Tales of Symphonia's PC port has some big problems

The Windows PC port of Tales of Symphonia, Bandai Namco's beloved 2003 role-playing game, was released on Steam yesterday but fans soon discovered that the quality of that re-release was not up to modern standards. Tales of Symphonia's PC port shipped with a locked resolution and frame rate, almost non-existent graphical options and what appears to be a sloppy localization.

Tales of Symphonia is, by its own description, "based on the PlayStation 3 port of the original GameCube game," so it's taken a few leaps across console generations to get here. But game crashes, missing features and obvious bugs have angered Tales series fans on Steam, leading to an influx of negative user reviews.

Some of the most common complaints surround Tales of Symphonia's internal resolution and frame rate, which are locked at 720p and 30 frames per second, respectively (though some users report running the game at 40 frames per second). Others point to technical issues related to the game's built-in DRM and tabbing between the game and other programs.

Users have pointed out problems with the game's localization, which appears incomplete. Some menu items appear in English, even if the user has their language set to French, German or Spanish. Some menu items are simply blank. At least one menu option has a glaring typo in English: "Battle Contorols."

Fortunately for Tales fans, well-known modder Peter "Durante" Thoman has already updated his generic down-sampling tool (aka GeDoSaTo) with a plugin for Tales of Symphonia. It currently addresses the locked internal resolution of 720p, though Thoman says he's only spent a few hours working on his latest fix.

We've reached out to Bandai Namco for comment on the PC port of Tales of Symphonia, and will update with any new information we receive.