Category Archives: Thought Food

Tales of Symphonia Text Review and Story Breakdown: Introduction

With the PS3 re-release of this classic RPG on its way in just a couple days, I figured I’d post my satirical review of the story while it’s relevant! One or two updates per week until I’m done with them.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I wrote this script a few years back when replaying Tales of Symphonia, meaning to turn it into a lengthy video review. My heart wasn’t in it when I tried recording, though, because I’m not versed in the language of cinema and video.

That said, no reason to let it go to waste. I may not love making video reviews, but I do love Tales of Symphonia. You’ll just have to use your imagination and memory at some points where clips would have been. =P

My script is incredibly long because the game is incredibly long, so here are the tl;dr takeaways if you want to read something specific:

Part 1: Beginning – Magnius at Palmacosta

  • 1-1: Colette is written unbelievably inconsistently from the first five minutes
  • 1-2: Lloyd gets verbal smackdowns all the time early on and has a chip on his shoulder
  • 1-3: Tales of Symphonia starts a lot like Secret of Mana; also, dat Dragon Quest VII hero design
  • 1-4: Lloyd “stop apologizing, you dork!” Irving actually apologizes more than Colette
  • 1-5: What’s so weird about wings? Foreshadowing?
  • 1-6: The first big heroic deed in Palmacosta raises the classical problem of evil, which secretly raises the classical Münchhausen Trilemma and Cartesian doubt and Humean skepticism and many other things; the game dismisses this pretty quickly, but I don’t

Part 2: Saving Palmacosta – Defeating Kvar

  • 2-7: Lots of standing around during Magnius’ monologue when taking action would have helped
  • 2-8: Lloyd “you’re not allowed to apologize any more” Irving has still apologized more than Colette by the time of the second scene (is this just a translation thing?); also, Noishe is a Pokémon
  • 2-9: Raine “Sage” and “Genius” “Sage” can’t interpret the Book of Regeneration correctly but Colette can
  • 2-10: There is no part 2-10
  • 2-11: Dwarven Vow #11 is secretly the game’s most brilliant foreshadowing; also, turning into an angel seems like a positive
  • 2-12: Only Colette and Sheena are called clumsy but actually the whole party is; in fact, Lloyd even goofs up getting revenge on the guy who killed his mother

Part 3: Post-Kvar Fallout – Tower of Salvation Preparation

  • 3-13: The party is 100% sure that the angel transformation is bad and can be reversed, but neither is necessarily true
  • 3-14: Sheena needs an outfit change if she wants people to assume she’s pure and the Tower of Mana could theoretically have been skipped
  • 3-15: Turning into an angel finally seems negative when Colette loses her voice; meanwhile, Lloyd doesn’t understand that food is important
  • 3-16: Lloyd and Colette aren’t yet shown as heroes, but that makes them heroes all the more
  • 3-17: Colette and death in fiction in general hinge on character appreciation

Part 4: Tower of Salvation – Meltokio Sewers

  • 4-18: Dracula’s got the score on Colette and the entire plot up to this point
  • 4-19: Seven irrefutable proofs that Noishe must be a Pokémon (and the Renegades are bigger bunglers than Team Rocket)
  • 4-20: Girls with red hair are stellar, guys who wear pink are awesome, and Zelos is amazing; also, hints of Lloyd+Sheena (deredere), Colette+Zelos (tsundere), and Genis+Presea (ordinary crush)
  • 4-21: I can’t believe it’s not midi-chlorians and speciesism!
  • 4-22: Zelos is instantly as clumsy as everyone else except Presea and even Symphonia can’t save sewers

Part 5: Meltokio – Rescuing Colette

  • 5-23: Colette/Zelos OTP yo (no, really, they’re eerily parallel characters and honest only with each other)
  • 5-24: Sheena hates fun, Lloyd is tired of human nature, and Presea and Regal are thematically redundant story-wise
  • 5-25: Sheena’s character moves forward in Mizuho, but Rodyle sets up an amazing tee ball for Colette’s character and then nothing happens with it; also, those terrible Regal lines

The Fairy of Pirates and Purchases

With the recent revelation/rumor/report that hackers have made progress at cracking Nintendo’s 3DS, online debate begins anew over region locking and piracy. I’ll get the region lock question out of the way: I follow @EndRegionLock on Twitter. Enough said. (My account is here.)

Now we can concentrate on piracy. I won’t comment on the morality issue; in the early 2000s I enjoyed debating philosophy online, but in three years I don’t recall changing anyone’s mind or anyone changing mine. It was great fun, but “multiplayer” philosophy doesn’t accomplish anything “single-player” can’t, so no ethics discussion. This talk is about numbers.

In Nintendo’s seminal SNES classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, throwing enough Rupees into a certain pond draws out Venus, a fairy who offers Link a choice of holding 5 more bombs (at least until the final upgrade) or 5 more arrows.

