The soundtrack for the game is primarily composed by Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura, with contribution from Takeshi Arai. While the level of attention to detail in towns and villages is impressive, the overworld is drab, as the world itself is poorly modeled and enemies are represented by greyish blobs. The game still looks beautiful, even as the cel-shaded effect has been scaled down. Lush jungles and arid desert landscapes serve as exciting backdrops for dungeons and villages alike. Years - and a number of upscaling filters - later and the colors still pop off the screen, if now a bit muddled. Tales of Symphonia has a timeless art style that engages the player and provides a vibrancy to the locales the characters explore. Players can button mash to some effectiveness, but true back-and-forth strategy yields Battles are expected to be turned over in short order with an emphasis on blocking enemy attacks and landing effective counters. This system is not perfect, as it can be difficult to negotiate combat when enemies approach from multiple angles, making it difficult to attack one enemy while defending from a second at the same time. Combat is enjoyable without being overwhelming, and offers a surprisingly intuitive mix of 2D combat and 3D movement, the lineage of which is still seen in modern iterations of the series. Each character utilizes a unique weapon type and together provide a diverse array of fighting styles, which are complemented with the use of arts in the form of battle techniques or magic spells. The end result are relationships that feel organic and entirely earned by the time the credits roll.Ĭommon JRPG tropes give way to an engaging tale.Ĭombat is governed by the “Multi-Line Linear Motion Battle System”, with players controlling one character while effective AI controls the remaining party. Short, sweet, and almost entirely optional, the skits provide depth to each character while also infusing plenty of humor into the mix. These chats will go over story events, but also personality quirks and qualms between characters. This deep characterization is partly due to the skits between the party. The story beats become increasingly wild, especially in the last third of the game, but the bonds between characters help ground the story’s emotional center due to the strong characterization between Lloyd, Colette, and the family they have chosen for themselves. The threat the Desians poses is immediate and dangerous, and the stakes only continue to grow as layers of the story are peeled back. Symphonia features a number of interesting and innovative story twists that still excite twenty years later. They are joined by the duo’s friend Genis, his elder sister and schoolteacher Raine, mercenary Kratos, and eventually a cast of others who join the group on an adventure that goes considerably further than it first appears. Unfortunately, as the source of mana has faltered, so has the seal as a result, the Desians have re-emerged and have been abducted humans for labor camps and experimentation. Where the world was previously under assault by a race of beings called Desians, they were sealed away by the goddess Martel. The game sees players control Lloyd Irving, a young man who accompanies his childhood friend Colette on her pilgrimage to regenerate the world of Sylvarant, a world slowly in decline due to the gradual depletion of the planet’s mana. However, while the mechanics and presentation hold up, the blatant disregard for the title and lack of quality-of-life improvements renders this an accessible, yet entirely inferior version of Symphonia. Ten years and a PC release later, Bandai Namco brings Tales of Symphonia Remastered to the latest console generations. In 2013, the game was released for PlayStation 3, packaged with its sequel, Dawn of the New World. First released in the west in 2004, Tales of Symphonia was a landmark RPG and bold new direction for the series that is till felt nearly twenty years later, boasting memorable characters, an intriguing story, and colorful 3D graphics. The Tales series is another long-running JRPG series that has attracted a following in the West since the 1990s.
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