Tales of Symphonia: Disgrace.

I find this game to be simply Horrid, and I state my reasons why. There is no free roaming map system. No battle-arte style switch, the party system gives the feel of inadequacy, and constantly switches. The main character is the most pathetic in the Tales of series. This game is no where near the level of it's predecessor. I didn't expect dawn of the new world to be as good as, or even better than the original. However, due to the minor/major changes they've made I didn't anticipate it being this deplorable. This game is an abomination as a supposedly "direct sequel" to the original. I can't finish the game, because I'm too frustrated with it. How dare they even think about releasing this game. This game lacks the depth of the original as well as the quality. I would rather have a linear battle system that I can do more with, than a free-run with only two main characters; given the rest of my party is contingent upon that moment in the story. Sure you get the other characters, but only as the story unfolds toward the end. The monster system is absolutely horrid. I don't want to form a pact with monsters, with them not being able to properly do what I want in battle. Monsters are limited in battle, so it gives the feel that they will just do whatever they want without any guidance, even if you tell them what to do. There is a disconnect I feel with this game. The creators failed to act upon why so many people fell in love with the original. I thought to myself, "This is not Tales of Symphonia, this is a disgrace." I look foward to the release of Tales of Graces f. I pray it will be the best one to date.

If it would have been a stand alone game with no relation whatsoever to Symphonia's cast, I would've liked it better. It did soil Symphonia's name. You might as well finish it though. It gives the characters of the 1st game a decent ending. And if you don't like the game you REALLY want the bad ending. Made me feel so much better. If you haven't seen it go look it up on youtube. But yeah,

WARNING, SPOILERS INCLUDED AND I'M NOT SURE HOW TO PUT SPOILER THINGS!
*Terrible main characters
Emil just randomly decides to kill Lloyd. Sure he thinks that Lloyd kills his parents in Palmacosta. But killing somebody is a big deal. And Emil just isn't a realistic character what so ever.
Emil was also a complete rip off of Luke fon Fabre from Abyss. At the end of the game, Emil ends up fighting Ratatosk in a one on one battle to find out which one is the "true Emil" Sound familiar Abyss fans?

Marta was just annoying with major mood swings that were just obnoxious many times throughout.

Although Aster, Richter, Tenebrae, and Decus were all great characters in my opinion.

*Lack of world map
I don't know about anyone else, but I HATE point and click maps. It's a gorram RPG so just walk around!

*Terrible story
Let's Kill Lloyd! Oh my god! Lloyd's friends all like him. Maybe he's not so bad. Lloyd, why did you kill me parents. That wasn't me retard Oh, sorry about the mix-up. Let's be friends and stop Richter! Deal! pretty much how it went without giving out to many spoilers.

*Battle System
Battle system was actually kind of cool. I also wouldn't of minded being forced to train monsters if I had at least a full party of 4 people so I didn't have to use them if I didn't have to. Nope. To much to ask.

*Level limit cap
Seriously. WTF. Lloyd and everyone else can't level up past level 50. Making them, virtually useless. Once again, forcing you to use monsters that most of the time suck. Royally. I play Tales for stories not Pokemon.

*I do agree with you on many points. And Corruption, what points do you disagree with?

*Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New Fail!

quote The Masterman

*Terrible main characters
Emil just randomly decides to kill Lloyd. Sure he thinks that Lloyd kills his parents in Palmacosta. But killing somebody is a big deal.

No, he doesn't 'just decide' to kill Lloyd. Lloyd killed his parents, and Emil was resigned to that fact until the events in the cave where he SAW Lloyd again after he'd gained the equivalent of super powers, and realized that revenge is a viable option for him.

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And Emil just isn't a realistic character what so ever.

Right. Why don't you explain this one, because I'm curious how Emil isn't realistic compared to, for instance, Luke, who has the power to de-atomize entire cities.

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Emil was also a complete rip off of Luke fon Fabre from Abyss. At the end of the game, Emil ends up fighting Ratatosk in a one on one battle to find out which one is the "true Emil" Sound familiar Abyss fans?

Are you sure you played the game? At this point, Emil and Ratatosk know who's who and what's what. The battle between the two of them was Emil fighting to convince Ratatosk not to screw over the world.

Abyss is my favorite game in the series, but the parallels between Luke and Emil are very loose ones and personally, I think you're grasping at straws.

Luke and Asch were two separate, completely physical beings, and Luke's character development focused on the identity crisis that that involves, and in becoming his own person eventually.

Emil and Ratatosk were not two completely separate beings - just two separate personalities of the same being: Ratatosk. Emil's story was focused not on his identity crisis (for the most part), but rather on him manning the *bleep* up and coming to terms with who he is. It was about him maturing, but in a different way than Luke.

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Marta was just annoying with major mood swings that were just obnoxious many times throughout.

Same boat as Emil. Marta had a lot of maturing to do. That was the whole point of her character: the lovestruck teen with her own delusions of what a man should be and how the world works maturing into somebody who could see Emil not what she thought Emil should be (re: Ratatosk) and could make decisions for the good of the world and not just herself.

