It's a classic story-- a couple of plucky kids get together to go on a fantastic adventure to save the world. Role playing games have depended on this story since their inception, throwing in small variations to keep the interest of their players. They do remarkably well keeping interest too, some part of you just wants the plucky kids to make it, assuming they aren't too obnoxious. Tales of Symphonia does a good job of balancing appealing characters with a decent variation of this standard story.

The game starts out introducing you to a world of elves, humans, and dwarves. Despite the bog-standard names these are not the Tolkien-esque archetypes you may be expecting. Elves are smart but not particularly obsessed with ocean voyages, and the dwarves are great craftsmen but not so much into the tunneling. There are also half-elves, a group that are more or less universally disliked. A group of half-elves, called the Desians, serve as your bad guys. They run human ranches where they more or less meaninglessly abuse humans and drain all the mana out of the world.

This is where the plucky kids come in. One of the kids is the Chosen of Regeneration, destined to travel the world to pray at various sites and hopefully reawaken the Goddess who will then theoretically smack down the Desians and bring an era of peace and prosperity. Naturally she brings along her childhood friends, and they pick up some adults along the way. All the characters are more or less your basic Japanese flavored fantasy archetypes. You have your bold but not too bright hero, a cute but dumb as a rock girl, their smaller and much smarter best friend...it goes on. While the characters are nothing you haven't seen before, the game goes a long way towards helping you like them. At many spots along the way there are optional conversations you can trigger between the characters by pressing the Z trigger. If you find the characters interesting enough to want to know more about them, then the option is there and you really do get a good feel for who these people are. If you dislike them, there is no obligation to play them, letting you get on with the combat.

The combat is real-time, not turn based. You have basic attacks with your weapon which you string into combos and special attacks that take up Tech Points and can often be used as part of a combo. Combos are important because they fill up a meter that lets you have everyone in your current fighting group (up to 4 characters) use a special attack without burning any Tech Points. That's about as deep as the strategy gets, other than occasionally selecting a spell or special attack against a certain type of monster. When you are roaming on the map you can see and choose to avoid encounters, but really it's best to fight as often as possible to get your level up.

Of course it wouldn’t be a real console RPG without two things, side-quests and collections. Tales of Symphonia doesn't let you down on either count. The main quest and side-quests alone will give you more than 40 hours of play. Add in collecting every single monster-type among other things, as well as multiple endings, and there is a wealth of gameplay here for those who want a game to keep them occupied for a long time.

Tales of Symphonia comes on two discs. This allows the game not only have a ton of content, but to also have voice acting-- something missing from many Gamecube games. While it sometimes it sounds like the voice actors were not given enough direction, there is remarkably little to complain about in the sound department. The voices are appropriate for the characters, the combat sounds are decent, and you can even blessedly turn off combat taunts instead of hearing the same two or three lines regurgitated over and over again. Visually the game is bright and cheerful. The environments might not be as engrossing as they could have been, but they do evoke the mood of the various places you travel.

Tales of Symphonia is not a perfect RPG. It comes with a pretty cliché story that even multiple twists, most foreshadowed way in advance, can't really rescue from predictability. Some people won't enjoy the combat system where the greatest strategy is just to keep on grinding your level up. However, if you look past the flaws, there's really an amusing experience laying in wait. If you only have a Gamecube and have been waiting for an RPG, Tales of Symphonia is the answer to your prayers.