ToS 2 First Perspective

I also just got Tales of Symphonia 2: Dawn of the New World. Some comments while I'm playing it:
1. The game starts off with a couple of mysterious encounters and stuff. Not bad I guess.
2. Emil is spineless.
3. WHERE IS MY RIE? D: D: D:
4. Combat with the wii-chuck is unintuitive. While the A and B buttons are your bread and butter, the + button for menu makes you hold the wiimote in an awkward angle.
5. Blocking button + joystick =/= backstep. I am getting pwnt so many times because I tried to do that and instead of backstepping (double tap back), I go into free run (and subsequently get critical hit). And I thought they were supposed to be using TotA's combat system...
6. Manual, the saviour of Tales of Symphonia is completely useless. The game pretty much forces you into semi-auto because of the above.
7. Targeting feels awkward. You press - to change targets, and hold it to magic lens the enemy. However, I always have to wrestle with the targeting before it does things right. What can't they have the ToS's targetting system? Hold - and use direction buttons to change targets. Not this weird - button thing.
8. GAMECUBE CONTROLLER BETTER. I can't believe they made the wii-chuck mandatory because of a stupid change in how the sorcerer's ring works.
9. The monster capture system is weird and awkward. Most of the time if you have to capture a monster, you have to use moves that are horribly weak against it, and capture rates can be pretty bad. It doesn't help that you don't get elemental abilities outside of water for quite a while as well.*
10. Return of past characters is great. They do have a bit of a graphical update, so it is welcomed.

*after messing around with it more, it seems like spamming heal spells does the trick too. That also gets annoying.

Overall impression:
I'm not exactly impressed, but most of the elements to ToS is still here, so diving in would be right at home. Heck, even the townships are all the same in here. Good times. :3

Current rating: 7/10