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Trivia / Tales of Symphonia

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  • All-Star Cast: In all seriousness, the English version became very much memorable because the dub cast was particularly very stellar for those growing up with American cartoons. The ones who were the least well-known for the time were just Heather Hogan and Shiloh Strong, but even their performances were praised. The others? Let's just say that out of the ensemble of Scott Menville, Cam Clarke, Jennifer Hale, Tara Strong, Kari Wahlgren, Colleen O'Shaughnessey and Crispin Freeman, you can probably find at least five western-produced cartoons from the 20 years prior to the game's release that you absolutely adored.
  • Bonus Material: In addition to the OVA's, there are 6 omakes/bonuses. They all have No Fourth Wall and are rather absurd.
  • Breakthrough Hit: This was the game that established Tales as a real, going concern outside of Japan. As the main page notes, it was the first Tales game to ever sell more than a million copies total thanks to its worldwide sales, and thanks to the strength of the original release and remasters, it stood as the best-seller overall for nearly two decades before just barely being topped by Tales of Vesperia. Needless to say, the Newbie Boom this game generated defined an entire generation of Tales fandom, and its effects are still felt even decades on.
  • Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Nintendo Power magazine incorrectly referred to Raine as Genis's mom instead of his sister.
  • Dummied Out:
    • There's an unused model of Rutee Katrea in the game's coding. She was probably going to appear in the Coliseum Cameo battle along with Garr. The PS2 version and PS3 versions also have an unused "Meikuu Zanshouken/Dark Blade" arte name shout for Lloyd, the same Mystic Arte used by Cress Albane, hinting that Lloyd was probably going to receive an extra move along those lines as a tribute.
    • Every character has Relationship Values indicating how they feel towards Lloyd... including Lloyd himself, in what is presumably a simple copy-paste oversight. While Lloyd's self-love can be modified by cooking foods with his liked and disliked ingredients, it never does anything for obvious reasons.
    • In the GameCube version Raine has incomplete data for two Mystic Artes — a chant and animation for Sacred Light (implemented in the PS2 release) and a chant only for Fairy Circle (implemented in the PS3 release). In every version, she also has Dark Sphere and Bloody Lance (Dark-elemental variants of her existing Photon and Holy Lance spells) fully coded into her moveset but completely inaccessible.
    • In the GameCube version, every playable character plus the Final Boss and superboss has cut-in portraits for Mystic Artes (and Presea has two!), but only Lloyd, Colette, and Genis actually use them — Sheena and the bosses arbitrarily don't, while the other playable characters don't even have Mystic Artes to use them with. All of these got implemented starting in the PS2 release.
    • The Japanese version has a "Rename Gem" key item that allows renaming the playable characters (in text only; voice acting still uses their original names). International releases remove access to it, presumably due to variable-width fonts making variable character names a lot more work to deal with for the scriptwriters. And they aggressively removed it, too — even if you edit your save file, the localized game actively deletes the Rename Gem from your inventory if you have it and reverts the characters' names to normal if they're edited.
    • In the GameCube version, Kvar has an unused voice line in which he shouts "Booty Call!" like it's an attack. This was probably a joke of some kind, since it doesn't really fit his character.
    • Sheena has an unused summoning spell in her moveset for Corrine's post-reincarnation identity as Verius. The plans for this apparently didn't get very far, as it's just a near-identical copy of her summoning spell for Corrine, except that it requires her to be in Over Limit like other summoning spells.
    • Every character has a generic spellcasting voice line, including Lloyd ("Take this!") and Presea ("Ha!") who have no spells to use these lines on.
  • Late Export for You:
    • After ten years, the PS2 release of Tales of Symphonia was bundled with Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World for the PS3, complete with a graphical update, in the "Tales of Symphonia Chronicles" two-pack for North America and Europe.
    • The OVAs were added to Crunchyroll in 2021- almost 14 years after the first OVA began release in Japan.
  • Role Reprise: In Chronicles, Bandai Namco went out of their way to call in the original cast to do the new contents from the Japan-only PS2 version instead of just using the new cast at Dawn of the New World. Of course, skits are still not dubbed.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Voice and animation files not used in the main game show that the characters had unused artes that would've made them even more powerful. For example, Lloyd would've been able to the same artes as Cress, including his Limit Break Dark Blade and his Eternal Sword artes while Colette would've been able to use Final Fury (complete with tripping that somehow produces lasers from the sky) and an extra Limit Break called Sephiroth.
    • Interviews reveal that Zelos's Relationship Values were even more crucial to his survival in the original draft of the game, where he'd die sooner if his trust with the party was low, and his survival was achievable only if his points were the highest of the party.

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