The GameCube never really had that much of a selection when it came to
RPGs. There were a few, but nowhere near the amount the Playstation 2
was getting. When Namco announced that their next major entry in the
Tales series was coming to GameCube, owners of Nintendo’s console were
ecstatic, which included me. I am a huge role-playing game fan, and
using my acquired freeloader I imported Tales of Symphonia as soon as
it hit American shores in July 2004.
Tales of Symphonia was
regarded as THE GameCube RPG and one of the best in the Tales series.
It gained high praise for its graphical look and gameplay mechanics
with interesting characters and story. Namco are following up the
success with a sequel that follows on from the original Tales of
Symphonia story. It’s been out in the U.S since November 2008, but it
has finally been given a date of autumn 2009 for PAL users who don’t
have a way of importing it.
The story of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is set two years
after the events of the first game. If you are one of the people who
played Tales of Symphonia, then you know that the story in that game
was focused on Lloyd and his companions as they went on a journey to
try and merge the two worlds of Sylvarant and Tethe’alla. Having been
successful, the story of Dawn of the New World is about how the people
are coping with the merged worlds. It’s not good I can tell you, as
people are finding it hard to adjust to the joint worlds, with strange
weather occurrences happening around the world along with the
Tethe’allans, who have no respect for the Sylvaranti as a race, due to
their inferior technology.
Taking control of the game’s main
protagonist, Emil Castagnier, you start off understanding that Emil has
a huge hatred for Lloyd Irving, the main character from the original
Tales of Symphonia. This is because Lloyd killed his parents when he
attacked Palmacosta in the blood purge. Emil is now left to live with
his Uncle and Auntie in a village, where everyone worships Lloyd as a
hero for what he did when merging the worlds together. Emil is an
outcast in a sense because everyone picks on him for his hatred of the
hero Lloyd. All changes one day when he meets Marta, a girl that seems
familiar, yet he can’t quite place it. To help her, he becomes a Knight
of Ratatosk to protect her from the Vanguard, a group who are after her
because she has the core of the spirit Ratatosk buried in her head.
Story wise, Dawn of the New World isn’t quite as entertaining as its
predecessor. For starters Emil, for most of the game, is a huge wimp.
Every time he complains you just want to slap him for not being a man.
It can be irritating at times, but that negative does have a positive
side because since he became a Knight of Ratatosk, he has gained a
split personality. The other Emil is all up for fights and wanting to
kick some arse, even though he can be a bit of a git at times, he’s
still better than normal wimpy Emil. The other main character Marta,
the female protagonist of the game, is a lot more entertaining and
likeable as she comes out as a caring girl with a friendly personality.
The
star of the show though is Tenebrae, the Centurion spirit of darkness
and a servant to Ratatosk. He has some of the best lines in the game
and a comical personality that helps push the story along. He’ll do the
picking and get picked on but he’s just one of those characters that as
the game progresses, you grow to love and adore because of his witty
remarks and the feeling that he’s the guy of the group you can depend
on.
There’s one flaw with Emil and Marta though, both of the main
characters suffer from the exact same problem, the use of the word
sorry. I swear Dawn of the New World must have the record for how many
times sorry is said in a game. In one scene, it is said about 7 times
in the space of 20 seconds, it’s crazy, and you just feel like giving
them Ketamine, to stop them from being so depressing.
Emil and
Marta are the only new characters you will be using in battle. The
entire cast of the original Tales of Symphonia make a return throughout
different parts of the game, and they are also playable, but not like
you’d expect. The problem is that even though you get all these
fantastic returning characters from the first game, they are given
fixed levels and equipment, so you can’t level them up. Different
characters from the original will keep leaving and joining your team
and all have the same locked level and equipment. The further you are
in the game, the higher level they return to you, but it’s such a huge
shame that they aren’t given a proper role in the game.
Since Emil is now a knight of Ratatosk and Ratatosk is the lord of all
monsters on the planet. It means Emil can befriend monsters in battle
to help him fight. This is a new addition to the Tales series and no
doubt will be limited to just Dawn of the New World too, due to the
story and the fact that it isn’t all that great for mainly one thing,
character depth. You see, no matter how cool the monsters you catch
are, and trust me they are some pretty funky looking ones out of the
200+ monsters you can befriend in battle, they just don’t feel as good
to play with, as say someone like Lloyd or Genis or any other Tales of
Symphonia characters for that matter. It’s a real shame that the
returning characters are limited as surely Namco would have known that
fans would have loved to play with their favourites again.
