Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

[Nester the Lark]

Here's a couple of interesting new tidbits from a 1up.com preview.

The North American version will start you off with some bonus items/currency/extras if you have a GameCube memory card with cleared Tales of Symphonia save data. Very cool! It'll also have more gesture based shortcuts than the Japanese version: eight instead of four.

[Deleted]

Oct 13, 2008 19:37:29 GMT -5 Nester the Lark said:

Here's a couple of interesting new tidbits from a 1up.com preview.

The North American version will start you off with some bonus items/currency/extras if you have a GameCube memory card with cleared Tales of Symphonia save data. Very cool! It'll also have more gesture based shortcuts than the Japanese version: eight instead of four.

Aww, dammit - and I haven't played ToS since my GC memory unit died D: Looks like I'll have to get cracking on new playthroughs...tche, between Saint's Row 2 and Wario Land, that's not happening XD

Also, Kratos apparently returns as the narrator of the story. That's kind of a nice touch. Fingers crossed for a Cam Clarke reprisal!

[Wildcat]

Apparently the game came out this week. If anyone picks it up, I'd like to hear impressions! (I won't be, since i put it on my Christmas list)

[Hiker of Games]

I'm about ten hours in.

I don't care much for the main hero. He's an emo wuss. His counterpart is your generic bubbly female lolita. The only bright spot at the beginning of the game is your magical flying panther buddy who mocks your two main leads enough that you put up with them.

The gameplay is similar to Symphonia, though sometimes it doesn't seem the same amount of effort was put into the world itself. The loss of the world map is no big deal and it's convenient in it's own way. However sometimes there are houses and areas that are blocked off... mostly because they existed in the first game and the developers didn't seem to want to do them again. But as far as battles, they're just as good. The addition of monster capturing works out pretty good and the monsters can actually be extremely helpful if you put them to good use. Although I prefer actual humans for aesthetic reasons, I've been prone to substituting them with monsters on more difficult battles.

One thing I've been enjoying are the skits, which seem to be much, much more frequent. They're also voice acted this time around, so that makes them fun. Most of the time they're pretty funny and it adds a lot of fun character development that you can listen to if you feel so inclined, but don't have to worry about enduring through (unlike cutscenes that can't be skipped.)



Minor Spoilers ahead!


One thing that is a bit annoying is that Emil and Marta are the only 'real' playable characters. Other characters that enter your party (Richter and the main six characters from Symphonia) enter and leave your party fairly regularly. They gain no experience and have fixed levels that will increase as the story progresses. You also can't change their equipment either. Even though it certainly is cool to see the Symphonia cast again, it's disappointing to know that I can't use them as fully as I could in the previous game.

[Wildcat]

Thanks, Masa. That gives me a good idea of what to expect. I didn't expect Lloyd and Co. to get a good deal of the spotlight (which they deserve, honestly), and it sounds like I was on the right track. Shame the two newbies have such generic RPG cliches attached to them - I was hoping for a bit more diversity. Well, when I get the game, I'll just see how it goes.

[Deleted]

Masamune's pretty much summed up my feelings so far. Emil is a whiny bitch and Marta's shallower than a kiddie pool - and knowing they follow up on the heels of such awesome characters as Lloyd, Zelos and their lot is a very big disappointment. Even their "flying panther buddy," Tenebrae, starts to feel like a one-trick pony by the fourth chapter of the game. But really it's Emil that bothers me the most because he's wishy-washy, yielding, and unassertive; he only ever reacts to anything when Lloyd is mentioned, which usually triggers him to go "Super Saiyan" on the rest of the cast, going from an anime bitch cliche to an over-the-top, angsty, "WAGE!" cliche. To make things worse, the lessons these characters learn are both infrequent and...well, really dumb. It takes Emil the better part of three chapters to realize people look up to and defend Lloyd because, you know, he actually is a hero, and people aren't saying it just because. I'm waiting for them to improve, but it's taking too long.

The problem is that an intolerable protagonist can be saved by a great supporting cast; this was the case in Tales of the Abyss, where Luke (main character) was an absolute dick, but at least you had Tear, Jade, Anise and Mieu to get you by, because they were all awesome. So by the time you reach the halfway point and Luke stops being a dick, you get another cool character to add to the pack you already had. At this point I'm only playing the game to see what happens with the original ToS party, and it's unfortunate that they need to carry the game and that Marta and Tenebrae aren't enough to do it alone.

