Game Review: Final Impression: Tales of Symphonia

ACK! I’m such a procrastinator! I was supposed to do this for you during break...but the Nintendo DS and PS2 consumed my attention. So, you can expect good reviews from them, at least...

And Happy New Year, everyone!



Okay, now on to the review of Tales of Symphonia, which “Symphonia”, by the way, is the Latin word for “(musical) band”...if I’m recalling correctly. If not, it’s very close. And no, I have no clue how it’s related. In fact, I don’t think the word “band” was even used during the game. Oh, well.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Loved it. I recommend anyone who likes RPG’s to play the game. The plot was as interesting as any good book’s, in my opinion, which made it so addicting. I also enjoyed the fact that its plot could be altered by your relationship with the other characters. My personal favorite was Kratos, mostly because he was a pretty good “button-mashing” character (though, it wasn’t technically in his personality), and I thought his whole background and history was interesting and he fitted into the plot very well, not to mention had some very corny and funny sayings he’d articulate at the end of a battle if he were last to strike (yes, whoever was last to strike in a battle would usually say something, either stupid, corny, or funny. I just thought his were particularly corny/funny, except he couldn’t bet Zelos’s phrases. He definitely had the funniest...). I think I might have enjoyed playing as Lloyd, only because he was the best button-masher in the game, but the Tok’ra refused to let me play as him. You can see her post (when she posts it) about the other characters to get a better idea of their personalities. I’ll try to give more of a review from the gamer’s point of view...though the plot and characters are an important part of this too. I won’t go into the plot just in case you want to play the game ;-). Though, I will say that Kratos was “unavailable” to play as most of the game, which annoyed me, since the only character like him was Zelos, who is a faster character, but weaker...:-/.

Though, to be honest, I didn’t have a good point of view of the game from a “gamer” point of view. Why? Well, the game, in my opinion, is obviously designed for one player, but is possible for multiple players, and since I was “player 2”, the Tok’ra did most of the action since she was “player 1” (warning, the screen only focuses on player 1, so I’d suggest keeping the players to 1 or 2, and have the second player become very good at being able to fight when they can’t see themselves or the enemy, like I had to do). Or they could become the healer/magic caster and just hope the enemy will leave them alone.

[Now, for those who just happen to have the game, but don’t know how to allow multiple people to fight, I’ll explain, since it’s very/hardly explained in the instruction manual. Anyway, you plug in the additional controller(s) and then make sure the character you want to be is in the same position in the list (so if you wanted to be Kratos and he was the 3rd person in the list, you either plug your controller into the 3rd slot, or put yours in the second and move him to the 2nd slot), and then you go to the “Tech” in the menu and switch the status from “auto” to “manual”.]

Even though the Tok’ra did most of the “world-walking” (when your traveling the world, not the map), walking around got annoying because of the strange black creatures (random enemies) that you might accidentally run into and having to find these posts in each area in order to get “long-range mode”, so you can travel faster on the back of Noshe (a huge, green and white dog...who doesn’t look like a dog...). It only becomes less painful when you get the rheairds (these gliders you ride on that allow you to fly). The worst part however is traveling by boat; hard, in my opinion...

The graphics were good in my opinion. I strangely don’t have too high a standard for them, but when it went into “movie mode”, it was definitely very cool. The sounds were fun too, except for the Desians’ (bad guys/half-elves) human ranches, which started to annoy the heck out of me, since it was the same for each ranch.

And although some of the puzzles required us to look online, none were drive-you-bonkers hard. And besides the camera/view problem, battling was awesome. It’s “real-time”, meaning that you don’t have to wait for your turn to fight and all of the action is occurring now...and the computer players are actually helpful!

So...I’d definitely recommend it. It’ll keep you occupied...it’s two discs, after all...


(P.S. unrelated to Tales of Symphonia, if you have Mario Kart DS, I have absolutely no one on my friend list. So if you do have it, tell me, since I don’t know anyone who has it...and for those that have no clue what I’m talking about, I’ll explain it in the upcoming review.)