Tales of Symphonia review (GameCube)

You can even earn additional bonuses by triggering certain events during a fight. The bonuses come in the form of unique "titles" bestowed upon a character that will grant extra points to certain stats when gaining a level. A magic user who uses every form of elemental magic in a battle will get a title that boosts magic power; a character that pulls off a 30-hit combo will get a title that boosts strength. Depending on how well you perform during a fight, you'll either get points added to or taken away from your "grade." You can keep your grade high, or trade the points in for useful items along the way.

When you're not busy fighting (or avoiding fighting) in dungeons, you'll be wending your way through by means of solving a series of usually simple puzzles. The puzzles are built around the use of an item called the Sorcerer's Ring, a magical bit of jewelry that can change powers by charging up via a special item in the dungeon. Some of the powers are amusing--in one instance the ring will shrink your party to bite-size, and suddenly the sewer rats you come across become giants in battle. You'll rarely get stuck on a puzzle; the dungeons tend to be short, and the puzzles are easy to decipher.

When wandering the world otherwise, you'll find a variety of towns and cities to visit and plenty of people to chat with. And it's not just non-player characters you can shoot the breeze with; at certain points in the game, a title will appear at the bottom corner of your screen with an image of the Z button. If you press the Z button, you'll bring up a skit that involves the diverse members of your party talking to each other, usually about recent events that have occurred. These skits--which consist just of talking heads (character portraits) and are separate from cutscenes--are almost always optional, but they go a long way toward fleshing out the characters in your party as well as their personalities and relationships with each other. Unfortunately, the skits tend to scroll slowly, allowing for changing facial expressions at key points in the dialogue, so it makes them sometimes tedious to sit through. They're a good way to keep the game from being broken up by too much exposition, and if you wish, you can skip the skits and go on to the next world-threatening event--of which there are a lot, as the game easily lasts 40-plus hours.

Visually, the game's characters sport the cel-shaded effect that was all the rage not so long ago, and the cartoon look fits the anime-inspired art style well. Fresh-faced and brightly colored, everyone looks almost too cute in that way the Japanese have perfected, although the 'toon look isn't flawless. The game, at times, utilizes a blurring effect that attempts to create a sense of foreground and background positioning of characters within certain scenes, but it just ends up smearing the look and making you squint. Towns and cities have made the crossover from the classic Tales' hand-painted design to a new 3D setup very well; they still have a lot of detail and personality, and are very easy on the eyes. The world map portions of the game have much less eye candy, due to the fact that there's already so much going on with enemies popping in and out of view. The camera view, when running across the landscape, can also be a bit chancy; a lot of times you'll have to adjust it to try to get a clear idea of where you're going, and even then you'll sometimes run into a monster you felt you should have seen.

The voice acting in the game is very even and pretty consistent in quality; you'll rarely get over-acted or oddly inflected lines. Certain characters sound better than others, but none of them sound horrible, which is nice considering that there's quite a bit of voice in the cutscenes. The soundtrack holds true to the Tales' norm of combining wind instruments and bells in pleasing ways for main themes, and battle music does its job of getting you hyped up and then staying out of your way.

Tales of Symphonia was worth the wait. Fans of Japanese role-playing games will take to its style and the depth of its battle system, and those curious about the genre and who loathe the idea of turn-based battle and scads of random encounters will appreciate the quick fighting pace. While the story may rely a bit too much on cliché, the ride is still worthwhile. If you have a GameCube and like RPGs, you definitely need to check out Tales of Symphonia.