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The Tales of Symphonia PC-Port is a mess!

Momentary

Banned
I think any Japanese game not developed by Koei Tecmo has been pretty damn good. I don't know what people are saying. Degica, Arc System Works, H2 interactive, Idea Factory, and Capcom have all done fantastic jobs. Hell, even Konami has had great ports.

People are WAY over dramatizing this. It sucks that Koei Tecmo puts out so many shit ports that people think they represent Japan.
 
My thoughts:

1. Glad i didn't jump on this, but i hope this mess is somehow fixed in the future, cause i need ToS not only on Cube and PS3, but also on PC ... ToS everywhere!

2. I was under the impression that 'outsourcing' any text-strings in standalone files and load them via a 'key' is common practice, anyone willing to confirm or correct me here?

Though using a CSV is a new one, lol.

3. Hey Durante, looks like Namco thought they could lower their effort, fully expecting you to take care of any f*ck ups again. Maybe you should apply with them, position as "Chief Porting Officer"!
 

Durante

Member
I think any Japanese game not developed by Koei Tecmo has been pretty damn good. I don't knowant what people are saying. Degica, Arcade System Works, H2 interactive, Idea Factory, and Capcom have all done fantastic jobs.

People are WAY over dramatizing this. It sucks that Koei Tecmo puts out so many shit ports that people think they represent Japan.
I agree.

I actually joked in the Steam thread that Namco outsourced this port to Tecmo.

2. I was under the impression that 'outsourcing' any text-strings in standalone files and load them via a 'key' is common practice, anyone willing to confirm or correct me here?
Yes, that is actually standard (and good) practice for internationalization.
 
I think any Japanese game not developed by Koei Tecmo has been pretty damn good. I don't knowant what people are saying. Degica, Arcade System Works, H2 interactive, Idea Factory, and Capcom have all done fantastic jobs.

People are WAY over dramatizing this. It sucks that Koei Tecmo puts out so many shit ports that people think they represent Japan.

Batman AK port = PC ports are disasters. People will always bring the port in every argument forever. People love to generalize if it suits their needs.

To be fair, perhaps we can also add SE ports to the 'bad ports' side. But they're kinda hit and miss.
 

deoee

Member
To be honest, I hope nobody mods this to improve it and it gets the miserable sales it deserves. It's a shame we're at a point where developers are relying on modders to fix their shit for free. If not for mods, ports like this would completely flop due to abysmal word of mouth.

Say hello to Bethesda games.

This whole port here is a mess btw. How can there be no control? Who thought "yeah those random characters and emtpy text boxes are fine, let's get this thing out!"

I would be ASHAMED to release anything in this state... ugh
 

cheesekao

Member
Actually, that statement doesn't make much sense. 99% of all games games ported to PC are better than the console versions.
*If you have the hardware



Also quoting myself here since I don't want to repeat myself


"I don't see what's wrong with having a console and PC and buying the console version if the PC port is Arkham Knight tier trash or buying the PC version of a game if the console version is trash as well."
 

Falk

that puzzling face
There are always exceptions to the rule though

See: The Last Remnant.

Literally saved by being on PC. (From a legacy standpoint, if not a commercial one)

edit: Er, you changed what you posted and now my post looks silly :(
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
I think any Japanese game not developed by Koei Tecmo has been pretty damn good. I don't know what people are saying. Degica, Arc System Works, H2 interactive, Idea Factory, and Capcom have all done fantastic jobs. Hell, even Konami has had great ports.

People are WAY over dramatizing this. It sucks that Koei Tecmo puts out so many shit ports that people think they represent Japan.

And Square Enix. How many of their Japanese PC ports don't have some sort of glaring issue. Last Remnant maybe? Haven't played it.
 
There are always exceptions to the rule though

See: The Last Remnant.

Literally saved by being on PC. (From a legacy standpoint, if not a commercial one)

edit: Er, you changed what you posted and now my post looks silly :(

He edited his post like 3-4 times already.

And Square Enix. How many of their Japanese PC ports don't have some sort of glaring issue. Last Remnant maybe? Haven't played it.

