Tales of Symphonia Posted July 24, 2004 at 12:00 am

Vance showed me Tales of Symphonia, a cel-shaded RPG for the GameCube featuring anime cutscenes. The real-time battle system reminds me of another RPG I liked quite a bit: Star Ocean: The Second Story. Tales is the first cel-shaded game I’ve experienced first-hand. The effect is interesting, but not revelatory. Tales also sports multi-player support, but Players 2–4 are limited to control within battle. The camera only follows Player 1 so control can be difficult.

Achieving a concensus for dinner proved to be more difficult than I expected. We settled on LaBamba, but Granddad opted to stay home. Vance and I rode separately so we could go our own way after dinner. I quickly started to feel like a fifth wheel after we ran into Vance’s friends at the mall; Vance did say they were mallrats, after all. Vance eventually did eventually find his GameCube 1019 memory card.

The PlayStation 2 game console I had purchased arrived. It’s lightly used with all cables and documentation in the original box. The seller included Kingdom Hearts and Medal of Honor: Frontline for good measure. The plan is to hook up the PS2 through my monitor and somehow route the audio through my PC speakers. I’m uncertain exactly how to do the audio, though.