Tales of Symphonia

In a recent spat of replaying a bunch of old Gamecube games for nostalgic purposes only, I came across Tales of Symphonia. This RPG action/adventure game takes follows the story of Lloyd Irving as he and his friends go on a journey to regenerate the world. As the plot progresses, you will discover dark secrets about the World Regeneration process. The plot is mostly linear, but like all JRPGs, there are more sidequests than one can ever complete in one play through. Between all the character titles, costumes, cutscenes, mini-games, treasure hunting, monster hunting, and bonding, it is impossible to do it all in one playthrough. However, lucky for you, if you did well enough, you gat to carry over a portion of your previous game's accomplishments into the next game. The battles use a system called GRADE to judge your use of tactics and skill in the battle. The system appears arbitrary, but some of the basics are how difficult the enemy is for your character level, how much damage you took, how many times characters were incapacitated, and your use of spells and abilities to build attack combos. Ideally, you'd like to gain GRADE from each encounter, but it is possible to come out of encounters with a net loss of GRADE. Boss battles are especially an area where massive amounts of GRADE are gained or lost at a time. However, at the end of the game, no matter how good or bad you did in the final boss battle, 1,000 GRADE is awarded to you for completing the game. Now, you may spend your grade in the game as a "premium" currency to buy crafting materials or EX-gems. EX-gems offer boosts to your character and the boosts you choose may unlock hidden combinations that give you extra perks in battle. As I mentioned earlier, GRADE can also be spent at the end of the game to carry over certain aspects at the end of the game into a new game. If you want to see these bonuses, just go to the hints and cheats tab, they are all listed there. These carry-overs are essential to completing all of the side quests in the game.

Now, lets discuss these side quests: they're a massive headache for completionists. To trigger many of the side quests, you have a small window of opportunity to perform them. There will be stages in the game where you must perform the task after one event, but before a future event. Usually the events are major milestones in the plot, but unless you are using an FAQ guide, you'll find yourself going back to the same places over and over hoping to get the events to occur. This is especially true for obtaining alternate costumes and character titles. Titles are neat in that they help augment your stats upon leveling up. If a title boosts your HP, strength, and defense, you'll get greater growth in those three stats after leveling up. Titles are usually granted through progression in the story, side-questing, reaching level milestones, and such.

My only complaints about the game are that its a marathon to play through the story once without chasing down all the side quests. It takes well over 40 hours to complete this game without side-questing, but this is a JRPG and there's no point to playing the game if you aren't going to side quest because you miss so much backstory. If you want to try and go for a 100% completion on this game, expect to be devoting more than 100 hours into this game. Otherwise, this game has a great story line, plenty of small emotional moments, and great replay-ability. In fact, even if you aren't trying to complete it, it is still worth replaying in order to catch many of the more softer moments of this game, usually involving Kratos, one of the more significant supporting characters of the plot.