When I beat Tales of Phantasia, I thought it was an okay game, so I decided to buy some of the other Tales games. After all, I liked one game in the series, and the others were positively reviewed, so I thought it’d be safe to get more than one before playing them; of course, if you saw my post on Tales of the Abyss a couple months back, you’d know that I found out that wasn’t the case. However, now that I’ve played another Tales game and gotten myself more acquainted with the combat mechanics, I’m starting to think I gave Tales of the Abyss a bit too much credit.

(Speaking of Abyss, to those who saw my post on that game: don’t worry, this one’s shorter)

• Tales of Symphonia
  

  42 hours playtime

  9 of 39 achievements

This is a JRPG, but with real time combat instead of turn-based combat. Even though battles take place in fully 3D environments with allies and enemies positioned in different areas around the arena, you’re stuck moving left/right in the 2D plane between you and the enemy you’re locked onto (there’s no free run in this game). Do you want to reposition yourself, perhaps to lure enemies away from allies or maybe enter a Healing Circle cast by said allies? Tough luck, you can’t. Maybe you got unlucky and the boss cast an AoE spell that takes up the entire space between it, you, and the invisible arena border; you could try to use Tempest to jump over the boss (assuming you have enough TP to use the move), but even if the boss is short enough for that to be possible, you likely wouldn’t have time to pull it off before the spell activates and you get hurt. Of course, due to the dissonance caused by the worst possible blend of 2D and 3D game-play I’ve seen, enemies can easily swarm and stun-lock you before you have a chance to get an attack off (enemies always come in groups except for a few bosses), so you have to wait a few seconds either for them to decide to stop attacking or for your allies to bail you out by attacking the enemies from angles you could only dream of reaching. I know Tales of Phantasia had problems, but this is probably the worst way they could have realized its mechanics in a 3D environment (yes, it’s even a step backward from Tales of the Abyss).

The main difference between this game and Abyss is, without free run, the only hope of fully avoiding an attack (as opposed to blocking it) is to run away immediately after finishing your combo (though you may need to run back to the enemy a bit to tease their attack out). Of course, if you try to reverse your direction, you’ll slide for a bit, causing a delay in your movement that could be critical in whether or not you avoid said attack. Fun fact: this is exactly what your AI partners are programmed to do when attacking: run to an enemy, attack, run away, wait, repeat. No, they’re not actually programmed to react to the enemies or anything; it’s just that pattern on loop, so it isn’t uncommon to see an ally run toward an enemy in the middle of an attack combo and get hit. They aren’t even programmed to react to other enemies, so when running away from one enemy, they’ll often end up running toward another and stay there, taking hits from said enemy. Then again, if they’re bound to the same 2D-plane mechanic as the player (which I doubt), their actions make a bit more sense.

Now that I’ve explained the game’s concept, let’s dive into the combat mechanics. They’re largely the same as in Tales of the Abyss: A is for your regular 3-hit combo, B is for chaining a TP-consuming special attack to the end of your 3-hit combo (of course, the buttons are in different places on an Xbox 360 controller), hold X to guard and press Y to bring up the menu. Yes, once again, there’s no strategy to the combat: you either do a 3-hit combo or a slightly longer combo by chaining a special attack at the end, and you keep doing that until someone dies. Once again, there’s no way to cancel an attack in order to avoid an enemy’s attack (only spells can be cancelled, and your character doesn’t have any spells); you push the button, you sit through the animation. Once again, the enemy variety is really just for show since all melee attacks act like all other melee attacks, all projectile attacks act like all other projectile attacks (too fast to really react to), and all attack spells are nigh unavoidable (except for the small number that are actually unavoidable, like Dark Sphere). Sure, the attacks could theoretically be avoided in one-on-one fights, but when almost every battle is crowd versus crowd (combined with the inability to cancel attacks to dodge or block), no amount of skill will prevent you from getting killed, much less avoid taking damage at all. The only exception to this lack of diversity in attacks was this one wolf enemy that would actually arc a projectile over you, meaning it could only hit you if you followed the “run away” strategy mentioned in the last paragraph. Of course, by this point in the game, you’ll have given up trying to implement any kind of strategy since the combat is designed specifically to punish such rational thought; just set your allies to “Attack Same” and tap that A button. Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and end up having time to react and avoid an attack, or even an AoE spell.

Seriously, if you get killed by a boss in this game, just buy some more healing items (or buy/upgrade your weapons if you haven’t reached late game), then fight the boss again with the same strategy and you’ll be just fine. Example: there’s this one boss that can revive its allies, and on my first attempt, it was really tedious and I ran out of items and got killed. For my second attempt, I bought a better weapon for exactly one character (the player character) and I beat the boss without even having to revive anyone. The only exception are mimics (which are optional) since they can’t be harmed by physical attacks (yet they attack very rapidly, resulting in your allies being unable to have enough time to cast spells if one of them gets targeted).

