Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is the spinoff-sequel to Tales of Symphonia, a semi-successful game for the Nintendo Gamecube. It features an enjoyable real-time battle system and allows players to tame and use monsters to fight alongside you in battle. These monsters can, in system not unlike pokemon, transform and branch out into different monsters of the same type. 

Graphics: 7
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World features colorful environments with interesting monster and characters designs, however the character animations during cutscenes feel somewhat stiff and awkward.

Sound: 7 
The music in Dawn of the New World is somewhat average. Most sound too much like Sakuraba's other works to stand out, with a few exceptions and remixes from the game's predecessor. The voice acting is also fairly average, with none sounding ear-grindingly awful but none standing out too much either. People who have played Tales of Symphonia will notice that only a few of the voice actors present in the original returned to voice the same characters in this game. 

Addictiveness: 8
Dawn of the New World features a Grade system which allows you to rack up grade points simply by playing through the game. Those Grade points can then be spent upon starting a second playthrough, allowing you to carry over items, abilities, money, and monsters as well as letting the player buy bonuses like extra experience and HP. A new dungeon is also unlocked to added, giving this game good replayability. 

Story: 8
The story to Dawn of the New World is the reason why I called the game a spinoff-sequel as opposed to just a sequel. The main characters, Marta and Emil, are independent from the ones in the first Tales of Symphonia, as is the plot, which centers around the main character becoming a Knight for the monster king, Ratatosk, and collecting cores to restore balance to the world. The characters from the original are still there of course, but their roles are, for the most part, limited and there to please fans. Outside of that the story is fairly interesting and features quite a few interesting and mind-bending plot twists along the way.

Depth: 7
On average this game takes about 40 hours to beat, which is a decent amount of time. The game has a few sidequests to do along the way, but since it lacks an explorable overworld there isn't much to discover.

Difficulty: 6
The difficulty in this game can be changed at will and the controls work fine. There is a double boss fight near the end of the game that gave me quite a bit trouble, but aside from that I didn't have any problems.

Overall: 7
Overall, this is a solid game on its own, however I feel it could've been better if it was a stand-alone title. It introduces too many new concepts and doesn't further the story of the original enough to be a true sequel and I feel some really interesting things could've been done with the world if it wasn't forced to reuse a lot of what was established in the previous game.