Apparently 13 years is not quite enough time to make a not-terrible PC port for a console game, as the recent Steam release for the 2003 Japanese RPG Tales of Symphonia has proven.

Users have been complaining about a number of serious issues with the game’s PC port, including frequent game crashes, reduced frame rate and resolution compared to the original, and a number of missing or incomplete features.

There also seems to be problems with the language encoding for the game, which has resulted in missing or garbled text in several languages.

“I love this game as much as anyone, and I put over 200 hours into it on the Gamecube, but I can’t support a developer releasing a port as poorly-done as this,” one user wrote in a review on Steam. “I’ll consider purchasing the game again once the numerous problems have been patched. Until then, I suggest you skip this one and refuse to support Bandai-Namco for releasing this shoddy excuse of a port.”

Tales of Symphonia, which was first released for Nintendo GameCube in 2003 (2004 in North America and Europe), was not the first game in the Tales series, but it is considered by many fans to be the archetypal Tales game, and the 10 games in the series that have been released after Tales of Symphonia have frequently been compared to it.

Because of this, many fans were excited when publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc announced that a port of the game was coming to Steam, but the abysmal state of the PC port has left many saying “not like this.”

A fan steps in to fix it himself

So far, there has been no word from Tales Bandai Namco on the state of the port or the possibility of official patches to resolve its issues, but Peter “Durante” Thoman, the well known modder who made the extremely popular DSFix mod for Dark Souls, is already working on his own unofficial fixes. Thoman noted in an article for PCGamer that it took him all of 14 minutes to fix some of the game’s biggest oversights.

“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,” Thoman said.

For the moment, it may be better to play an emulated version of Tales of Symphonia rather than buying the legitimate Steam version.

Not that we are endorsing that kind of thing, of course.

Image courtesy of Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc