Tales of Symphonia

Namco’s foray onto the Gamecube slakes the thirst of the RPG-starving fans.

Tags: Categories: Game Cube Reviews, Reviews

Posted by Brad on Aug 12th, 2004

Title Players
Tales of Symphonia (title page) 1
Developer Publisher Genre Online
Role-Playing No

Tales of Symphonia, brought to us at long last by Namco on the Nintendo Gamecube, pours the icing on your favorite type of cake. It comes out swinging with the one-two punch of solid story presentation and the deepest combat system to grace an RPG yet. Its flaws run deep, though they may seem so only in comparison to the peaks that surround them.


Let’s not mince words – It’s a Japanese RPG. It fits all the traditional conventions of the genre that you’ve come to know and love. You’ve got your elementals, your arena battle sidequest, your airships, your creature summoning, your strangely out of place supertechnology, and your usual ragtag band of misfits trying to stop Armageddon storyline. What sets Tales of Symphonia apart from the great many other offerings out there is that it does all of these things very well, weaving the well known cliches into a refined and comfortable world.


Interpersonal relationships play a large part on your travels, driven by both deeply entertaining (while entirely stereotypical) characters, and writing that rings with credible drama. In a pleasant development there are some genuine, mature (the real deal instead of what normally passes for “mature”) themes playing out in the world of Sylvarant. At times it gets a little preachy, but remains enthralling for its course. All of this is carried out through cutscenes and conversational skits that you can trigger by pressing the Z button when an appropriate icon appears on the screen. It’s a great little feature that both gives you the option of skipping the extraneous bits of plot and character background if you’re not interested, while also breaking up some of your overworld journey with a bit of entertaining fluff.


Also scattered around the map are specific trigger areas that launch special conversations between your party members. These include choices that will either improve or worsen your partners’ opinions of you, which will affect the outcome of the game. Some will also grace your characters with new Titles – story based “jobs” that increase certain character stats every time you level up.


The story translated very well into English with few awkward exceptions, and the voice actors employed did a fantastic job of selling the full range of emotion written into the cutscenes that carry the epic. So many times in the past have games been lost in translation, but Tales comes together even in the most difficult of areas, humor. Some of the spats between party members break down in absolute hysterics. Sadly, Tales represents another example of games with great voice work when not every line is voiced, and you’re left with emotionless text. It’s jarring, to say the least, and a shame when some of the best conversation is left to the reading alone.


As you might expect, the story is fairly linear, sometimes to its detriment. You do have a few options of which town or dungeon you want to explore first, and a couple of puzzles have multiple solutions, but at the same time there is some aggravation to be had when you’ve run ten minutes through monster-crowded forestry to a particularly alluring landmark, only to find the door locked. More to the point, few of these opportunities will reward you with a hint on where you should be at that moment, leaving you instead with a shrug and a trip back into the woods. There is, for the chronically astray, a handy map and mission log that will put you back on track.


The map feature is particularly useful as it’s sometimes hard to find your way around the overworld. If there’s any huge criticism to be made about Tales of Symphonia, it’s the overworld. Abandoning the pristine lines and colors that dominate the rest of the game, it looks and plays as if it were tacked on – ugly and employing a camera that stares groundward anytime you step anywhere near a mountain. Even in the open it’s hard to tell exactly where you’re going, as the camera never quite reveals the horizon or its landmarks.


There is a long-range camera mode which you can use, but only after exploring an area for special markers, and then only within that particular area. While it may have sounded good on paper, it comes across as an excuse to include a worthless dog character whose presence is both random and irrelevant, a steed for your party that doesn’t actually seem to run any faster than you could on foot. Other modes of transportation, by sea and by air are both troubled by horrible controls that you fight against more than utilize to reach your destination. It’s criminal.

Thankfully, once you leave the overworld and enter a town or dungeon, things settle down a bit. Each of the dungeons consists of a single overarching puzzle, played out via a magic ring that changes abilities as you progress. The puzzles are not exactly brain-scratchers, but it gives you something to do on your way to boss battles, and offer up just enough reward in treasure chests and exploration to keep you going. You wouldn’t be greedy to expect a little more.


The same can be said of towns – nothing too complex, but featuring a few extra side quests and prizes hidden about that add good depth to your walk around the world. Normally, this would imply a few mini-games to distract you, but Tales is sadly lacking in this area, offering up only a few measly diversions. In a notably fun feature, citizens around town will react to you differently depending on who is heading up your group, lending variation between playthroughs of the game. Hilarity abounds as your womanizing world savior hits on every lady in town (frighteningly, this includes the children) and is rewarded with thousands in Gald, the nonsensically misspelled currency of Sylvarant.


A few bugs cropped up over the course of play, few of real consequence, but worth noting as a word of warning and an admonition of Namco. The game locked up twice during load as it transitioned between cutscenes. Your experience may vary, but if you’re gunshy about frustrating gaming scenarios, be warned that watching this beautiful game crash after beating the final boss can happen, and you may want a disposable controller on hand to hurl across the room.

