Bandai Namco's "Tales" series began in 1995 with Tales of Phantasia on the Super Famicom, PlayStation, and GBA, among other platforms, and was most recently seen a couple of years ago with Tales of Berseria. It's not finished yet: A PlayStation Lifestyle report says the company revealed at the Tales Of Festival 2018 in Japan that it is working on "the newest 'Tales of' game title for consoles."

Nothing else about the project was revealed but the Tokyo Game Show is a few months away and it's not unreasonable to speculate that it will be properly revealed there. Just before the start of that show, on September 16, Bandai will also hold a Tales of Vesperia 10th Anniversary Party, another fine opportunity to reveal (or at least tease a little bit more about) a new Tales game. 

Specifying that it's "for consoles" is perhaps unfortunate, but at this very early stage it's fair to expect that it will come to PC as well. Recent 'Tales of' games including Symphonia, Berseria, Zestiria, and Vesperia have made their way to our platform (with sometimes mixed results), and Bandai Namco recently announced that the Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition will be coming to PC this winter. 

Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Souls' DSfix. He has previously analyzed PC ports of Valkyria Chronicles, The Witcher 3, Tales of Zestiria and more.

Bandai-Namco, this is unacceptable. You too, Koei-Tecmo.

Yesterday Bandai-Namco released Tales of Symphonia on Steam. It s a game with a history of bad porting: the PS3 release which this port is based on—in turn a port of the PS2 version—was in some ways still inferior to the Gamecube original. So no one truly expected anything more than a decently competent barebones affair, with the same assets, framerate limitations and features as the PS3 version. However, what we got rivals the very worst ports in the last decade of PC gaming, and more than that the surrounding circumstances leave little conclusion other than the responsible company (or companies) simply caring little about the quality of their products.

I don t enjoy writing negative articles, but sometimes it has to be done. In this one, I ll explain all the things wrong with Tales of Symphonia on PC, and more than that, how these facts clearly point to an underlying system of priorities for creating this version of the game which simply makes no sense. No technical sense. No sense from the point of view of the customers. Note that there is one positive takeway from this: at least the resolution issues were easy enough to fix. I did it in less than three hours.

In any case, I want to refrain from descending into hyperbole or painting with too broad a brush—something I often observe when these topics are discussed. So first, let s start with some perspective.

The state of Japanese ports: it s actually not bad!

It should be clear to even the most reticent doubter at this point that Japanese publishers have started to realize that in most cases, not porting their games to PC is leaving money on the table. Many of them either started out releasing quality ports, or at least continuously increased both the quality of their ports and their support. Small companies like Idea Factory International manage to port and support their niche games without issues, and with all the basic amenities expected on the platform. Sega s selection of games to port might not be to everyone s taste, but all their ports are technically solid, and sometimes they include gems like Valkyria Chronicles. Capcom inarguably took far too long to port Dragon s Dogma, but when they did they delivered an excellent result with great performance, variable framerate and resolution support, extended options, and at a fair price.

Even Square-Enix, after some problematic initial attempts, is making progress, and both FFT-0 and Lightning Returns show some respectable efforts on PC, even though there is still room for improvement. NISA s PC version of Disgaea is happening about 5 years later than it should have, but you can already tell that at least some care and effort is being put into it.

Until just recently, I d have happily included Bandai-Namco in this list of success stories. They are porting more and more of their franchises, and their same-day release of Zestiria was easily the best version of the game, even before modding improved it further. This makes yesterday s release all the more of a baffling disaster, but more on that later. First, let s talk about Koei-Tecmo.

Koei-Tecmo, this is why you fail

Before talking about Koei-Tecmo I want to make one thing crystal clear about the success stories pointed out in the previous section, and that is that good ports generally succeed on Steam:

• Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 1, a very niche game, is sitting comfortably above 200 000 owners according to SteamSpy.
• Dragon s Dogma was released less than 2 weeks ago, and sold its current 220k without any deep discounts.
• Valkyria Chronicles (a strategy RPG from 2008!) has now reached a staggering 600k+ owners.

All of these are certain to have made back the investment on their quality ports many times over.

Koei-Tecmo has also ported a lot of games to PC recently, and they increasingly linger in the low 5 digits in terms of owners, according to SteamSpy s numbers. And one reason for that should be blindingly obvious. It s not that they are bad games, it s that Koei-Tecmo has not, even after many releases, invested even the modicum of effort required to support the very basics expected of 3D games on PC. This of course includes features such as arbitrary rendering resolution—that is, when they don t simply port a last-generation console version rather than the most recent one. And that s of course before getting into their tendency to release late, bad ports at ridiculous prices. (Note on SteamSpy figures: its creator says the tool can t accurately gauge data like playtime from games with fewer than 30,000 owners, but the number of owners should be within the margin of error).

