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5. Tales of Symphonia
In the Nintendo 64 days, RPGs were hard to come by. Once a staple of the SNES era, Nintendo’s falling out with Squaresoft led to an RPG dry-spell. As the GameCube era began, those dire straits started to improve, with games like the aforementioned Skies of Arcadia and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Namco’s Tales of Symphonia continued that trend, giving the console yet another gorgeous offering. With stunning visuals, and strong voice acting, the title was nothing less than endearing.
Over a decade after its release, Tales of Symphonia remains one of the most well liked titles in the history of the Tales franchise. That’s probably why the game inspired a sequel, while Symphonia‘s main character Lloyd Irving has gone on to appear in Soulcalibur Legends and many other games and spin-offs. Tales fans can even look forward to seeing Lloyd appear in the upcoming 3DS title Tales of the World: Reve Unitia.
Glad to see Super Monkey Ball so high on the list. (Although I prefer the second one) It’s a shame that Amusement Vision isn’t around anymore, because I really enjoyed what they were doing on the GameCube.
Great list. All are worthy of inclusion. I’m particularly glad to see Skies of Arcadia Legends get some love; it’s a very good RPG and filled a massive hole in the Cube library at the time of its release.
I have long thought Baten Kaitos Origins to be the best of the Cube RPGs — better than Symphonia, better than Arcadia. It gets little love because it was released so late and sold in very few quantities. Even in my own list I left it off, mostly because Symphonia was a more groundbreaking and important RPG, and because its combat was pure awesome.