Tales of Symphonia 2: The dawn of the new world

[Prpl_Mage]

I went christmas shopping soem days ago and saw this. I didn't even knew it was released in Japan!
Some time back when it was announced as "Knights of ratatosk" it was all the rage and stuff. But I didn't even know they changed the title.
Namco Bandai went silent with it.

So I bought it. Invited some friends and we were all hyped. We pretty much nerded the last game to death with low level runs, getting all titles and so on.

So Lloyd is mad, some cool cut scenes and our hopes are up. And then, and then : the hero is a complete pansy.
His voiceacting and the character himself ruins a good part of the game.

And for some reason your party members near the start are monsters that you can tame(make pacts). And monsters can't be controlled by players. Only character may.
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Without spoiling too much for the people who want to buy this and give it a shot. Here comes the reasons why this game is nowhere near as good as the last.

Overlimit:
So far. It's gone. Haven't seen it and it haven't been mentioned. It was a great feature.

Ex skills:
Gone as well, this I can buy because of certain events in the last game. This tiem around you have something that reminds me of FFIX and Paper mario 2. You have SP, and with the SP you can equip abilities such as Backdash, Ukeimi hp boost, VS bird ect. Kinda neat but not as fun as the EX gems.

Free moving in combat:
Actually a great feature. By holding down the Z button you can run as you steer the controlpad instead of running forward and backwards. But it kinda destroys the feeling at the same time. The bad part is that all attacks will count as critical.

Unision attack (and elemental grids):
Not working as they should...
In this game you only need to cross over half the unision attack bar to use it. You don't need to hit with anything. Pressing the button makes it start. Now comes the tricky part.
The ToS2 battles have some kind of "Elemental grid" system. Basically - there is one big round pearl and 5(maybe 6) smaller ones beside it. It's all a part of the interface. The primary(big) element is based on the location. A dark cave will have Dark as element when the battle begins.
Using Artes(magick) with elemental properties will add that element to one of the minor. If you get 3 minors of one type - the major element changes into that.
So. what does that have to do with unision attacks? Everything.
Characters have elements in this game probably since the monsters you tame have them. Either way. When you activate an unision attack - only the characters/monsters with the matching elements will attend beside yourself. So if the primary is Dark. All characters and monsters with the dark element will participate.

Elemental favors:
It replaced overlimit I guess...
Basically. If your character or enemy have the Water element and the primary element of the battle is water - you'll regenerate a % of your hp over time, you apparently get stronger and all Artes with the water element gets stronger. Yeah - not even half as fun...

Colldown???!:
The prequel of this game was speedy and mad. When you weren't doing anything - you could attack. This time around they've added some kind of timer that ticks down after the last attack in a combo. It's kinda 1-2 secs or something but still. You cannot follow up a combo after a combo. But you can run away and guard with the character. Pressing the attack button again does nothing. So you gotta wait.

Chapters:
The game is divided into chapters and each chapter gives new stuff kinda. So apparently - missions from chapter 2 is not available in chapter 3. Also, the world map is gone and it's now replaced with choosing your destination.

Lack of cooking skills:
The old "spend groceries after a battle to regain hp and tp" is gone. I'll explain what this is for later.

Monster taming:
FFTA had some monster taming. But this time around. The game actually expects you to get and train monsters. You start of alone against monsters that like to deal tons of damage to you. So you need some proper meatshields.
Also. Cooking is now used to increase the stats of your monsters once per lvl. It can only be done at a Katz guild though.
The monsters easily gets better than your characters since you can boost their growth and train them easily.

But it doesn't stop there. You can evolve the monsters when they reach a certain lvl or a special accessory is equiped. This resets them to lvl 1 but they get some of the stats they had earlier as well as all abilities and Artes.


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Anyone else bought this game? Am I too stuck in the old days or something?
Discuss.

[HackersTotalMassLaser]

I bought this like a year ago. And it was announced. I think you were just hiding in your rock then.

It dissapointed me to some point but I still liked it.

I thought it to be way too short and linear.

[Grandy]

Only two character you can change the equip/level up =/= my idea of an RPG

[Apex]

I've been meaning to play it, but I for the life of me can't find my Gamecube memory card with a thrice completed save of the Original, for all those bonus contents or whatever. That and I haven't had free time.

[YuriLowell]

The game was average at best, in my opinion. It does what it can as a sequel, but beyond that, it's nothing special. I like Tales of Vesperia way better (and it came out a few months before ToS2).

[SaiKar]

There was a lot about the game I didn't like. The monster taming was sort of weird, unnecessary, and randomly failed a lot. And since it was a sequel game, any time you'd encounter one of the original ToS characters you'd throw out one of your monsters immediately. By the end when I had access to all of the ToS chararacters I just made a party with them plus the two new ones and forgot the monsters entirely.

It did piss me off that [spoiler]you thought that some of the original ToS characters had become evil, like Lloyd, but it turns out that they all had good motives in the end. I was really hoping that they DIDN'T have good motives in the end and the game would be about playing "the other side" as antagonists to the super lovey-dovey lovefest that was ToS, but it boiled down to that anyway. Even with Richter, who was trying to let demons invade the world. He was trying to let demons invade the world to save his best friend. OR SOMETHING. God, I don't know. That was a bit hard to swallow.[/spoiler]

Here's the thing though. I really REALLY liked the Emil / Marta plotline. It was a completely different take at a love story than I have ever seen. [spoiler]It basically boils down to Emil having a split personality that we can call Emil, his normal, extremely weak and timid self, and Ratatosk, a version of himself enpowered by the god of monsters that can actually fight and is far more direct and brash. Emil saves Marta from a bad fate at the beginning of the game and she starts following him around like a lovesick puppy that goes COMPLETELY over the top with her affections, but she only likes the Emil personality. This really pisses off the Ratatosk personality since he's doing all the actual fighting and hard work and the Emil personality is confused and doesn't even remember the incident.[/spoiler] There's a lot of twists and turns it that I found extremely well-written from a human perspective, as if the characters were real people that were acting like real people would, albeit somewhat screwed up real people. So, by the end I really couldn't care much about the game's feeble attempt at a sequel-based storyline and just wanted to see how the Emil / Marta thing could possibly at all end well with given all the weird crap that was cropping up, and I have to say that I am pretty satisfied with the ending.

I have no real desire to replay the game though. Story was okay but the monster taming thing was kind of eh and I can't be bothered to do it all again.

[Shady Ultima]

I didn't even try it, after being interested initially, it sounded like they dropped the ball on how great the first one was.

Tales of the Abyss was great, and I heard Tales of Vesperia was good, so I'll probably pick of ToV before this one.

[YuriLowell]

I personally think ToV is the best of the series. Of course, some people don't think so, but I think the main character, Yuri, is a very awesome character, better than any previous hero.

[HackersTotalMassLaser]

I rentd Tales of Vesperia. I didn't like it enough to rent again, I got like halfway into it or something. All I saw in the game was Judith's bouncing boobs. And I am not the perverted kind of player. So that's saying something.

Here's the thing though. I really REALLY liked the Emil / Marta plotline. It was a completely different take at a love story than I have ever seen.

Really? I thought it was a bit redundant. There was no resolution or elevation  to their "relationship" til the end. It was always "OMG Emil you are so awesome" and "Geeh is she like this all the time." As for the actual aspect of the conflict, with the different sides and all, that's seen in a lot of animes and manga.

But yeah twists it had, were good enough for me to keep going. Also, villains, SUCKED. Besides Richter, but he really pushed it.

Anyways, I need to sell the game to gamestop. They are still giving 17 bucks for it.