Wednesday 3 February 2016

Tales of Symphonia (Steam Port, Game Review)


This PC port of a thirteen-year-old game is locked at thirty frames per second. That should tell you all you need to know about this one, the very fact that whoever was tasked with porting this to a new generation can’t get it to run at the full sixty frames the Gamecube was capable of. Really, more than anything else, this is the kind of unmitigated disaster, which has gradually eroded trust in HD Re-masters, and modern re-releases alike. Unless the developer is taking the time to rebuild the whole game from the ground up, it seems we’re destined for another flop.

3 comments:

  1. To be honest, I thought the port of FF6 would be the worst port to the PC that I'd ever see, this just shows that there's no bottom to this barrel. Hopefully Steam just removes this outright from their stores and accepts returns for it.

    There's a lot of games that I love which I do hope they're brought to PC someday, however if this is the state that they'll be in, I'll stick with the console version.
    All that's missing is for them to have done what a number of studios have done with re-releases, add in characters who weren't in the game before, have no bearing on the main plot, and make the game worse with their inclusion (see Persona 4 Golden and Tales of Vesperia for the PS3).
    It's also optional for them to add ridiculous fanservice scenes to those games that weren't in there before, because somebody saw that the hotspring scene in P4 had no fanservice and thought "THIS WILL NOT STAND!" Since they didn't realize that was part of the joke.

    Presumably they'd do the same thing to Vesparia since that also has a hotspring scene where the joke is the player doesn't see anything and nothing happens. No really, nothing happens, the main character waits in the lobby while everyone goes in, the older guy and the boy try to peek, nothing comes of this, and then everybody leaves.
    The best part? Getting the scene where nothing happens costs a ridiculous amount of in-game money and requires a lot of grinding for no payoff aside from a few jokes the party members make to each other later, it's hilarious.

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    1. If there's one thing the industry has proved over the past few years, things can always get worse even when they shouldn't. I mean, FF6 was an undeniably bad job, but this was so half finished I had to edit and finish off half the stuff they were supposed to have done in the first place. There's relying on modders and then there's just being bloody lazy.

      Hah, keep meaning to actually play those two in all honesty, but I have heard nothing but good things about them. Persona's supposedly long start and exaggerated length is honestly the main reason i've not had the chance to pick that one up, that and a lack of time. Still, if you vouch for them i'll definitely give them a shot. That kind of humour is the sort of thing i've only seen Star Ocean 2 pull off when it comes to JRPGs, so it sounds like it could be fun.

      Oh, also, I will be responding to your posts on the Star Wars article, I just want the time to respond to them in full. Sorry if I end up keeping you waiting.

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    2. If you're going to play P4, I'd really recommend the original, there's nothing Golden adds aside from making the game piss easy, even on the hardest difficulty because one of the random enemy drops is a free stat increasing card. Normally you can get 3-5 stat boosts to increase after each level (something like 10-20 battles) whereas now you get them every 3-5 fights, on top of regular levels.
      Out of curiosity I learned that not only was it possible to beat the game by ignoring the ability to switch Persona's, it was smarter for me to do exactly that because my first persona always had higher stats than everything I could get. Since creating new Persona's and switching them to adapt to new enemies and attacks is about half the game, Golden's main feature is rendering half the game pointless. They also add a new character whose only purpose is to be a Mary Sue, and who later gets godlike powers, and who ends up butchering the main villains motivation just by existing. Presumably somebody was upset that the game didn't have that character archetype where they both love and hate the main character, and flip-flop between the two.

      Persona 4 is a really long game though, it's no exaggeration that it takes most people 40+ hours to beat it. It's also no exaggeration that it takes a bit to get going, once the plot's rolling on it though it's really engrossing.

      Vesperia is kind of the same way, it takes a while to get going, there's three plots that happen in the game, and they're separate enough to the point that at the 20 hour mark I thought I was nearly done, then plot #2 gets introduced, at hour 40 I thought I was nearly done, then plot #3 gets introduced, then the game was over at hour 60+.

      I like to think that Vesperia was made by somebody who hated JRPG cliches, as an example the main character is in his early 20's, most of the time he's doing actions that while he's doing them to help others, they aren't really good things themselves (like break and enter, robbing, and outright murder) and a lot of the time people in that game are fairly smart. A character in your party tries to distract some guards who are guarding a checkpoint in the wilderness so they can get past by telling them that there's a fire, one guard points out that there's no smoke and another points out that he can't smell anything burning, and they try to arrest the character for lying to them.

      Take your time on the Star Wars stuff, I'm not in any hurry.

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