Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World Review by: Crazy Li - 8/10
A Much Under-Appreciated Tales GameBack when Namco released Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube, they found themselves a true hit. The series had been fairly obscure, especially in North America. Symphonia was their break-out game that gained them worldwide popularity. Given how well it did and how games sense have been hit-or-miss in reception, it makes sense that Namco would try to capitalize on Symphonia by making a sequel.
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World takes place six months after the end of the original game. Lloyd abandoned his quest to destroy all the world's cruias crystals and instead has gone around looking for Centurian cores. A lot of confusion has been going on and there are reports that Lloyd is heartlessly slaughtering people in the name of the Church of Martel.
Let's look in detail at the execution of this entry to one of my favorite video game series:
You play a young boy by the name of Emil Castagnier. Emil is a very meek and timid boy who lives with his judgmental aunt and uncle following the death of his parents. Now here's the first mistake Namco made: Emil is a very difficult character to assume a protagonist role. How can you lead a story if you're too afraid of everything? He has trouble speaking up and is just far too wimpy to progress the story properly. He basically has to have events fall into his lap to get anywhere in the initial bits of the story. Fortunately, he does improve over time.
Another early thing I noticed is the horrific number of flashback sequences early on in the game. There seemed to be a flashback every 5 minutes to events that you just witnessed 5 minutes prior. It got very annoying very fast.
Anyway, Emil soon meets a young lady by the name of Marta Lualdi. She's a lot more assertive than he is and kind of has to lead the way, acting more the protagonist part initially. She's the only other true playable character. Here, we find the next big flaw of the game: it drastically changes the Tales formula in a negative way. Tales has since the beginning established 4-character battle parties (with 3 or more reserve party members) and ever since Destiny, the option to control any character you want, typically with multiplayer capabilities. This is one of the big selling points in my mind. There aren't a lot of multiplayer RPGs and even fewer that are actually fun in that capacity. While the game supports 2 players just fine, going beyond that is an epic struggle. The game gives you monsters to fill in for the lack of human party members being consistently present and there are a number of guest characters from the original Symphonia cast that come and go. While other players can use the guest characters, they never gain EXP in your party and thus don't improve like a regular character. Player one also can't use any character except Emil or Marta. They can't set themselves to a guest character outside of battle. I'm pretty sure no one can control the monsters either, so a 3rd or 4th player will often be left with nothing to do as your party is rarely filled with human characters until the very end.
The whole Pokemon-esque monster capturing and using system is somewhat interesting... considering you fight along with them, it's more akin to Dragon Quest Monsters (or perhaps some of the Shin Megami Tensei games). Either way, I don't think it was executed gracefully in this game, primarily since it's meant as a substitute for real characters. You can't sacrifice real characters in a Tales game.
These blunders aside, the game did have its strong points. The three actual new, significant characters that were introduced in this game are very good with strong characterization. It also had some interesting new enemies like Alice... once again with strong characterization. Considering the game had so few actual new characters to focus on, I guess it was easier for them to develop these characters. Emil was especially interesting by the end.
If you ignore the monsters and guest character limitations, the gameplay is solid. The battle system is pretty standard for modern Tales with most of the great features I take for granted these days (like Free Run). It's still a fun game to play in spite of its flaws.
Graphics: They're about what you expect for a Wii RPG. They could have been better on a better console... but as far as Wii games go, these are really good.
Sound: Come on... it's Motoi Sakuraba... how can you go wrong? The soundtrack is stellar as Tales standard. Sound effects are just fine. Nothing to really complain about other than the lack of consistency for what battle theme was used. It seemed completely random and arbitrary.
Addictiveness: It wasn't as fun as most Tales games because of all the weird things they did and how they made multiplayer harder to enjoy. The battles themselves are at least as fun as any other Tales game but that alone won't give it a stellar replay value.
Story: Honestly one of the best stories I've ever witnessed in a video game. I'm not usually this impressed. They did it all. They took a pathetic, loser of a main character and turned him into this awesome bad-ass. The development of the characters and their stories were so well thought-out. I also found the villain of the game to be the best villain I've ever really seen in a game. Not only is he awesome as a character but very relate-able and not someone you can really hate. It's easy to make the bad guy "I'm just evil for the sake of being evil" or go with the "Humans are stupid and prejudice, so I'll just wipe them all out" plot lines. This game manages to avoid that and make an antagonist that you can
really understand, see where he's coming from, and sympathize. There are points where I find myself siding with him actually. He's really not a bad guy, despite being the main enemy. So much of this story I felt was brilliantly executed and it had some really good plot twists.
Depth: It's a decently sized RPG, so there's a bit to do. There's also a lot of quests that you can complete for extra play-time as well as special side-quests you can unlock to learn more about the characters and their back-stories.
Difficulty: It can be REALLY hard a times to play as just Emil without any real help... but other than that, it's not an incredibly difficult game.
Many people trash this a a terrible game, but I really enjoyed it. It's not the best, but far from the worst game in the series. I can certainly appreciate a lot about it, especially the story since that tends to make-or-break RPGs for me.
Graphics
8 Sound
9 Addictive
6 Depth
8 Story
10 Difficulty
6
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