Tales of Symphonia Remastered was officially announced at the Nintendo Direct earlier this week, bringing back one of the GameCube’s most beloved JRPGs to modern platforms. Characteristic of most Nintendo Direct streams, there were not initially a ton of details in the game’s announcement, but we have a better sense of what the game is and isn’t right now. One such factor is that the remastered version will run at half the framerate of the game’s original release.
This comes from the official website, which lists technical details near the middle, outright saying that the game will run at 30 FPS. While the game will run at 1080p and the comparison pictures indicate that the modern version will look a lot less washed out than the PlayStation 3 version, once again running lower than the GameCube version is a disappointment.
Bandai Namco has never officially come out to explain exactly why every subsequent Tales of Symphonia release has run at 30 FPS while the GameCube version ran at 60 FPS. It’s been assumed that the developer had to make concessions for the PlayStation 2 port that resulted in half the framerate of the JRPG originally built for the more-powerful GameCube. Presumably, Bandai Namco only still has the source code from that PS2 version, which had a little bit more content, and does not have or does not want to use the GameCube version.
Nintendo keeps archives of all source code for games published on their platforms, but possibly require that games rebuilt using that archive are exclusive to their console. The tradeoff might not be worth it for Bandai Namco.
Tales of Symphonia Remastered releases on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Switch in early 2023.
