Tales of Symphonia

Written by D'Marcus Beatty  on September 07, 2004

Full Review: I thought you said "Tails"

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Tales of Symphonia is the recently released Namco RPG, and is the latest in the УTales of" series while also becoming a much appreciated RPG on a system known for its lack of RPG titles. Tales of Symphonia fills that void well, with an epic, sprawling story laid over beautiful visuals that create an overall enjoyable game experience.

Tales of Symphonia follows the adventures of the hotheaded, impulsive hero, a young man by the name of Lloyd, who just happens to be close friends with the savior of his world, the lovable and simple Collete, who has earned the title of УChosenФ. The pair, along with other friends and guides, set out to replenish their world's mana, which has waned dangerously. Collete bears the responsibility of awakening their goddess to refill the lost mana, but as the story progresses, their party learns that there is a reason for the loss of their world's magical energy. As the adventure advances, they also learn of a severe cost to both Collete and another world should they chose to complete their journey. Their decisions will take them across continents and entire worlds as they search for the truth about their world and for a means to bring back their lost mana. The story, although it starts fairly slow, picks up and becomes very interesting in fairly short order. The entire tale is massive, spanning almost eighty hours even for the swiftest players.

The graphics in the game are lovely, composed of a watercolor, cel-shaded visual style that is easy on the eyes. The game is 3-D, with a camera that can be rotated using the R and L buttons. You'll want to do this often, as everything in the game is well detailed, although cartoonish. The audio is also laudable, with appropriate background music as well as proper sound effects. The voice acting is also fairly well done, with a cast that effectively conveys their lines with the proper emotion.

One thing that Tales of Symphonia does extremely well is to actually convey a sense of camaraderie between party members. There is a real sense of friendship between the characters, which is communicated well through the numerous and frequently occurring skits, which displays a conversation between the characters in your party. Also, certain combinations of characters produce humorous post-battle comments, such as a lecherous male character commenting on a female party member's Уbattle styleФ with obvious innuendo.

Speaking of the battle system, Symphonia has a real time battle system that is among the most dynamic of any current role-playing title. Characters have the ability to attack, block, dodge, and access their inventory and spells from a pause menu. Gamers control one character while the others are controlled by A.I. commands that you can set, such as telling a character to focus on healing others. Also, in another brilliant innovation, the other characters can be controlled directly by plugging in another controller (up to four) and allowing a friend to help with battles. This is useful but almost superfluous, unless gamers have friends who are willing to sit through watching you play through towns and wander around, as their only input will occur in battle.

Special attacks are assigned to the B button and are set up so that pressing up and B button produces a different attack than pressing left and B button. In addition to these, there is also a Unison Attack, which is available after filling an onscreen gauge. Unison attacks allow two characters to use their special attacks together to inflict tremendous damage on foes. Certain attacks done in concert also yield secret attacks, so its worth experimenting to find new unison techniques. Also, there are no random battles, as foes can be seen, approached, or avoided on the world map. This is a welcome change from the CPU imposed random battles that have plagued RPG games since the beginning.

One compliant against Symphonia lies with the aforementioned skits, which are fairly numerous. The title of the skit flashes across the bottom of the screen while the characters are in town or on the world map, and if players want to watch, then they press the Z button. Because of this, there is the option to completely ignore them, although most gamers interested in the story probably won't. Although they aren't essential to the plot, they do add to the character's personalities, and because of this, they should have been treated better visually. After pressing Z, players will see boxes, essentially containing talking heads, conversing with each other. This often breaks up the action, and requires the player to sit and read, which, when done repeatedly, pushes the player out of an otherwise immersive experience. Maybe Namco should have considered actual cut-scenes, or full body models, or at least the ability to control what the character says, which would have adding some interactivity. Another slight flaw is that all of the foes on the world map are black, amorphous blobs, while conversely, foes in the dungeons are represented accurately by the enemies that you'll encounter if you approach. This seems inconsistent, and obviously shows that the world map foes could have also been detailed equally.