Tales of Symphonia

The cel-shaded visuals look beautiful, as does the stunning anime sequences scattered throughout the game.

The best RPG I've played all summer. I love that I'm loving an RPG on the GameCube.

It's fun, lengthy, and beautiful...hard to beat a combination like that.

While this undoubtedly sounds familiar to RPG veterans, Symphonia manages to distinguish itself through solid and enjoyable gameplay.

The game's gorgeous graphics will work your eyes just as hard as the battles work your thumb, too. [Aug 2004, p.110]

There's only on thing that irks me though. All of these characters have distinct voices and wonderfully rich attitudes. The voice acting is superbly done with so much clarity and excellence. But despite all of the quality, the characters' cel-shaded lips don't move.

A fairly good RPG. Nothing stands out about it, nothing incredibly amazing has been done with it, but it is a serviceable and enjoyable game if you're a fan of the genre.

Don’t understand how anyone could not like this storyline. To me the best plot twists I’ve seen in any game and tied for my favorite main Villain in any game ever. The world is as cool as it gets and the backstory/lore behind the game is amazing as well. Pair that with my favorite characters ever and having way more main story boss fights than any of the other tales games and you have my favorite game ever.

No puedo creer que la gente de tan alta puntuación a este juego , haber la historia personajes y música son buenos pero el resto es absolutamente tedioso e insufrible , el combate esta decente supongo veo que la nostalgia deja ciegos a muchos.

It'd be great if it weren't for its target audience being young kids. Everyone can somewhat agree that JRPGs tend to be 99% teenager oriented with lots of cheesy drama, poorly made simple character relationships, and since the late 90s, silly emo villains who want to destroy the world because it's just such a bad world to live in. I've lost count of the JRPGs that did this, some of them with incredible talent and success(Persona 3 FES), some which end up as a giant pool of silliness(Final Fantasy X). ToS doesn't aim for the teenage crowd, for once. Or if it does, it's very slightly. It aims for a younger crowd. Little kids. Let me be blunt and say that this is a terrible design choice. First off, the entire game is exposing a story that is for all intents and purposes your typical JRPG story but with characters that are even more childish than usual. A simple example: like all JRPGs, you need your hero to have some sort of flirt or love interest in the party. Here, the closest thing we get to a romantic relationship is a shy talk about mundane things on a hotel's balcony. It's painfully childish at all times. It's a refreshing change to have something else than teenage, but this is even worse; Not in a sense of annoyance or stupidity, but in a sense of constant disinterest. I don't care for the childish relationships of the characters, I don't care for any of the plot devices or emotions expressed. The entirety of the story is fine but it can't pique my interest in any way. With JRPGs I tend to get interested, then get annoyed at the stupid(unless I never got interested in the first place). Here, I just let it roll without ever batting an eye. It's a constant smooth stream of cutesy childish talks, drama that is very lightly touched(whatever truly sad moments happen are grazed over and then ignored because it has to stay upbeat and kid-friendly), and humour that would probably make an 8 year old chuckle, but would make a teenager cringe, and just bore an adult like me. It's an interesting idea to have a JRPG just for kids. But the sad thing is, it simply doesn't work. I don't know of a single kid under 12 that would go through with the 50 to 70 hours of play time ToS offers. Kids I know just don't have that patience or commitment. And kids over 12 will probably find this cringeworthy or at the very least quite boring. The shame is that besides the story and characters and very childish tone, and despite a few minor issues with the visuals and plot, the entire game is a masterpiece. Its combat is brillant and extremely fun, it's one of the few RPGs where just grinding is a constant enjoyment, the music ranges from meh to very nice and never devolves into plain boring, the art style is great and cell shading technology makes this game absolutely booming for GameCube standards. It still looks great today, like the original Wind Waker. It's fun and memorable with lots of interesting elements in the gameplay, upgrade, weapon, healing, and every step opens a new little adventure or sidequest that you just can't say no to, and if the level design and music seldom soar near the heavens, they certainly do a decent job. It's just the story that is a drag and can't keep any sort of interest with me. Ironically, this might be an excellent game to speedrun, but as RPGs go, this is one of the most boring ones I can think of in terms of story. I played through it many times, and constantly stopped at yet another fortress/dungeon with their meh music, or just because I was so unequivocally disinterested with the story. A shame since it manages to do what almost no RPGs do, be fun to just play and yet have enough depth and complexity to keep you going for dozens of hours.

Cliched story, had to turn off all the annoying voices, combat becomes an unfortunate combination of moronic AI that doesn't follow orders and with fairly bad real-time action that falls into a boring, repetitive pattern for many fights. I got to a particularly poorly-designed puzzle and decided that after about five hours, I don't think it's a great idea to invest my time in the remaining 40-or-however-many hours this game has left. I still think Phantasia is probably the best one in this series and don't think I'll be playing anymore since Symphonia is among the top three games in the series; and it's quite bad.

Just dropped by to give this game a 0, I wasted a weekend of my childhood playing this garbage pile ****.