We don’t want to come down on it so much, but here the mediocrity, which might have flown anywhere else, mucks up the works even more than usual, thanks to the parts of the game that work quite well. Collecting monsters, visiting old Symphonia locations, listening to the dialogue scenes and watching the motion-captured characters act out the drama suck you in like few other Wii games can, only to have the hackneyed plot devices and persistently obnoxious sidetracking annoy the living crap out of you.
If you can look past the last-last-gen flaws that absolutely should be gone by now, there’s a totally playable bit of gaming here that’ll scratch your RPG itch for the time being. But if you’re unsure as to which new Tales game you should play, Vesperia or Dawn of the New World, go Vesperia.
Nov 13, 2008
