I Put This Down: Tales of Symphonia

Mkay so as you all know, I acquired about 20-22 new Gamecube games over the summer. God damn. I haven't even opened all of them yet. I had to develop a strategy in order to quickly play and/or beat all of these games so that I could talk about them here. Typically, I would figure out which games were short, and I tried to blast through them, while allowing myself to spend weeks on longer games, such as Metroid or Wind Waker. Among these longer games was, and still is, one REALLY damn long game. With a typical playthrough occupying at least 80 hours of your life, this next title really had me baffled as far as how I was going to go about playing it quickly. Do I play it every day for a month until it's done? Do I allow myself to take 1000000000 years on it while playing other games in between sessions? Well Ill tell you, what wound up happening was me putting this game down. "Ill play it later" I would tell myself. But days, weeks, maybe a month went by before I finally picked this game up again; this is where our story begins.

Tales of Symphonia

Recently, I've been going around saying "Most of Gamecube's best games came from Dreamcast." It's a hyperbole, not a lie. Tales of Symphonia is a JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) that came out for the Sega Dreamcast maaaaany many years ago. Despite it's age, it has made a pretty remarkable impression on Gamecube and RPG fans alike. There are many notable qualities this game has. From it's adorable graphics, to it's deep story, this game really kicks ass from beginning until...you put it down. Notice I didn't say "end". It's true- I haven't finished this game yet, but I will. Don't worry. The question today is the same as it always is with I Put This Down:
Why did I put it down?  Why did I pick it up again? What do I think of it now?

Why did I put this game down? Well let's see. I suppose the answer is that I simply didn't have time to play this game. Believe it or not, between my band, school, sleep, friends, working out, getting mad chicks, getting beefy, buying Red Bull, and donating large sums of money to charity, I didn't have a spare 80 hours of my awesome life to designate to this game. It is a shame too because I really do enjoy this game. Tales of Symphonia is the first real RPG I've ever played, so the new gaming experience was very exciting. This game is often praised for it's amazing character development, graphics, fighting style, and soundtrack. The dungeons are fun because the 1 item you have that pertains only to dungeon exploration changes with every dungeon, affectively creating as many different puzzles as there are dungeons. These are all claims that I found too awesome to be true while reading about the game, but it turns out that they are, in fact, true. Those were just a few reasons why the game was all the more difficult to pause. Unfortunately, in the end, the amount of fun the game was to me was not enough to keep me going for more than 20 hours at a time. Ultimately, I put this game down.

 

But then I picked it up again! I think I just missed playing it. The thing about Tales of Symphonia is that the story makes you want to play the game. It's like reading a good book - you may not love reading in general, but what the hell, are you just going to put down the damn book without fucking finishing it? You're already 20 damn hours into it you scumbag! Just finish it and learn what happens. The game is fun to play and the ever-growing story counteracts the sometimes repetitive gameplay. Maybe you find yourself pressing the same buttons over and over, but the reason WHY you're pressing those buttons changes, and so does too your feelings towards the repetition. Considering the game has 80 hours to god damn do it, the character development IS really flawless. You got some dudes betraying you, some people dying, some friends destined to become enemies, some unlikely alliances, all while optional cut scenes take the development one step further by providing you with windows into the personal lives of each of your team members. Is the viewing of these scenes essential for the understand of the story? Not at all, but they are a good example of the steps game designers can take in order to ensure that those who may put this game down pick it up again. As you guys know, this isn't a review, so I can't talk about gameplay that much, but I will say that the fighting is fun as hell, as it takes place in real-time akin to Viewtiful Joe or even Super Smash Bros., and navigating the open hub world is very fun and rewarding. When a developers give you a big map, they want you to get lost. They want you to appreciate what they have created, and I do. I so do, Namco.

So what do I think of it now? I love it. In the end, Tales of Symphonia offers an exceptional gaming experience. Nothing is too challenging, nothing is too annoying. Everything is perfect as far as I am concerned. The idea of playing an 80 hour game is daunting to me, as, like I've said, I've never played an RPG before (I know this isn't even the longest RPG out there, dickhead, so don't yell at me), but I anticipate feeling really good when I beat it. It will be rewarding and I look forward to it. I do feel like I will wind up putting it down in increments of 20 or so hours, but that's fine by me. If spending 80 hours on this game is inevitable, then I might as well enjoy every last second of it. Seashells. Forever.

I Put This Down, Then Picked It Up Again

I put this down, then picked it up again
because it's good enough for one more round.
I put this down, then picked it up again
thought it would be better this time around.
I put this down!

