Good, a little bit of a let down too.
The story goes on about a young boy named Emil from Palmacosta who's life was turned totally upside down when our hero from the first Symphonia game supposedly killed his parents and pretty much majority of the town. Being one of the few to survive he flees to his auntie and uncles home, and they take him in resentfully. They consider him an embarassment to the family and fear he brought in the slew of monsters that have started attacking residential areas. So needless to say our new fearless warrior is actually a scardycat and completely timid around absolutely everyone. Complete with the ever present "I'm sorry" that you can hear from at least one girl character from all the other Tales games. But this time, yes, it's the guy. And the main character at that.
Trying to leave as much story out as possible now. But during the beginning of all this he meets a girl named Marta, who in turn had her mother killed by our heroine from the previous Tales game, Collette. Oh my how the tables have turned this time around! Anyway these two become fast friends and start out trying to track down Lloyd and Collete and basically try to revenge family deaths as well as revive and age old god of monsters, Ratatosk. We'll leave it at that. Go play the game yourselves mooches!
¤ Story ~ Well lets just say there's a lot of it. Amidst a lot of your gameplay you're going to be constantly stopped by numerous cutscenes. This seems to slow down the fact that you want to go into battle flinging your sword. And the telltale other way Namco likes to put story and random conversations between characters is to have the C button option so that your characters pop up in manga style art squares and chat with each other. This has always been fun for me even tho you can't possible walk around anywhere during these clips. But it gives you more of a feeling for the characters and their backgrounds. It makes it... more personal. Yeah.
¤ Gameplay ~ I'm almost disappointed in the gameplay for Tales of Symphonia this time around. It's a very watered down version of all it's predecessors, which were more inclusive and detailed. You don't have the free roam battle map system where you could get random encounters and lvl up that way. It's a straight forward map, which I guess couldn't be so bad if you're the easily lost type or refuse to look at a gaming page like gamefaqs to make sure you're going the right direction.
The battle system is definately watered down too, because it's just lacking all the previous elements that made the orginal superb. First of all, it's really hard I guess to make a more inclusive attacking sequence with the Wiimote and nunchuck. You can just run up and smack the A button repeatedly to perform a 3 hit combo. You use the joystick on the nunchuck and the B button to use your small variety of arts. And when your bottom gauge is passed the half mark or all the way full, you hit the C button to perform a higher arcane attack either alone or with one or 2 of the party members nearby. But that attack always looks the same, even tho up at the top it clearly states the name of the special artes move you just did. That's graphically disappointing to me. There's nothing else to spectacular about the battle system either. The characters are given a limited amount of options about where they should stand in the party or who they should attack. There is no real extensive tweaking of artes.
¤ Graphics ~ Well since most of the game takes places in the same areas as the original a lot of the graphics feel similar. No one really tried to test the Wii's limits on this game. But even with that it still looks good.
Overall it's still a decent game. I probably wouldn't recommend it to someone who hasn't played the first one for the GameCube simply because the story would be a little hard to follow. But then again it has a beginning feel to with the fighting style so it's almost a toss up. I hope anyone else who does play it enjoys it.