The Tales of Symphonia PC port released on Feb. 1 and is so plagued with issues that fans are flocking to the game’s Steam page to fume. Let’s just say that the current number of negative reviews outnumber the positive ones.
Is Tales of Symphonia a bad game? Far from it, which is part of what has fans so angry.
“This is a good game and it looks really good with the upscaled graphics and higher resolution 2D assets, so it's a real shame that the port had to be so poorly executed,” stated Steam user Fugsnarf in their negative review.
“Graphical settings don't necessarily bother me, but constant crashing does….Please, I just ask the devs to not **** up my favorite game,” said Steam user The Notorious P.I.G.
“This is a great game, but an awful PC port. I experienced stuttering and crashing from the first moments of starting the game, and I asked for a refund within ten minutes of playtime. I love this game as much as anyone, and I put over 200 hours into it on the Gamecube, but I can't support a developer releasing a port as poorly-done as this,” said Steam user tribemaker.
Tales of Symphonia was originally created for Gamecube in 2003 It was then ported to the PS2, and then to the PS3, and now to PC. Playing telephone with ports over console generations doesn’t necessarily need to result in a disaster, but Peter “Durante” Thoman over at PCGamer has broken down the many levels on which the Tales of Symphonia PC port failed.
Resolution locked at 720p
Framerate locked at 30fps (the original Gamecube game ran at 60fps)
Localization files are broken, locked or incomplete
All new typos, like “Battle Contorols”
Random crashes when alt-tabbing
Load times of up to 30 seconds for tasks as simple as opening the config/save menu
An ineffective DRM called VMProtect that creates a new EXE file every time the game starts
Lack of support for mouse/keyboard controls
Only 6 save slots and inconsistent button icons
How long did it take Durante to fix these issues? 14 minutes to kill the resolution lock, and another two hours or so to make the resolution fully configurable, work around the DRM, fix issues with videos and the menu system, and support downsampling. Durante’s fix is available here .
Bandai Namco has yet to comment on the PC port officially, though a stickied thread on the game’s Steam Forum indicates that the post-release patching game is already afoot.