Nothing like a Tubthumping reference to start a new line of posts.

Anyway, I Put This Down will be yet another short archetype of posts. Each IPTD post will be a brief discussion of my thoughts of a game that I played for a bit, but didn't finish immediately. The pattern for these games will be the following: I bought it, played it, put it down, forgot about it, picked it up again. The discussion will take place after I pick it up and start playing it again. Who knows what will happen the second time around?

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

The Prince of Persia titles have exhibited a new form of platforming/adventure games ever since their original
conceptualization. In these games, you play as the Prince of Persia himself who has decided that the best way to save Persia from the rule of an evil king is to run around a bit, jump off a few walls, and kill some bad guys. Fair enough. These games are praised for their ability to combine parkour-like skillsets with puzzle-solving, and dungeon-crawling mechanics. In addition to all of the moves that I wish I could do in real-life, the prince also uncovers a dagger whose hilt stores the sands of time. Releasing the sands of time from the dagger reverses the flow of time. This ability can be used during gameplay in a way that is exactly like re-winding an old VHS tape (speaking of old reality...). Pressing R will not only employ the power of the most ridiculous but still awesome backwards WOOSHing sound effects, but will bring the prince back in time for up to about 5 seconds real-time. So that's what we have for us today - a parkour prince and a dagger that can reverse the flow of time.

Of course, I am writing as if I intend to belittle the game - I don't. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time really is a fun game. The controls, outdated as they are, are solid, and although the camera makes me want to die, the ability to reverse the flow of time in order to undo your mistakes is compensation enough. So the 3 big questions are the following:
Why did I put this game down?
Why did I pick it up again?
What do I think of it the second time around?

I did just admit that I thought this game was fun, because I do - I wouldn't lie to you guys. But I put this game down a long, long time ago because I thought it fell into a trap that Mirror's Edge introduced me to, but wound up existing for a long time before that. You see, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is really 3 different styles of gameplay arranged separately on 1 disc. This game is exactly 33% parkour, 33% puzzle-solving, 33% hack-and-slash combat, and 1% synergy (this proto-discovery was realized by my friend Dylan = credit where credit is due). What is unique to the P.O.P. series is the parkour-extreme-platforming so I bought this game (my first Prince of Persia game) thinking that it was going to be about 90% parkour and 10% wishing I was still doing parkour. The trap that this game falls into most likely stems from the developers thinking that the parkour parts were awesome, but the princes' skillset weren't large enough to create a game of 100% parkour without it starting to feel repetitive after about 2 hours. So what they did was create additional gameplay styles that included combat, by throwing in some beat 'em up sections which consisted of the slaying of multiple waves of enemies until everyone except you is dead. Fine. But what happens with these "solutions" sometimes is that the very remedy used to cure repetitive gameplay becomes repetitive. So let me be more specific to this title:
Problem: The game would be boring and repetitive as shit if ALL you did was parkour.
Solution: Add more game mechanics, like fighting and puzzle-solving, in order to prevent the parkour from getting stale.
New Problem: Fighting and Puzzle-Solving get stale and supersaturate the game to the point where I miss the parkour. #ijustlearnedhowtobold

So I really really loved the parkour parts of the game, but the combat sections were sloppy, and the puzzle-solving sections were challenging, but not fun, and were really more annoying than anything, as they hindered my ability to throw myself off of buildings and stuff. I put Prince of Persia: Sands of Time down because I couldn't handle how not fun the puzzle-sections were. All I wanted to do was some wall-runs and some jumping off of stuff, but apparently Sonic The Hedgehog is still my best bet for that desire.

Probably 18 months passed and I decided to see what would happen if I popped that disc back into the cube again. Perhaps, I thought, my new found video-game wisdom would aid in my future appreciation of what is usually considered to be, like, the 5th best Gamecube game ever. Resuming my old file, I immediately became stuck in a parkour portion that only a youtube video walk-through could help me out of, and then was INSTANTLY thrown into the most annoying puzzle-section I had yet to behold. I cleared it after about a half hour of fucking falling like an idiot, and pretty much just said "fuck it" after that. Prince of Persia has yet to see the world outside of its since then. Being several hours into it, I feel like I have played it enough in order to decide that I have seen what I needed to see.

On a side note, I understand that the game took a different approach to the video game soundtrack by...well...not having one, but it didn't work. If I am going to literally be watching myself fuck up, and be forced to watch myself fuck up in reverse slow-mo, then imma need some tunes to keep me going. And that's all I have to say about that.

Verdict:
I put this down, then picked it up again, and threw it back to the ground
where it stayed down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H5uWRjFsGc