I m actually saddened by Koei-Tecmo s seeming inability to grasp the relationship between how they treat the PC platform and the sales of its games. A few years back they bought Gust, one of the very few developers which I care about without any PC presence left at this point. The really sad thing is that this course would be truly easy to correct. If you cannot do a remotely adequate job in-house, then just hire one of the many companies who specialize in this kind of project, and who can provide you with a good port at a fair price.

Actually, if you want to port Atelier and not fail just drop me an email!

Tales of no QA

Now, after gaining some more perspective on the overall state of things, let s focus on the port which actually prompted this article. Tales of Symphonia was ported with a locked framerate and lacking support for mouse/keyboard controls—both of these are hardly praiseworthy, but to some degree expected and even acceptable considering the surrounding circumstances of the project.

What isn t acceptable is locking the rendering resolution of your 3D game. We ve been over this, but just to reiterate: supporting arbitrary rendering resolution, unlike arbitrary framerate, basically never requires a significant re-engineering effort. If it is not done, it s a sure sign of either lack of understanding of the platform, or a severe lack of budget or care when porting.

However, even a locked framerate, resolution, and bad support for standard PC controls is not enough to truly qualify as one of the very worst ports in the past decade of PC gaming. Those three points basically apply to Dark Souls 1—however, From Software had the decency to deliver a mostly bug-free and apparently well-tested product which worked well enough within its limitations. This is not the case with Tales of Symphonia.

In addition to all the faults already listed, the port as released comes with some incomplete or entirely broken localizations, crashes frequently on alt-tabbing or otherwise resetting its DirectX context, and has loading times which are completely beyond the pale when you consider that this was originally a Gamecube game and hasn t changed much since then, asset-wise. In fact, these issues are so severe that points which would seem significant for another port, such as limited save slots and inconsistently updated button icons, can almost be disregarded in the discussion.

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I d argue that even the mellowest individual could be forgiven for becoming agitated about the level of quality assurance (or rather lack thereof) implied by all the issues pointed out in the previous section. However, even all of that would not have been enough to prompt me to write an article such as this.

In the opening paragraph, I talked about the underlying system of priorities evident in this porting effort. It s now time to finally come back to this point, and the very reason to be outraged rather than merely disappointed at this port.

Basically, all of these issues could be explained by someone in Bandai Namco management deciding that this project has to be completed on a budget equal to one executive lunch. Companies often make budget decisions which are beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, so I could live with that.

Yet, there is one additional fact that tells us even this scenario—terrible as it is— does not suffice to capture the full extent of incompetence or apathy at play here. Because apparently, the budget was sufficiently large to license the VMProtect anti-tamper system. Which, by the way, generates randomly named executable files for each run, providing the headline for this section. Not only is this system apparently completely ineffectual—with a cracked version of the game appearing in mere hours—it also actively hampers efforts of modders (should any even show up after such blatant disregard for the platform) trying to fix what is broken with this release.

So let s recapitulate. Namco-Bandai cannot afford even the very minimal changes required to support arbitrary resolutions or superficially QA their product, but they can afford a completely ineffective DRM system. An ineffective DRM system for a game which people, if they were so inclined, have been able to pirate freely for over a decade.

That is apparently the quality of the decision making processes within this company. Their fans—and PC gamers—deserve better.

Postmortem: fixing stuff

After finishing up the initial draft of this article, I got curious and decided to see how long it would take me to defeat the resolution lock for this game. The answer was 14 minutes. Fixing some issues with videos and the menu system, as well as making the resolution fully configurable, supporting downsampling, getting it into a state ready to be released (which included some workarounds for the silly game DRM taking up precious minutes) and actually releasing the fix took another hour or two in total. Obviously, this fix is pre-alpha quality at this point, but hey, at least you don t need to pay me for it.

Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Souls' DSfix. He has previously analyzed PC ports of Valkyria Chronicles, The Witcher 3, Tales of Zestiria and more.

The recent release of a modification for running Tales of Zestiria at 60 fps—rather than the default 30—has once again demonstrated that mods can significantly improve PC games after release. But what actually constitutes this type of modding is still a mystery to most gamers. How difficult is it? How complicated? If modders make it look easy, why can't game developers implement these features in the first place?

