In many ways my favorite video game of all-time, the 2004 JRPG included many deeply political themes in what first seemed like a run-of-the-mill adventure.
Note: While I will try to avoid major spoilers in this piece, I will discuss major plot points of Tales of Symphonia. Part 2 can be found here.
As much as I write about being a lifelong sports fan on this website, I’d be lying if I said that video games weren’t the earliest constant in my life as a child.
Initially introduced to games via Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, my family getting an original PlayStation near the turn of the century exposed me to the Crash Bandicoot series for the first time, as I grew obsessed with both Warped and Crash Team Racing.
I was a Nintendo kid through and through though, being further cemented by getting the Nintendo 64 for my fifth birthday in April 2001, and later its successor in the GameCube for Christmas in 2003.
My initial experiences with the GameCube didn’t leave me instantly enamored in the way previous games had. I had a hard time figuring out how to play Luigi’s Mansion, while Super Mario Sunshine, the other game I got with the system, remains too hard for me as an almost-30-year-old.
Around a week later, I convinced my dad to pick up Super Smash Bros. Melee, which had me glued to the GameCube in the way I was expecting to be.
It’s also worth noting that at this point in my childhood, I didn’t exactly have friends. I was an indoor kid who greatly struggled at Little League Baseball and had a tough time relating to other kids in school. I played a lot of video games and spent a ton of time on the computer and really didn’t see much wrong with it at the time.
I also should point out a few things about my background that will come into play later in this – I grew up in a predominantly white Chicago suburb that has consistently stood out as one of the more conservative communities in the entire region. Racism and homophobia were (and are) extremely prevalent in the community, and it appeared to be normal to be afraid of and avoid anything that could be considered different.
Granted, my background was a bit different than that of most kids from where I grew up. A suburb of large Polish and Lithuanian diaspora communities, I’m of mostly Italian and Mexican descent, and both of my parents were staunch party-line Democrats during my childhood – something that was notably at odds with how most of my classmates were being taught to view the world.
Thankfully, I did meet another kid just as into video games as I was through Little League in March 2004, which both helped me have some baseline of a social experience while also just having someone other than my sisters, who often didn’t want to, to play games with.
We ended up spending that summer wholly obsessed with Melee and Luigi’s Mansion, playing them both every day in an effort to unlock as many characters as possible in the former while simply trying to complete the game in the latter – which would be the first game I ever beat in full.
Towards the end of that summer, my then 9-year-old friend, Jacob, brought a new, mysterious game to my house that he kind of compared to Melee, in the sense that there were battles involved and that was something for me to be familiar with as a starting point.
This game was Tales of Symphonia, a Japanese RPG initially released in Japan in 2003 before earning a North American release in July 2004. As far as how we discovered it? Jacob simply said that he saw the game available as a demo at the Fry’s Electronics store near where we grew up, and had convinced his dad to get the game for him.
At this point, I had no idea what a role-playing game is – which is probably what led me to getting so engrossed in the game. To me, video games were pretty simple at that point – I was either going to be racing against someone, or embarking on a straightforward adventure that entailed some sort of rescue at the end of the story.
ToS was anything but that – you’re instantly launched into a scene of dialogue, setting the stage for the plot of the game while being introduced to the playable characters that end up joining your party.
At the very beginning of the game, the mission seems simple. You live in a dying world with waning resources, and you’re about to embark on a journey to regenerate said world and bring salvation to those who are suffering.
The party of main protagonists features three students – Lloyd, a dim-witted swordfighter; Genis, a child prodigy and mage, as well as Colette, a clumsy, light-hearted character who was selected as the “Chosen One” to carry out world regeneration.
After Colette is officially named the Chosen after minor battles at a nearby temple, Lloyd and Genis offer the first test of moral clarity in the game, and the first thing that made me think about what messages in the game were being conveyed.
Lloyd and Genis’ home village of Iselia is known to have a non-aggression treaty with the Desians, the group introduced as the primary antagonists of the game, who are fighting against world regeneration. Yet after encountering who they thought were Desians at the temple, upholding the treaty becomes an afterthought to Lloyd and Genis.
When traveling back to Lloyd’s home, Genis convinces Lloyd to go visit a friend of his at a “human ranch,” a facility that can best be described as a concentration camp or forced labor camp – showing scores of prisoners performing hard labor and suffering abuse at the hands of the guards.
After being caught talking to Genis’ friend, the two attack a few of the Desian guards – resulting in a violation of the non-aggression treaty. The next day, the Desians invaded Iselia, buring the village to the ground and resulting in many of the residents blaming Lloyd and Genis for their actions.
