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Game Title: Tales of Symphonia
Platform: PC (Steam)
Developer: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Genre: Role Playing
Age Rating: PEGI: 12+, ESRB: T for Teen
Release Date: 1st February 2016 (Steam Worldwide)
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Game Score: 5.5/10
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Summery:
Tales of Symphonia arguably one of the more memorable J-RPGs on the Gamecube sadly just feels rushed and unpolished on PC.
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Out of many of the Gamecube titles in it's library there are plenty of stand out titles outside of the usual Nintendo dispute being behind the PS2 and Xbox consoles. These games range from the Resident Evil Remake and Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Rouge Squadron II and Eternal Darkness just to name a few. While the system wasn't really the place for J-RPGs it arguably got one of if not one of the most memorable games of the past decade and longtime fans still consider it to be one of the best games on the Gamecube next to Metroid Prime and the aforementioned Resident Evil 4. This game I'm talking about is Tales of Symphonia which made some J-RPG fans who were stuck with all the Final Fantasy games turn their heads in some way. Tales of Symphonia was known for it's amazing characters and story, great battle system and it's responsible for creating a loyal fanbase that helped spawn a sequel as well as a Japan only animation. It was later ported onto the PS2 and PS3 in which they added some new content put played rather horribly and that can also be said for it's PC port which is now available for download on Steam.
Before I get into how terrible and unoptimized the PC port of Tales of Symphonia is I should explain just the basics of what the game is and how it is played. The game follows the protagonist Lloyd Irving who journeys with his friend Colette Brunel who is the chosen who must save the world from both the loss of mana and also a group called Desians which are causing people to suffer. Throughout the game you get to witness several character moments and backstories which are really great and gives each of the game's characters plenty of depth. Lloyd Irving the game's main protagonist is surprisingly likeable, he believes in a world where everybody lives their lives equally. Colette is a humorous klutz who trips over in some unexpected events, but something good comes out of it while also taking a few conversions out the window when her stupidity is in play. Presea is an emotionless girl who has lost her time being controlled by the exsphere but once she regained her emotions her characteristics involving her voice and likeness in paw pads make her very enjoyable. The best out of the Symphonia cast is Kratos a wondering swordsman with secrets that can't be spoiled here, he fells guilt over the things he felt so weak to accomplish and he's every bit as heroic as Lloyd and also believing in his ideals. He's a calm and collected character and his english voice by Cam Clarke is well delivered. Like in these Tales games you can expect to have several plot twists that can surprise first time players and despite the long story development time the storyline in Tales of Symphonia is really enjoyable and it will feature moments that will leave players laughing or crying in tears. The series stable is the skit system in which many of the characters chat over the currant events that will unfold or just plain idle chats which can be hilarious while other times just emotional that you often feel sorry for their situations at times. Each of the characters are voiced in both English and Japanese allowing you hear the original tracks from the Japanese version.
Tales of Symphonia is an Action RPG which was very different from the turn based RPGs that were out at the time. The game is split between an overworld where you enter towns to rest, get better equipment and get clues to your next objective. The overworld and each of the dungeons has several monsters to fight which require you to touch them to start each fight making you decide how you want to handle your battles. There are puzzles to solve as well as a challenging boss encounter that appears at the end. As long as you do spend actual time grinding up experience points to make your party members stronger and upgrading their equipment you shouldn't find the game hard on the Normal Difficulty setting.
Tales of Symphonia's battles take place in real time rather then turn based in which four of your party members are taken into battle with each of them having their own abilities called Artes in which you chain together to create highly damaging combos. While you can play alone you can add extra controllers (if your PC has extra USB slots) to have other players join in the battles locally. Enemies have a strength and weakness mechanic where enemies are weak against certain elemental attacks which can make battles a lot easier once you learn their weaknesses and how the enemies behave in battle. Later on in the game you'll access to the Unison Attack which allows four of the characters to combine all their attacks to create a powerful attack if the right attacks are met and also like in the PlayStation versions you can also pull off a Mystic Arte which deals major damage but require conditions in order to pull them off. The battle controls is a little hard to go back to if you have played the more recent Tales of Zestiria and it's more note worthy if you are playing with an Xbox 360 controller. Regardless Symphonia's battles are merely a product of it's time and it pretty much shows how much the game has aged which the rest of it I will come back to.
