Some more updates regarding the Tales of Symphonia Pachislot coming soon in Japan including website updates, a new trailer and some offscreen footage:
First off, KITAC updated the official website with new pages detailing several features such as the game flow, battle system, art, and more. Besides the OVA footage, new screenshots feature the ingame renders and chibi art of the main characters scattered around the site.
For Tales of Symphonia Chronicles on the PlayStation 3, a GameFAQs message board topic titled 'Casino'. Also which slot machines should I use, 1 chip, 10 chip. I couldn't do it' - Vanille. User Info: Bigheadman. Bigheadman 6 years ago #2. Use the 100-chip slots. Bet 500 at a time, reload if you lose, save if you win. Build up to around.
- Tales of Symphonia Chronicles PlayStation 3. My advice is to buy some chips (500 or so), then gamble it using the 10-chip slot machine until you reach 1020k.
- For Tales of Symphonia Chronicles on the PlayStation 3, a GameFAQs message board topic titled 'Casino'. Also which slot machines should I use.
To showcase these updates, KITAC also uploaded a new trailer:
Finally, since the launch of the site, Youtube user Omiya Demasse uploaded a couple of offscreen videos showing the Pachislot machine itself in action. We'll link the first one here--the other two are listed in his account:
Tales of Symphonia is the fifth mothership title of the series and the only title to be released for the Nintendo GameCube. It was then later ported to the PlayStation 2. It has a direct sequel escort title in the form of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, and the two were later ported to the PlayStation 3 as a single release in the form of Tales of Symphonia Chronicles. The game is a distant prequel to Tales of Phantasia.
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Tales of Symphonia is one of those well-loved RPGs that I never paid much attention to when it was first released. The long running Tales’ series first jump to fully 3D environments is revered by many as a classic that’s right up there as one of the finest Japanese RPGs of the era. Even playing it for the first time over a decade after its initial release I couldn’t help but be impressed by its scope and visual stylings. Had I played it back in 2004, I’d probably have spent months obsessing over the world and characters, but looking at it from a fresh, modern perspective I can’t help but feel that Symphonia is held back by a number of elements that simply don’t stand the test of time. It’s fun, but far from the best the genre has to offer.
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Tales of Symphonia tells the story of a boneheaded swordsman with daddy issues defending a humble young girl on her pilgrimage to several elemental temples. On their adventure, the pair and their fellow guardians have to deal with casual racism, misused magical technology and a corrupt church. Or wait, was that Final Fantasy X? There’s little originality in Tales of Symphonia’s worlds-spanning narratives, with a lot of “serious” plot twists that are difficult to take seriously. There’s a confusing number of competing factions in the setting who are constantly switching sides and changing aims; I suspect this was supposed to give the story a sense of moral ambiguity, but it just makes everyone seem indecisive at best and absolutely pants-on-head crazy at worst. The narrative is a mess, but it does lead to some enjoyably bizarre moments. Who could forget the endearingly moronic protagonist Lloyd suddenly deactivating a bomb offscreen or escaping from prison by simply opening the door? The inconsistent narrative logic makes for a story that’s far more entertaining than it should be, especially when coffee is involved.
It helps that the most of the cast are endearing (Zelos and his constant womanising aside). The overarching plot might by weak, but the characters shine through optional skits that flesh out the cast and world. These short conversations are hardly the most elegant way of delivering character development, since it’s often nothing but the cast saying how they feel, but the banter is frequently funny and the cartoonish character designs help sell it. Tales of Symphonia’s script does fall victim to excessive world-building, though, with dialogue that’s often filled with absurd amounts of jargon. There is a decent enough tale of discrimination and family ties here, but it’s buried beneath a lot of mana dwarven vow half-elf mithos desian mana world regeneration sylvarant exsphere martel elf tella’thia cruxis mana noishe.
Tales of Symphonia sports a cel-shaded style that holds up better than most other RPGs from around this time period. The upscaled version I played had a couple of dodgy textures here and there, but the strong character art, enemy designs and detailed environments more than compensate. It’s still a good-looking game, even if I wish it had a more distinct visual identity. Most of the game involves travelling between two worlds (this is barely a spoiler at this point), but the two settings look far too similar. Given how often characters remark on the changing environment and the effect of mana on the landscape, I suspect it wasn’t intentional that both worlds reuse the same lush green fields.
This lack of identity persists with the soundtrack. Motoi Sakuraba completely phones it in with the music, sticking too closely to the same structure and tone as much of his other Tales work. His previous soundtracks for Valkyrie Profile and Golden Sun were much stronger than Symphonia’s bland assortment of RPG standards. Even Sakuraba’s trademark prog-rock battle themes are forgettable here. Sure, the music when you square off against the Summon Spirits is great, but it’s an arrangement of “Fighting of the Spirit” from Tales of Phantasia so it barely counts.
Tales of Symphonia’s co-operative battles tie into the themes of the game. Characters aid each other and team up to perform combination attacks, giving a sense of unity to this diverse cast as they join forces in spite of their backgrounds. Maybe the fact that everyone in the party makes stupid decisions outside of battles ties into your allies’ AI being absolutely braindead. Even with a large degree of control over where they’re positioned and how they’ll conserve their limited pool of TP, the other party members still do things like stand in a monster’s face while trying to cast a spell. Tales of Symphonia can be played cooperatively, but the camera isn’t really designed for that and fights end up with four players who have no idea which way they’re running. Constantly pausing the game to dive into menus also interrupts the flow of the real-time battles.