The mayor of Iselia, who is portrayed as a short-tempered, prejudiced man, moves to banish Lloyd from Iselia, with Genis demanding that he be banished as well alongside his companion.
I recall how this part of the game made me feel as an 8-year-old – I felt confused that a morally correct action could be punished so fiercely, and I was particularly thrown off by the lack of compassion shown by the other villagers and the mayor towards characters who risked their lives to save someone. Turns out, the real world had plenty in store for me to think about in that regard!
At this point, Lloyd and Genis embark on a journey on their own, looking to meet up with Colette and the rest of the party who had began the quest for world regeneration without them. After eventually reconvening and moving forward in the journey, the game’s progression to the largest city on the main world of Sylvarant was the next portion of the game that left me deep in thought.
After completing the first official step towards regeneration, the party sails to the city of Palmacosta, a bustling waterside metropolis that shows a vastly different society from the one seen in Iselia and the other small villages encountered along the way.
With a large church and university, Palmacosta was clearly portrayed to be the cosmopolitan, more multicultural city of the continent – a characteristic that was perhaps best defined by the actions of its leader, Governor-General Dorr. Dorr appeared to have widespread support among Palmacosta residents for appearing to challenge the Desians head-on while raising a small daughter as a single father after his wife was apparently killed by the group. This greatly differed from the non-aggression tactics seen by Iselia’s leadership.
Yet it turns out, all of this was a convenient facade for what was actually happening – collusion between Dorr and the Desians behind closed doors. When the party learns of this and moves to confront Dorr, they learn the truth – Dorr’s wife was actually poisoned by Desians and turned into a monster, while he was paying the group in hopes of finding a cure.
This felt like the first true psychological crossroads of the game – where the humanity and desperation of Dorr to simply save a loved one is pitted alongside the corruption and betrayal he engaged in as the leader of the world’s largest city. Dorr’s daughter reveals herself to be a Desian minion herself after killing Dorr, with the party defeating her in a battle before moving on.
As a young kid playing through this for the first time, I had never consumed any media that had forced me to think about these things before – particularly about the delicate balance leaders strike between their public and private images, as well as how they lead their lives behind closed doors.
The game’s mission takes a definitive turn following the introduction of Sheena to the party. Initially brought into the game as a rogue assassin aiming to kill the Chosen’s group on two different occasions, the group reconciles with Sheena while trying to save the people of Luin following a catastrophic Desian invasion.
After Sheena joins the party and the journey of regeneration continues, she opens up to the group about why she was aiming to assassinate everybody – a revelation that changes the entire complexion of the story.
Sheena reveals she is from a parallel world known as Tethe’alla, a world invisible to but directly related to Sylvarant in terms of how they source their mana, the energy of life. Sheena explains to the group that with the way mana is structured between the two worlds, one world is always flourishing while the other is waning – while the journey of regeneration is simply a matter of reversing that structure.
Though she initially sought to assassinate the Chosen to stop any potential decline of Tethe’alla, her exposure to the deep suffering of those in Sylvarant made her ask the question anyone with a heart left in the real world asks themselves everyday – “How can everyone be safe, happy and healthy?”
With the group facing the reality of the journey of regeneration bearing no functional difference from Sheena’s original mission of assassination, the party vows to move forward in an effort to achieve the impossible – save both worlds from decline while defeating those intent on stopping them.
I remember this being the first part of the game where I felt truly emotional playing it for the first time around – while only seeing more of the real-world parallels in my playthroughs that have happened since. What’s perhaps even more sobering is knowing that explicitly or not, the cruelty displayed in this game had its roots and inspirations from real-life historic events, with many current events invoking sentiments seen throughout this title.
It had me asking questions to myself that I still can’t find the answer to when processing the daily horrors of the real world today –
“What is the purpose of all of this cruelty?”
“What is there to be gained by making others miserable and putting others down?”
“Why was there ever a move to compromise with an aggressive organization only seeking death and destruction?”
Sure, I’m talking about Tales of Symphonia here, but ask yourself those questions and you can make a litany of topics fit into that disheartening reality – for those in power, sometimes cruelty is the point.
Sometimes, kids can get the point really quickly because they haven’t yet been exposed to the piles of bullshit that create grey area in topics where there shouldn’t be any.
It always reminds me of a core memory of mine that occurred early in my childhood, likely in 2001 or 2002. I was on a visit to the doctor’s office with my mom, and was waiting with her at the front desk as she paid for the appointment. While she took out her wallet, I wondered aloud, “Why do you have to pay for the doctor?”
Just like the questions posed above, I still haven’t gotten a good answer.
This piece will be continued.
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