Game Review: Tales of Symphonia (GC) - Retrospective

This is a game I played a LONG while ago, almost four years. It took me around half a year to beat, and I played practically nothing else. The time it took was due to me having school to attend to as well as a social life to maintain, but that is neither here nor there.
So, after freshing up my memory as far as plot and characters are concerned (Thank you GameFaqs!), I sat down and wrote this little retrospective.



Gameplay and controls:

I always deal with the gameplay and controls first, as this is the first thing people will confront, apart from how it looks and the box the game came in, obviously.
And as far as gameplay is concerned, ToS is a great game. The Tales of-series from Namco have this running thing of real-time battles, making it feel more active than any Active Time Battle-system Square ever came up with. It's intense, yet very easy to learn. Mastery comes with time, and you will spend time with this if you intend to see it through. I spent nearly 70 hours or so on it. And I still had a lot to unlock and I skipped most of the side-quests. If the side-quests aren't smoothly implemented in the plot, or if I don't find them interesting enough to pursue, I usually avoid side-quests in J-RPGs, as there is enough to do already.
The battles are played out in real-time and a surprising amount of work has gone into it. This is where controls come in, as they are tight, at least when pulling of the attacks of main character Lloyd, or whoever you choose as party leader. Yes, party. You play real time battles with a party. This calls for a strategy system and puts demand on the AI. And the strategy system is fairly straightforward but with a lot of ways to customise your party's strategy to suit just your playing style. My style is quite agressive, but more defensive styles are possible. But the best bit is that the AI does what it is supposed to do. At least what I want it to do.
There is one problem with the controls though: movement. It feels like I am walking on air. The movement of my characters is too fluid, with no resistance when turning or stopping.

One large portion of how you fight comes from how the characters are "tooled". In western RPGs, how the party's characters turn out is usually left entirely to the player. In J-RPGs, choice is usually more limited. In ToS, there is very little, you as a player, can do to change a character's class. Or more to the point, what stats will change how much when they level up. All characters have predetermined classes, to which a little change can be applied with a title-system as well as T- and S-rings. It gives you some customisation choices, but not the kind someone who has played Neverwinter Nights is used to. Just saying.
Also, what skills, or Technics/Magics, the characters learn is entirely individual, with the characters learning skills at a set level, similar to Pokémons. Again, the T- and S-rings offer something in ways of customisation, but no landslide of change.

Now, all this racking might've frightened people, but rest assured, the gameplay is throuroughly adequate, if not fantastic. It's still a good system. But what really makes me like the gameplay and one reason I saw the game through was the following two points:

- There are no random battles! This alone means a gold star and at least one extra point to ToS. You can actually choose if you want to attack an enemy out on the "overworld" map or not. You can actually choose it in dungeons as well. This is great, meaning that if your group has gotten badly beaten up, you can, most of the time, just avoid confrontations altogether.

- Secondly, healing potions and similar in this game heals a percentage of your health, and not a set number. This goes for spells as well, meaning that cheap, easily learnt healing spells play a part even at a late stage of the game. Some might say this makes it imbalanced, what with the fact that I can go back to my starting village and stock up on cheap healing potions. Well, yeah. Maybe. But at that point in the game, you have access to better potions for a price that doesn't seem out of tune for what you're paying for a less effective one.

Also, I have heard some people complain about long dungeons in this game. If you consider 2 hrs a long dungeon, maybe you shouldn't play RPGs, or at least you haven't played ANY BioWare game.
I found the dungeons varied and fun to play through, as random encounters aren't an issue in this game. The puzzles in them were clever enough and took some brain-usage to get through. More than God of War did, on reflection, and that is a scary thought.

I do have to give the game one last lamp over the head before we leave for the next section, and that is that you have to grind your way to level 5 on your starting characters before you should even attempt the first damn dungeon. There is precious little grind later on in the game (no more than 5-6 hours from what I recall), but being hit with nearly 2 hrs of grind this early can put some people off. It nearly did it for me.

Graphics and sound:

The graphics of ToS are quite nice. Nicely animated cel-shaded characters, with a lot of individuality to each. My main problem would be in that the textures are of rather low resolution, something that became painfully obvious even on my old 14" TV. Also, in some places, it seems like they forgot to texture the backgrounds at all. It's mainly in the Overworld map, but as you will spend a lot of time trekking across it, it can get rather tedious. The dungeons are fine, though.

I know I said the characters were nicely animated, and yes they are. It's just that some of the clothes design makes very little sense, even in the context of the game. What are those leather strap things that flow behind main character Lloyd? What are they good for? Why are they there?
Also, maybe I am amazingly obtuse, but it took me nearly 2 hours to figure out that Genis is a guy. I know it is explained later on why he's so androgynous, but still: he made a good example of ThatGuyWithTheGlasses' "Boy or Girl"-game.

