Then, we have Colette, who acts happy all the time, but carries a gigantic weight on her shoulders as the Chosen of Mana, whose entire purpose in life is basically to keep the world alive. Fittingly, he’s the magic user who hangs back and lets others handle the enemies up close. His friend Genis is a prodigy child who is super smart and talks a big game, but he’s also sheltered and doesn’t know a lot about the world. He’s always in the thick of the action and doesn’t have a lot of defense tactics, so he needs to rely on others for support. To start off, our hero Lloyd is a determined, if naïve, teenager who fights with two longswords because he thinks it’s cooler that way. Here’s where the gameplay and the characterization start to mix in a cool way that the player may not even notice right away – the characters’ personalities and their fighting styles mirror each other. In any case, we also get to know our first three other party members right off the bat. They’re so… um… charming? Straight off, we’re introduced to Lloyd Irving, our erstwhile protagonist, who is voiced by none other than Scott Menville! I swear, every time I play this game, I really want Lloyd to let out a “Titans Go!” before every battle. Who is he? Does it matter? Well, we’ll file that in our brains for later. The other thing you may notice is that, as far as you know, this guy in the narration is talking directly to you, the player, and he seems to be pretty knowledgeable about the lore of this world. This can make Symphonia’s first act a bit impenetrable for those of you who gag at anime glurge in all forms, but stick with me here. Okay, so the Tales series is actually kinda famous for this, but every game starts out with a purposefully clichéd JRPG story just so they can turn it on its head about five hours in. And actually there are two worlds and you gotta keep the balance between them but it’s weird because you can’t but maybe you can and people are racist against half-elves or something and… and… It seems standard enough – you gotta save the world by taking the Chosen One on a journey and making her an angel or whatever. So you turn on the game and hear a voiceover giving you a quick summary of this world’s mythology. If you haven’t played this game and you still want to be surprised in your own playthrough, none of this should be that devastating. But if you look a little bit closer at how the game is crafted, you’ll see that it’s a lot smarter than it looks.īy the way, I’ll try to spoil as few of the big twists as I can, but I still need to talk about the plot through about the first third of the game. In fact, you could say that its action RPG gameplay and its mostly linear story don’t mix much at all. It’s not an art game and its design mission wasn’t to weave gameplay and story together seamlessly. It was published by Namco in 2003-2004 and it was the first Tales series title to really get a following outside of Japan. Well, let me tell you about one of my personal favorite games of all time, Tales of Symphonia for the Nintendo GameCube. Interactivity and linear storytelling just don’t mix, right? But these days, so many people, even a lot of gamers themselves, don’t see much value in trying to tell a compelling story with a video game. and Pokémon, I’ve loved video games just as much. And ever since my older brother threw out my dolls and taught me how to play Smash Bros. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved a great story.
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