Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Re: Tales of Symphonia

[quote name="wireface"][quote name="FABIO"] -4 player mode This part is pretty wonky. First of all, you don't start off or always have 4 characters in your party. In fact in the first hour you're going to frequently have less than 4. Those extra people are going to have nothing to do when the story reduces yours party. Characters also hop in and out of your party frequently so it's impossible to pick a favorite and stick with him. Now here's a big boo boo. In fact, I think I must be mistaking on it because it's such a glaring gameplay flaw. You see, the controller port determines who controls which character. Port 1 controls whomever is in the first position, port 2 the second, etc. It seems that you CANNOT SWITCH WHICH CHARACTER YOU CONTROL DURING COMBAT. You can switch wheter a character is human or AI controlled, but you cannot change which character you're manually controlling. If you want to switch to the magic user so you can cast a specific spell, you're fucked. If the character you're controlling is killed, you're fucked. Actually, there is a gay way around this: just pause the game, and plug the controller(s) into a different port, then switch your old character to AI controlled and your current character to human control. What unnacceptably retarded bullshit is this? In Star Ocean 2 you switched party members with the press of a button with the AI taking over for the character you weren't controlling. Again, I'd like to think that there IS a way to switch characters and I just can't find it (no instructions with my rented copy), but pushing all the buttons on the controller yielded nothing. This is a huge goddamn design oversight. [/quote] Me and my brother just beat this game a couple of days ago. I'm pretty sure you're right that there's no way to switch characters mid-battle, or at least, we never figured it out. The best way around it that we found, in the case of magic users anyway, is to go into the menu and select the spell. In the long run this way works out better anyway because the casters might as well be controlled by the AI. When a player uses them, they're limited to however many spells they can map to the controls (like 6 or something). Also, controlling them is boring. Hit a button, stand there while they cast. Repeat, usually while off screen if you're not player 1. Which brings up a far worse problem than the controls. For one player, the camera is fine. For any more than that, it fucking sucks. It stays focused on player 1 the entire time. So unless everyone attacks the same enemy, half the party is off the screen. And there are certain battles where its better to split the fight up, like to keep a magic user pinned down while someone else protects your own casters. The most frustrating aspect of all this shit is that there's a perfectly functional camera there. Let player 1 die. The camera pans out so that everyone is on screen. ! Why not leave it that way the entire fight? I get the impression that this game was developed as one player. Somebody figured "hey, if we make it multiplayer more people will buy it!" so they enabled four player control, and changed nothing else. This game worked alright with two people, I can't imagine what 4 player would be like. I can guarantee that at least two people are off screen at all times so i guess it would suck. As for not having four people in the party all the time: it does start this way, but after a couple hours, you almost always have at least 4 if not more to choose from with a couple exceptions here and there. Oh, and after the first couple hours, switch the difficulty to hard. On normal you can win most fights, even bosses, by mashing the buttons. Hard makes even the jobber fights challenging enough to be fun. [/quote]