Marta is obnoxious because her character flaws are ones that most people look down on.

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*Lack of world map
I don't know about anyone else, but I HATE point and click maps. It's a gorram RPG so just walk around!

I can't really argue this, since it's just an opinion, but I frankly didn't care about the lack of over world exploration. There was plenty to do in the new dungeons and locations that you could visit that it hardly mattered.

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*Terrible story
Let's Kill Lloyd! Oh my god! Lloyd's friends all like him. Maybe he's not so bad. Lloyd, why did you kill me parents. That wasn't me retard Oh, sorry about the mix-up. Let's be friends and stop Richter! Deal! pretty much how it went without giving out to many spoilers.

I understand why you dislike the story; you dislike the main characters and the story was driven by those characters and their own growth and development, so it's only natural, but that is a horribly bad summary of the main story. ._.

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*Battle System
Battle system was actually kind of cool. I also wouldn't of minded being forced to train monsters if I had at least a full party of 4 people so I didn't have to use them if I didn't have to. Nope. To much to ask.

I seriously don't understand why people complain about this. With monsters at your disposal, you have over one hundred different possibilities for monsters with stats and abilities. Don't like what you have? Switch it out for another. They're not hard to level up at all; they generally level up faster than Emil and Marta at the lower tiers until they catch up to Emil and Marta's levels again.

How do they make battles any easier or more difficult than what they would be if you were using cast members instead? They don't. You control the difficulty based on what monsters you use and what level they're at.

How do they affect the story? They don't. It isn't as though having monsters in the party makes the original cast disappear - they're still around for story scenes.

So what's the deal?

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*Level limit cap
Seriously. WTF. Lloyd and everyone else can't level up past level 50. Making them, virtually useless. Once again, forcing you to use monsters that most of the time suck. Royally. I play Tales for stories not Pokemon.

Oh really? You plays Tales for the story? Tell me, what does that have to do with level capping the old Symphonia characters? What's that? Nothing? Huh. What do you know.

The level cap was stupid, I'll agree, but I didn't really mind the original cast not being a huge part of the story - because I'd already played their story. That was what Symphonia was about. Yes, I care about them, but they don't need to be in the game any further beyond what they were: investigating the influx of monsters and looking for Lloyd, and - once they learned about the real problems facing the world from Emil and Marta, they helped out where they could.

Again, this is not the story of the original cast. If you want that, go play Symphonia. This game is Emil and Marta's story. It's not the greatest thing ever - and what'd you expect? It's a sequel game and not an actual mothership game - but it's not made out of fail like you and Gai seem to think.

Out of all the Tales Games I have played, the order in which I enjoyed them the most would be like this:

Tales of the Abyss > Tales of Symphonia > Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World > Tales of Vesperia.

I actually enjoyed the first three a lot. A LOT. Great storyline, but Vesperia was the most disappointing Tales game I have ever played.

But that's another story for another time. Maybe for later.

It is true that ToS II had very typical characters and even a bit cliched at first. But it didn't stay like that for forever. At first I hated Emil for being so... Clumsy, I think would be the right world? And Marta was just too "kawaii", even for me. But they really turned to be something else. In the end not only do they do the oh-so-typical world saving, but also Emil has to fight himself, almost literally. Like Kratos pointed out, they really had some maturing to do and they turned out to be great characters. They are absolutely two of my favorite characters in games of all time.

The storyline of ToS II is really interesting. It has an storyline of its own, but it partially complements ToS'. I played ToS before the first one and I did expect more of a continuation to ToS storyline, but in the end it had it's own storyline and it wasn't bad at all. Again, cliched a bit, but things make sense, and I didn't find any plotholes anywhere. I would go as far as saying that it was pure and beautiful. Simplistic to certain extent, even, and even predictable at some points. But enjoyable.

I found the lack of world exploration bad at first. But I was thankful after I realized I didn't have to do lots of back-and-forth by land... Really didn't mind that aspect.

Now why did I mention ToV at all? Because Vesperia had a great storyline, but it lacked something essential that previous Tales games had: Character development. For me, TotA and ToS II are the best games when it comes to character development (TotA had a better storyline in general, but that's another story for another time). ToS II really had it complete. ToS II, in terms of storyline, is worse than ToV, but ToS II did it so good, I didn't care about it's predictive storyline at all.

All in all, character development is a MUST for me. People claim ToV is one of the best Tales they have ever played, but I was disappointed because it didn't have the wonderful character development TotA and ToS II had.

quote Kratos

Wouldn't want to take credit for someone else's thought.

Great minds think equal.

At first, I was really mad when I read this, because I followed the link from when I looked up Tales. Thought you were making fun of the first one. But Luke and Emil are the opposite.
Look:

Luke: Douche->Emo->Normal Person
Emil: Normal Person->Emo->Douchy Emo

The only awesomeness to be extracted from the entire thing is Tenebrae and Richter.