Yeah, most of their ports are bad, and those are their self-developed games.
Lightning Returns was pretty good though, as I heard. But FFIX is not looking really good.
 

deoee

Member
At least in Bethesda's case the games are open for modding from the start, that's much better than these other games where the modders have to come with a way to open the game first.

They kind of changed that for Fallout4, you had to edit some txt files somewhere in the system to get various mods running.
 

Durante

Member
And Square Enix. How many of their Japanese PC ports don't have some sort of glaring issue. Last Remnant maybe? Haven't played it.
Unlike Tecmo, S-E is on an upward trend at least. Both FF-T0 and LRFF13 were much better ports than the first two parts of FF13.
 

Card Boy

Banned
So basically all the PC version has over the emulated Dolphin version is a crisper UI, that is pretty pathetic.

edit: seems a Dolphin texture mod even trumps the PC version there aswell.
 
Some of these I can somewhat expected, like the resolution and framerate lock. It was going to be a port of a low-effort port, so arbitrary locks of the PS3 release were likely.

Others are baffling to me though. The character encoding problem in the other languages should be really apparent by simply trying the French version, so I can only imagine they just didn't try it at all. I hope they are planning to patch this, but I won't hold my breath.
 

Lingitiz

Member
They really must have scraped the bottom of the porting "studio" barrel with this one.

(Unlike Zestiria or pretty much any other recent Namco game which were ported by capable studios)

I've been saying that long before all this happened.

I think Symphonia is a perfectly mediocre game rated highly purely due to its history.

Zestiria is incredibly mediocre too (I liked Symphonia but it's been years). Such a damn boring and average game.
 

Falk

that puzzling face
People are complaining about the bad background textures.

The game isn't even out, and while there's a steady stream of hit-or-miss FF ports on Steam (VI vs VIII... heh) it really is a little too early to judge, especially given Square Enix's recent track record of bad screenshots. I'd have been way more concerned with
Garnet's hair being short/long in the wrong places chronologically
but it was pretty clear the marketing material might not have been from a shippable build.

Wait till the game comes out, still has severe tiling issues in the backgrounds, THEN by all means say it's not looking really good.

Especially considering the models were touched up, something that wasn't expected at all.

Wait, Final Fantasy IX? The PSX game? I assume people are complaining about the 240p background art as if they could easily re-make ALL those backgrounds in high-res. How silly.

Nah, we're referring to whatever upscaling method they were using (regardless if it was real-time or baked) where each tile (as they're stored in the original data) was being upscaled individually resulting in visible and annoying seams.

There was a stream where Square Enix Presents JP played the mobile version much more recently, and I couldn't spot the issues there anymore, but that may just have been Youtube/stream encode smudging the artifacts over.
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
4.The game is locked at 30fps, but some people can run it at 40 fps:
This particular issue really strikes a chord with me. I mean, Tales of Symphonia is a GameCube game, first and foremost, and it happened to run at 60 frames per second. Yet, somehow, every single PORT of the game has run at 30fps instead.

I get it, maybe the PS2 couldn't handle it at 60fps especially considering it was made for the GC first - but even PS3 should have been able to deliver 60fps.

I just don't get it.

People are complaining about the bad background textures.
Wait, Final Fantasy IX? The PSX game? I assume people are complaining about the 240p background art as if they could easily re-make ALL those backgrounds in high-res. How silly.
 

Momentary

Banned
And Square Enix. How many of their Japanese PC ports don't have some sort of glaring issue. Last Remnant maybe? Haven't played it.

Square Enix isn't even on the same planet as KT. FFT0 and Lightning Returns are pretty good. Even with Type 0 being locked to 30, that game had some care put into it by whoever ported. It's definitely the superior version.

They've also seemed to stray away from using DotEmu on their smaller titles. Seeing the work going into FF9 really makes me think that they (DotEmu) have no hand in this release.
 