After running into an enemy on the field, the action shifts to a 3D plain. Appearances can be decieving, though; it looks like you’ve got full movement in three dimensions, but characters instead “snap” to an opponent and move in 2D. This clunky movement makes it hard to align skills that affect a set area, but even as an early draft of the battle system that would be refined in later titles, Symphonia’s fights are a lot of fun. Like Super Smash Bros., each character has a number of artes that can be performed with just a single button combined with a direction – a control scheme that’s very intuitive and makes it easy to chain together combos. Some of the characters (namely spellcasters) aren’t much fun to play as but regardless of character choice, battles in Tales of Symphonia are very quickly paced and engaging. Getting through fights quickly and efficiently also rewards players with a “Grade” that can be spent on rare items and unlocks after the credits. Though Tales of Symphonia is still a very lengthy game, it’s nice to play a JRPG where fighting the final boss takes ten minutes, tops.
While Symphonia’s battle system is fun, there are some issues with character customisation. The game’s poorly-explained skill system divides artes into Tactical and Strike versions. These two different paths are influenced by which Ex. Gems a character has equipped, which also grant various passive boosts. This sounds like an interesting layer of customisation, but it’s one that ends up discouraging players from experimenting. Only four gems can be set at a time and while each gem grants four selectable skills for each character, replacing it with another gem destroys it. This wouldn’t be so bad if certain combinations of gems didn’t also combine to form additional compound skills; the fact that gems can’t be freely swapped between characters makes finding a workable set of skills even more of a pain. That said, for most characters these compound skills aren’t all that useful, so you can just play the game paying attention to the default boosts provided by your steadily-increasing pool of Ex. Gems instead. I particularly liked the inclusion of a Personal Skill for each character, which included helpful features like increasing the walk speed, easy enemy evasion and more creative abilities like chatting up female NPCs for items. Overall the character progression systems in Symphonia have a lot of depth, but it can be frustrating if you aren’t slavishly following a walkthrough. It’s particularly annoying that you have a huge range of moves at your disposal, but half of them are locked off for arbitrary reasons. It’s technically possible to learn every characters’ list of artes, but this requires forgetting the existing move and manipulating your affinity, which in turns takes a lot of grinding.
There are a few other annoyances with Tales of Symphonia. Having a full 3D overworld to explore might be nostalgic, but the slow movement and cramped camera angle made me realise I don’t actually miss RPG overworlds at all. Exploration in dungeons is a bit better, since they’re packed with puzzles. Right from the first hour you’re given a magical ring that changes function with every dungeon; the ability to shooting flames, shine light, freeze things and other uses that mix up all the block pushing. Even when you’re exploring samey Desian facilities, the different actions keep it feeling relatively fresh and there are no random encounters to interrupt the puzzling. That said, not all of the ring’s gimmicks are much fun and some of the dungeons are quite tedious to traverse. Like the story, some of the puzzles don’t follow real world logic and there’s a disconnect between your action and the result needed to progress. For example, one particularly awful sewer dungeon has spider webs you can shrink down and cross, but the webs won’t show up until you do something arbitrary.
From the story to the soundtrack, there’s a lot of aspects to Tales of Symphonia that feel uninspired, but much of the ambition is buried underneath the surface. Though it definitely has its fair share of fetch quests, there’s a large number of side quests to pursue, which all tend to have a self-contained narrative that helps to develop some of the more minor characters. These story ties (as well as the useful items and costumes) make them feel rewarding and unlike in the later Tales of the Abyss there aren’t as many points where these side quests are completely blocked off. There’s also a hidden system of relationship values where dialogue options and side quests influence which characters show up to support Lloyd at various points in the story. Like in Final Fantasy VII, this is just a neat bonus that isn’t really worth obsessing over – although it is the only way to recruit a certain character in the HD version of the game. There’s even some flexibility in completing major plot events out of order by ignoring NPCs and just going exploring, which is quite rare. The world map might be a poor way of giving the game a massive scale, but there’s a definite sense of progression and escalation in Tales of Symphonia that compensates for some of the weaker aspects of the plot.
Tales of Symphonia
The Verdict
Tales Of Symphonia Titles
I suppose I should look at it in a historical vacuum, but that's impossible without a time machine so I suspect Tales of Symphonia's continued popularity is due to its warmth and replayability. Some aspects that were likely impressive for the time, like the English voice acting and action-based battles, don't hold up particularly well. Combat is still fun, but the unique systems around character customisation don't quite click and it's a basic battle system that other Tales titles would greatly improve on. Symphonia's more experimental aspects might not quite work out, but there's something oddly comforting about how its cast meshes with its collection of tried and true RPGs tropes. Ignoring a few tedious dungeons, it's quite well paced for such a lengthy game - possibly a bit too quick to keep track of what's actually going on in the plot! In the end, Tales of Symphonia is lacking in flavour but works as decent enough JRPG junk food. It's a fun 40-60 hours, but don't expect to remember much by the end.