It took me a long time to play through this game, and that’s because there wasn’t a whole lot to bring me back to it. It had its charm, and was pretty fun to play, just not really fun enough, and badly lacking in a good story, which is what makes an RPG really addictive, even above its gameplay – though poor gameplay can kill even a good story (see Wild ARMS). A straightforward port of a PS1 game, it really doesn’t hold a candle to its sequel, Tales of Symphonia, which I now want to replay more than ever.
A plucky, simple-minded young hero and his two best friends, a feisty girl and a slightly cowardly scholar, find a crashed spacecraft with a strange dark-skinned girl inside, and get involved in an epic quest to stop her world coming crashing down onto theirs. With the usual flying ships and quests for elemental spirits, it’s very much an archetypal RPG story, so what really needs to bring it to life is its characters. And...well, Meredy is cute and Reid is a good leading character, but...well, they’re all a bit boring, the stabs at injecting romance don’t go anywhere, there’s no real impetus for the characters to do anything and none of the bad guys make any impact at all. This is the real problem, and the reason that having seen the weak ending, I now have little interest in going back to get all the attacks I never bothered to learn or go to the hidden dungeon that can only be reached after you’ve finished the game. Not by any means a bad game, but so unimaginative and lacking in character that its replay value is 0.
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