Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51.
Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52.
Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53.
Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54.
Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55.
Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56.
Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57.
Cocoron (Famicom)
58.
The Darkness (PS3)
59.
Haze (PS3)
60.
Animaniacs (GB)
61.
Lair (PS3)
62.
Bionic Commando (PS3)
63.
Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64.
Darkwing Duck (NES)
65.
Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66.
Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67.
Metroid II (GB) *
68.
Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69.
Eggerland (FDS)
70.
Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71.
Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72.
Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)
73.
Legendary Starfy (GBA) *
74.
Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)
75.
Tales of the Abyss (PS2) *
76.
Tales of the Tempest (DS)
77.
Tales of Eternia (PS1)
78.
Nier: Replicant (PS3)
79.
Tales of Symphonia (PS3) *
80. Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (PS3)
Known as “Tales of Symphonia: The Knight of Ratatosk” over here in Japan, after finishing my original Tales of Symphonia replay and enjoying it quite a bit more than I thought I would, it made natural sense to go straight on to the other game on the PS3 double pack. While I have owned this game before, I never played it. Like many Tales fans and people who’ve played the original Symphonia, I had always written this off as just some later, half-baked cash-in on an older, more popular title on one of the current big selling systems. How good could a Wii sequel with Pokemon-ish mechanics possibly be, right? I was ultimately very happily surprised at just how good it could possibly be, however! It took me around 44-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware getting the best ending.
Symphonia 2 (as I’ll be calling it for the sake of brevity) takes place two years after the end of the first game, and it starts with a brief flashback. Soldiers led by the first game’s protagonist, Lloyd Irving, sacking the city of Pamolacosta and murdering its inhabitants. A young girl is nearly struck down by them, but she’s saved by a mysterious young man. Six months pass, and our story follows Emil, one of the survivors of this massacre which is dubbed “The cleansing of blood”. A very shy and unconfident young man, he has been terribly traumatized by the experience and now lives with his aunt and uncle in the nearby town of Luin where everyone calls him a liar for claiming that the hero Lloyd could possibly be responsible for something so horrid. After meeting the mysterious young girl, Marta, who claims he saved her in Pamolacosta, and a brash stranger named Richter, Emil slowly embarks on his quest with the new mantra, “Courage is the magic that grants dreams”.
This game is cowritten by the original writer of Tales of Symphonia & Tales of the Abyss working alongside the main writer of (among other things) Tales of Rebirth, and very thankfully, you can see their influence all over this game. Much like in Rebirth, Symphonia 2’s world is one that has not been saved by one grand act of heroism at the end of the previous conflict. The laws of reality may change, but people’s hearts don’t change that quickly, and this is a world still gripped tightly by the fear, anguish, and malice of prejudice and all that comes with it. It’s a pretty damn heavy premise for an RPG (let alone a Tales game), but it’s something that I was really glad to see the game handle with the respect it deserves (just as I’d expect from the guy who wrote Tales of Rebirth).
At the same time, this is an intensely hopeful story about how communities and people heal from what’s happened to them. This is a game about how, not just wanting revenge, but *living* for vengeance, changes people. You end up becoming blind to new information because your entire identity has been redefined by that quest for retribution, and the ends wind up justifying the means all too quickly. It’s a story that makes a lot of sense coming from the writer of Tales of the Abyss, and while I still wouldn’t say it’s quite as tightly put together as that game, it’s still excellently put together.
There are a ton of returning characters from Symphonia, but they very wisely take a back seat to our new cast, as their stories and arcs have already been fleshed out in their previous game. That said, it’s still nice to see the old characters get a bunch of screen time here, especially ones like Zelos and especially Royal who get short-changed a bit in the original Symphonia. I’d also be remiss not to mention the main thrust of the love story between Emil and Marta. It’s a really beautifully done story about how two people who don’t really know how to relate to other people (for very different reasons) learn to be comfortable and accepting of one another and themselves. The writer of Tales of Rebirth had actually just come off of writing Detective Evangelion, and while that’s something of a silly spin-off of Neon Genesis Evangelion, it’s pretty hard not to see the influences of a character like Shinji Ikari on someone like Emil. All in all, it’s a story I went in with basically no expectations for, and it ended up blowing me away, and it’s easily one of the best written Tales games they ever made.
Mechanically, this plays a lot like the other console Tales games of its era (Abyss and Vesperia), but with some interesting twists here and there. You’ve got a party of four, you’ve got mana, and you’ve got normal attacks, artes, and all that Linear Motion Battle 3D action combat stuff you’ll likely be very familiar with if you’ve played any of its contemporaries. Rather than the individual overlimit system that we see in Symphonia or Abyss, or the full-party overlimit system that Vesperia uses, Symphonia 2 actually has no overlimit system at all. Instead, you have a revamp of Symphonia’s Unision Attack system. When the bar fills up from attacking loads, you can click the right stick to unleash a full party attack on an enemy, or you can do your current character’s mystic arte instead if you don’t mind draining the bar all the way. It’s a neat and intuitive system, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, exactly, it’s a good way to distinguish this game from others of that time period.
