Barely the bare minimum.
I have fond memories of playing Tales of Symphonia nearly 20 years ago. It was one of his first JRPGs I played and I still consider it the gold standard in the genre. With a complex story in a massive world, fluid real-time combat, and a star-studded English dub featuring Scott His Menville, Jennifer Hale, Tara Strong, and more, this game has a lot to offer. . There are some things that haven’t aged very well, like the lack of quality-of-life features in future Tales titles, and a messy opening act with clunky exposition, but for those looking for an absolute play, this game is easily recommended. Classic.
Unfortunately I don’t have many kind words about the latest remaster, not only is it the first time the game has been re-released on a Nintendo system, but it’s also the first time the game has ever been available in the West. For the third time in… Tales of Symphonia Remaster has enough issues that calling it a remaster feels generous. Not only is it completely devoid of new features and improvements, but it retains all the technical flaws from previous re-releases while still allowing new ones to be introduced. a problem of its own.
Sinfonia Remastered is based on the PS3 re-release from 2014, and many of its issues are inherited from that version. There has been a lot of talk about how games are locked at 30fps. This is a downgrade from his 60fps on his version of GameCube, which has its roots in his first PS2 port. If that was the only problem, it might not be too bad, but the game’s art style was compromised by the inconsistent rendering of the anime-style character outlines featured in the original release. doesn’t look as bold as the original GameCube version, and some scenes even disappear completely. Some scenes, bizarrely, contain dialogue that is completely missing in the PS3 and Switch versions. This is not a censorship or updated localization issue. Characters respond to missing lines as if they were there.
Porting to PS3 (which is also on Steam) isn’t much of a problem in the end. If you’ve never played the game, you won’t notice most of it. Load times between maps, which were previously negligible, are now seconds. Colors aren’t very vibrant overall, as the game’s brightness is turned down for all scenes. Textures have been upscaled by AI, resulting in a blurry soup of visual detail. The battle UI now features textured seams not found in any other version, and small icons and text fonts now display compression artifacts. One particularly egregious example I’ve noticed is the small black line that consistently appears above lowercase ws in dialogue.
Some of Symphonia’s graphical effects are simply broken. The pause screen that used to appear over what was happening in the game now has a solid black background. The stylish animation transitioning between exploration and combat is completely absent, replaced by a hard cut to black followed by a hard cut to white that fades in after a few seconds. Cutscenes also seem to have lost the ability to crossfade, now suddenly jumping cuts between shots that used to be slow transitions. It should work at 1080p. This is the best ever console version of Symphonia.
A lot has been compromised in this remaster, so if it was an emulator that ran the GameCube version in HD, it would have actually been an improvement. It’s not just an exaggeration. We actually checked out what the GameCube version looked like in a fan-made emulator, and it rendered the game in 4K. There are no compression artifacts in the UI and no visible texture seams. Character outlines are perfectly intact and the game runs at a smooth 60 fps. All aspects where the official remaster fails. The only thing the GameCube version lacks is the content added in the later PS2 port, but at this point I’m starting to wonder if that content is worth the effort.
Tales of Symphonia seems to be a game destined to get a little worse with each subsequent re-release. , introduces a whole new problem, which is difficult to justify. The minimum requirement for a retro game port is not to notice technical issues if you haven’t played the original, and Tales of Symphonia Remastered falls short of that standard. Playable. It’s still Tales of Symphonia.
