When playing Tales of Symphonia, expect lots and lots of awkward, boring dialog as you get shuttled from town to town. While there are many issues with this game, I would summarize it as one main critique: a linear experience with no hook. It's tedious, frustrating, and outright disrespectful to the player's time. An interesting narrative premise, in theory.īut as a cohesive whole, the game is massively flawed.This is where Symphonia's cast shines, as these are the only times in the game where the characters seem human. It's fun to watch the main cast bicker and banter over trivial things. The chemistry between the characters during random conversations (called "skits" in Tales parlance).It's fast, fluid, and fun real-time battle system.This isn't to say that the game is irredeemable. We did finish the game after 40 hours or so (as Tales fans, we felt that it was our duty), but I almost wish we hadn't. It took about 20 hours for my fiancée and I to realize that we were wishing for this game to hurry up and get itself over with. We tried powering through its painfully-slow start, its cringe-worthy voice acting, and its tedious dungeon design, but the game never improved. We wanted to give this game a fair chance, so we tried to keep its age in mind.īut despite our best attempts to play the game as if we were Caprisun drinking, yogurt yogurt slurping preteens in the 2000's, we both quickly realized that this game has not aged well. The game is over 15 years old: game design, art, and graphics have dramatically improved since 2004. Having said that, we also knew that we'd have to temper our expectations. Owing to its constant online praise, we were eager to get this Symphonic party started. ![]() It consistently ranks very highly on "Best Of Tales Series" lists such as this one, where it's ranked as the 2nd best Tales game of all time. Let me set the stage: my fiancée and I were absolutely pumped to play this game. Tales of Symphonia's battle system is fast and fun, but that's probably it's biggest (and only) strength. ![]() So, as closet lovers of anime melodrama and cliched romances, what did we do? We played both of them, of course! What did we think of them? Read on to find out! Interestingly, both of these games offer local co-op: a second player can control one of the party members during battle. This game was also published by Bandai Namco, and was released in 2007 (and later ported to the PS3 in 2008). I, on the other hand, had a weird curiosity for Eternal Sonata, a JRPG for the Xbox 360 (and later PS3). Originally published by Bandai Namco in 2004, it's seen several re-releases since then: it was ported to the PS2, then to the PS3, and then finally to PC. ![]() With a lack of notable RPG releases this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my fiancée and I decided to tackle some of the games in our backlog.Īs a lifelong Tales Of Series fan, my fiancée had been itching to play Tales of Symphonia, an action-oriented JRPG for the Gamecube. My opinions below aren't meant to serve as a full review for each game, so I may generalize for the sake of brevity.I'll be avoiding all spoilers in this post, aside from one video that you can skip.
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