I bought Tales of Symphonia and so far have spent an hour and 50 minutes on the game. So far so good, I haven' t had the urge to shut the game off and throw it aside like every other Non-Ys RPG I' ve checked out so MAYBE this just might be the RPG to appeal to me while waiting for Ys 6 on the PS2 and PSP.

Tales of Symphonia has some nice music, cool graphical presentation and hand drawn cutscenes, not prerendered CG thank goodness.
Of the most importance I really liked the Battle system. It' s a solid mixture of real-time battles and menu based battles but done in a way that' s quite painless. I can control my character in real-time and engage in some hack n' slashfests until my enemies are obliterated. You can perform some nice attack combos as well. What' s cool about the battle system is that while I' m dishing out punishment in real-time, my merry band of misfits can be set to automatically attack enemies and fend for themselves, freeing me up to worry about the character I' m controlling.

I' m looking forward to investing a little more time into this game as it seems pretty solid so far. Of all the RPGs on the market I picked this one because of my growing interest in Namco.

And I bought the U.S. version to boot - OOOh I feel so dirty! ;0