The game isn't even out, and while there's a steady stream of hit-or-miss FF ports on Steam (VI vs VIII... heh) it really is a little too early to judge, especially given Square Enix's recent track record of bad screenshots. I'd have been way more concerned with
Garnet's hair being short/long in the wrong places chronologically
but it was pretty clear the marketing material might not have been from a shippable build.

Wait till the game comes out, still has severe tiling issues in the backgrounds, THEN by all means say it's not looking really good.

Especially considering the models were touched up, something that wasn't expected at all.

I'm not judging, just predicting. I'm personally fine with it, tbh. Moreover, it seems that it can be modded with filters or something like that, which looks great. But I won't be surprised if people are throwing negative reviews just because of that factor alone. You know, steam community in a nutshell.

Unlike Tecmo, S-E is on an upward trend at least. Both FF-T0 and LRFF13 were much better ports than the first two parts of FF13.


Square Enix isn't even on the same planet as KT. FFT0 and Lightning Returns are pretty good. Even with Type 0 being locked to 30, that game had some care put into it by whoever ported. It's definitely the superior version.

They've also seemed to stray away from using DotEmu on their smaller titles. Seeing the work going into FF9 really makes me think that they (DotEmu) have no hand in this release.

I've been saying that over and over again since the release day of Type-0, it's not a bad port. But apparently people are just unforgiving. Every little detail can drive them to bring the game down.
 

orochi91

Member
Zestiria is incredibly mediocre too (I liked Symphonia but it's been years). Such a damn boring and average game.

I feel that this can be said for most of the "Tales of..." games.

Vesperia (and maybe Abyss) seems to be the most well-received among fans and critics.

In fact, I recall there being a thread the other day where the topic revolved around "Tales of..." franchise being the Mcdonalds of RPGs, lol

The combat seems to the only universally well-liked feature in this franchise.
 

jj984jj

He's a pretty swell guy in my books anyway.
Such a shame, especially when people were starting to argue that Namco was getting better with their PC ports. Why would they fuck this up so badly after Zestiria?
 
I feel that this can be said for most of the "Tales of..." games.

Vesperia (and maybe Abyss) seems to be the most well-received among fans and critics.

In fact, I recall there being a thread the other day where the topic revolved around "Tales of..." franchise being the Mcdonalds of RPGs, lol

The combat seems to the only universally well-liked feature in this franchise.

Pretty much, though I don't think I'd count Abyss in there as I've seen it to be the most divisive among the fans, even though I like it.

Zestiria just looked even more mediocre than 'normal' Tales standards, especially after reading all those impressions when it came out.
 

MaLDo

Member
Wait, Final Fantasy IX? The PSX game? I assume people are complaining about the 240p background art as if they could easily re-make ALL those backgrounds in high-res. How silly.

Textures Resolution is not the problem. Scaling issues are.
 

Dr Dogg

Member
This is quite uncharacteristic for me, especially as I usually end up trying to give perspective to folks who lash out at what is perceived to be a bad port, but this might well be one of the worst ports I've ever laid eyes on, certainly in the last ~5 years. Straight away firing it up you could see it was internally rendering at a lower resolution and the barren settings menu already had me thinking 'this isn't going to be good'. As soon as I fired it up I had a few folks in the Steam thread wanting to know what settings were like and the framerate and such so that was great being the bearer of bad news.

But I'm taken a back how a game that is resolution locked, has various spelling errors and special character that aren't recognised, issues with accessing menus and save screens, some menus not displaying text at all, text and button prompts in UI elements spelt incorrectly or PS buttons, a DRM solution which 1). doesn't last 5 mins, 2). makes it incredibly difficult to use any injectors and 3). a right pain to even try and fix this in any way at all. Not to mention bizarrely having less save slots than any previous version. Plus there are a few folks in the Steam hub who can't even start it and some folks who get crashes after 15 mins of play (though not enough info to base the true cause of these issues).

I was playing about with it in CheatEngine last night and did find the addresses to resize the UI and the horizontal axis for one buffer but I really don't know if I can be bothered to look any further. I did manager to get the UI values into the main executable and they held when this bonkers DRM solution took over.

