Tales of Symphonia was how I spent the summer of 2004, and, along with Dragon Warrior VII and Persona 3: FES, is one of the very few games I've spent more than 100 hours playing. I've known for a long time that a sequel to Symphonia would eventually be hitting the Wii--but I must've not been paying attention, because Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World comes out next friggin' month. While I figure out how to take a leave of absence from graduate school, wet your whistle (or any woodwind instruments you have lying around the house) with the official English trailer:
I'll say right now that the Tales games have a pretty low batting average; on the whole, about a third of them are worth playing--and out of that third, only a few are truly excellent. I've actually been a bit disappointed with the series since Symphonia; Legendia--despite having what may be the world's greatest RPG soundtrack--was a major step down, and Abyss was fun until my experience was throttled by constant, inescapable load times. I'm still not certain if DotNW will suck on toast, but at least one thing is clear: I dig Namco's approach.
Yes, they're being cheap: DotNW is made partially out of materials recycled from Symphonia. But this eco-friendly approach makes the RPG--a genre known for its depth of content and 50+ hours of play per game--much less of an overwhelming financial risk. Persona 4 is taking the same approach, and (sadly) may be the last PS2 game of note released in this country. It's always been my belief that developers could continue making RPGs with the tech of last-gen, and fans of the genre really wouldn't care; maybe this idealistic dream would have been possible if the backwards compatibility of the 360 and the PS3 wasn't such a mess. But as things stand, the hefty price of now-gen entry means that quite a few franchises aren't going to come back. Case in point: I'd love to see another entry in the underappreciated Shadow Hearts series, but the developer is now working on projects backed by deep, deep coffers, like Lost Odyssey.
I never thought I'd be congratulating a company on their shameless frugality, but it looks like Namco has the right idea--and even Mega Man 9 took advantage of re-used and low-intensity assets to give people the game they've been wanting for over a decade. Can the deliberately old-school (both in tech and design) RPG be far behind? It's been done before, but never out of necessity.
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