty- in that there's not much to do apart from shop for stuff and go in a few houses and talk to some NPCs who deliver a few lines of boring, pointless dialogue. Consequently, the game can feel a bit hollow, you're just forever going from one dungeon to the next. It would have been nice to have some Zelda-style minigames and more interesting NPCs to chat to, to break up the gameplay. Well, and the fact that the 'world map' style of things isn't exactly condusive to looking at a distant mountain and going there, jumping over fences with your horse. I'm not comparing this infavourably to Zelda (completely different games), but you get the point. The map-world graphics are terrible, barely above PS1 level, which is really lazy. Or if it was a data space thing, they should have rendered a nice 2d map, with paths and cities as buttons on it. Incidentally, Baten Kaitos, also a traditional RPG on Gamecube does this.
The dungeons themselves are not great; they're generally quite short (though lengthed by respawning enemies). The puzzles are generic block pushing, or light all the torches, match up the statues etc. (Please Nintendo don't do this again in Twilight Princess!!!) They leave an unsatisfied feeling, and because they're over relatively quickly, you are then forced to go to the next location as there's nothing much else to do.
Actually, the whole game is like that- there are too many locations and not enough functionality and interest in each one.
The graphics on the main characters are pretty good; sharp and colourful anime-styled cel shading. Enemies in battle are also presented well, in the same style. Town graphics are not so good, a strange mixture of muted colours and pre-rendered, but soft-focus style which doesn't pay off. Irritatingly, there are almost no cutscenes of any kind, apart from when the characters are standing around talking-but seeing as the general graphics are poor, the few ones there are leave little impact.
Which is very bizarre, seeing as ToS has a fantastic pre-title screen sequence. Proper, quality anime with rousing orchestral music and a fantastic visual flair and energy. There are a couple more near the end, but they're quite short. Weird, because they neither followed the FF convention in this, or the action style of ingame graphics cutscenes. Disappointing.
The music is quite 'meh' as well, a few tunes are repeated throughout the dungeons, and the town music is forgettable background stuff.
Tales of Symphonia is a fairly solid game, with the dynamic battles and strategy making up for the spartan towns and repetitive dungeons. It is very long though, I ended up just playing to finish it, I had little interest in the story which had descended into 'oh no a giant demon who we didn't see before and is going to devour the earth, you are the only ones who can save us' blah blah blah.
So yeah... I suppose if you stayed into the story throughout it would be better for you, (do you like long, boring stories?) but it got very tedious towards the end for me. Get it if you're an RPG nutjob and you have a long attention span.
An introduction would be nice!
ReplyDeleteThats a cool review - well written and easy to read.
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