Game Review: Tales of Symphonia Remastered (Xbox Series X)

In all my years of playing video games, I have only played two entries in Bandai Namco’s long running and insanely popular ‘Tales’ series of RPG games. Those two games are Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Symphonia. The latter I first played in 2005 on the GameCube, and I never finished it.

Fast forward twenty years, and I was looking for an RPG to start playing. I had that itch, and it was almost scratched by one of the Final Fantasy games, when I came across Tales of Symphonia Remastered, a game I did not know existed. A flood of nostalgia hit me, and it was decided, this would be the RPG I would play, and this time I would finish it (I have as of April 2025). It was nostalgic heaven, better than I remembered, but with notable flaws that stops it being one of the RPG ‘greats’.

Released in 2004 as the seventh main instalment of the Tales series on the Nintendo GameCube, Tales of Symphonia’s story is not an easy one to sum up.

It’s a story about regeneration and sacrifice, the two go hand in hand, and always have within the world of Sylvarant. A world filled with hate, a world balancing on the precipice of destruction, and a world beholden to ancient prophecies surrounding the ‘Chosen One’.

This is a person sent on a journey to ‘regenerate’ the world and in doing so, ascend to angel status. The new ‘Chosen One’ is a young girl named Colette, and her journey is just beginning, aided by a party of characters, none more important than a young man named Lloyd. He wants to help his friend, but can’t stand seeing the injustices of the world, something that constantly gets him in trouble.

Trouble that only grows and grows as this story transforms bit by bit into something truly epic, and incredibly dark. The ‘Tales’ series has never shied away from dealing with deep and complex stories, and Tales of Symphonia is one of the more famous ones for its depth. Even if there are one to many threads and it does start to drag on in the latter stages.

Still, Tales of Symphonia has an excellent story, and a major part of that is its excellent characters. They’re all so likable and have their own distinct personalities even those that come much later in the game. They’ll make you smile, make you laugh, make you grimace, and make you cry. It’s not hyperbole to say that Tales of Symphonia has some of the best characters in many RPGs full stop. We love you Zelos!

Sure, some of the voice acting is a bit cheesy, and it’s sometimes hard to take a dark scene seriously when such colourful and wacky characters are involved, but a lot of this just adds to the charm.

Gameplay is also excellent, and the action follows the series’ standard of real-time combat. Four party members battling it out with enemies, balanced by their abilities (melee, spell casting, healing, etc) and utilising combos to rack up damage. It’s very simple, on the surface, but when combined with different techs, ‘ex-skills’ (a form of upgrades that characters can equip), strategies, items, and more, combat has a surprising amount of depth.

Not only that, but players can also choose to play as any character in the party, which helps vary things up. Important as combat can be really repetitive, especially when it comes to ‘random’ encounters while exploring the overworld.

That side of things sticks to the classic RPG side of things, albeit with far less to do, and far less to see. There are huge expanses of nothing, and while this is less of a problem later in the game when flying is an option, the early stages just results in constant enemy encounter after enemy encounter as you make your way to the only town in sight. The overworld is rarely fun to spend much time in, and the camera has a mind of its own.

It’s surprising that this sort of thing wasn’t looked at, considering this is a remaster, but it’s far from the only thing that could have been improved, but wasn’t. In fact, aside from some obvious visual and technical improvements, this is a barebones remastering. Its presentation is almost identical to how it was when first released. Which means irritating aspects like its strict save system and lack of quest tracking still exist. The former is forgivable enough even if the occasional autosave would have been nice, but the latter is unacceptable.

There are times in the game where you simply won’t know where to go next, and the ‘synopsis’ entries which serve as a guide are mostly useless. Couple this with the fact that there are tons of things you can miss, including side-quests, and it’s head-scratching that there wasn’t an attempt to make the game more user friendly. It’s a lazy remaster, that’s what it is.

Still, saying all of that, I love it. I love the story, I love the characters, I love the gameplay and combat, I love the world, and I love the fact that it was as satisfying to play now as it was 20 years ago.