Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World makes multiple mistakes, that Fans of the series, or even to some extent, anyone who does their research about sequel (trying to make an informed purchase), will notice these slips.

ToS presented a lot of interesting characters, that all of us enjoyed seeing together. More importantly, they all had wonderful voices. If a sequel comes out, even years later, they should make the effort to get the original voice actors back. What sort of sequel doesn’t have even 50% of the original voice actors? Did they die? Did they all happen to be really busy at the time of voice recording? No to both, and then some. Cam Clarke (my inspiration) does the voice of the ruggedly bad-ass Kratos. He was hired for the Cameo battle in Tales of Vesperia, but Namco decided to call him up for ToS2. And HE’S NOT EVEN IN THE GAME! I’ve concluded that the voice actors (Scott Menville, Colleen O’Shaunessy, Crispin Freeman, Jeniffer Hale, Shiloh Strong…) either COULDN’T be bothered to pay homage to their fans, OR they weren’t being paid enough. Which actually leads to the former reason. They probably didn’t care, because they weren’t being paid to care. No love for the fans. Personally, I would have done it for free, just for the fans. All the aforementioned VAs (except maybe for Shiloh Strong…one shot thingy), are all big hits. So it should be not problem showing up for a sequel. Xenosaga has three games in its series, and all of the have pretty much the same voice actors. It really hurts to know that people aren’t dedicated to the fans that made them what they are today.

Next point, the attention. In recent years, it’s become really popular to simply slap on “concepts” onto a game (Harvest Moon +Diablo= Rune Factory for example), and claiming they’re doing it well. I’ll say it outright now: Japan is GODLY. They can do things really well. So when you find out that your next ‘canon’ Tales of game is gonna have a pokemon-like gimmick added to it, jaws drop and brows furrow. Fair enough. I think the big deal is moving the gameplay in such a contrary direction. When you’re told the focus of a game is no longer to work together with your team mates, but rather, to breed and train monsters (that you can’t control, btw.), it’s a big shock. I personally don’t like the monster system. Not because it doesn’t work, but because there are too many amendments made to MAKE IT WORK. Let’s see:

1- To accomodate the monsters, you lose the 4-6 other plot related characters that would have joined Emil and Marta on their journey to awaken Ratatosk.
2- The cooking system is now geared towards boosting your monster’s abilities. Which is not only convoluted (since you’re told to feed them once every level, and the monsters can only level up in dungeons, where you can’t cook.), it also means your party is losing a method of healing. This puts more strain on your items and healers.
3-It splits the player’s friends up. ToS was always about the teamwork. Getting together with a bunch of pals and freaking out over dodging Meteor Storm, or getting out of Sword Dancer’s way, was THE main event of the game. Players 2-4 now have even less to do, since they have to wait for player 1 to find the original cast and then let them play. It doesn’t help that the OC (original cast) can’t level, or gain new techs.
4-The monsters are integral to the plot, but don’t speak. Tenebrae is a neat character to play off of Emil’s insecurities and Marta’s flightiness, but he’s the only other character. The OC comes in once and again, but because we know what they’re about, fans are more likely to look for any discrepancies between ToS and its sequel.

Aside from the monster system, I think the game itself does work hard at presenting something nice to its players. If one compares it to ToS, it has many wonderful additions, some that even Vesperia lacks. Motion capture. The characters do feel almost human in their behavior, despite their anime proportions. It has voiced skits, which until now ,was only found in Vesperia and the Radiant Mythology series and Legendia (sort of). This means that at the very least, every Tales of game to come out should have voiced skits as its staple. The combat has been enhanced: Free Run is now a standard, and the field of battle is larger too (along the lines of Abyss).

It would be easy to simply slay Dawn of the new World for all its mistakes. But then again, everyone made fun of Legendia for doing things differently. But I can tell you now, that on its own, Legendia is a really good game. ToS2 loses out a lot for not treating its fans the way game companies should (Disgaea is a great example), and for placing more importance on Vesperia (because they wanted to celebrate the 10th anniversary right away, they could only do so much with so few people). In the end, it’ll depend on whether you can play this game as a seperate entity, while keeping in mind that it is a sequel, or you play it as if it were a direct sequel to ToS1 (even though there’s a 4-5 year gap production-wise), and slam it for it’s fan dissing. I’m in the middle, but I’ll finish it a few times, and see if I still feel in the middle about it.

It was a sad day for Tales Fans… because it made you feel like not being a fan anymore… I know I did when I found it there was no cameo battle.

Tinyguardian

As for Emils motivation and him becoming courageous from what Richter says in the beginning. I’m 40+ hours into the game and Emil hasn’t changed too much. It’s a very gradual thing due to his experiences throughout the game.

I can’t get past the dialogue written for ten year olds and the clunky control scheme,nor the fact that any battle that’s actually hard turns into ‘Spam the heck out of unison attacks’.

The plot is also just plain lazy. They took a world that already had elemental spirits that control mana and made up another type of elemental spirits that control mana. Centurians seem to be exactly the same as summon spirits only without the summoning. Also, they completely contradict the ending of Symphonia. Tethe’alla was reaching out peacefully to Sylvarant, then they decided ‘Nevermind, we’ll oppress them instead’? And that’s ignoring that Kratos was supposed to be leaving forever. I bet they also did stuff that contradicts the distant future of Phantasia. They contradict the ending of Symphonia so much, knowing Team Symphonia didn’t even design the game it’s hard to see DoTNW as more than Symphonia fanfic..

