I will never understand why people hype up Tales of Symphonia. It is one of those games that is so medicore in absolutely everything you don't know how ANYONE likes it, sort of like an Oblivion of jRPGs.
Even a healthy amount of the fans say the battle system is the only good part, but holy crap is the battle system awful.
You can chain attacks in the pattern of 3/4 basic attacks (they change depending on the control stick's direction, but there's always one that's objectively best in all aspects), level 1 special, level 2 special and level 3 special, but you aren't allowed to use the same "tree" twice (for example, you can't link Demon Fang and Double Demon Fang). Seems simple, but heres the thing, short of skipping a move entirely, this is the ONLY sequence you can link moves in (otherwise your character pauses, the enemy loses its flinch and you get your ass kicked before starting the move) and you can only map 4 special moves (plus 2 shortcuts for anyone in the active party, one of which is reserved for telling the AI to stop showing off its ability to run in all directions while you and enemies can only move in 2 and to fucking heal your ass), so there will only ever be 2 ways to link moves for most characters (Kratos can gain one special ability that lets him link in any order, but it just pushes you into using a different pre-canned combo, while Regal has some bizzare catagorization of his specials that still forced you to use a single string with no variance). When to block/dodge is horribly telegraphed and everything is an HP sponge, ESPECIALLY on hard mode.
I think the ONLY thing it has going for it is the "sklit" system where are fixed points you can press z for the characters to talk to eachother in some irrelevant conversation, which if the characters weren't blobs of cliches would actually be pretty good for establishing their personalities, backstories/ect without clloging the game up with mandatory cutscenes. This isn't even really all that unique (party talk in Dragon Quest for instance, predates it)
What's REALLY embarrassing is that Tales was around for EIGHT YEARS at that point and didn't improve squat, but a bunch of sRPG makers (Flightplan) with no experience making this kind of game decided to make a similar game (Summon Night: Swordcraft Story) a year before on the GBA, and it beats any Tales game in every single aspect: You have 3 sets of attacks that actually do something different and can be chained together, and can change to 2 other completely different movesets at the press of a button. your specials are varied and can't be spamed because of a double Vanciean (you only get so many preperations of a spell before resting AND you can only cast 5 or 6 spells a battle) spellcasting system. On top of that, the characters are actually enjoyable, weapon crafting is fun, the story has its unique points, the setting for the first game is actually fairly interesting (It's a Venice analog with a bizzare mix of technology thanks to the world's status as a dimensional hub)
Is it clear I HATE ToS yet?
Skies of Arcadia has major graphics issues
Still? I really want this one since I never quite finished it when I still used my GC.
Dolphin WIki says yes, but you may want to try it anyways, as it is many SVNs (including a few very mjor ones) old. It's apparently playable, but has weird shadows and the like.