In this article, I'll go over the most common types of modding today, and then go into more detail concerning the ones relevant in cases like Zestiria and Dark Souls. I ll also go back to the vexed question of why mods can often accomplish feats which are apparently out of reach of the original developers and publishers, and provide both my own and other modders perspectives.

This is my first time reporting primarily on other modders work, and it s a great joy to see an excellent community form itself around the practice, even for games which don t natively support any modifications. As such, before delving into the heart of the matter, I d first like to extend my thanks to the two people primarily responsible for the improved state of Tales of Zestiria on PC today: Andon Kaldaien Coleman and Niklas DrDaxxy Kielblock. Both have been exceedingly helpful in providing their own perspective on the process of modding in general, and on modding Tales of Zestiria in particular.

A Short Taxonomy of Modding

When trying to classify types of modding, the first and most crucial distinction is between mods directly supported by the developers of a game, and ones which are not. The former is a staple in e.g. Bethesda s games, and also somewhat common with releases from other developers with a PC background.

What is possible through this type of modding and how it is accomplished depends completely on the types of tools provided by the developers. In general, gameplay modifications and content additions are far easier to accomplish when official tools are provided, and a truly staggering amount of content can result. However, as it s the most well-understood and easiest form of modding to get into, it's not our target in this article.

If modding is not officially supported, there are three common ways of modifying the behavior of a game despite that limitation: data file editing, API-level interception and direct binary code injection. Of these options, editing a game s data files is the most straightforward, though it can vary from simply modifying .jpg images to adjust textures all the way to reverse-engineering the custom binary file format(s) of a game.

This leaves us with API-level interception and binary code modifications, which are the methods applied to Tales of Zestiria. We ll investigate these in more detail now.

API Call Interception

The TZFix project by Kaldaien—the primary mod for Tales of Zestiria—started out with the goal of solving an issue I missed in my initial port review, simply because I use an audio setup on which it does occur. While this bug was patched rather quickly, the game used to unceremoniously crash on startup on systems which use a 7.1 speaker setup.

TZF was soon extended to also improve the game s frame pacing (poor consistency of frames can cause stuttering even with a high average fps), which was problematic on many systems, reducing apparent smoothness despite ample performance. By now, it features aspect ratio support for non-16:9 displays, a shimmering fix, and also integrated my character shadow resolution improvements.

As you might expect from the title of this section, all these improvements were achieved using API call interception. This means that calls to standard programming interfaces—such as DirectX or core Windows functions—are intercepted by the mod, examined, and potentially modified. A fundamental tool often used for this purpose is minHook, which provides functions for relatively conveniently replacing API calls in memory. The other part of the fundamentals equation is actually getting the mod code into the game process, which is generally accomplished either by replacing a library used by the game with a wrapper—as TZF does for d3d9.dll—or injecting it by other means.

In any case, applying these modifications, while requiring some mechanical effort and familiarity with low-level details of how library function calls work, is really the simpler part of the process. Figuring out where and what to modify when to achieve a desired effect, without introducing undesired consequences, is where the true challenge lies. This falls squarely in the area of reverse engineering, a topic whole books have been written about, but I ll try to provide a quick overview based on a concrete example from Tales of Zestiria.

The first step is to figure out which API functions are actually invoked by a game. I mostly simply use Microsoft s dumpbin utility for this, while Kaldaien prefers Dependency Walker and specialized debugging tools. Either way, as a modder you have to form a hypothesis on which APIs are probably involved, and then investigate its use more closely. For our discussion, I ll go with the character shadow resolution mod I implemented.

Generally, with some basic knowledge of how 3D rendering works, you expect shadows to be rendered to some intermediate buffer first, and this buffer to be used again when the final scene is rendered later on. There are a lot of tools out there to investigate the rendering of a game, but few of them are geared for reverse engineering and modification of games with only access to a (potentially encrypted) binary. I was happy to hear that Kaldaien found the framedumping functionality built into GeDoSaTo useful for this purpose. By associating its visual image dumps and logging output, it s possible to reconstruct which buffers are involved in shadow rendering.

However, simply changing their size did little to improve the visual output in Tales of Zestiria. It was also necessary to determine which GPU shaders are used in filtering, reconstruct the meaning of their parameters from their usage, and adjust those parameters to the new shadow dimensions. Note that this is a few hours of work summarized to one sentence.

That s API call interception in a nutshell. It can be used to work around game bugs, as in the initial TZF or my recent short-term Mushihimesama fix, but it can also greatly improve aspects of a game or even add features to it. Examples of this include TZF, DSfix and even the generic functionality of GeDoSaTo.

