Fans of early 00’s gaming have had a great week playing Metroid Prime Remastered and the new Game Boy emulators added to Switch. I have to say, the timing of this “remaster” could not be worse. Readers, I can’t tell you how awful it is to spite finish a video game for review, but that’s just what I did with Tales of Symphonia Remastered. I am trapped in a reverse Goldilocks scenario where I have access to two bowls of “just right” porridge, but I have to eat every bite of a third bowl that tastes like Baby Bear got his boogers all up in it.
TALES OF SYMPHONIA CHRONICLES ON PS4 PS3
I won’t lie - I am a little upset about the sorry state of the Switch “remaster.” What makes me more upset, though, is that I own both the GCN and PS3 versions of this game, and I have to finish the worst version of it to complete this review.
TALES OF SYMPHONIA CHRONICLES ON PS4 PS2
On PS3, it is a similar story: while the framerate is 30 fps, it also looks, sounds, and plays better than this Switch “remaster.” This is exceptionally frustrating, because each version (including the PS2 version) has gotten progressively worse, a unique achievement in mediocrity. Checking my original copy of Symphonia on GameCube (with EON’s GCHD add-on attached for HDMI support), I determined that it looked, sounded, and played much better on GameCube: there is no input lag, the framerate is a rock-solid 60fps, menus are transparent, voices are clearer, load times feel shorter and less frequent, and the textures look more uniform - in the remaster, many background textures look stretched, and highlighted/foreground textures look a bit glossy. Except Sheena who is busy ‘mirin.Īfter getting reacquainted with the game’s cast, setting, and themes, I began to feel a paranoia that this isn’t the Symphonia I remember: loading screens are rampant and entirely black or white, menu backgrounds are not transparent, the controls feel wonky and delayed, and the framerate seems inconsistent. The Symphonia crew looks out at the horizon. When I revisited these opening hours in this “remaster,” I couldn’t help but feel that something was off. I love the opening few hours of Symphonia, as it hits familiar light-hearted first-area vibes, but it also doesn’t wait around to address heavy stuff throughout this game, Colette and gang encounter great injustices like mass torture, slavery, and genocide, all while they grapple with the traumas of death and general adolescence. Its opening hours follow cute, big-hearted teen Lloyd and his friend, studious boy Genis, as they seek to accompany this game’s “Chosen One,” Colette, on her adventure to open elemental seals and save the world. Tales of Symphonia Remastered starts out like a familiar trip down memory lane. While it is admittedly more readily available, it is ostensibly the worst way to play Tales of Symphonia. It provides no new updates or upgrades (in fact, it has less content than its predecessor because it lacks the Dawn of the New World spin-off included in Chronicles), runs at an unsteady 30 fps, has terrible load times, has input lag when docked, crashes on occasion (especially before cutscenes), and has compromised audiovisual quality. Tales of Symphonia Remastered, on the other hand, is not a good game - especially on Nintendo Switch. Tales of Symphonia Chronicles on the PlayStation 3 is also a pretty good game: it displays the original in HD, has extra content, and it runs reasonably smoothly (despite its downgrade in framerate from the GCN original). I have fond memories of renting Symphonia on the GameCube over and over from a local video rental store in the 2000s, and I think it still holds up today. The original Tales of Symphonia for Nintendo GameCube is a good game.
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