and some of the old ones also have absolutely ludicrous achievements that require playing through the same 100+ hour game dozens of times as that’s just sort of what people did when they only owned a handful of titles. That doesn’t work today, so much, because we have a LOT of games to choose from now.

It’s not that it ‘doesn’t work’. It only ‘doesn’t work’ if you insist on being an absolute completionist and getting every possible achievement. If you accept that some achievements are for crazy over-achievers/no-lifers and you don’t have to get those, then it works just fine.

It isn’t easy like modern games, and that’s ok, but it does make it VERY grindy.

What difficulty settings are you playing on? I don’t remember it being especially difficult when I played it back in the day, though it could get grindy at times. I probably grinded way more than I needed to, though, because I just really enjoy being overleveled for things and being able to utterly demolish trash-talking bosses.

Most controller buttons don’t do anything for a very long time, either, so you get the feeling those buttons might access those menus, and they don’t. (it does technically use the full controller, based on the mapping I can see, but not for the first quarter of the game at least)

This might be a function of playing it on PS3 instead of Gamecube? Different controllers, after all.

Some of the voice lines are quite tinny

Possibly a result of compressing them enough to fit on the game disc. I don’t know about the PS3 version, but the Gamecube version had to be on two discs because it wouldn’t fit on just one. I wonder if the Gamecube version might be less compressed and have better audio quality?

For how it was made to be balanced, it works decently, even though I’ve outgrown the grindy games. For example, if you are running across the world map, you can only dodge so many enemies before one spawns that bee-lines for you at breakneck pace to guarantee a fight, but otherwise you can seemingly stand on the map forever and not enter random-encounter combat. Thats very annoying, yes absolutely, but it does help to keep you from going broke, which is a huge balance, honestly.

You’re going broke using consumables on random encounters!? Yeah, you definitely need at least one healer in your party, and that experience should be much improved if you go with dual healers. You should hardly ever need to use consumables on random encounter battles. Consumables are only for boss battles.

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On your second playthrough (and you definitely should have a second one), you should look up some guides and walkthroughs. There are huge portions of the story, entire maps and storylines and stuff, that are completely optional and easily missable.

I guarantee you’ll discover new things on a second playthrough that you never even saw a hint of during your first, plus it has a pretty good ‘new game +’ mode that lets you use points from your previous playthrough to buy buffs or debuffs that will make your next playthrough easier, more difficult, or just more interesting. Plus, the game lends itself well to replay because you can then play it with different characters in your main party.

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But, shit… You know? I’m almost finished with my current Cyberpunk playthrough, and you’re giving me the Symphonia itch… I think I might fire up the old emulator and play Symphonia again when I’m done with Cyberpunk.