While not quite as well known as other JRPGs, the Tales series is a franchise that has seen quality releases year after year in Japan, but we seldom see a game in this franchise being brought over to the west in a timely fashion. So instead of the latest title, Tales of Xillia 2, Namco has instead re-released one of the more renowned title in the series and it's sequel in a package along with updated visuals.
Tales of Symphonia
Its not just an up-scaling of the original GameCube and Wii versions though, as most of the art assets have seen a complete overhaul including various illustrations of characters and areas. Other welcome upgrades are aslo present in the form dual audio and a few minor extra pieces of content. While it severely shows its age in the interface, menus and presentation Symphonia still manages to be a very pretty game mainly due to the fantastic art style it boasts.
Tales of Symphonia casts you as Lloyd Irving, a young swordsman tasked with protecting Colette Brunel, a young girl who has been charged with saving the world by unsealing five ancient temples which will trigger a world saving event called "Regeneration". The plot takes its fair share of twists and turns later on and can force you into quite a few situations with very interesting choices. Its a great ride for most of the game's duration and the writing really does do a great job of making you feel like part of this quest. It bears remembering though that this is now a nearly decade old game now so the presentation isn't quite up to today's standard with minimal cut scenes or not much in the way of voice acting.
The cast of characters is memorable, diverse and very well written with each party member having a unique connection to the rest of the crew. This leads to some very memorable dialogue sessions between them and a crew of makeshift heroes that feel genuinely connected and loyal to one another, rather than a collection of isolated personality types that so many RPG inadvertently stick you with.
The battle system is based in real time and plays very much like an hybrid of classic JRPG battle systems (think Final Fantasy VIII) and more western, action focused takes on the genre. From a party of four the player controls one character at a time with the rest being handled by the game's AI. You can set battle parameters for each character individually before and during combat to have fulfil a specific role or target a specific enemy. The AI does a relatively good job of this with characters sticking to their assigned roles and allotted abilities most of the time. After a certain amount of damage has been dealt to a group of enemies you gain the chance to trigger a "Unison Attack" which sees the entire party unload a barrage of pre-assigned abilities on a single target resulting in massive damage being dealt.
These skills are assigned by way of equipping "EX Gems" each of which bestows unique traits on a character in way very reminiscent to the way Final Fantasy VII handled it. While it's all good fun and functions perfectly well, the game's tutorial is extremely poorly handled. A lot of concepts are introduced in quick succession with long, poorly worded logs and the game almost never gives you a chance to put into practice what you've just been taught for quite a while.
Another nasty problem crops up in the game's save functionality. There's no auto-save or checkpoint system to speak of, only pre-destined save points scattered across the world and its dungeons. If you die, you will be sent back to the last point at which saved at one of these and it can lead to hours of progress being burned down in front of your eyes. Thankfully most dungeons have one of these save points right before their boss encounters, but they're locked behind a seal that requires a special item to unlock, one which become increasingly scarce as you advance through the story.
This frustrating save system, coupled with some harsh difficulty spikes led to me losing almost an hour of progress quite often and causes the game to become very frustrating at times. Its also a pretty lengthy game, offering a bare minimum of 30 hours of content, though you can easily squeeze double of that out of the game if you're willing to hunt down all the miscellaneous side activities.
Dawn of the New World
Included in this HD re-release is Dawn of the New World (originally released for the Wii in 2008) a semi sequel to Symphonia, its a much briefer experience and falls very short of being as good a game as its forebearer. It's very a forgettable experience overall. Instead of Lloyd and company the story focuses on a new cast, lead by newcomers Emil Castagnier and Marta Lualdi both of whom are very poorly realised characters, who never measure up to the interesting premise that sees them embarking on their journey. The plot itself is bursting with interesting potential, but the execution is quite frankly piss poor.
Its much more constrained game, featuring no real overworld and a stripped down combat system that sees you recycling the same few moves over and over again. A few new promising mechanics are thrown into the mix, but in the end it essentially boils down to a tedious monster taming system which yields very little reward for all the effort it asks. It's not the worst JRPG I've ever played, not by a country mile, but it's tedious and very disappointing considering how much I liked the original game and the interesting premise behind the sequel.
Tales of Symphonia is a game one that I would heartily recommend to fans of classic JRPGs, provided they can still stomach aspects like the dated save system and the lack of fast travel. The story is fantastic, the characters that comprise your crew are memorable battle system that is holds up well fun, though its all left poorly explained and remains susceptible to very sharp difficulty spikes.
Dawn of the New World on the other hand, is completely worth a skip. It never comes close to being a game I felt was worth my time.