Binary Code Modification

While API interception opens up a great many possibilities, it cannot by definition modify behavior which does not involve any external library calls. That s why the 60 fps modification by DrDaxxy was missing from the list of features in the previous section, and why he had to resort to direct investigation and modification of the game code and variables to accomplish this feat.

While both API interception and binary modification boil down to reverse engineering, with the former a modder at least has the known semantics of the library functions to guide them. With binary code modification, one of the greatest challenges is finding some starting point. For DrDaxxy, who used CheatEngine for most of his work, that starting point was the idea that a game running at 30 fps should store some values representing 1/30 somewhere in memory.

Just changing those values already had some effect, but only achieved the desired effect in some scenarios. What followed was an investigation of the game code which uses these values, which finally turned up a multiplier used in several other instances. Adjusting this multiplier led to mostly-working 60 fps gameplay. Subsequently, these adjustments were refined further, implemented in C and included in TZF. If this description sounds like it is glossing over tons of important details and lots of intuitive leaps, that s because it is. There is just no way to fully convey everything you need to know to get started on a binary mod project in a few short paragraphs.

The power afforded by binary modification comes with some drawbacks (other than its sheer difficulty). For example, official patches to a game should usually not change the behavior of API-level interception, but often completely break binary modifications hardcoded to specific addresses.

So why can t [company X] do it?

This is a question that commonly, and understandably, gets asked a lot. The answer likely differs with each individual case, but it is important to gain some perspective on both sides of the equation.

Both Kaldaien, who got his start reverse engineering games 15 years ago on Everquest, and DrDaxxy, a 20-year-old student who first made headlines for his GTAV FoV mod earlier this year, told me that they invested about 10 hours each before the first public release of their mods. Now this is obviously based on existing infrastructure and knowledge, but nonetheless it is not a huge amount of time compared to what it takes to develop a game. Even more crucially, as the main part of the article should have made obvious, the majority of this time is spent reverse-engineering behavior which should be far more obvious in the original code base that the developers work on.

However, the expectations for mods and official releases are vastly different when it comes to stability and polish. The initial version of the 60 fps unlock suffered from a variety of glitches, many of which have been resolved by now. Still, some remain, including minor visual niggles to at least one currently known progress-stopping bug—which incidentally, according to DrDaxxy, might also be one of the hardest to fix. For an unofficial release, many gamers won t mind disabling a mod manually for 1 minute in return for 50+ hours of a much smoother gaming experience. But for an official release, this would be unacceptable.

Taking into account these constraints, Kaldaien opined that Bandai Namco delivered a respectable port and made a significant effort to accomplish many of the things TZF is polishing off.

In my personal opinion, what should truly be taken away from this is a celebration of the nature of the PC platform, which allows people to tailor their experiences in the way they want. We get to decide for ourselves whether to put up with minor annoyances in return for a given feature or not.

You can download TZFix and the 60fps mod on the Steam page here.

We quite liked Tales of Zestiria, the "traditional JRPG" that hit Steam in October. We did not, however, like the fact that it was locked at 30 fps. As Durante put it in his analysis, a frame rate cap "is both anachronistic and a strike against any PC game, much more so if it is action-based," as Tales of Zestiria is. But there is now a way around that limitation.

The "fix," which is based on the Batman Fix DLL that was released in September for Batman: Arkham Knight, is part of a fan-made project intended to address various annoyances that plague the PC release of Tales of Zestiria, including "shimmering artifacts," the FMV aspect ratio, audio distortion, and of course the frame rate cap. Very importantly, it manages to do away with the cap without messing with gameplay, something Bandai Namco claimed it was unable to do.

The fix is quite new and so there may be a technical hiccups, but NeoGAF and Steam commenters alike seem pretty happy with it. That said, the fact that it's unofficial means you're on your own if something goes wrong, although the only thing that seems likely to is that it simply won't work. One way to tell, according to mod creator DrDaxxy, is to check the in-game clock: "If it's not exactly as fast as an actual clock, the mod is not working properly for you," he wrote. It'll take a spot of digging to find them all, but several potential solutions are floating around in that same thread.

The Tales series has been around for 20 years and has been known for its heavy console ties, so it comes as a bit of a shock that it s finally made it to PC with the release of Tales of Zestiria.

A mostly traditional Japanese RPG, Zestiria follows hero Sorey—a human with the ability to see the powerful and magical Seraphim—as he becomes the Shepherd and explores ancient ruins to rid the world of evil Hellion beasts and the Malevolence they spread. Like Metal Gear Solid, it s one of those stories where if you try to explain the complexities to a newcomer they ll start backing away in fear, but all of that talk of Prime Lords , Squires , and misappropriated names from Western fantasy legends will make perfect sense eventually. When you're not untangling the lingo, you spend your time exploring towns and dungeons, taking in a tale filled with melodrama, and smacking bad guys over the head with your sword in realtime battles.

