WARNING: SPOILERS for Tales of Symphonia abound! If you don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading. You have been warned.
How do you start off a stream session meant to make up for dying too much in the last one? By dying again, of course!
And that’s exactly what we did to kick off the third Tales of Symphonia stream. The scene began back in the Seal of Water, a little more prepared, with me rushing through all the puzzles—after all, I know them by heart. We saved one last time before fighting the guardian of the Seal, and…got slaughtered in a pitiful 30 seconds.
At this point, even though I’d been absolutely adamant about it through the first two sessions…I caved. I gave in. I admitted I was wrong. The Hard difficulty was just too much for our group in this situation (unless viewers want to see us try every boss battle about 3 times). So, we finally switched to Normal—for good this time. And while it didn’t make the boss battle we were facing easy, it did help massively, and we eventually managed to win the day.
So, the Seal of Water was finally finished, bringing us one step closer to saving the world. After resting a bit, we headed back to Palmacosta, which, it turned out, was under the protection of one Governor-General Dorr. There, we stopped by the school to prove Genis’ intelligence…and Lloyd’s stupidity. We succeeded at that, but when we went to retrieve a book that would tell us where to find the other Seals, we found that impostors had walked off with it!
We managed to track down the ridiculously greedy man who obtained the book, but he wouldn’t give it to us. He wanted the Spiritua Statue, an item that actually happened to be right by the Seal of Water. Because I already knew the locations of the seals, I suggested we abandon that quest.
It was probably better that way, because just then, we found out that Palmacosta was being attacked! We raced back there to see the local shopkeeper up on the gallows. The stunt was orchestrated by the muscle-brained ringleader of this area’s Desians, the obnoxious Magnius. Lloyd’s response to this was a little unreasonable, so I made a big build-up to that moment. Josh referred to this earlier as “Lloyd’s famous scene.”
So there you have it: Lloyd set us on a mission to destroy the Desians’ human ranch near Palmacosta. The stakes went up a few minutes later, when we heard that that shopkeeper’s daughter, Chocolat, was kidnapped by the Desians. And when we got there, the Governor-General’s assistant Neil confirmed what Kratos and Raine had suspected all along: everything that had happened here was a big, complex trap to catch Colette—and Dorr was in on it.
We headed back yet again (this area has the most running back and forth of any in the whole game) to see Dorr negotiating with a Desian. Apparently, the Desians are squeezing money out of Palmacosta by hanging Dorr’s wife over his head. She had been turned into a monster, similar to Marble way earlier, and the Desians claimed they could remove the “demon seed” from her for a price. Lloyd gave him a proper telling-off about this, and then…
Just when we thought Dorr could be redeemed, he got stabbed in the back with a nonexistent weapon. The culprit? His daughter Kilia, who was really this big purple demon thing. We fought her before turning back to the now-dying Dorr. He gave us his last words, asking us to help the people of his city and giving us the means to sneak in to the Desian base. Once he breathed his last, we solemnly made our way back out from the city and back to the ranch for the final time (though not before I spoiled the [joking] fact that Kratos is really an oversized baby created by an ancient order of wizards. Sorry, guys).
Back at the ranch, we received the most useless power ever for the Sorcerer’s Ring: radar. Admittedly, it does give you the ability to find items randomly floating in the air, but at the cost of not being able to see enemies. The radar is also necessary to operate the ranch’s teleporters for some reason (???). With it, we navigated the area until finally, at long last…we found Magnius.
He started off with a few mind games, as all good villains do. It turned out Marble was actually Chocolat’s grandmother. Magnius highlighted the fact that Lloyd was the one who killed her, and no matter how much the group tried to explain, she wouldn’t have it. She let herself be recaptured by the Desians and was taken away. Better luck next time?
Either way, it came time to finally face Magnius in battle and send him to his grave. This was a little bit of a challenge, as his massive brawn and axe broke through most of our tactics. His fire attacks also hurt quite a bit, so we spent some more time trying to keep him from casting. Overall, even though he can be considered this stream session’s major boss, he went down relatively easily once his minions were gone.
Afterwards, Magnius collapsed to the floor, making his scars look rather conveniently like cartoony knocked-out Xs. Raine finished the job by starting the ranch’s self-destruct sequence, leading to our quick escape and a very underwhelming explosion.
With that, we got ready to call it a wrap. This was quite easily our most successful stream session yet. We almost didn’t die at all!
Because it was rescheduled from last week, in order to get back on schedule, we’re doubling up. That means that the next stream session is this Saturday, August 24th, at 2 PM PDT/5 PM EDT/9 PM UTC. Join us then on our Twitch channel to see the next session live, or catch up on this and older ones in the past broadcasts section.
