Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game’s About
The Wii hasn’t been graced with a prestigious RPG title thus far. Finally, Namco Bandai has come to Wii-owning RPG fans rescue. Garnering great success on the GameCube, Namco Bandai has, finally, released a sequel to Tales of Symphonia for Wii. Introducing an all new cast of characters, along with the main characters of Symphonia, Tales of Symphonia 2: Dawn of the New World combines a bit of old with new and creates an RPG for Wii owners to engage themselves in.
Lloyd is now a hero to the entire world. Now revered as Lloyd the Great, whatever he says gets done. However, something isn’t quite right. Lloyd is performing actions that even his most loyal followers are having doubts about. Traveling the world in search of Centurion cores, Lloyd hopes to stop the resurrection of Ratatosk — the lord of the monsters. While it may seem like a goodwill journey, you soon discover that the Centurions are needed to keep the balance of nature intact. It’s now up to young boy named Emil, his faithful Centurion, and a young lady named Marta — whom happens to be the holder of Ratatosk’s core — to seek out Lloyd and stop him from collecting the cores and to seek revenge against him for the deaths of their parents. Has Lloyd let fame corrupt his judgment? Or are other factors in play here?
What’s Hot
The Tales series has always featured one of the most engaging and fun battle systems when it comes to the RPG genre. Dawn of the New World is no different. Using essentially the same battle system as Symphonia and the recently released Vesperia, Dawn of the New World has you controlling your character in a circle battlefield. You can free run in this area to evade attacks, make adjustments to attack an enemy from the back, and so on. To defeat the many monsters and enemies found within the game you have the basic attack, artes — the equivalent of magic — and the newly introduced Union Assault. Union Assaults unite the members of your team during a battle to perform one major attack to an enemy. This adds a little more depth to the battle system and gives you a small edge over tougher opponents with this trump card. As you battle, you fill up a gauge and once it passes the halfway mark, you are clear to unleash your fury. Of course, the more you battle the more you level up and learn new skills, artes, etc.
Tales also expands on the basic premise of monster gathering. Unlike previous Tales entries, monster gathering actually holds a purpose in Dawn of the New World. During battles, if certain conditions are satisfied, you’ll be prompted to acquire the defeated beast. The more monsters you acquire and have join your side, the more powerful you can make yourself and other party members become. The monsters also have purpose when it comes to battle. If you don’t have a human character to help you participate in battle, you can assign a monster a battle slot.
To help level you up and gain new abilities, monsters, artes, etc, you can make your way through a wide variety of sidequests. Every town you enter will have a guild offering certain quests to help keep you busy. These will vary from delivering herbs to a sick monster, guarding a town, to defeating a wave of invading monsters. Each quest will reward with a new weapon or item to help you on the main quest.
Unlike most Wii titles, Tales of Symphonia 2: Dawn of the New World has lots of voice-acting. With nearly every main sequence, skit, and key segment featuring voice-acting, it’s refreshing to hear voices in a Wii game for once. The voice-overs are well done and convey the feelings of the said characters rather nicely.
What’s Not
Now it’s time for the bad news. There’s no denying that Tales of Symphonia was one of the best looking GameCube games last-gen. Sadly, Dawn of the New World is far from being one of the best looking Wii games. Instead of using the same cel-shaded graphical styling as the Cube incarnation, Namco Bandai instead used a completely different look. While it stays true to the original, it doesn’t have the same appeal. The look of Dawn of the New World is very reminiscent of the PS2 Tales titles. New World could have easily been done on the Cube and PS2. While some of the environments do look nice, the overall presentation is very old. The lighting, character reactions, and effects are recycled from last-generation titles.
Even for a Tales title, this game is way too linear. Gone is the overworld exploration. Instead of conveying that epic feel of traveling across the world, New World gives you command of a list of locations that instantly take you that location. That’s all it takes to move forward. You visit one town, defeat some enemies, get told you need to visit town A, exit to the world map, choose town A from the list, and bang you’re there. Sure, you can stay in the previous town or even travel to towns you already visited before moving forward, but you’ll find that you can’t really do much of anything while there. Ultimately, you must move forward to progress in any fashion.
Every RPG has the annoying main character that either doesn’t want to go on the journey and gets dragged into it or some jock that happens to save the world after he recovers from amnesia. I’d gladly take those options over Emil. Emil is a whiny, crying, over apologetic, little wuss. The only time he stands up for himself and becomes a total badass is when he engages in battle. Once in battle, Emil gets a deeper darker voice and a more “I’m the f***ing man” attitude. Had he carried that attitude throughout the entire game, he would be a worthwhile character to care about.
Final Word
Tales of Symphonia 2: Dawn of the New World has a great battle system, voice-acting, and nice new elements like the monster gathering. Unfortunately, the linear story, dull characters, lack of exploration and mediocre graphics hold back the experience. There’s no reason to make a sequel to a hit RPG with such a half-assed effort. I’m not sure you can even classify this title as a true sequel and not just a spin off from the main storyline. If you are waiting for a true Tales experience, do yourself a favor and get Tales of Vesperia. If you don’t have a 360 and this is your only option, then you’ll find an average RPG with some strengths that get overshadowed by stronger flaws.
