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Wii RPG EXPERIMENT! Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Apr. 17 11:09 PM by Mark Burnham

Recently at the Namco Bandai Editors' Day event in San Francisco, the company showed off the newest wild attempt to create an RPG for the Nintendo Wii: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. The title is fitting, because creating an RPG for the Wii is dangerous, exciting experimentation into the new. It's a shame more funding doesn't go into this sort of fringe research, because it's brave. Baroque recently tried to get the Wii-RPG ship off the ground, but failed, so we'd like to have high hopes for Namco's journey of adventure.

But having looked at the screens, observed glassy eyes, flashy on-screen hit point notifications, quirky cliche characters galore, I'm baffled and bored. It looks laughably derivative, like are-we-in-1995-derivative. And worse the Tales series is practically ragged with overuse already. While I'm ranting, who wrote the rule that says that any RPG on the Wii must feature four-year-olds with huge eyes and cutesy smirks? Or punchable Chocobos with big eyes? I'm tired of Nintendo assuming RPGs are for itsy bitsy babies. If Nintendo wants to impress the hard core RPG fan in me (and you? am I alone here?), they'll bring the darkness in the Fallout 3 sense, no one will have big eyes, everyone will be in their thirties, blood will spray and the music will make the soundtrack from Silent Hill sound like Sigur Ros while you're in Hawaii on your honeymoon in heaven. That's what I'm talking about. Until then, Nintendo/Bandai walk away from the RPG table with your Tales between your legs. I need to play Oblivion now.

Comments

Is it lame simply because it's a traditional RPG? Is it lame because it uses a standard manga art Have you seen the numbers on sales of "derivative" RPGs such as this? Give us something more to go on than "it's like all the others" because being like all the others in the RPG genre is a good thing. If you like reading sci-fi novels, do you call Asimov lame simply because he is yet another author writing about robots?

I somehow get the sense that you aren't really an RPG player after all, and would only be happy if RPGs were to somehow turn into FPS's overnight. If you don't like these games, why do you write about them?

 

To clarify, I love RPGs, even traditional JRPGs, for sure. Or I wouldn't write about them. I still fire up FF part one, Baldur's Gate, Star Ocean...stuff my FPS peers can't stand. I've played my fair share of Tales games even. I merely wanted to draw attention to how the Wii's branding prevents it from having any sort of real variety with RPGs, and how tiring it can get when RPGs on the Wii all have four-year-olds in them. Why can't the Wii branch out a bit? My beef isn't with traditional RPGs, it's with the general babyness of the Wii really.

 

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