While
the monsters aren’t as good as playing as the Tales of Symphonia
characters, they are needed to help get through the game. To get them
to join your team, you need to meet certain requirements in battle,
doing so will allow them to join you at the end if you have enough
friendly stats with them. You can also use monsters of the same element
in your team to help persuade the monster to come join you. Monsters
can also be cooked food to grow into better, stronger beasts once
they’ve hit a high enough level to evolve. A lot of the times you’ll
just befriend the monster then leave him/her to it, as you have to
level up each monster individually from level 1. They do level up
faster than normal but once you’ve found your ideal monsters, you won’t
bother with any others that you encounter. I ended up having a wolf
that I evolved to the maximum level and kept him throughout most of the
game, because he was a damn good ice wolf and I just didn’t feel
connected with the whole monster hunting aspect. It felt it was more of
a side thought and thrown into the game because it seemed like it was a
good idea.
The staple of the Tales series is the battle system. It has always been
one of the best parts of the series. The battle system in Dawn of the
New World takes its roots from Tales of the Abyss, rather than Tales of
Symphonia. While at first you might not think this means much, in fact
it means you can now run fully 3D in fights in real time; you aren’t
limited to the left and right plain. It adds an extra dimension to the
fight, meaning enemies can come from any direction now. Fights in Tales
aren’t usually random, as the enemies appear on screen, so you need to
physically let your character touch them to get into a battle, so
random encounter haters don’t need to worry. Every battle feature from
Tales of Symphonia makes it in, meaning you’ve still got your equipable
artes, general attacks and everything else that you’ve become
accustomed too.
Namco always have a little bonus when it comes to Tales games. The game
can actually be played with four people, but this is limited to fights
only. During non-battle scenes, the first player controls everything.
During battles however, players can be assigned to a certain character
(not monsters) and be able to fight alongside each other. It’s a little
Easter egg thing that has always been there and it’s nice to have that
feature just in case you’re playing when you’ve got a friend over.
For
some strange reason, Dawn of the New World suffers from some technical
loading problems. Occasionally when you go into battle the game will
pause for a couple of seconds, looking as if it has frozen, when in
fact it is loading the battle. These problems never happened on the
original game, so I have no idea why it’s happening for this sequel. It
doesn’t happen every time, so something must be going on to kick up the
slow loading, strange indeed.
Dawn of the New World doesn’t use
the same cel-shaded chibi look of its forerunner. Instead the game opts
for more realistic looking character models, it’s still colourful, but
there’s this sense of a darker tone seeping through the game. The
graphics are only a minor improvement over the first game, but the
animation is certainly a lot better between the main characters of Dawn
of the New World when compared to Tales of Symphonia. They seem to
animate more naturally using the realistic anime style.
One thing that Dawn of the New World should get a lot of praise for is
the skit scenes in the game. FINALLY the skits have full audio, it’s
the first in a Tales game for us English audiences. Skits are little
scenes that take place in the game when a button appears in the bottom
left corner. Pressing that button opens up some character panels and
the characters will speak to each other about random things or story
plot. The Japanese version of the past few Tales games have been
getting audio for these scenes, but us unlucky English had to do with
just text. Not now though as Dawn of the New World speaks it all in
English, all 400+ skits. There’s a lot of spoken dialogue in Dawn of
the New World and most of it is solid work, there are only a couple of
bad characters. The downer is that some of the original voice actors
don’t come back, so the characters that you know from Tales of
Symphonia don’t sound the same, a big shame there.
In the end
though, when you look at the big picture, there aren’t that many RPGs
on the Wii system. Dawn of the New World is a decent RPG, but is aimed
mainly at the people who played the GameCube original, which is
probably quite a lot of the Wii owners anyway, but fans of the first
game will be both happy and disappointed at the sequel. Fans will smile
in glee at returning characters and revisiting classic locations, but
will be saddened by the fact that it’s a really linear game that
doesn’t do justice to the reappearing cast from Tales of Symphonia.
It’s also a shorter game as it can be beaten in around 30-40 hours.
People
who haven’t played the GameCube hit will probably feel a little
lukewarm towards Dawn of the New World, it’s purely made for fans and
if you aren’t a fan, you probably won’t get the most out of it. There
is a warning for fans though, when you play it, make sure you’ve got
some happy pills with you, just to be on the safe side.
