Anime adaptations of video games often do not get the best reception from the fans. Here’s a look at whether Tales of Symphonia falls in this category or not.
Tales of Symphonia is the fifth entry to the Tales of Series, a popular set of a Japanese role-playing games. It was originally released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2003 to high praise, making it the entry that really put the franchise on map in international waters.
A series of OVAs was produced by ufotable and divided into it’s three parts, with 11 episodes at total. To commemorate the upcoming remaster that will release on Nintendo Switch in February 2023, these episodes have been made available for whole free on YouTube. But is Tales of Symphonia‘s anime adaptation worth watching, or is it yet another case of a bad adaptation of a beloved video game??
Is the Tales of Symphonia OVA Faithful to the Source Material?:
Tales of Symphonia is an incredibly long game, with its main story going for about 47 hours — and that’s not including the side quests. It’s so long, in fact, that the original Game Cube game came with two discs instead of that usual one. The anime adaptation, by comparison, is incredibly short with fewer episodes than this typical single-season anime. This means a lot of story content and details had to be cut out to fit that limited runtime. Although the anime is at least faithful to the main cast’s characterizations, some of their character arcs had to be slimmed down to the bare essentials.
Many of other story details, like the human ranch subplot, didn’t get much focus in order to spend more time on the main heroine’s journey and purpose as “The Chosen One”. Despite putting much more focus on the primary plot line, the Tales of Symphonia anime still manages to exclude important information and characters — particularly one who plays a large role in the latter part of the game but appears out of nowhere in the anime’s final and last episode. With that said, the game’s core message remains true in this adaptation and manages to offer a satisfying ending for viewers of the original game, although many agree that it felt rather rushed.
