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He would even forgive Yggdrasill if he could

I'd honestly argue that Symphonia is pretty smart with how it goes about telling the game's story. Rather than being a 1:1 game-to-video conversion, it has multitudes of differences, both big and small, and too many to count and list. They knew they didn't have enough episodes to cover it all (even if episodes are longer than usual) and so were pretty careful about what to cut. It's basically an adaptation of the core parts of the main story and nothing else, covering only the important parts. Several parts are completely omitted or heavily altered. This prevents it from being inconsistent with the source, as it's instead consistent with itself. The end result feels less like a straight adaptation and more like a retelling of the story, for better or worse. You could argue that it's unfaithful to the game, but it compensates that by working better for newcomers.

For example, they had Colette be broken for the entirety of Tethe'alla instead of regaining herself in its early parts. I always felt the game had her come back to herself far too fast, like maybe just 3 hours or so of gameplay later. The anime waited with it until its end, and thus also removed one other instance of her being kidnapped. If you think it's too much in this anime, the game is worse at it. This also made Lloyd's motivation come off as stronger during this part, as he was rescuing a broken Colette in an attempt to regain her both physically and mentally, rather than just rescuing an already restored Colette who was just being imprisoned.

This and many other changes makes it work a lot more as a standalone product. Hell, I'd also argue it did a better job at making me care about Regal and Zelos than what the game did. Though I'd argue that the Sylvarant portion needed at least another episode, as it felt like it didn't explain certain things properly enough, and that it could jump from one event to another without anything in between. Tethe'alla and United World suffer from this problem a lot less. But at the very least, I think it was a smart decision to have Sylvarant focus primarily on the relationship between Lloyd and Colette, and somewhat Lloyd and Kratos, as these two relationships are the major pulls of the story.

It reminds me of the direction they took the Zestiria TV series, the first season at least, which makes sense considering it's the same director. There's a lot of fluff that can be trimmed down or modified to streamline it, and both Symphonia and Zestiria did just that.