Now I have to ask

Since I bought a Wii people have been saying "don't buy Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World! IT'S TERRIBLE!" and I believed them. The reviews weren't very kind either. But I like to make up my own mind on most things and as such, I finally purchased the game for cheap a couple of weeks ago.

The response, of course, was STOP NOW!!! And nothing I was seeing was explaining that, but I figured it would EVENTUALLY get terrible. I mean, Emil's whininess was a huge turn-off for the first few hours, but he was no worse than Tidus.

So I just beat it with the good ending, and having done so I am thoroughly confused as to what the problem was with it. It couldn't possibly be the story, because it wasn't that bad. I've played games with much worse stories, much worse endings. Some of them were even Tales games themselves.

So I have to ask you, Kurtle, anyone, what is the problem with this game?

For some reason, you weren't affected by the awful character design and lack of a good story.

I have no idea what you consider a good story. This didn't have an amazing story but it was decent--solid--at least. Did you expect Symphonia all over again or something? The characters from the original were no better than these. No worse either. Marta, Emil, Ratatosk, Richter, etc. are all consistent and still manage to grow which is more than could be said for most game characters.

Tenebrae alone is the best thing either of these two games managed to produce.

Sarah.

Opinions.

You swifted through them and played a game you found to be decent. Be proud of yourself.

Do people seriously try to find a good story in JRPGs? Or do we cross our fingers and hope that there is a consistent and somewhat plausible story with excellent musicals and graphics.

Do people seriously try to find a good story in JRPGs? Or do we cross our fingers and hope that there is a consistent and somewhat plausible story with excellent musicals and graphics.

It's rare to find any game that has all three, but yes, I can name around a handful of jRPGs that are what I consider to be the pinnacle of the genre, one of which I consider to be the single best game overall.

tenebrae is awesome, but the problem with the game is simply: it's not the first.

compare the story, length, character development of the first ToS, then look at the second game, everything was worse in the second game, not to mention it's much more broken, perma-stun emil and insta-cast marta, can't train the old cast either. also: lolpokemonV2.0

overall, it's not a bad game, but comparing it to it's predeccessor, and some of it's peers, it's DEF not good.

Do people seriously try to find a good story in JRPGs? Or do we cross our fingers and hope that there is a consistent and somewhat plausible story with excellent musicals and graphics.

First thing I thought of from this was Golden Sun 1 and 2. It's hard to find a game that just has everything you could ask for in an RPG.

tenebrae is awesome, but the problem with the game is simply: it's not the first.

compare the story, length, character development of the first ToS, then look at the second game, everything was worse in the second game, not to mention it's much more broken, perma-stun emil and insta-cast marta, can't train the old cast either. also: lolpokemonV2.0

overall, it's not a bad game, but comparing it to it's predeccessor, and some of it's peers, it's DEF not good.

The first game was NOT that good though.

Also I have no idea what you're talking about with this insta-cast/perma-stun business as I never came across anything like that. And ugh people need to get over being able to capture monsters in game and comparing it to Pokemon. POKEMON DIDN'T EVEN DO IT FIRST.

So far these reasons are pretty pineappleing dumb. A lot of it seems to be looked at through nostalgia goggles. Symphonia 1 was not a great game.

Also @Swerve: jRPGs aren't the ideal medium for story-telling but that doesn't mean they're unable to produce good ones. Suikoden II has an amazing story, for example.

Symphonia 2 wasn't a god awful game as people make it out to be. The only complaints I have about the game are : The prequel characters don't level up, you get a game over if your two main characters die and still have monsters alive, and there are no super hard post-game bosses to fight. The storyline was alright, and Emil was a peach in the start, but overall it was an alright game.

None of the faults I could find with the game were that major. Mostly little things like

-Unable to change the equips/level up the original symphonia cast. Either they shouldn't have playable at all, or they should have been fully playable.
-Too much forced party swapping. S'all well and good having multiplayer as an option, but when all but 2 of your party run away repeatedly at many points through the game, it got on my nerves. Also, stealing away all the party members and throwing you either right into a boss fight, or after a point of no return before one of the last bosses annoyed me when I didn't bring leveled up monsters.
-Would have prefered proper party members to the monster system.
-Would have prefered an actual world map as opposed to teleporting between towns/areas.

The first game was NOT that good though.

The main thing was, it was easily one of the best gamecube rpgs, which I am fully aware isn't saying much.

When one of my friends was able to take a weekend off from the Navy, he came down and we all went to Gamestop and he ended up buying a bunch of games, cause he said he was utterly bored at his place back in Florida, and one of the games he happened to pick up was this game.

I told him I had looked into it before, too, and saw it had pretty bad reviews, so I never really considered it again, but he still bought it, because we all loved the one on the GC. When we got back to his house, we threw it in and started it up...

It really wasn't as bad as we thought it'd be. The dialogue is rather laughable, we just cracked up. But the game itself isn't bad. In my opinion, I didn't really like the whole "monster partner" system, and would've preferred just regular teammates, but it was tolerable.

Oh, and I did find it really ridiculous when the main character transformed from a platypus into some deep-voiced badass. It reminded me of Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh!

I personally saw it about the same way, and the points that did bother me have already been said.

-Unable to change the equips/level up the original symphonia cast. Either they shouldn't have playable at all, or they should have been fully playable.
-Would have prefered an actual world map as opposed to teleporting between towns/areas.

My only real gripes.

The main thing was, it was easily one of the best gamecube rpgs, which I am fully aware isn't saying much.

Personally, I saw Skies of Arcadia as the best due to it's level of exploration and fair bit of customization. Granted that was a port, so if we are talking GameCube only titles, I'd have to agree.


But really; the correct stance is to have your own opinion on things. I generally take things more positively than others when referring to negatively viewed games, and tend to question over-hyped games. I'll even throw down a favorite franchise if there was a similarly designed game in the same period which out-performed it.