The gameplay does add some character customization, there are unlockable titles and costumes which are unlocked through completing sidequests. Sidequests require you to talk to various NPCs which have to be done at the right time in the story or some will become unavailable if you progressed to far. You can cook up meals to restore your characters HP, TP and status effects which can be learned from Wonder Chefs found in towns aside from using recovery items. There is also a Ex-Skill system where you can equip Ex-Gems gives characters different abilities and the correct combinations will give characters Ex-Skills like improved guarding, higher chances of critical hits, chances of resurrection and so on. Like in other Tales games there is plenty of customization which allows you to experiment to your playstyle and this game really does reward the player in that regard.
Now that I have talked about the gameplay of Tales of Symphonia it's time to talk about what is wrong with the PC port of the game. Now to be fair for a 13 year old game that originally came out on the Gamecube it does look great but the issue is that the game's graphics and overall design is based entirely on the PlayStation releases of the game. I've noticed that the PC version of the game is not running at a high definition resolution and I have seen on the internet that the graphics are at 720p resolutions. It means that you'll see things like dull and pixilated textures on the environments, stiff animations and also plenty of character clipping. What's also bad about the graphics in this port is that the frame rate is locked to 30 and there is some mild stuttering and some reported that they can run the game at best 40 fps. Other problems with the game come from the incomplete and broken translations, various typos, PS3 and XBox 360 button icons being used, random crashes, only six save slots, saving and loading taking 30 seconds to occur when played in Windows 7 and this DRM program called VMProtect which creates a new ".exe" file every time the game boots up. Now prior to doing this review Bandai Namco has patched some of those issues like the saving and loading, menu translations, adding additional save slots and button icons but they yet to fix the main issues like the frame rate and we can hope that the developers continue to fix the game up. Now when I installed and ran the game the things I experienced before the patches came up were the obvious 30 FPS and minor stuttering but on the positive side the frame rate is better then the frame rate I noticed in the PS3 port. Other things I experienced with this version was the mouse cursor taking up the screen, some voice dialogue wouldn't work while also wrong character dialogue played in one cutscene for some bizarre reason. I didn't experience any game crashes even with long periods of gameplay time and also didn't experience any interference between my game and my anti-virus software besides minimising which also didn't cause any issues after maximising it again.
What you have overall with Tales of Symphonia on the PC is that it's an unstable, broken mess of a PC port that just feels rushed and unpolished. While I didn't experience a lot of the issues that people have had with it but the way that the port looks and plays makes this a lazy designed port compared to how smooth and polished the Gamecube original and in fact just the way it looked on it in general. Now I can understand that the developers wanted to take a very popular game and bring it up to the PC platform to try and get the fans attention, but it follows the same path as Final Fantasy meaning that they will do little to bring the game up to be optimisation on the PC platform as a cheap cash-in to milk the fanbase. Hey at least playing through this is much better then having to play any of the really bad Final Fantasy games on PC especially FFXIII and it's sequels. On the plus side if you did pre-order Tales of Zestiria on Steam before it launched then you would get Tales of Symphonia as a free game. I will forever love Tales of Symphonia considering what it has done for me, I will remember that day when my nephew got it for Christmas and seeing him playing it on that boxing day and seeing the combat system was like which got me into the Tales series later on. I'll even remember the days when my nephew even brining it over my house and he and I spending that time to get quests and challenging boss fights done together or going over my nephews house to play the game myself till I got my own copy. Now recommending this is something that's out of my hands, personally if you never played Tales of Symphonia before and love RPGs then I say I recommend this game enough but if you don't have a Gamecube or PS3 but want to play this game then that version would be your only option. There are some modding communities that aim to fix the mess that Bandai Namco has done with this port like the graphics and it's not bad for what they are doing. Personally I would go for the Gamecube version because some prices on EBay are actual really reasonable for what it's worth but the PS3 is okay if you want the extra content plus the sequel. If the developers are going to put the Tales of Symphonia sequel or in fact other Tales of games in general then the developers need to come to grips with brining their games to the PC if they want the series to survive. Let's just hope the newly announced Tales of Berseria does not suffer the same fate on the PC.
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The Good Points:
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1. Everything from game mechanics, character customization and story is all there
2. The game at least functions
The Bad Points:
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1. Horrible pixilated graphics, frame rate and other performance problems
2. Some of the dialogue is messed up in some way
3. Very poorly optimised for the PC hardware
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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