Although it never gained the popularity of The Last Illusion or Dragon Quest franchise, the Tales series has earned a good reputation as the ‘other’ classic JRPG series that has consistently maintained good quality for quite some time. Back in 2004, Namco (no Bandai yet) had only just appeared in the fifth installment of the Tales series, making the bold transition to full 3D with its release. The story of Symphonia on Gamecube. Showcasing an appealing shaded visual style and packing enough content to last hundreds of hours, there’s a lot to love about this release as options are much slimmer for great RPGs on the market. Nintendo console. Currently, Tales of Symphonia Remastered–based on the 2013 PS3 re-release, which uses the Japanese PS2-specific version as a base–brings a classic experience to modern hardware, and while it’s still a fascinating adventure, but it has certainly shown its age.
The story is set in the land of Sylvarant, which is going through an ecological crisis. The severe mana shortage caused by the lingering effects of a war thousands of years ago meant that the world was slowly dying and the inhabitants’ time was rapidly running out. The only hope is that the Reincarnation takes place, in which a person known as the “Chosen One” opens various seals across the land to awaken the goddess and return life to all things. You play as Lloyd, the current Chosen One’s good friend, Colette. Lloyd is the stubborn son of a dwarf blacksmith, and after accidentally causing a terrible tragedy to his village, Lloyd sets out with his best friend Genis to accompany and protect his friend Colette their journey to complete the Chosen One quest and save the world from destruction.
Tales of Symphonia tells a rather compelling story, at least in general terms. What at first seems like a trivial exercise in the grueling tropics will soon give way to a much more exciting adventure with some shocking plot twists. Admittedly, some of these quirks were telegraphed, but we were still impressed by the narrative ambition on display.. The downside to all of this, however, is the manner itself. The writing is quite stiff and often unintentionally amusing. Some of these cutscenes include a ridiculous array of emotions in just a minute or two, and dialogue rarely feels natural—it’s the epitome of a ‘video game scenario’. In some ways, unwieldy trades definitely add to Tales of Symphonia’s allure, while in other respects they diminish it. Suffice it to say that the uneven writing has hindered the entire story from reaching its full potential. Still, it’s been a great ride along the way, and we’d say the story as a whole is Tales of Symphonia’s strongest suit.
The game follows typical JRPG conventions of exploring the vast world map, visiting towns, and exploring nearby dungeons to keep the storyline going. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but we feel that the pacing here is good at motivating you to go through the content before any of it starts past the welcome time. Dungeons are a highlight of the overall gameplay loop, reminiscent of things like yellow sun with the use of puzzles before you get to the boss at the end. None of these go beyond the types of torchlighting or block pushing work that have been done so far, but they do help break up monster battles and give you a little extra challenge to reach a certain number of chests. Additionally, each dungeon introduces some new idea or gimmick, helping to differentiate them and create a more specific sense of progress as you go on.
Fighting in Tales of Symphonia is action-packed and bears many similarities to the 3D fighting genre like Tekken. Your character is always locked in by enemies and confined to a 2D plane, where they can run towards or away from enemies in a straight line, while attacks are designed to link together into Short combos based on directional input are combined with the press button. After you build a nice collection of skills – called art – for your characters, the combo system really starts to come together, but by today’s standards, battles feels extremely difficult. Compared to games like Ys VIII or Kingdom of Hearts IIFeaturing a similar hack-and-slash combat feature, Tales of Symphonia feels like it’s slowed down a few steps.
For example, you may feel uncomfortable trying to avoid multiple enemies’ attacks because you can only move in two directions while their attacks can hit you from many different angles. Meanwhile, you cannot cancel your own attack animations after starting them, which encourages you to take it slow and be selective about when and how to use the skill, however the overall battle speed Fast will push you to fight reactively and recklessly. Keep in mind that Tales of Symphonia was the first 3D release in the series and while later games have improved on the downsides and repeated the strengths here, unfortunately it didn’t last very long in this part. fighting is Okay once you get the hang of it, but it always feels uncomfortable.
Character development is handled through an interesting device-based system that determines stat and skill growth. Completing objectives, completing side quests, and reaching certain milestones will unlock Trophies that help or hinder the growth of specific stats as your character levels up. For example, the title Drifting Swordsman gives a slight boost to your HP and a slightly larger boost to your growth in both strength and defense. You are not told specifics such as the numbers in the game, online tutorials recommend that there is a fair bit of strategy underpinning the Trophies; Not only is getting Trophies in itself often a challenge, but what you equip and how long you equip them will greatly affect character building over time.
As for skills, the most important factor for building your team is the EX Gem system, which affects the type of arts a character can learn along with passive skills. You get EX Gems by defeating bosses and thoroughly exploring dungeons, and each will grant you some small support for things like accuracy or strength. Each character can have up to four gear, and depending on the combination of gems you use, you’ll get unique effects like being able to defend mid-air or auto-heal after status effects. We’d love to focus on testing here, because there’s a much Different skills that you can discover by trying different combinations.
In terms of visuals, Tales of Symphonia Remastered doesn’t do much to significantly improve the visuals compared to the original. Here, the original shaded look is downgraded, and although everything has been upscaled to HD, it looks like some more work needs to be done to bring this stale release back to life. more improvements. The chunky character models and the muddy, fuzzy textures look pretty old-fashioned. And while the anime style works well enough here, there is a distinct lack of creativity in the environmental design, which relies heavily on familiar settings such as ‘arid desert ruins’ and ‘peaceful towns’. seaside’ without much of a unique visual flair.
We also feel it is necessary to say that the moving business itself is quite sloppy. While the original GameCube release ran at a smooth 60fps, it was limited to 30fps and we’ve seen cases in both dungeons and combat. matches where the speed seems to slip to 20 or less. Combine this with the fact that Tales of Symphonia Remastered doesn’t come with a sequel, Dawn of the New Worldgo with The Story of the Chronicles of Symphonia on PS3 in 2013 and it’s hard to see a value proposition here. Then in some ways this new port is worse than the original release And the remaster came out a decade ago. It includes additional content (extra costumes, artwork, etc.) from the 2013 release along with some minor quality-of-life updates such as possibly skipping some cutscenes, but looks like it’s still not enough to take the opportunity to bring this back on new hardware.
Conclusion
Admittedly we were a bit confused about Tales of Symphonia Remastered. While the story is engaging, the character building is satisfying, and there’s a lot of content to play with, Bandai Namco’s near-non-existent efforts to remove the rough edges of the 20-year-old game This certainly held it back from greatness. Things like intense combat, outdated visuals, and clumsy writing limit the appeal here, which makes this remake feel like a missed opportunity. It would be easier to recommend this to people who are nostalgic for the original and want to relive those memories, but it’s hard to say whether newcomers should pick it up. It’s not the best action RPG on the Switch, and it’s not even the best Tales game on the Switch. We will take this proposal lightly because of its positive sides DO outweighs its negatives, but with the caveat that you should probably wait for the deep sale or buy it used. There are much better RPGs to play on Switch these days, and this one doesn’t quite deserve to be near the top of your list.
