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After completing Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, it occurred to me that the monster system really could have been explained better. So this week on the Strategy Session, we’re going to take a closer look at this subsystem, and what it takes to build a truly dangerous monster.

First, though, let’s discuss the basics of the system. In order to capture a monster, you’ll need to Spellbind it first. This means you must have Emil in your active party, and at least four of the Elemental Grid slots must be showing the same element. Once you’ve got the Grid where you want it, go ahead and kill your target monster. When the battle ends, Emil will try to get the monster to join, either by himself or with backup from other party monsters. A number of different variables come into play in this process, so let’s start by going a bit more in-depth with the Element Grid.

The Grid itself is constructed of five Minor Elemental slots around one Major Elemental slot; get any three Minor Elementals the same, and they’ll combine and overwrite the Major Elemental. In order to Spellbind a monster, you’ll need four Minor Elementals to line up. This can be a tough thing to accomplish early in the game, as Emil doesn’t start with elemental attacks of any kind. My advice is to put Marta’s First Aid spell on one of the D-Pad shortcuts, switch your party members to Hold Position in the Tactics menu, and fling First Aid until you’ve got the grid where you want it. It can be a bit tedious, but until Emil gets elemental attacks of his own, it’s your best bet.

Later in the game, Emil can get a moderate bonus to his monster capture rate by matching the elemental of the monster with the Grid, but a much easier and more reliable method is to call for backup. After a battle in which at least one monster was Spellbound, Emil will have the opportunity to try to convince one monster to join the party. On his own, Emil’s chances are actually rather low, but party monsters can join in and provide our hero with a rather sizable bonus, depending on a number of variables. Which monster provides the best bonus is actually a little counter-intuitive; the best bonuses come from monsters that have an elemental weakness to the monster you want to capture, or who share an element with it. Monsters are also divided into Families, and using a monster whose Family is weak to the capture target provides a nice boost. The Families, in order of “X is strong against Y,” are Plant, Aquatic, Beast, Bird, and Insect. Conversely, using a monster with an elemental or Family advantage against the monster you want to capture will reduce its effectiveness — Light vs. Dark is an especially egregious example — as will a large difference in levels.

Once a monster agrees to join you, you’ll have the option of immediately dropping it into your party. Given that you can’t access the Katz guild’s monster storage inside of most dungeons, capturing monsters is more or less the best means available to modify your party to match the enemies in a given dungeon.

As a monster levels up, it’ll learn Skills and Artes more or less constantly until it reaches its individual level cap, which is usually either level 50 or 100. In order to keep training a particular monster past its level cap, it will have to evolve. This resets the monster’s level to 1, but with 20% of the stats it had when it was evolved. Evolved monsters will also retain all of the Skills and magic Artes it knew, but all physically-based Artes will be lost. Which is a bit of a bugger. On the whole, it’s best to level up a monster until either its stats become too weak to continue contributing in battle, or it stops learning skills, before evolving it. This should give the evolved monster the best Skills and Artes available to it, as well as providing a bigger bonus to start with.

Many monsters actually have multiple evolutionary paths, as well as ones that are only available to monsters equipped with certain statuettes, which are obtained through item synthesis. There’s a big advantage to taking a monster through as many evolutionary paths as you can, since more evolutions means more Skills, more Artes, and higher stats, but the game’s low overall difficulty means most players aren’t going to need fully evolved or meticulously groomed monsters until the second playthrough, where higher difficulty levels are available.

Overall, the monster system can be a bit more complicated than it seems at first, and it requires more care and planning than I, for one, am used to in a Tales game. Still, once you understand the way the capture system works and how monsters grow and evolve, shepherding your tiny Mandragora into a Lailah of mass destruction can be fun, rewarding, and surprisingly easy.