It all gets off to quite a slow start, but the intro to this 40+ hour game is never dull. The opening area feels lush and vibrant despite it actually being quite technically sparse. The bright anime-style and gentle greens of the rolling hills are charming, soundtracked by a score with an infectious sense of adventure. If you played Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube back when it was hot then the world will instantly feel familiar, as both share a very similar medieval fantasy vibe. If you haven t? Just trust me, that this is a very good thing.

I found Sorey and his merry band of invisible friends really likeable despite their questionable taste in feathery earrings. The scripting and characterisation for each party member makes each one feel relatable and distinct. Edna the Earth Seraphim, for example, may look like your typical, sweet lolita anime trope, but she s actually sarcastic and deadpan. She delights in winding up the rest of your little troupe, and feels like a twisted version of Daria. Helpfully, normal humans can t actually see your Seraphim companions either, leading to some really awkward situations where it just looks like Sorey is babbling to himself. World saviour indeed.

At some points you ll find yourself having to make some tough decisions, and while they don t really affect your progress they do feel as though they have consequences in the way they affect your team emotionally. Early on you have to decide if you want to help fix a bridge using your powers in front of a large crowd. Do you risk them fearing you and your monstrous abilities, or wait until they re gone and delay your journey? There s not a lot of depth to it, but the characterisation is so well done that I couldn t help but feel emotionally connected to Sorey. I decided to be hasty to help the townsfolk faster, and felt an immediate pang of sadness as they all backed off in fear, leaving Sorey to stare glumly at his feet.

Unlike other JRPGs such as Final Fantasy 7, Zestiria uses action-based combat rather than traditional turn-based battles. It s surprisingly simple to get with grips with as you use a combination of physical strikes and magical Artes . While it can seem button-mashy at first, new elements such as Armatization add depth, letting you fuse with a Seraphim partner for increased damage.

Even the equipment system is full of strategic details to exploit. Instead of just swapping out cotton vests for stronger plate mail and the like, you can fuse items together to receive special effects and bonuses. The shiny new amber tiara I picked up about five hours in didn t come close to trumping my regular ol pound shop costume one, as I had already fused it with more useful abilities.

If you don t like JRPGs then this won t quite be the game to change your mind, but it s one of the best in the Tales series.

Despite an engaging story during which I became increasingly attached to Zestiria s young heroes, the adventure can feel a little clumsy in places. Being a port of a PS4 game, Zestiria is best played on a gamepad as some of the button-mapping on keyboard feels awkward in combat, and the camera can get stuck at inconvenient angles if a fight breaks out near a wall. I also found myself having to awkwardly stand in just the right place to check a monument or trigger a conversation, and it can be hard to figure out where to go next. There s a star icon to signal important events, but it ll only appear if you re in the same map area which isn t helpful if you need to be in a different zone entirely.

There are also a few points where traditional crosses over into just being needlessly old-fashioned. You still need to make use of save points dotted around the countryside, but at least there s a quick save feature for when you re really in a pinch. While Zestiria s dungeons are a huge improvement on previous series instalments (I actually explored things rather than just looking for that one stereotypical dead end that always has a treasure chest at the end of it) areas can still feel like particularly fancy corridors that ferry you between plot points. However the game hides it all well, making up for its weak points by having such fantastic style, and the story is involving enough to forgive any minor discrepancies.

If you don t like JRPGs then this won t quite be the game to change your mind, but it s one of the best in the Tales series. Fans will love the vast improvements on previous entries, and the fact that it shares a similar sense of spirit to that of the legendary Tales of Symphonia (also coming to PC soon, and free with Zestiria if you pre-ordered it). If you re into the genre but have never played a Tales game before then this is a great place to start.

Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Souls' DSfix. He has previously analyzed PC ports of Valkyria Chronicles, Dark Souls 2, The Witcher 3 and more.

The release of Tales of Zestiria on PC marks an important point in the history of Namco-Bandai s long-running JRPG franchise. Not only is it the first Tales of game to release on Steam, it arrived at the same time as the western console version, and is the first release—disregarding remakes—to officially feature both localized and original voice tracks. These seem like auspicious conditions for a successful release, but as PC gamers we are well aware that even the best starting conditions can be ruined by a mediocre porting effort.

In this article, I ll evaluate various aspects of Tales of Zestiria s port, in order to clarify whether the Tales franchise landed gracefully on PC, or was forced to crawl there.

