Regular readers of this blog will know that I do not count Tales of Symphonia as a great game. In fact, after the first disc, it went from what could have been a great game into a spectacularly shitty game. There were some fun characters in the game, however. Raine, the big-sister healer character who had a tendency to smack the party around (getting slapped by a doctor is funny, dammit), and the clumsy assassin, Sheena.

Sheena is not exactly a role model for aspiring young feminists. There is a fair bit that’s wrong with her character, starting with the “lookamaboobs!” pose that the concept art keeps showing her in. She’s indecisive and tempremental. When you first meet her, she’s an assassin set out to bump off your charge (a treacle-filled blonde named Collette); but she fails at her job mostly due to her bumbling. She has a tendency to fall down and fall into things. She’s not a particularly powerful character in battle, and the big pink bow she sports combined with a little fuzzy wuzzy magical talking squirrel as her companion is hard to take seriously. (Spoilers beyond this point)

What makes Sheena interesting is her backstory. The theme in Symphonia is that there are two universes that have to share a finite current of mana, an abundance of which will allow a universe to thrive, and a dearth will cause a universe to wilt. Unfortunately, mana is not static, and has to flow from one realm to the other, so the quest of the Chosen One is basically to reverse the flow so that a world with a mana shortage can have a turn at the wheel, so to speak. Lloyd, Collette, and the rest of the starting party are all from the world that suffers a lack of mana. Sheena was sent from the world that has enjoyed an abundance of mana for too long, and isn’t keen on giving it up. Her job is to assassinate Collette and stop the flow of mana from her world to the world of Lloyd.

Sheena’s attempt to kill Collette are thwarted, however, and she finds herself questioning the purpose of her trip and the purpose of allowing the world of Lloyd to continue to suffer when her own world has enjoyed a surplus of Mana for longer than it should have. As a result, she joins Lloyd’s party to attempt to find a way to balance the mana problem, and struggles with the decision to betray her world through the rest of the game.

She grew up in a hidden! ninja! village! (how can that not be cool?). When she was young, Sheena attempted to form a pact with a powerful summon-spirit. She failed (she couldn’t understand him), and it resulted in the death of several villagers, and left her adoptive grandfather in a coma. As a result, she’s extremely unsure of herself. She lacks confidence and a sense of conviction, so there’s a lot of emotional gymnastics when she talks to other characters about important things.

The problem with Sheena is that she has a hard time doing things for herself. When she does attempt to stand on her own two feet, she usually ends up tripping over them, so her skill in battle comes from being able to form pacts with summon spirits and then work up enough energy in battle to get them to come in and lay the smack for her. Once she joined the party, we tried really hard to get her to be powerful in melee, but she simply doesn’t have enough power behind her. Add to that scraping and saving to be able to use a summon spirit, and by the time Sheena finishes summoning, the enemy has moved to another area of the battlefield and you’ve summoned an incredibly destructive spirit where it can do no harm. If you can stand the 2+ minutes of bad voice acting and exposition (with a big spoiler), here’s a battle sequence involving Sheena (plus my all-time favorite healing spell):

As you can see, she’s not doing a lot of damage, and has to be resurrected at one point. This is a pretty good example of her in-game use. It’s a shame, because if her character had been just a little bit better-balanced, she could have been a lot of fun to use.

On a more positive note, Sheena is at least well-written enough that she doesn’t spend too much time rehashing female warrior clichés. There aren’t any cop-outs with the two male characters tied romantically to her (she has a crush on Lloyd, Zelos has a crush on her), and she does manage to overcome her fear of failure and return to her village to lead them once the game is finished. But what a wasted opportunity that they couldn’t have smoothed out her rough edges and made her a more exciting character.

Mighty Ponygirl posted this entry on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 8:42 am and filed it under Characters, Women in Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.