stand on equal footing with the most recent Final Fantasy titles. Rob Fahey of Eurogamer argued that the game was "the finest example ever made of the truly traditional Japanese RPG", but was concerned that this traditional nature might dissuade players from trying it. Benjamin Turner of GameSpy said that the lush artwork and innovative battle system characteristic of Tales games helped Symphonia stand out in the GameCube's "RPG-starved" library. The battle system was praised for its ease of use and fast pace, with Jastrzab proclaiming it to be one of the best systems conceived for an action RPG. Metts explained that it "strikes a perfect balance between the strategy of traditional menu-based RPG battles and the fast, skill-based action found in a weapons-based fighting game like Soul Calibur". While Star Dingo of GamePro concurred that the game's individual character control was "excellent", he lamented that the computer-controlled nature of the other party members resulted in a loss of the experience of learning new skills and spells, and said that attempts to micromanage the other members made the battle system clunky and burdensome. Daryl Vassar of G4techTV cited the battles as the game's high point and claimed they were fun enough to win over non-RPG fans, though he considered the summoning system — which requires a character to take a great deal of damage before performing such an action — to be a weakness. David Smith of 1UP.com was initially aggravated by the limitations imposed on three-dimensional movement combined with the number of enemies, but later acknowledged that the limitations encouraged strategic depth by preventing the player from exploiting repetitive or unbalanced tactics. In this regard, Smith deemed the system to be an improvement over that of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time; Fahey also drew a comparison to the title, considering the computer-controlled characters in Tales to be significantly more intelligent. Shane Bettenhausen of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Mary Jane Irwin of IGN complained that the game's difficulty was imbalanced by the boss battles, which required significant grinding and were sometimes fought in a close consecutive fashion. Jastrzab also acknowledged the boss battles as "fearsome and challenging", but regarded them more admirably. Brian Gee of GameRevolution and Irwin noted that the free-roaming gameplay made it easy for the player to wander into a dungeon with excessively strong enemies. Irwin negatively compared the amount of backtracking in the game's