When a new Japanese port is released on PC, launching it for the first time is always exciting. One common option is that you are greeted by a launcher, which could be either barebones, such as the initial one shipped with Final Fantasy XIII, or quite feature-rich, as in the recent Final Fantasy Type-0 release. Alternatively, the game launches directly. This might be a bad sign—if the reason is that there are no options to set—or a good one, if PC-specific options were integrated directly into the game rather than in a tacked-on launcher application.

Zestiria s port falls into squarely the fully integrated category. Not only does it launch directly, it also launched at 5120x2880 on my system, which effectively dispels fears of either a completely locked or a limited resolution selection.

In addition to the unlimited resolution selection, the graphics option menu also reveals a number of additional settings. Resolution, VSync and Fullscreen are common options and work as expected, though it should be noted that disabling Fullscreen while selecting the full screen resolution automatically engages borderless windowed mode, which is a useful inclusion. Another important point to keep in mind is that some of the settings only come into effect after restarting the game. That said, let s look at each setting in more detail.

Graphics options

The Shadow Quality setting actually influences two separate aspects of the game s rendering, as far as I could determine. For one, higher values improve the filtering quality on character shadows, and for another they increase the resolution of environment shadows.

Both of these effects are visible in the comparison above. The main character s shadow is significantly more filtered on high, while it shows significant artifacts which are even more distracting in motion on low. Meanwhile, the tree canopy shadow is more detailed and less blocky on high quality. As you would expect, off completely disables shadowing, and medium slots in between the high and low settings.

The only anti-aliasing option available in-game is FXAA, in the customarily almost indistinguishable high, medium and low variants. As we will discuss later on in the performance and tweaking sections, there are many options available on PC to further increase image quality, but FXAA is not a bad starting point for downsampling, for example.

As the comparison illustrates, FXAA does a pretty good job at handling geometry edges, with the usual weaknesses in motion and for sub-pixel artifacts.

Among the set of settings available in Tales of Zestiria, Draw Distance may be the most interesting one, and likely the one with the most immediate visual impact—outside of resolution of course. Just like one would expect from the name, it affects the draw distance for a wide variety of scenery objects and even creatures.

The comparison image above illustrates the difference between the near and far settings. Look at the full-size image to get a more accurate impression of these differences. Not only is a lot of vegetation missing with the near setting, the same goes for some rocks and even the goats to the right. Again, the medium setting slots in between the two. As is always the case with draw distance in games which have you moving around in larger areas, the lower settings are very distracting, with grass and objects visibly appearing out of thin air.

It s good to see Anisotropic Filtering among the in-game settings, although it is generally easy to enforce at the driver level. Its effect on both the clarity and filtering quality of textures at an oblique angle is profound.

The final option available in the game s graphics settings is LOD Detail. Despite taking a number of direct comparison screenshots at multiple points in the game, I could not determine any impact of this setting so far. This doesn t mean that it is completely without function—it could e.g. change model quality in parts of the game I haven t reached yet, or have some subtle impact during battle scenes, where it s almost impossible to create direct 1:1 comparisons. If anything turns up later, I will update the article to reflect this, but for now I believe this setting can safely be disregarded.

Performance

First of all, it needs to be said that Tales of Zestiria s PC port performs amazingly well. So much so that one might even be tempted to wonder why settings such as shadow quality or draw distance were included at all—of course, more settings are never a bad thing. Anyway, the obvious fly in the ointment regarding performance is that ToZ is another JRPG locked at 30 FPS, and since its battle system is quite active that lock makes a difference not only to perceived fluidity, but also in terms of gameplay.

Now, given the quality of the port in other areas, and my own attempts which I ll summarize later, I m willing to believe that it would not have been easy to unlock the framerate for the PC release. And in Namco-Bandai s defense, they did announce the framerate situation prior to the release. However, none of this changes the simple fact that a 30 FPS cap—any framerate cap really—is both anachronistic and a strike against any PC game, much more so if it is action-based.

In any case, if you can live with a 30 FPS limit, ToZ does not disappoint performance-wise. With all settings at their maximum, at a 4k (!) resolution, it never even reaches more than 50% GPU utilization on my GTX970. There have been reports of the game running well at more modest settings even on Intel s recent integrated GPU, and given my measurements I don t doubt these results. Frame delivery is also exceptionally consistent, with none of the micro-stuttering issues that plague some in-game frame limiters (looking at you, FF13!).

