In the latest trailer for Tales of Symphonia Remastered, its release date was confirmed for early 2023. This remastered version was initially announced during the Nintendo Direct held on September 13, alongside Octopath Traveler 2 and other highly anticipated titles.
Tales of Symphonia was originally released in 2003 exclusively for the GameCube before finding its way onto multiple consoles and PC later on. The original featured local co-op during battles, a max resolution of 480p, and a story that spanned over two GameCube discs. The remaster aims to bring this JRPG adventure up to more modern standards with promises of improved graphical fidelity and gameplay.
In the trailer released on November 9 via the Bandai Namco YouTube channel, Tales Of Symphonia Remastered’s release date was confirmed for February 17 of next year. Outside this announcement, the trailer teases some higher-resolution anime cutscenes, in-game battles, and story beats, but does not go into detail at all on what exactly has been upgraded. The major changes are instead available on the Japanese website for the game.
According to the site, Tales of Symphonia remastered will play at a native 1080p resolution on all consoles, while the Switch in handheld mode will play at its full 720p specs. The developers have also made improvements to how the boat, which is earned later in the game, operates; added an option to skip events, and included a vague change to the save menu screen. An odd design choice made by the developer for this remaster, however, is to lock all versions of the game to a static 30 FPS.
As mused on in an article from Eurogamer, it’s possible the version being used for this remaster is the PlayStation 2 port, which has a cap of 30 FPS, matching the specs shown on the site. The PS2 port did feature some additional content that may have contributed to why the frame rate was set lower, but it is an odd choice to maintain this restriction for current-generation consoles, which tend to only receive a hard 30 FPS cap in odd situations, such as in Gotham Knights.
