Wow, NinGurl69 *huggles...way to overhype a game. Dawn of the New World is a good game, but I'm in Chapter 3 (just completed the Iselia Ranch section) and I'm not seeing that it's headed towards "great game" territory. Despite just recently evolving a kickass trio of Manticore; Salamander; and Fenrir monters, I'm just not sold on the monster system. Yes, the things can grow absurdly powerful, but most look (and sound) incredibly lame/generic and all of them take a great amount of work to make good. There's also a very real problem with having 2 monster characters alongside Emil and Marta: you get Game Over when all your human characters die and your monsters can't use items, setting up a very real situation where you get a Game Over even though you still have 2 fighters in the battle. I've come very close to hitting that situation. It's a fun idea (and certainly better done than in the GBA Lufia game, which was the last game I saw to use a similar similar), but it just isn't implemented very well. I'm not thrilled with how you basically have to mess with the elemental affinity of the battlefield (which isn't even possible till after acquiring the first Centurion Core) just to get one halfway decent generic-looking unison attack now, either. I would have prefered instead of this whole convoluted monster system that they would have just let you select one monster at the beginning of the game who would travel with you, level-up, evolve, and fill a 4th slot in your party.
Likewise with the Quest system: the Quests are generally fun (though hard) at first, but like I said I'm in Chapter 3 and I'm already seeing repeats of very generic dungeon crawling missions, and they don't get any more interesting the second time through. They would have done better to have story-based sidequests tied into these Quests.
Then we get to the visuals. Yes, the motion-capture does give some fantastic animation in the cutscenes, but the whole game looks substandard with this very bland color pallete and very soft edges. In other words, it looks just as half-baked as Tales of the Abyss. The voice-acting and music, though, are outstanding. Most of the recasted Symphonia voices even sound good, and there's a lot more nuance in the acting now. And after this game they can't go back to not voicing the skits, because it makes all the difference in the world.
My opinion of the game may change as I get further along, but basically if you loved Symphonia you'll like this game. If you didn't or didn't play Symphonia, this really won't do anything for you. Vesperia, though, looks amazing and from what I've read sports a very interesting main character...though not the most interesting supporting cast.
Topic: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (Read 68493 times)
