Once you get past the bright and cheery super-deformed graphics,
Tales Of Symphonia has a significantly large amount of
Nightmare Fuel.
Spoilers below.
- The worst offender is undoubtedly Expheres and the Exbeula creatures, which are humans that have been horribly mutated as a side-effect of producing expheres. These people, despite being giant throbbing masses of green flesh, are also fully conscious and are in ridiculous amounts of pain from the mutation. It's possible to reverse this transformation, but only one mutated character is lucky enough to survive, and only through a sidequest.
- Expheres, if you use them correctly, enhance your combat abilities. However, their original intended purpose is to slowly turn a person into a soulless shell that does not age, cannot eat, sleep, or speak, and cannot feel, taste, or smell anything. Eventually, the consciousness is completely absorbed. And as the game points out more than a couple times, just because your consciousness is absorbed into an Exphere doesn't mean it stops working.
- The Desians and their human ranches, where humans are treated like cattle in order to produce these Exspheres. And the rest of the world's humans don't particularly care, as long as their city isn't being attacked. The Desians also breed humans for the sole purpose of making more Exspheres.