What's more this version was supposedly show off quite a while ago. On 24th September Bandai Namco Europe showed off what was supossedly the PC version then. Symphonia footage starts at the 1hr 13min mark roughly

http://blog.talesofgame.com/en/tales-of-zestiria-livestream-replay-and-pc-settings-menu/

At when you look at the button prompts they're 360 ones alright so none of the previous version released thus far. And this was shown off before Zestira had even released So I'm wondering was this port finished a while a go and was just sat on to unceremoniously release it in the state it was or 4 months+ it was still being worked on and yet still comes out in this state.

I'm laughing at this situation really, maybe because I got it for nothing (and if you paid for it I'm really sorry for you) but I honestly expected to wake up this morning and find it pulled from sale. Whoever signed off on this must be clearly mad as I can imagine this has done some damage to the Tales series on PC, just as it's getting started. Although chances of that being as butchered as Symphonia are probably slim to none being a game still in development but I do wonder if this example might have people holding off on Berseria on PC or not buying it all together. Even I had a sudden shock thought of 'what if they fuck up Dark Souls III?' so I dread to think what the more flippant people might jump to.

Really can't wait for the response from Bamco on this but seeing as the community dev on the Steam Hub initially had a profile name of 'LaZy MoFo' and has a Vac Ban on their account I expect either nothing or something completely redonculios!

I'm so sure that DotEmu had a hand in this, that if it's not them, I'll quit PC gaming forever.

Not really.

Hahaha come now, say what you want about DotEmu but at least they know how to implement arbitrary resolution support.
 

Arthea

Member
that DRM means I'm not playing it, even if I already have it.
No big loss, I've played it before, but still very disappointed.
 

Arthea

Member
Terrible port.

Just play it on Dolphin people. The game should be dirty cheap nowadays anyway.

Dolphin has no steam achievements and emulation is much more demanding than the port. I don't see how that solves anything, we should ask Bamco to fix the port, we should insist on it, for future releases as well.
That's only solution.
 

Zafir

Member
Dolphin has no steam achievements and emulation is much more demanding than the port. I don't see how that solves anything, we should ask Bamco to fix the port, we should insist on it, for future releases as well.
That's only solution.

It's a Gamecube game, so I doubt it requires that much more than the PC version of the game.

I don't think anyone is suggesting they shouldn't fix it really. I think the problem is more, that everyone questions whether they actually will.
 

Hektor

Member
II think the problem is more, that everyone questions whether they actually will.

The game is already sold to a lot of their customer base through it beeing pre-order bonus of Zestiria.

It's 20$.

The Damage to this ports reputation is already kinda done now.

Fixing it would require a lot of effort.

And apparantly the drm makes fixing it a lot harder, going by what some people say in here? Got no idea how stuff like that works.

All in all, i don't expect them to do a lot.
 

Arthea

Member
The game is already sold to a lot of their customer base through it beeing pre-order bonus of Zestiria.

It's 20$.

The Damage to this ports reputation is already kinda done now.

Fixing it would require a lot of effort.

And apparantly the drm makes fixing it a lot harder, going by what some people say in here? Got no idea how stuff like that works.

All in all, i don't expect them to do a lot.
well, they should remove DRM for starters, at least we should ask this first and foremost.
 

BONKERS

Member
Ahahaha oh my god. Bandai Namco is just shitting all over one of their most well known franchises.


Tales of Symphonia for PC, is not only a poor port of the PS3 version, keeping the idiotic 30FPS cap for a game that originally ran at 60FPS.

But it's render locked to 720p! ahahah
And then there are all the other issues.


Seriously Bamco, fuck off. How have you not learned by now? SERIOUSLY! After having been involved with PC games for well over a decade.

Dark Souls alone should've been lesson enough to make sure releases were done RIGHT.

But after they couldn't even bother to fix Zestiria's constant stuttering that someone unrelated without the source code fixed easily. WHy would I expect anything less than vast incompetence????


It's like you are competing for who can do a worse job between you, Tecmo Koei and Square Enix.

At least Capcom can do the bare minimum basics and get it running well without much issue.
 
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