Honestly, I think this game was a mistake. It's not bad...but it's really not that good, either. Only three JRPGs have ever really caught my fancy out of the entire genre (Skies of Arcadia, the first Tales of Symphonia and The World Ends with You), and this isn't one of them. On top of the new characters being generally unenjoyable, the story is typical RPG fare ("collect seven or eight color-coded magical mcguffins," I believe is how Yahtzee Croshaw put it), the monster-collecting system is difficult to operate properly and feels like a slipshod Pokémon tack-on, and for some reason it lacks the same epic feel Symphonia had.

One last thing I'd like to highlight is the voice work; this time around, it feels very weak. Some of the voice actors and actresses from the past game have indeed been replaced (Lloyd, Zelos and Genis have new actors so far), and it's only those returning from the past iteration that display real skill in the art. Raine, Colette, Regal and Kratos have been the most pleasing out of the entire game. (I have not encountered Sheena or Presea yet. I've got my fingers crossed.)

I'm pretty sure that, by the time I've reached the end of Dawn of the New World I'll rule it out of my personal canon for the franchise.

And I really wanted to be able to control Regal again. D:

[Hiker of Games]

Well I'm on Chapter 6 now and though some of my dissatisfactions are still there, I've come to like the game more. Emil has grown enough as a character that I don't dislike him as much anymore, Tenebrae remains amusing, and enough of the Symphonia cast are in and out of the party now that I'm kept pretty satisfied. I'm kind of meh on Marta as a whole, but whaddya gonna do?

As for the eight cores that you have to collect. While they may be MacGuffins (and ones that force you to revisit old dungeons no less), they've been handled in a way that they do their job of keeping the plot moving without feeling like you're on a collectathon.

I also want to point out that this game's skits are hilarious. Was the old ones this good? They aren't quite as insightful, I suppose, but fans who have played Symphonia already know all about the Symphonia cast, so just seeing their amusing antics and interaction is amusing. The voice actors honestly don't bother me. I never expect voice acting from games and I don't remember their old voices well enough to be bothered by a difference.

[Wildcat]

Thanks for your input, TEi. I was afraid of some of the things you mentioned, particularally the changes to the voice cast (I liked Zelos' and Lloyd's voices). Eh. If I get it for Christmas, I'll see how it goes.

[Deleted]

Old topic bump is old, but here me out:

Shortly after my last post in the thread, I traded ToS: DotNW in, because it was doing about what I'd said it was a year ago. It's difficult to enjoy a game that's a glorified fanfiction, especially on the heels of the original, so I never really got more than halfway through the game. I put it out of my mind, and I haven't once regretted getting rid of it for whatever pittance it happened to earn me. But lately I've been in a ToS mood, and I wanted to go back and relive the Flanoir scenes from the original, so I turned to my trusty pal, YouTube.

What I found out - and if you consider this a spoiler, fuck you, the game's been out for over a year now - is that in DotNW, Lloyd performs another Flanoir scene with one of the first game's party members (Kratos excluded). Since there's no backwards-connectivity between save files, you choose right then and there who Lloyd had the original Flanoir scene with, which leads to the follow-up for DotNW.

Now, I said that DotNW felt like a glorified fanfic, I'll say it now and I've said it before. It's absolutely terrible, riddled with cliches and ick and ugh, so it shouldn't come to any surprise that the Flanoir Scene Reduxes are equally as terrible. But here's the real kicker: if you choose to have the scene with Genis, Regal or Zelos, it's pretty much, "here we are, two years later and in a shitty sequal, what now?" But if you choose Colette, Raine, Sheena or Presea?

iwgj4g4 I can't even fucking say it, just watch the awful and feel as revolted as I do:

Colette: (Skip ahead to the 4:00 mark...or don't, if that's your fancy)


Sheena:


Raine:


Presea:


Two words:

What. The. FUCK.

[Savage Adam]

lolwut

I know next to nothing about the first ToS, and yet this still disgusts me.

[Deleted]

Dec 27, 2009 14:48:12 GMT -5 Savage Adam said:

lolwut

I know next to nothing about the first ToS, and yet this still disgusts me.

If you have the time, definitely go pick it up. It's a GC game, so you're all set to play it. One of the best JRPGs out there. And the original Flanoir scene between Lloyd and Presea isn't pedo-y at all.

[Wildcat]

I saw this for $15 at Best Buy, but didn't even consider it. Thanks for the warning, TEi!

It's a shame that the original, which was fantastic, had to be followed up with this half-assed attempt. At least it doesn't claim to be a proper sequel. Namco Bandai was tripping all over themselves to state that in developer interviews. XD