I only recall reading about Tales of Symphonia for the last few months prior to it's release, and it didn't see to otherwise get a lot of press build up (unlike any Final Fantasy RPG). Plus, being an RPG for the Cube, it was a welcome sight to have.

The game does not disappoint. It's best described as your standard RPG (with running-around, talk-to-everyone, complete-side-quests, build-up-experience, and so on) with some unique elements with a battle system that reminds me very much of Viewtiful Joe. The latter basically requires you to actually battle your foes, using a varities of standard attacks, blocks, and learned abilities, with your basic movement controls forwards and back from your foe (hence the "Linear" part of the name). The computer AI is actually pretty good in controlling up to 3 other party members and you can fine tune their actions, so you can have a spell caster stand back and fire shots from afar, and get your melee guy in close, but their initial default settings is good for the starting player. But you can have up to 3 other players helping out with the battles (at which point they take over for your AI). If your coordinate your efforts with your team, you can earn enough power to do a unified attack, which can cause massive pain to the foes.

The RPG part of the system is pretty standard, with elements vaguely common to Final Fantasy's jobs and materia, and learned skills. The game progresses you slowly but at the right times into each of these and actually has a good learning curve. Another interesting addition is a Cooking skill, sort of a down-to-earth alchemy type skill. There's a variety of ingredients around that you can buy, and by learning to cook better meals, you'll create dishes that have much better healing powers than the most basic recipes. Also, weapons and armor can be upgraded using customization, in addition to the usual stop-and-shop approach to party building.

The difficulty (up through 5hrs of gameplay) has yet to be too hard. You learn quickly that while you can melee most opponents to death, the bigger foes need careful battle skills to survive, including watching for openings or a big attack. Where you need to go and head towards on the world map is well spelled out through the plot. On the world map, there are random encounters, but similar to how Zelda 2 did them; you can see the creatures and can possibly avoid them, but some will catch sight of you and make tracks to get you. Plenty of save points and rest areas at about the right places so far, as well.

The game itself is beautiful to look at. It combined anime-based cutscenes with cel-rendered characters to give a overall anime look, and uses the Cube engine to make it sparkle just right. Audio is pretty good as well, though some of the catchphrases your characters say in battle start to get old, but this can be customizable. And surprising to me, given the limited capacity of most Cube disks, about 20% of the NPC dialog is actually spoken by professional voice actors. This helps with the game immersion. It should be noted that the game spreads across 2 disks.

Plot itself is sufficiently interesting without being overly repetitive of every other RPG. In this land, the world needs a Chosen to Regenerate the world; the Chooen, a teenage girl, with the help of her childhood friends (of which the lead hero is one of), her teacher, a rouge merchanary (and others, presumably) must restore the world as to prevent the attacks of Desians (a superior race) on human outputs and towns and bring peace and harmony. The pilgramage of the Chosen is a long path, with trials for both herself and her party and needs all the help it can get to work out.

Probably the only downside is that there are conversion scenes that you trigger via on on-screen display. These conversions use anime-drawn characters (with a variety of expressions), but have only text representation of the speech. Given that you can neither quit these scenes (which last no longer than a minute or so) nor fast forward through the text, it seems that these are aching for some voice over work. While most of these conversions are silly and fun, some actually lead to unlocking helpful hints to complete the game.

With only about 6 hrs clocked in on the game so far (as of this writing), I've yet to find any major problems or disappointments with the game