This level of performance, combined with a 30 FPS framerate cap, makes evaluating the impact of individual options both challenging and somewhat pointless. Nonetheless, I gave it a try for the most obvious candidates:

• For Draw Distance, going from near to far causes an increase in CPU utilization by about 8%, and an increase in GPU utilization by 5%. This result makes sense, as drawing more objects, particularly with the DirectX9 API, generally requires more CPU performance.
• Shadow Quality does not seem to affect CPU utilization at all, and going from off to high only increases GPU utilization by 4%.
• FXAA also has negligible CPU impact, and its impact on GPU performance is also around 4%.

On the next page: Zestiria's excellent keyboard/mouse controls, and attempts to circumvent the 30 fps lock.

Input and controls

Given that the most recent port I investigated previously was Final Fantasy Type-0, I went into trying to play Zestiria with mouse and keyboard with some trepidation. However, my concerns proved unfounded and I m happy to report that Zestiria s mouse and keyboard control scheme was clearly designed by someone who had previously played PC games.

Movement (WASD) and camera control (mouse) work as you would expect from a third person game, and all the other keybindings make sense as well. Also, there are options to invert the mapping of inputs to camera movement both horizontally and vertically. I know that games which omit these are almost impossible to play for some people, so I thought it worth mentioning.

All the inputs for every player—as is tradition for Tales games, local co-op is supported—can be mapped individually to either mouse and keyboard or other input devices. Furthermore, individual bindings can be set independently for normal gameplay and for battles. The game also features well-designed images not only for gamepad inputs but also for all the keys on a keyboard, and the latter even appear to be localized.

I d classify this as a good job all around already in terms of input for a PC port, but it doesn t stop there. The menus have been adapted to work very well indeed with keyboard and mouse, a rare treat really when it comes to these ports. All in all, the way input was handled in Zestiria s PC version truly deserves praise.

Issues and tweaking possibilities

In the short time since the game s release, a few issues have cropped up, but they appear to be easily circumvented, and hopefully easily patched. Note that I haven t experienced any of these on my setup, but I m reporting both them and their workarounds here for completeness.

• Audio-related issues ranging from noise to the game not launching at all. These appear to be related to the sound settings on a system, and can generally be eliminated by setting the hardware to 5.1 (or 6) channels and 48 kHz.
• Refresh rate mismatches if the game chooses e.g. a 59Hz resolution instead of a 60Hz one. This can be fixed with external tools (e.g. forcing the highest refresh rate in the driver) or worked around by using borderless windowed Fullscreen mode.
• Input mapping a new device without restart doesn t always work reliably, to work around this issue just select the device, restart the game, and then perform the input mapping.

I expect all of these to be patched promptly; they don t seem like issues which would be very hard to track down or fix.

One of the greatest strengths of PC as a platform are the myriad tweaking possibilities it offers beyond what was envisioned by the original game developers. In Tales of Zestiria s case, I ll present a few simple but very effective tweaks, outline some more advanced ones, and report on the likelihood of a FPS unlock after my initial experiments.

One of the simplest tweaks which might improve your experience with Zestiria is downsampling. As the game has very low requirements, even on a mid-range gaming PC it can be viable to run it at resolutions of 4k or even higher. Your options for downsampling include driver-level solutions such as Nvidia's DSR and AMD's VSR, as well as my own GeDoSaTo. With GeDoSaTo, I ve also already enabled the possibility to toggle the game s UI, as well as taking screenshots without the HuD showing. Do note, however, that the most recent version of GeDoSaTo is unstable for many users and it might pay off to wait a bit until this situation is resolved.

 Talking about resolving issues, one disappointment for some fans prior to this release was that the original opening theme song for the game would be replaced with another, likely due to licensing issues. On PC, restoring the original was even easier than anticipated, as it shipped with the initial release version of the game. This error has since been corrected, but the file is already out there and easy enough to find and replace. If you are interested, just search for AM_TOZ_OP_001_JPN.bk2 and replace the file AM_TOZ_OP_001.bk2 in the RAW/MOVIE folder with it.

I spent around three hours looking into how the game performs its frame pacing and regulates animation speed. That s not a lot of time when it comes to reverse engineering, but at this point I d say the odds for a simplistic framerate unlock are rather bad. I did get the game to run at different framerates, both lower and higher than 30, with a lot of unstable and ill-advised hackery: changing the results of various Windows API functions which report and measure time, preventing the game threads from sleeping, and other heavy-handed adjustments which could just as well break a program entirely. Zestiria didn t break during my short testing, but as expected everything I tried affected the number of frames delivered as well as the speed of animations and gameplay equally, with no sign of any possibility to independently adjust the two.