But that’s not even the worst of it. You see, there’s one particular boss battle I’d like to spotlight since it helps show just what kind of nonsense goes on behind the scenes of the game’s battle system: near the beginning of the game, your character is accused of breaking the law and has to fight a monster as punishment. At this point, you only have one ally, but there’s only one enemy for this fight (the boss), and on top of being fairly slow, it only has two melee attacks with a half-second wind up animation before each (with the possibility of chaining the two attacks together). In other words, this is as fair a fight as you’re going to get in the game: it’s stats are balanced around you not having much help and it actually telegraphs its attacks, giving you the ability to rush in, hit it, and get away before it can attack again. If that sounds too good to be true, don’t worry, it just reveals another problem with the combat mechanics. You see, on top of enemies being able to stun you, you can stun enemies as well; normal enemies usually get stunned after the first attack (as do you), but bosses usually take a few hits to be staggered. However, in this battle, you’ll learn that the number of hits it takes to stagger enemies is variable: even after your ally kills himself, one combo will stagger the boss for all three hits from your combo, but the next combo staggers it only after the first attack, then for the next combo, only the last hit staggers it, and if you dare to try another 3-hit combo, the boss won’t be staggered at all, giving it enough time to attack you before you can run away and avoid the attack. EDIT: I ALMOST FORGOT TO MENTION THE WORST PART: There are even times where the boss will be staggered for the first two hits, then get UN-STAGGERED from the third hit and attack you before you can react!! In other words, the only way to avoid taking damage from this fight is to tease an attack out of it, run to the boss, attack it once, then run away since the inability to cancel attack animations results in you being unable to react if the attack doesn’t stagger the boss. Oh, and don’t forget that it’s random whether it attacks once or twice, so you have to wait long enough to make sure it doesn’t attack a second time, but not too long before it tries to go after you again (needless to say, I turned hard mode off not long after this fight).

EDIT: As a side note, the game’s hardest boss isn’t even the final boss like it was in Abyss, but rather the boss two dungeons before. Then again, I’m using the word “hardest” loosely here due to the aforementioned combat.

Oh, also: once again, hard mode literally just increases enemy stats and that’s it. Then again, what more can be expected from a game that rewards neither skill nor tactics?

I do have a correction to make regarding something I wrote in my post on Abyss: I thought that there was no way to switch characters mid-battle, but it turns out there is; it’s just that the games never tell you how to do this, ever. You do this by bringing up the menu, then pressing Start (or, in Abyss’s case, Select, and you can only do it after reaching a certain point in the game). I only figured that out by accident and I had to look it up to find out how to do it again. This doesn’t change combat as much as you may think, though: there’s a chance it could save you if you forgot to restock on Life Bottles, but it’s still the same combat (I mostly used it to keep one of my healers from wasting TP during regular battles).

With the combat out of the way, let’s look at the rest of the game. Like many other JRPGs, you have an over-world that you’ll run across to reach new towns and dungeons. Town exploration is fine, but actually navigating the over-world is rather annoying: not only does the camera turn slowly just like in Abyss (taking around 2 seconds to rotate 180 degrees), but there are many spots on the world map were the camera tilts into an overhead perspective, and since it’s already zoomed in closely to your character, this makes it really hard to navigate, even with the map on. It’s possible to access a “long mode,” but that requires finding the stone monument first, and even then, it’s only for the small area you’re at; you’ll have to find another for the next area of the map and so on. Plus, whenever you exit an area to the world map, the camera points backward, so you’ll often have to spend a couple seconds rotating the camera every single time you transition to the world map. However, all of that pales in comparison to the ship controls: not only are the sticks reversed (right stick moves and left stick rotates), but you can’t move left or right; you have to move forward, backward, or rely on the slow rotation. What’s worse is that the rotation is physics-based, so it’s slow to start and slow to stop. This is on top of the fact that, whether you’re on land or sea, you can get stuck on walls (this doesn’t happen in combat, thankfully); you think you’ll be moving forward, when suddenly your character stops moving even though there’s nothing in front of you, and then you realize you got too close to the wall and have to over-adjust to get unstuck. Luckily, you get the ability to fly a mere few hours after getting the ship (but not before you have to navigate the ship through narrow, rocky terrain, getting stuck even when the path is wide enough for you to get through), and not only do they provide faster transportation, these let you move in any direction without having to rotate the camera first (sticks are still reversed, though).

I’d also like to mention some moments of the story briefly. Being a JRPG, plot contrivances are to be expected, especially ones that involve characters being impulsive and dumb in order to shoehorn another boss fight in the game. However, this game takes it a step further: for reference, the game starts off by making it clear that your character isn’t The Chosen One; you’re just a sidekick on The Chosen One’s journey, which is a neat subversion of that trope and a decent first impression. However, not long into the game, you learn that there’s an impostor of The Chosen One when your group is accused of being the impostors (this is an early plot point and it gets forgotten about not long afterward), but The Chosen One shows everyone there her wings, thus showing everyone there that she is, in fact, the real Chosen. However, during the other instances where the impostors have fooled people, the group either keeps it a secret or tries to convince the other people by using words. My question: why? Why not just have the Chosen show her wings again? She can do it at will and there’s no reason to keep her identity a secret at this point in the game, or ever.

I will give the game credit for one thing: not all of the dungeons are empty mazes! Quite a few of the dungeons actually have varied gimmicks to them, which is more than most JRPGs can say about their dungeons. Sure, some of them are really annoying, like the abysmal path-finding-AI in the dungeon of darkness (the things will get caught on walls as well, but will also sometimes go backward for no reason!), but some of the gimmicks could potentially have been expanded upon to create actual puzzles, like the light-reflecting segments in the Tower of Mana.

Just like the last Tales game, I don’t recommend this one. It’s too bad, because there’s obviously effort put into the games: the graphics are solid (there are even a few textures in this game that were updated to be more high-res), the soundtrack is good, the animations are serviceable (though there are plenty of stiff ones), the story is passable, and the dungeons have actual level design, but all of that (except the level design, to a small extent) is just window dressing while the window itself (and the rest of the building, i.e. the game-play) is just a small pile of broken glass.