Maybe this is a bad thing, but I barely remember a song from this game. I do remember how greatly satisfying it was to hear when Lloyd's sword hit an enemy. So; forgettable if decent soundtrack and good sound effects? Yeah, I guess so.
The one thing I do recall very well was the downright atrocious voice-acting on behalf of the English voice actors. I just shut the whole damn thing off, and the game became much more enjoyable then. I dunno why games companies insist on doing this: getting D-grade voice actors to do their characters, when that part of the budget can be used to buff up the rest of the gaming experience. I mean, was Baldur's Gate any less epic because it didn't have voice acting? No! Game's that don't have the budget, shoudln't attempt to do voices in this day and age. And sometimes, even games with a budget can suffer... ::cough::FinalFantasy X::cough::

Story and characters:

This is where the game falls through for me... I'll start with the story.

The main problem with the story is that it finds itself in a T-rated game. T is the EU version of PG-13. This means there is no way any difficult or upsetting moral dilemmas are going to enter the story. At least not any that you as a player can affect.
The secondary problem for the story is that it finds itself in the company of the characters of this game, but I am getting to that.

The plot of ToS twists and turns like an angry ball of tagliatelle. I don't want to reveal any serious plot twists here, but there is honestly only one major twist, and that come roundabout 20-30 hrs in. At least before the half-way turn. And you see it coming a mile off!
Without revealing too much of the plot, the story revolves around two (parallell) worlds that share a common "life-source". I have no idea how that is supposed to work from a scientific perspective, but as there is magic and technology co-existing in these worlds, Final Fantasy-style, I don't bother thinking too much about it.
Anyway, when one world is in flow from this life-source, the other one is in ebb. A long time ago, there was balance, but since some time back, there isn't. The mission you get is essentially to stop one world from draining another, at least to begin with.
Now, the whole gist of the two worlds thing would have been awesome, if a some point the game forced you to chose between them; which lives and which dies. But no, this would probably be "off-message", so a piece of Deus ex Machina is thrown in instead.
And it comes in the form of one of the least likable characters I have EVER come across!

Her name is Colette Brunel. She is probably meant to be lovably clutzy and good-naturedly naïve, but she only comes off as a ditzy, dumb blonde.
Now, if there was any fairness to the world, I, as Lloyd Irving, would be able to dump this moron. But there is a little bit of a problem, apart from the obvious one of Lloyd being a couple of cards shy of a complete deck himself, in that the game flaunts one of these "relationship bonds"-malarkey.
The idea is that, if you do some things correctly, you can change the outcome of the game. In one case, even change party make-up. Bleh! I say! Bleh! How the hell you're supposed to figure these out WITHOUT consulting GameFaqs or a printed walkthrough spread across your thighs, I have NO idea. I finished the game without consulting GameFaqs, so I can safely guess I got one of the more "generic" endings. I didn't play it through a second time as I had borrowed the game of a friend and I rarely replay J-RPGs.
I also get the feeling that the changes are so subtle that you actually could do without them. Why give the semblance of impact when there actually isn't one? But my main issue is that you can't figure them out without a walkthrough or a dedication in the game that can't be healthy.

To be honest, I actually tried, oh damn I tried, to get Lloyd and Genis hook up and thus force Genis, the androgynous bastard, out of the closet. Seriously, he has the world's largest man-crush on Lloyd, and it's only after Presea (who happens to be a pink-haired, taciturn tank-character) enters the game at a later stage, that Genis seems to dump Lloyd in favour of his new love. But it didn't help resolve my issue with the relationship-bollocks. Lloyd can't read signs even if he was hit over the head with the Spanner of Gay. Besides, he and Colette practically only have eyes for each other from the start.
Ditzy Blonde and the King of Idiots. Birds of a feather, I guess.

Oh Genis... You're too good for him...

Summary:

The reason I am bringing up Namco's J-RPG for the RPG-deprived GameCube is just that. The GameCube was so deprived from role-playing games that anything would do to satiate the masses, which means that Namco has gotten away lightly as far as serious critque of the game is concerned. The mere fact that the PS2 version of the game passed under most PS2-players radar nicely illustrates what I want to have said.

And that is that the game, although having a very enjoyable "fighting engine" and a plot full of delightful, if corny, twists set in a thought-provoking world(s), doesn't live up to its potential. And I hate when games developers squander potential in games. The game doesn't take the necessary step into truly morally oblique country with its settings. It gives us a glimpse of the moral choices and dilemmas that the characters face, but it doesn't let us affect them and feel the full force of them either. Partially, I think this was out of a fear of a higher ESRB-rating than T for Teen. Also, the plot is dragged down by some of the central characters being, let's be fair, down-right idiots.

In the final analysis of Tales of Symphonia, I have to say that there are issues with the game, something that wasn't immediately obvious for a RPG-deprived GameCube owner like yours truly, issues that only became obvious after a few years playing W-RPGs and other, better, J-RPGs. But despite the last few paragraphs of whining like a broken fan, I enjoyed the game, and would probably still if I opted to replay it.
This is, unlike God of War, a game I like despite its flaws.