Collection essentials #506: Tales of Symphonia (GC)

Switching platforms for a second, here we have the fifth main installment in Namco’s “Tales” series. There are various reasons why Symphonia is a highly notable entry. The fact that it’s a GameCube is one of them. For years, the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 had been absolutely dominant when it came to RPGs. A lack of support from third-party developers in general had haunted Nintendo since day one of the Nintendo 64, and while this trend did continue into the GameCube era, Nintendo certainly did make some effort to get more third-party exclusives on their platform. Tales of Symphonia represents one of their greatest successes in that regard, convincing Namco to release it exclusively for their console instead of Sony’s RPG juggernaut, and the game was a success on Nintendo’s platform garnering very respectable sales. (Eventually there was a PS2 version of Symphonia, but only in Japan, I would guess because of some kind of agreement between Namco and Nintendo of America)

Another reason Symphonia is notable is because it’s the first entry in the series that is fully in 3D. Namco opted for “cel shaded” 3D graphics, a style that makes the game look a little more like a cartoon. 

The story centers around a boy named Lloyd and his friends who live in a country town called Iselia. Lloyd’s best friend, a girl named Colette, is about to start a pilgrimage to “regenerate” the world, which is low on a crucial resource known as mana. A major problem is an evil, racist people known as the Desians who have seized a lot of power and have been conducting inhumane experiments on innocent victims. Of course, in these posts I only give a surface-level introduction to the plot, so I won’t be talking about the many twists and turns which happen along the journey. The game’s story is connected to Tales of Phantasia, the first game in the series, taking place in the distant past, but the connections aren’t very important and the two stories are mostly standalone with any tie-ins being just a nice little bonus for observant fans.

Being a Tales game, a big part of the draw is the characters. Symphonia features a large and diverse cast, and has a neat “friendship system” in which certain choices the player makes can improve Lloyd’s bond with the rest of the party and lead to different scenes and dialogue (though one flaw is that the game really doesn’t communicate this well at all and the average uninformed player will overlook it). For the Western localization, Namco wisely contracted a cast of experienced and talented voice actors such as Cam Clarke, Tara Strong, Jennifer Hale and Scott Menville. Unfortunately, the game’s optional “skits”, of which there are very many, were not dubbed in English even though they had been voiced in the original Japanese release. 

Being the first 3D Tales game had implications for gameplay. Of course, the game features real-time combat for its battle screens as Tales always does. And this time the battlefield is in three dimensions rather than on a flat plane. However, players can freely run around the whole battlefield. Instead, every character at a given time is “focused” on an enemy, and can only move directly towards or away from said enemy. This restriction ends up not being as big a deal as it sounds, but it does seem a little odd that a “free run” button wasn’t thrown in. Outside of battle, the game is more “puzzle-based” than your average JRPG. Early in the game you receive an accessory called the “Sorcerer’s Ring” which by default shoots a little flame that can manipulate the environment in various ways, but in many of the game’s dungeons the ring will be given a unique temporary power which must be used to solve puzzles, ensuring a good amount of variety over the course of this long adventure.

Symphonia has been ported or remade a few times over the years. So is the GameCube original worth considering? Yes, although it has some drawbacks. One issue is that a considerable amount of new content was added to the game’s ports which you’ll miss out on. A significant flaw involves multiplayer play. As is standard for Tales, there can be up to four party members in battle at once, which can be controlled by either human players or the computer. The issue is, when there’s more than one human player, the camera will only ever focus on player 1, meaning that any additional players will unfortunately not be able to see what they’re doing if they move off-screen, and that happens a lot. This was fixed in all of the game’s ports, as the camera instead zooms out so every human-controlled character is on screen at all times, which is far better. The biggest thing the original GameCube release has going for it is that it runs at double the framerate of all other versions of the game, so the action looks a lot more smooth as there are twice as many frames of animation. If you ask me, the improved framerate is not worth the trade-off, but others may have a different preference.

Symphonia first coming out on the GameCube instead of the PlayStation could have been seen as a gamble, but it wound up being in the right place at the right time. Nintendo consoles since the previous generation had been rather lacking in the RPG department, and there were a number of Nintendo fans who really liked RPGs and were really hungry for a good one. And so, being a high-quality RPG on a Nintendo console did help it stand out, and there were enough of those RPG-hungry Nintendo fans to make it a success in the West. Rereleases of Symphonia have also done well, and to this date it is the best-selling Tales game of all-time. This was really the game that put the series on the map outside Japanese, as the previous two Tales games released in America had pretty much flopped. Most gamers of my generation, including myself, likely were first introduced to the series with Symphonia. 

As a young teen in 2004, I had never heard of the Tales series before, but I took an interest in Tales of Symphonia as soon as I heard about it. I loved the fact that it was for up to four players, because I had younger siblings who could control my party members. I got it not long after launch and convinced my younger sisters to play with me. It was an instant hit, and we had a great time playing it together…for a while, that is. The problem we ran into was that we recruited a certain new party member that one particular sister insisted on playing as, and up to that point she had been our party healer, so suddenly we had no designated healer. I figured I could just take on the role of healer myself, but then the problem of the multiplayer camera reared its ugly head, as player one being the healer means that the other players are severely limited in what they can do offensively since the healer usually wants to keep a safe distance from the action. Sadly, this meant that our co-op days abruptly ended, and after giving the game a rest for a while, I eventually came back to it and finished it by myself.

Even though our playthrough was stopped short, Symphonia left an impression on my sisters and I that we all remember fondly. And there’s one shocking late-game plot revelation that one sister and I, as a running joke, repeat to each other every now and then, and she even put it as my name on her contact list in her phone.

Years later, I played Symphonia a second time on a different console, but I’ll hold off talking about that second playthrough until I get to that particular release. 

On the whole, I’d stop short of saying that Symphonia is one of my all-time favorite RPGs or my top Tales game. I think it’s above-average in many ways, including gameplay, story, characters and music, but at the same time I don’t consider it one of the “very best” in any of those areas. But it does deserve respect and attention as a game that does a lot of things really well even if it’s not the best at anything. For me, it does hold a special place in my heart as a game that made a big impression early in my life, and it got me invested in the rest of the Tales series. For that, it’s more than deserving of being dubbed an essential in my collection.