Thoughts and conclusion

I would classify Tales of Zestiria s Steam release as a success. From all evidence we are privy to, it appears the porting team did the best they could under the circumstances, and the result is a strong port, with excellently adapted controls, great and consistent performance, arbitrary resolution support and a range of graphical options.

Despite that, or perhaps because everything else is up to such a standard, the FPS lock hurts. I think my only choice at this point is to repeat my appeal from a previous article: Don't engineer your future games in a way which makes it apparently impossible for even what is clearly a technically competent porting team to change the framerate. This is the 21st century.

Other than that, I am impressed by this release. Namco-Bandai also did a good job bundling some free DLC, the most important of which is still freely available to buyers until November. On the other hand, the availability of what amounts to a trainer for 20 on Steam evokes something between amusement and disgust. However, apparently this type of DLC has been standard for the series for a while now, and, well, you don t need to buy it.

Returning to the essentials, this port of Tales of Zestiria is about as good as you could ever expect it to be given the locked framerate, and the best version of the game available on any platform.

Tales of Zestiria is coming to Steam! And if that rings a bell, it's probably because we actually found out about it back in June. But now we know more, thanks to the official Tales Of blog, which also explains that the PC release will run at 1080p, support 4K resolution, and be locked to a framerate of 30 fps. 

Wait! Don't go!

Okay, that last point might be a little off-putting, but Bandai Namco explained that there's really no other option. "The 'Tales of' battle system has always been an integral part of the gameplay experience, and changing the framerate proved to have profound consequences on things like: animation, balance, difficulty, and overall fighting mechanics tuning," it wrote. "We do this in the best interest for the players experience!"

The draw distance on the PC release will be double that of the PS3 edition, with a "far" option that will extend it even further. Shadows, antialiasing, and textures have all been upgraded, and players will be able to select a low, medium, or high setting for each graphical option.

Meanwhile, over on Steam, we have system requirements:

Minimum:

OS: Windows Vista 32/64-bitCPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2.6GhzRAM: 1GBGPU: Nvidia GeForce 8800GT or ATI Radeon HD 4830DirectX: Version 9.0cHDD: 12GB

Recommended:

OS: Windows 7 (x64) or Windows 8 (x64)CPU: Intel Core i3-530, 2.93 GHz / AMD Phenom II X4 940, 3.0GHzRAM: 4GBGPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti / AMD Radeon HD 7850DirectX: Version 9.0HDD: 12GB

Tales of Zestiria lists for $50/ 40, and will be out on October 20. Bandai Namco will serve up the first look at the PC version of the game during a livestream on Twitch that will include giveaways, an appearance by the Tales of Ambassador, and more, set to take place at 10 am PT on September 24.

Bandai Namco announced in June that Tales of Zestiria will launch on Steam on October 20, which was happy news indeed for fans of the long-running "Tales Of" franchise. And now there's even more good news: An HD remake of Tales of Symphonia will join it in 2016.

"As we announced during our Level-Up event, 2015 is full of surprise for Tales Of fans. Bringing Tales of Zestiria to PlayStation 4 and PC was our first step towards the celebration of the 20th Anniversary, bringing Tales of Symphonia HD, an all-time favourite, to PC is now the second step!" Herve Hoerdt of Bandai Namco said. "We are working hard to bring more exciting content for Tales Of lovers in Western countries, and we hope that our efforts are appreciated!"

The Tales of Symphonia entry on Steam doesn't say much about the game, nor does it give any indication of price, but in spite of the relatively far-off (and vague) release date, it does list some system requirements, which are fairly easygoing:

Minimum:

• OS: Windows Vista 32/64
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz / AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2.6GHz
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 8800GT / ATI Radeon HD 4830
• DirectX: Version 9.0
• Hard Drive: 7 GB available space
• Additional Notes: Gamepad support

Recommended:

• OS: Windows 7 (x64) / Windows 8 (x64)
• Processor: Intel Core i3-530, 2.93 GHz / AMD Phenom II X4 940, 3.0GHz
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti / AMD Radeon HD 7850
• Hard Drive: 7 GB available space
• Additional Notes: Gamepad support

Tales of Symphonia HD is also part of the Tales of Zestiria pre-purchase program on Steam. Four tiers of bonus "rewards" are on offer, based on the number of people who preorder the game: the "Classic Weapons Set," the "Classic Male Costumes Set," the "Classic Female Costumes Set," and finally, a free copy of Tales of Symphonia HD. The game will be added to Steam libraries automatically (if the final pre-purchase tier is achieved) when it's available, which will happen sometime next year.