TALES OF SYMPHONIA SERIES

And though Symphonia is a story-heavy RPG, this focus on pacing pervades the entire production load times are practically imperceptible, and story segments fly by as fast as you can read them. Unlike the later games, combat is still essentially in 2D, but since Symphonia grants rewards for finishing a battle as fast as possible, there's an emphasis on speed that does a fantastic job of cutting down on the tedium of fighting the same grouping of enemies for the dozenth time.

TALES OF SYMPHONIA SERIES

The Tales series as a whole set out to make random encounters in RPGs involve more than just the brainless mashing of a single button, and Symphonia's are the logical conclusion to this mission statement. Despite these problems, Symphonia's battle system outweighs Tales' inherent faults just for being so snappy and addictive. Symphonia definitely suffers from the problems series veterans would expect from a Tales of Game: cardboard characters, neologism abuse, and an overall tinge of blandness. As the genre scaled back drastically to save itself, Symphonia aspired to be just as big and meaty as the many PlayStation RPGs developed in the wake of Final Fantasy VII's success-one of the main reasons why this Tales kept my attention more than any other released since.

Of course, technical competency from 2004 doesn't exactly hold up ten years later, but just as Tales of Destiny tries to capture the feeling of 16-bit level-grinding, Symphonia takes the form of a throwback to the following console generation, when Japanese-developed RPGs were at their most ambitious. Tales of Symphonia definitely stands as the star attraction in Chronicles with its status as both the first fully polygonal Tales game and a (limited) GameCube exclusive, Symphonia feels like it has something to prove. And, like Final Fantasy, this Tales compilation pairs one original work with what could fairly be called a 'cash-in-' though Final Fantasy X-2 at least has the distinction of being polarizing when compared to Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World's relative obscurity. Arriving barely a month before Square-Enix's Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster, Namco's Tales of Symphonia Chronicles offers a nearly identical proposition: two sizable last-gen RPGs-or maybe that should be 'last-last-gen'-on a single disc. In this time of mass hysteria over new consoles, RPG lovers know it's better to be stuck in the past.

Tales of symphonia