Reviews VideoGame / Tales Of Symphonia Dawn Of The New World

Good, but Not Great

ToS:DotNW perked my interest as soon as I heard that it existed. I had played Tales Of Symphonia and had thought it to be the best game on the gamecube and one of the best RP Gs I'd ever played.

This game ended up being a little disappointing, but still, in the end being a good time. The visual effects were definitely better than the last game, the voice acting was good for the main characters (most of the time) it even had some Narm Charm which I love.

Now that that's out of the way let me Accentuate The Negative.

• The combat was not as enjoyable as it could have been. Enemies with tons and tons of Hit Points, their constant respawning; these ended up feeling like padding. Lots of artes that did poor damage and didn't combo well with each other and when they did work just pushed the enemies out of my range.
• The mons were an interesting idea, but their implementation was lackluster. They never felt as useful in combat as the GuestStarPartyMembers. Also, just getting them was a chore, the game will browbeat you if you fail a number of times, but doing better seems to mostly involve luck.
• The GuestStarPartyMembers nature of the game just got annoying after a while, levelable/equipable party members are definitely preferred for this type of game.
• The Katz quests: the items they offered were almost never useful, and the time it took you to do them was either 1 minute or a half hour but you got the same level reward for either. They felt like just another time sink sense they were necessary in order to get the crafting items. And the crafting was not nearly as interesting as in Tales Of Vesperia.
• The music was mostly just rehashes of the previous game, as were the dungeons, in fact almost all of the dungeons were just copy/pastes of the previous games dungeons.
• Having only a few of the characters retain their previous voice actors. While most of the replacements did a good job recreating the voices (Raine, Genis, Collette), the others were so far off that it proved distracting.

With all of that said, my problems with this game were mostly mechanical the plot was a little predictable but had one of the better reveals I've seen/read, characters were interesting, and the skits were incredibly entertaining.

This was a good game, but not a great one: 7/10 worth renting, maybe buying. 35 hours playtime for me.