I’ve slowly been making a game in what spare time I have. Aside from the time investment, I’ve spent about $1023 on software tools and designing characters—pennies to a big publisher, certainly, but almost a full month’s after-tax, after-rent pay for me. Let’s say five years have passed, it’s the day before I launch my game, and I’m transported to Hyrule to meet with Venus. You know where this blog post is going based on its title, right? I believe you do! So click if it sounds interesting.

The Gauntlet Gift of Always-Full Health

Every gamer recognizes the healing room signal: a showdown awaits. No excuses, only battle. What if every room heals the characters? Despite their many differences, Xenoblade and Ys feature automatic health regeneration anywhere in the world, shaping their every enemy. When developers expect that a player will generally be at about 40% HP, they’re more likely to design enemies who can be defeated by characters at about 40% HP. Guess how this works when a player will generally be at 100%!

When heroes always have their full health, villains always use their full strength. Keeping players’ heroes in optimal condition is like throwing down a gauntlet: it announces that everything, everywhere, knows how to kill them and will cut loose trying.

Gameplay vs. Story: The Catch-22 of Permanent Missables

If villains didn’t destroy cities, half the universe’s game heroes would sit on their sorry bums. We’d have no Mario, no Link, and not even Cloud. He helped Tifa and company for the money at first, but even a selfish motive required bad guys to battle; no one would have paid him otherwise.

I had this topic in mind well before Xenoblade, but its leaping cornucopia of sidequests demands that I write about it sooner than later. Xenoblade pushes incentive to thwart an imminent threat and pushes freedom to devote ages to exploring an expansive world—and that means it takes on the catch-22 challenge. The greater the major story events, the tougher the justification of minor events.

If a girl asks the party to collect honeybees and afterward her town is set on fire by dragons and run over by tanks, anyone will have trouble suspending disbelief that she still cares about those honeybees, owns amazing rewards to heap into players’ hands, and holds enough altruism in her heart to dish out those treasures instead of selling them off to help the reconstruction efforts. Permanent missables can have powerful story-based reasons for existing; it requires no suspension of disbelief that this same girl’s quest could only be fulfilled before her town’s untimely demise. Conversely, an experienced player who finds no hint of sidequests in a new town will be immediately alerted that it’s a worthless and doomed location doomed; the solution is not to cut the girl from the game’s final draft.

Many players hate permanent missables and feel cheated by them. Fair enough, but the point of this blog will never be to spread negativity. We should learn from them and the designer’s dilemma: an important NPC fated to die can’t issue a sidequest without introducing permanent missables; if no important NPCs die, the story loses its sense of danger; if only nameless NPCs issue sidequests, the story risks taking on a frivolous feel; if a game has no sidequests, it becomes linear. The only question for game developers, game designers, and even players is which they consider the lesser evil. From my time with Xenoblade so far, it sides with throwing away the danger; no matter how trumped-up the threat level of the villains, there’s always time to find a missing animal or fix a broken watch. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask had a similar feel; because Link could press an in-universe reset button, no one questioned whether he would eventually prevail.

A game without permanent missables isn’t better for being designed that way, nor is it worse; it simply chose its path and left the player to decide whether to follow.

Dedicated Video Game Music Targets the Driver’s Seat

The phrase “video game music” means something to most people—and something different from the phrase “movie music,” for example. The question is what it means and why. The skeptic might say there’s no such thing as video game music, only music that happens to be in video games, but even if that was true, it wouldn’t change the way people think and feel. This is a matter of word association, but also prototype theory and a pinch of Plato’s Theory of Forms.

The question is what the term brings to mind and why. In order to say “Yes, Virginia, there is video game music,” games must have carved out their own musical genre with unique characteristics.

I chose a sampling of twelve pieces of game music with these criteria:

* I consider the theme excellent in its own right.
* No 8-bit music. While chiptunes are a recognizable invention of the industry, there must be more to video game music than its instrumentation.
* No more than four well-known themes. I want most listeners to be unfamiliar with at least a few compositions so that they won’t already have mental associations with gameplay and can judge on their own merits whether the tunes sound like “video game music.” Only four pieces come from franchises that have sold five million or more copies.

First up is a trio of intro music. We begin with the Monster Hunter Main Theme and I can’t imagine any better illustration of what doesn’t come to my mind when I think of video game music. The gradual build and drawn-out notes remind me of the majesty of Jurassic Park or the grand scale of Star Wars. It reminds me of something that makes me stare in awe, not jump in and participate.

Wild Arms delivers an amazing intro scene on animation alone, but runs stronger still with Into the Wilderness backing it up. Inspired and classic music. Specific to video games? Not a bit. Unlike the Monster Hunter theme, this theme does make me want to pick up a controller and start killing enemies, but this could have been seamlessly slotted into any Western movie.

After four games stuck in Japan, Sakura Wars V made it overseas in the seventeenth hour. It’s apparent within ten seconds of its opening theme, Warriors of the Earth, that we’re in for a big band jazz piece. Sakura Wars has always drawn from all music genres even from an in-universe perspective, so this isn’t the series to turn to for dedicated game music.

Keep the rhythm and click here!