Alright! I'm going to review a game for the first time and we'll see how it goes. So yeah, I finally beat Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World! Yayyy! Uhm, let's see... How am I going to do this? I'm going to have... 5 different categories? And rate them out of 5? Maybe? Possibly? Hmm, the categories would be... Story, Characters, Gameplay, Music, Graphics, and Replayability. Actually, I think I'll rate them out of 10 instead! :D And here we go with the review! (I hope I do this right...)Never mind I'm scoring out of 5.
Story: Alright, I went into the game thinking that it wouldn't be as great as Tales of Vesperia. However, the story of this game actually amazed me! Although there are some shortcomings within it... For example, why can't we meet all 8 Centurions? We only meet Tenebrae and Aqua! Why Namdai? Even if this game was a spin-off... I really would have liked to meet all of them. Anywho, the story was adorable! And at the same time, it was grave.
Honestly, the most defining characteristic of the story was the Emil and Marta's relationship, as well as Alice and Decus. Although the conflict between Sylvarant and Tethe'alla was kind of interesting as well... Hmm... Well, actually the story was VERY confusing. Although it did make a lot of sense when everything became explained to you. :D Overall, I'd say the story was really good! Honestly, the love story is very cute, and quite a change from the average RPG, considering most main heroine and heroes are too dumb to realize they love each other until the very end, well at least one of them... But yeah, I think the story was one of the best parts of the game... So I give it, an 8! Since it's not perfect... But at the same time, it made me cry at some parts, and made me go "Aww..." in others. :D
Score: 4
Characters: ZOMG the characters. The original Symphonia characters are AWESOME! Although, the English voice acting for them isn't what I really wanted because they changed EVERYONE but Colette, Presea, and Kratos (Colette and Presea being my favorite original characters...) But overall the acting was REALLY good! Especially towards the end, as Emil got less and less annoying. Johnny Yong Bosch did a great job with his voice towards the end. Which made me happy. But yeah, Marta was great, it's refresing to finally have a main heroine like her. Outspoken in her love for the hero rather than it coming gradually and being shy about it. Emil's story was VERY interesting... Pull of twists and turns. Tenebrae is fudging WIN! One of my new top favorite characters for sure. I loved Alice and her sadistic ways. The way her story ends was so... Just... *sobs* Decus was fun~ He was more comic relief than anything though, but his role in the story was pulled off rather well.
The original characters are still as awesome as before. I have much love for Presea and Colette, even more now that I've played this. :D Although Presea did NOT get enough screen time. I mean seriously... Actually, Colette didn't either! Strangely Regal and Sheena got the most I think... Anywho, yeah the characters were one of the reasons why I actually started liking the series in the first place, so of course I wouldn't be disappointed in the sequel to the game that introduced me to the series. Although, I was expecting the quality of the story and characters to be much lower going into the game... Because it was a spin-off. Just goes to show that I shouldn't judge a book by it's cover. :D
Score: 5
Gameplay: Having played Vesperia first, I would have to say that I miss a lot of things like Link Encounters and Magic Lens and stuff... The battles ARE a lot of fun! But for some reason, it feels kind of... What's it called... Choppy! XD But yeah, sometimes when I attack with Marta or even Emil... I'm attacking, yet the enemies aren't getting hit and I'm getting frustrated. Also, Unison Attacks are kind of useless once you get Hi-Ougis which are WAYYY too easy to execute, but at the same time it's a lot of fun to spam them. The gameplay is definitely not as good as Vesperia, of course, I shouldn't be saying that because technically this game is older than Vesperia... But, I did have a lot of fun playing the game. The Quests are long and tedious sometimes though... However, the other sidequests are a lot of fun. Especially the ones related to the characters, like Richter and Alice. :D Overall, it is a fun game in terms of gameplay! But it does have some flaws... Just like Vesperia does.
Also, the Monster System. Not a big fan, but it works. I of course, prefer the human characters like Colette and Presea to the monsters, but the fact that they LIMIT the original casts' levels SUCK REALLY BAD. It would make us forced to use the monsters of course, if we can level up the original characters, there probably wouldn't be a point to the Monster System... Although it does give us the collecting ability of finding all the monsters and evolving them... It still sucks in a way though. Marta and Emil being the only permanent party members does make me really sad though.
Synthesizing is useless for the most part actually... We find all these materials and we don't really need to synthesize much at all. Although if you want to collect all the items... (Which is kind of useless considering there's no collector's book...) You have to synthesize. But blah... We get so much money that we can buy all the stuff that we can synthesize early anyway. I dunno, I just didn't feel like it mattered all that much. We even get the best weapons for Marta and Emil outside of Synthesizing... So yeah.
Also, the World Map... I'm disappointed in. No free roaming and instead point and click. A HUGE downgrade in my opinion.
Although, to be honest, a cutscene skip would have been nice... But it's okay, I like listening to the story anyway. :D
Score: 3.75
Graphics: They're beautiful! The expressions on the characters are amazing and the game runs VERY smoothly with those graphics. Honestly, I'd say the 3-D animations are almost better than Vesperia's! Although they aren't as colorful and crisp as Vesperia's... But the animations with the 3-D models are just simply amazing. I was surprised at how animated they were. Although I am disappointed that they didn't add any anime cutscenes at ALL. Although they did have the opening at least... Tempest had some opening scenes not anime which was lazy... But funny at the same time. XD
Score: 4
Music and Sound: Voice acting was great! Although I wish the old VAs came back. Music is mostly a rehash of the old soundtrack... Although the new stuff is kind of neat... Not ZOMG THIS SONG IS AWESOME neat... But neat. Honestly, I wasn't too impressed with the soundtrack, although it was great hearing all the awesome songs of old, but if they had a new really good song, it would have been great. :D
Score: 3
Replayability: There's New Game+! Which Tales of the Tempest surprisingly didn't have. That makes the replayability rise quite significantly! As well as Hard Mode... I'm not sure if there's an Unknown Mode or not... o.o But if there is... More Replayability! There's also all the monsters you want to collect, but that would take quite a lot of patience and time... Although I'm sure there are those that love the game enough will do it. Overall, replayability is good with the Grade Shop and stuff, and I wouldn't mind playing the game again at all, as I enjoy the story quite a lot and I did miss a couple of sidequests relating to Alice and *insert spoiler here*, so I probably will play eventually!
Score: 3.75
FINAL SCORE: 3.91 = C+
Wow, I graded a lot more harshly than I expected! But yeah, I did actually have a lot of fun playing this game! I mean, I LOVED the story and characters. It's just the gameplay could have been a lot better. The defining quality of this game are definitely the story and characters though. The graphics are good and very animated, which is great! Maybe I should have rated it higher actually. I only rated it lower because of the lack of anime scenes and that it wasn't as crisp and colorful as Vesperia, but oh well. Sound was meh, but overall it is a good game. I mean, it's not HORRIBLE, but it's not super duper good either. I guess this is what happens when someone breaks a game down and grades it. You realize that it's not the greatest game in the world. XD Although there probably is some bias in there that we can't avoid. Hopefully I wasn't TOO bias. Well, that's it! My first review EVER!
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Just comment this blog. :D