Sounds and music are a mixed bag. It’s nostalgic, and appropriate for a Japanese RPG, that a droning MIDI-like tune loops continuously as you slog around the overworld, but it has grown long in the tooth. Greater playback is available now, and can be used to far more dramatic an effect. It’d be hard to fault Tales for using “video game music,” but that time for criticism is not far off.


Tales of Symphonia is an RPG you can easily run through a few times. There is enough depth to the world with hidden nooks and crannies that it will take a few runs before you see it all. With three difficulty levels (Mania difficulty being unlocked after the first play), a monster info collection quest, a strangely entertaining cooking system that works as a clever item chase sideshow and a post-battle heal-up opportunity, and a fully developed save feature that lets you “buy” special features on subsequent plays, there’s plenty to explore.

You’ll find more than cooking ingredients laying about the world. Special bits of ore and mineral abound to be brought into town and handed off to a weapon customization specialist, who will upgrade your blades without fee, allowing you to bypass the weapon shops if you have collected the right bits and baubles.


Of course, all the weapons in the world would be pointless without a fully stocked bestiary to brandish them against. Namco delivers in spades, throwing a gorgeous and occasionally hilarious cast of creatures in your way. Whether it’s a simple kung fu fighting starfish or a rampaging cockatrice, the monsters of Symphonia’s hills and valleys are beautifully realized, marked out in dungeon and overworld encounters by dark blobs that can be avoided with a little gamepad trickery.

Not that you’ll want to avoid them. Far and away the greatest strength Tales brings to the table is that of its real time combat system, the hallmark of the series. The frantic hack and slash style seems simple at first, but quickly grows in depth to surpass that of any good action adventure out there, and rival some full-blown fighting games, all this using a minimum of buttons in its execution.


The combat grows from the roots of a basic ground and air combo system that joins all four members of your party into a cohesive unit. The higher the combo count you can chain together, the higher the experience bonus gained at the end of the fight, and the faster your Unison gauge grows towards a variety of united team slams that dish out huge damage. Also, your basic combo fuels your individual characters’ spells and techniques on a strike-per-point basis, encouraging a balancing act between basic and power strikes.


Your spells and techniques will improve with use, and new ones will be learned in the course of doing so. Each character balances between fast or heavy attacks, allowing you to play to your own style by customizing the casting lists for your crew. As a battle plays out, you can issue them commands, though even as the difficulty ramps up, the AI behaves intelligently and adheres to the concise parameters you can set for them. Once you get the flow of their movements, it’s possible to rain down 100+ hit combos between the four of you.


For an even greater thrill, plug in three more controllers and team up with some friends. Though only the first player will control your stroll around the map, battles become completely freeform. It bears noting that there is a potential problem wherein someone playing alone can accidentally set their party to manual control, even if there are no other controllers plugged in, leaving those characters helpless without indication of the problem. It’s entirely avoidable, but probably should have been sewed up before the game went out.


Bonuses are applied to the scoring of combat depending on your performance. The game tracks total combo hits for a match, the time it took to dispatch your opponents, the difficulty of the fight, and the variety of techniques used. It then registers a series of “Technical Smash” criteria, such as whether you avoided all damage, pumped enough pain into a single creature, or beat them all out of the gate before they ever laid a claw on you. Once all of this is figured in, you are rewarded not only with experience, items, and cash from a fight, but also something known as a Grade ranking, positive or negative. This is a cumulative score for the entire course of the game that also acts as a currency at special vendors, buying you special techniques or items, or new game settings for your next run, such as experience boosts or carrying over character levels. It’s an impressive addition on Namco’s part that draws you in time and time again. Hundreds of hours can be sunk into Tales as you poke around all of the hidden corners.


Tales of Symphonia, through its depth of play and intensity of combat, is reminiscent of the greats of Action-Adventure, while still staying true to its RPG roots. Were it not for the painful shortcomings that take place in the world outside of towns and dungeons and the occasionally underdeveloped puzzles on the interior, this game would be ready to go toe to toe with both your Zeldas and your Final Fantasies. If you’ve got a Gamecube and a taste for traditional Japanese RPG’s, Tales shouldn’t be missed.

What Works Score
+Puts the power to deliver unrivaled beatdowns into the palm of your hand. RPG combat like you’ve never seen before.
+Mature writing delivered by top-notch voice actors portraying fun characters. 		8.2
What Doesn't
-Mind numbingly bad overworld map, complete with atrocious transportation controls.
-Underdeveloped dungeons, towns lacking in minigames, and NPCs with little of interest to say.
Under the Shrink-wrap
Scratch the surface of this one and you’ll be stunned at how deep it truly runs. There are features hiding features hiding features here, and they’re a lot of fun to find!
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