Tales of Symphonia

I'll never get the love for this game. The plot and humor is awful, wherein most of the jokes is just mocking negative character traits and no one is ever allowed to have an arc without Lloyd solving their problems nor does the plot ever criticise his idiocy. Gameplay wise it doesn't offer much especially compared to later games; It has some cool combos but 3D space is useless, playing offense with mages is painful, and the dungeons are full of dull, brainless puzzles with annoying layouts.

One of relatively few post-2000 JRPGs to pull me in in the way those old SNES RPGs used to. I enjoyed its anime visuals and the size and depth of its worlds and its surprisingly morally nuanced villains who aren't pure mwahaha-rule-the-world dark lords. It's really really long too, I put close to a hundred hours into it in my initial playthrough.

good for kids.