A rather disturbing trend continues to rear its head in the gaming space we live in. Specifically, game development teams are increasingly okay with releasing products that are either bad, incomplete, or broken beyond immediate repair. Once upon a time, these things would bankrupt companies, and they’d never make games again. But in today’s gaming age, they do it without fear of massive repercussions. The latest team to do this act is Bandai Namco, who released Tales of Symphonia Remastered to multiple systems last week. It was meant to be an upgraded port of a beloved RPG but was anything but an upgrade.
As gamers found out on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PC, the game is as basic a port as possible. You could get through the game with minimal issues if you were lucky. But if you were a Switch gamer, you’d be lucky to get through the game without rage-quitting. Several bugs within the Switch version of the title have made the game a slog to get through.
Some issues include incredibly long loading times, massive frame rate drops, and more. That’s a key reason why the game has a low score on Metacritic. Fans have been making their feelings known on social media about the game’s broken state, and in a statement, Bandai Namco has apologized for the issues.
The statement was posted on Abyssal Chronicles:
“Apology and Information: Thank you for playing Tales of Symphonia Remastered for the Nintendo Switch. We have confirmed that there are currently problems with this version of the game that is on sale. At present, we are currently investigating on a fix.
We will give out information on an update as soon as it is available through this account, so please wait for more info. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused to our customers.”
While it’s nice to hear that Bandai Namco will “fix the issue,” the bigger problem is that there was an issue to start with. Before the game’s launch, the team noted that they did the “remaster” because fans had asked for it. But despite that fan love, they decided to port the inferior version of the game and then not ensure that the title was optimized on the Switch and other systems!
It’s pretty sad that the original version on the Nintendo Gamecube runs better than the modern “remasters.” But, just as sad, we can easily predict that something like this will happen in the future.
