swanton00's Full Review: Tales of Symphonia for GameCube
Being as big on rpgs as I am, I wanted more of them for my Gamecube then just Skies of arcadia. Now off the top of my head I cant think of many rpgs for the cube. I had seen this game often for awhile and I always had interest in it until one day I had alot of money and I decided to buy it new for $20 which I usually wont pay that much for a game. Tales of Symphonia is I believe a sequel to the Playstations Tales of Destiny, which I know nothing of so I cant really say if its an offical sequel or not. With that being said, I now advance onto the review.
Epic Plot
Your world of Sylvarant is in troubled times. An army of half-elves known as the Desians keep appearing and torturing human villages with attacks, capturing many of the villagers. There is a legend amongst the people that every so often a Chosen will arise and go on a journey to get rid of the desians and bring peace back to the world. Now the Chosen is thought to be your childhood friend who then embarks on her journey. But being the caring friend that you are your not just going to let her go without you. As Lloyd Irving, you accompany your friend on this treacherous journey. What unexpected events will occur during this epic quest to save the world. Only by playing the game will you find out...that or having someone spoil it for you, which isn’t cool.
Gameplay
Tales of Symphonia is a Role-playing game, ya know the type of game where you travel the world fighting monsters, gaining experience, leveling up and equipping new and exotic weapons to your party. Traveling the world map is done in classic rpg style, where your character is viewed from a good distance above and you’ve grown bigger so walking across these continents don’t take as long. Walking all over the world sounds pretty crappy no? Well, thankfully you get different things to ride on or fly on to shorten your journey. You start off with Lloyds pet um…uh..well it never says what it is but it looks like a big dog with bunny ears. Riding on this animal doesn’t give you a speed increase but the dog and other vehicles will change something on the world map. For Instance treasure chests can only be spotted when your on foot so its best to check out as many spots as you can on foot.
The battle system is ToS is quite unique. Its an innovative 3d real time battle system. Real time means you don’t go through menus for attacks and the order being judged on a characters speed. Instead, four characters from your party appear on the left side of the screen and the enemies party is on the right. You control one character at a time while the others act on the strategies you have given them which I will explain later. Think of an action or fighter game for the fighting Tos. You have a standard attack button, a special attack button and a guard. The control stick allows you to move back and forth or jump. Sliding the stick in a direction while pressing one the attack button will lead to different attacks. Special attacks get equipped in a menu to certain button arrangements. The character you can control will be able to use 6 special attack per battle. You equip them to such commands as the b button or Up and B. Special attacks consume a characters Technique points. By doing different combinations of regular attacks and special ones you can bust out combos which can lead to you getting better items and more experience points after each battle. The battling is really cool and different but sometimes I just got sick of just going in and doing some of the same few combos, it gets sorta hack n' slashy a bit. Atleast there are plenty of new moves for each character to learn as they level up. One thing pretty cool about the battle is that you can have four people playing at once. If you have friends just watching you play then why not have them join in and all four of your parties active members will be human controlled. Youll probably be better offlike that, but then again the strategies you can set the AI to are pretty good.
From any menu in the game you can go to the strategies menu. This is where you tell all of your AI party members what to do. There are four sets of orders you can have. For example, I have one order list for when I want my party to play it safe and go on the defensive side like backing away from the enemy and healing. I have another set where they just charge at the enemy recklessly throwing all their TP into magic and special attacks. You can get very specific with your orders. For each list you give a character three command sets. Like for my set to fight bosses I have a magic user/healer ordered to stay far away from the enemy, only using magic, making healing magic her top priority when an allies HP is low. Now I have a stronger fighting type character set to go straight up the boss using tons of special attacks but not being to reckless. Its cool to have four very different sets of orders. Issuing these orders in battle is done with the d-pad which is quite convenient.
Aside from the standard leveling up, and equipping better stuff, there are many ways to get your party more buff. One is by equipping gems into your characters expheres which are just things that each character that can battle have embedded into their hands. Each exphere has four slots for gems and each gem goes between level one and four. These gems do a variety of different things to a character such as the standard stat raising. There are some that will increase your speed when traveling in cities and dungeons, some will decrease the spell casting time for magicians. Theres a lot of effects and whats cool about them is that some can be combined into a compound Ex skill. With compound ex skills you will still have the effects of the gems that make it compound but in a separate list you will have a new compound still which has more cool effects to a character. Then theres the titles that each character has. On their status screen under the name of the character lies their title. This is a fancy name given to them to describe kind of how they are in the storyline. As the plot progresses you will gain new titles for characters. You can also gain titles by doing certain things in a battle or by doing a side quest. Each character can have one title at a time and titles will boost certain stats more when leveling up.
Throughout the game your party will need to enter many many dungeons. Dungeons as you would probably expect are filled with traps, puzzles and monsters as you would expect from an RPG. Theres tons of puzzles in Tos. A lot consist of moving around blocks and dropping them off ledges. It doesn’t really get old. Then theres the sorcerers ring. It’s a magic ring used by press X or Y, eh I forgot which one. That ring is what makes each dungeon unique and stops it from feeling just like the last one. In each dungeon it does different things. Its standard art is just to spit a small ball of fire. But that don’t cut it for all the games dungeons. So it can be changed at the start of each place. Another thing I have to mention is the humor of the conversations between characters. Your main character is a pretty dumb kid and some stuff he says just makes me laugh. You’ll be able to shoot lighting balls, cause earthquakes and even make the ring into a flashlight to complete different puzzles. You’ll have to learn what each power does when you get It fast, when you leave the dungeon it goes right back just spitting the ball of fire. Because save points and rest points aren’t common in dungeons, you get to cook after each battle. That’s right, cook. You set what character you want to cook and what you want them to make. Each character excels at different recipes and you learn tons of new recipes as you go on. Cooking generally restores Hp and TP a bit but can have some other effects like ridding your party of poisen or increases your attack power for a short time.
Graphicalness
Tales of Symphonia has cel-shaded graphics. The means that the characters are done brightly in 2D and the backgrounds are all in 3D. This creates a beautiful looking 3D world. The characters are pretty detailed and bright and colorful. The game doesn’t really have cinemas, talking scenes look the same as when your playing. I can imagine there is some anime cut scenes in the end as it does show a clip on the case, I just hav’t encountered anything yet. There isn’t mush body movement during talking scenes however. Like when I character is talking it usually just has their mouth flapping up and down. Unless they take out a sword or something, I just think it would be cool to have the characters like waddling around or something.
Sound Testing
This isn’t a game you will want to play with out sound, there so much to hear. The voices are all done by professional actors and they really sound into whats goin on in the game. While the battle music is pretty much the same song all the time, theres a lot for sound effects during a battle. You’ll hears tons of sword clanking and talking between one another. The characters will call out the names of the special moves they perform, if an enemy is about to cast a spell your party will be like, “we’ve gotta stop that magic!” Theres also tons of things the characters say after a battle. While I do enjoy the games music, its nothing extraordinary. Its disappointing to have the same battle music all the time. Bosses do have their own tunes though. And for like one or two of the games bosses there was some pretty epic sound symphony music, that stuff so makes RPGs.
Any Last Words
If you’ve got a Gamecube and you like Rpgs, get Tales of Symphonia. The unique battle system and the dialogue humor will draw you in.
Release: July 13th, 2004
Developer: Namco
Console: Gamecube
Genre: Role Playing
1-4 Player(s)
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