None of the character motivations are believable either. I’m supposed to buy that a complete coward suddenly becomes courageous because some random guy he just met called him an animal?

Lazy plot, clunky battle system. I might come back and finish it after I finish all the other games I’m playing now, but I don’t see why I should play it when I could play any of five or six other Tales games with better battle system and story. (DoTNW is even worse than Legendia on both counts).

The thing that I really like most about this game are the characters. Given most of them were in symphonia anyway, Marta and Emil are really kick ass characters. With all ten characters (there might be more but i don’t think so) there are many different possible party combinations.

There were really only two things about this game that bugged me. #1 No “real” world map and #2 Characters are stuck at certain levels. Those two things ended up not being a big bother though because I can warp everywhere and I also noticed the game auto-equips my characters with extremely good equipment. I’ve been playing as Lloyd while my gf plays as Marta and we have been having a lot of fun. The monster catching thing isn’t entirely necessary but it adds some extra fun.

Oh and about the catz guy, I never failed a mission so I never had that problem. Although recently I advanced the story too quickly and missed a few quests :’(

Actually, Radiant Mythology was one of my first PSP games. You’re right, it doesn’t have that issue. At least, I don’t think it does… its been a while since I played it and I only did about 75% of it. I kind of enjoy the Tales of spinoffs like that where all the characters mesh together (there was a great one the the GBA Narikiri Dungeon 2 I think). It had its moments, and it was fun to see Tales of characters from different games interacting. Plus, I’m a sucker for dungeon crawling.

Dawn of the New World does have a new game + feature and three possible endings, so you’re right. It does almost seem like Namco Bandai wanted people to go back multiple times.

Reading what you’ve said on how it works it seems pulled off really bad though.

There’s this Tales dungeon crawler for the PSP, Radiant Mythology where you go to city guilds for missions (and that alone basically makes the game “go there pick some potatoes”, “kill 5 wolfs in cave dungeon”, etc) and although the game is not that good I’m 200% positive that it doesn’t have that kind of issue. This to say that if they implemented that they should have know the aforementioned game and easily “dodged” that kind of frustrating approach.

I might be wrong, but that approach seems to me like a thing to make you “unable” to complete and do everything on the game on the first playthrough. I can’t see anything like that making me play a game again though, but I picture it unsettling me to a certain extent (like loosing interest on that katz guild early on), I’ll still try it when playing the game in english though, now even more so.

I was more lenient on Dawn of the New World mainly because it was a sequel, and so I figured that the reusing of the same engine/graphics/etc wasn’t a sin that merited a bash-article. If it had been a totally new Tales of entry, I would have expressed the same sense of outrage and disapproval. Since it isn’t, I was more forgiving of Namco Bandai’s slacking off. (Especially since I was glad to see a true RPG.) I figured that the “generic” sentiment would cover the fact that many of the things in Dawn of the New World are places, battle systems, storyline, etc that people have seen before.

I agree too that there is false advertising in the game ads concerning Kosuke Fujishima, which is why I didn’t mention his art or anything in the articles.

If anything, the thing that annoyed me most was the way in which the monster collecting/raising was orchestrated in Dawn of the New World. I truly think that the Katz Guild’s quest execution was handled badly. If you mess up a quest, you shouldn’t be penalized by losing it forever.

Not that the content adds anything to what I said above, but… just because you might think I didn’t answer the last time.

Now onto what you said now, I don’t have a problem with that kind of opinion (neither do I have anything to do with others opinions), and if I concluded it sucked I wouldn’t buy it a second time, probably (I say probably because I’ve bought bad tales games knowing they were “bad” before) but I honestly can’t praise it, or hear praise for it and sit still. I wouldn’t be lostinblue otherwise, it’s stronger than me.

I don’t think the articles for it, here in Siliconera, are bad or wrong, and are probably better than the bash fest that I see myself giving it, but then again, from my point of view I think it deserves to be bashed for what it isn’t and should; since that is Bandai Namco’s approach fault, and… they even mislead us at first, purposefully.

Even in the end result actually, I’ve seen the US release flash banners in websites, they’re passing it as Kosuke Fujishima’s work (writing his name in the banners), but in fact he wasn’t involved, because Namco didn’t want to pay him for this game (also because he was too busy with another higher budget tales) and, although I actually don’t give a damn about Fujishima, the fact that they were willing to pay his services for other stuff, but were clearly avoiding it on this one does a lot to show the priority and Namco approach to this one, I guess. But still, they mislead their fans, and played around with them, we’re not things or chess pieces on their game.

So, and for a rabid Tales fan that I consider myself to be, seeing all these signals and misteps, felt like a trainwreck and a lack of respect, so I have some personal emotional involvement in all this, as silly as it might appear.

On the game… I mild enjoyed what I played and will, hopefully enjoy it when I get my US version, but I can and will separate it, I can enjoy it, hence why I’ll buy it and for me judge it for what it is and not for what it isn’t, but I’ll never praise it, or let it off the hook, because as a game and as a end result I don’t think it deserves any of that. So really, I can’t be satisfied, or even content with the end result; entertained to a certain extent… well, It’ll have to do, since this is all the Tales I’m getting till the next one comes.