Tales of Symphonia Remastered Review

thesixthaxis.com:

‘Remastered’ one of those terms which is fast becoming meaningless, like ‘new and improved’, ‘unprecedented’ or ‘New York Times best seller’. These revamped rereleases have been coming thick and fast for years, and some invariably are better than others — both in terms of the base game and the how big of the facelift it receives on the way to current consoles and machines. Unfortunately, the latest iteration of Tales of Symphonia is remastered in the same way that those uniformly processed ready meals you see at the local supermarket are ‘handmade’.

I came to Tales of Symphonia Remastered as someone who never had the chance to play the original, whether on GameCube or its later PS3 release. It was one of those games I had heard of, but always remained on the periphery. When I heard the remaster was coming to the PS4, I figured it’d be a great chance to fill Lloyd Irving’s boots and regenerate the dying world of Sylverant.

For the uninitiated, Lloyd is on a journey — a FFX-esque pilgrimage with the Chosen, your childhood friend Colette, who is prophesised to be the one who will heal the world and seal away the Desians plaguing mankind. So far, so Final Fantasy X. It’s far from a carbon copy though, as rather than being the embodiment of Sin, the Desians are a race of half-elves who are subjugating and murdering humans, and are doing their best to kill the Chosen and prevent her journey to awaken the goddess Martel. This would seal away the Desians and save the world in the process.

It’s a great story, so it’s a crying shame that the PS4 edition of Tales of Symphonia feels like a PS3 port of a PS2-era game. The more I played it, the more I found my eyes drifting away from the TV and towards my copy of FFX Remastered on the