However, the biggest and most obvious change is the Pokemon-style mechanics I mentioned earlier. In a system that a friend of mine mentioned is very similar to some of Namco Bandai’s Digimon Stories games, you can recruit monsters you fight and they can fight alongside you in battle. The way you recruit them is a bit fiddly (use enough elements of the same type to turn the battle-duration gauge in the lower left to mostly all one type, and they have a chance to join you at the end of battle), but it’s ultimately not that difficult once you get the hang of it and get more elemental attacks to use and spam as Emil when need be.
You can have up to four monsters in your party, and once they get to a high enough level, you can take them to one of the cat kiosks and feed them their favorite food to raise their stats more and even evolve them into a new monster. However, evolving a monster sets its power back to level 1 just like a Dragon Quest Monsters game. This means you end up with a system where Emil and Marta are always fighting, and then you have two monsters in your main party and two in reserve leveling up after having freshly evolved (usually). You can actually have human party members from Symphonia fight with you as well, but they actually don’t level up, so if you want to keep on top of your enemies’ power levels, you’ll want to focus on getting better monsters instead of relying on more humans. However, all of your humans dying means game over, so having the option for more humans is certainly nice if you’re in a tough fight.
And this game has no shortage of tough fights, frankly. Earlier in the game, I was getting absolutely trashed by just how strong boss encounters were in particular, because you actually don’t have terribly high max health given how hard enemies can hit you, and being just a bit careless can land you in hot water very quickly. That said, the game thankfully has some catchup mechanics for this. Those cat kiosks you evolve monsters at also have repeatable mini-quests you can do in special quest dungeons. These are fun little vignettes on their own as well as being good ways to gain levels and a source of new equipment that’s often a tier ahead of what you can currently buy.
The game also has a sort of crafting mechanic where you can combine together materials you find with old weapons and armor to get some pretty big jumps in the gear curve if you’re careful about it (and those mini-quests are great ways to gain rare resources too!). Top it all off with the ability to get tomes that teach monsters spells (like the all-important healing spells), and you’ve got a quite flexible system for party customization that also allows them to have the old Symphonia party members come and go whenever they please without it meaningfully impacting your party strength. Very clever stuff, and it’s something that I ended up enjoying a lot more than I thought I would despite me not usually enjoying things like crafting systems and such. My only real mechanical complaint is that the ability to customize your party’s attack AI is very heavily limited, and that’s probably the most major thing that the big Tales game from the same year, Vesperia, has over this one mechanically.
Aesthetically, the game is definitely a Wii game, but it’s also quite a nice looking one too. There are a lot of locations reused from the original Symphonia either in whole or in part, but, given that we’re no longer using the chibi style that the original game did, it makes all of the returning characters and locations have new flair to them that I really liked. There’s also a lot of old music reused too for many locations, and while a lot of them are slightly new arrangements and the game has no shortage of just completely new music, it’s hard to ignore what feel like budget constraints in places like this.
The models for the main characters are really well animated and expressive, with the way Marta’s eyes get all glossy when she’s sad being one of my favorite touches. On the other hand, characters who aren’t them, including the returning Symphonia characters, are noticeably less well detailed, and some characters like Colette end up looking quite strange as a result. This was likely done for technical limitation reasons, as when lots of NPCs are on screen (even with the models they way they already are), the game can really chug in the in-engine cutscenes. While those moments are very few, they’re noticeable enough that it makes my hypothesis of “they likely look this way because they had to” one I’m fairly confident in. The aesthetics are honestly something I really liked despite their limitations, and the developers did a really good job making something both familiar and new with the likely less than normal budget they had for a big-ish Tales game like this.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I’d generally recommend that you should probably play the original Symphonia before this one for some extra context, I’m not sure you’d need to, honestly. This is a sequel that also stands on its own as a story shockingly well, and I would have never guessed that the lower budget Wii title would wind up being one of the best Tales games they ever made. While I wouldn’t say this game is miles above Vesperia mechanically (it’s very similarly polished, ultimately), it’s a wildly better written game, and Symphonia 2 frankly blows that game out of the water as a result. It’s also nuts to me how they managed to write such a good Tales sequel after Xillia 2 (which has a very similar “new guy & girl + all the returning cast” narrative design) wound up being such a mixed bag several years later. Fact of the matter is that a ton of folks slept on this game due to the platform it was on and the other big Tales game that came out the same year, and that’s a real shame! This is an excellent Tales game and a fantastic RPG, and its one that any fan of the series should absolutely make the effort to play if they want to see one of the coolest hidden gems in the franchise~.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
