Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Souls' DSfix. He has previously analyzed PC ports of Valkyria Chronicles, Dark Souls 2, The Witcher 3 and more.
The release of Tales of Zestiria on PC marks an important point in the history of Namco-Bandai s long-running JRPG franchise. Not only is it the first Tales of game to release on Steam, it arrived at the same time as the western console version, and is the first release—disregarding remakes—to officially feature both localized and original voice tracks. These seem like auspicious conditions for a successful release, but as PC gamers we are well aware that even the best starting conditions can be ruined by a mediocre porting effort.
In this article, I ll evaluate various aspects of Tales of Zestiria s port, in order to clarify whether the Tales franchise landed gracefully on PC, or was forced to crawl there.
When a new Japanese port is released on PC, launching it for the first time is always exciting. One common option is that you are greeted by a launcher, which could be either barebones, such as the initial one shipped with Final Fantasy XIII, or quite feature-rich, as in the recent Final Fantasy Type-0 release. Alternatively, the game launches directly. This might be a bad sign—if the reason is that there are no options to set—or a good one, if PC-specific options were integrated directly into the game rather than in a tacked-on launcher application.
Zestiria s port falls into squarely the fully integrated category. Not only does it launch directly, it also launched at 5120x2880 on my system, which effectively dispels fears of either a completely locked or a limited resolution selection.
In addition to the unlimited resolution selection, the graphics option menu also reveals a number of additional settings. Resolution, VSync and Fullscreen are common options and work as expected, though it should be noted that disabling Fullscreen while selecting the full screen resolution automatically engages borderless windowed mode, which is a useful inclusion. Another important point to keep in mind is that some of the settings only come into effect after restarting the game. That said, let s look at each setting in more detail.
Graphics options
The Shadow Quality setting actually influences two separate aspects of the game s rendering, as far as I could determine. For one, higher values improve the filtering quality on character shadows, and for another they increase the resolution of environment shadows.
Both of these effects are visible in the comparison above. The main character s shadow is significantly more filtered on high, while it shows significant artifacts which are even more distracting in motion on low. Meanwhile, the tree canopy shadow is more detailed and less blocky on high quality. As you would expect, off completely disables shadowing, and medium slots in between the high and low settings.
The only anti-aliasing option available in-game is FXAA, in the customarily almost indistinguishable high, medium and low variants. As we will discuss later on in the performance and tweaking sections, there are many options available on PC to further increase image quality, but FXAA is not a bad starting point for downsampling, for example.
As the comparison illustrates, FXAA does a pretty good job at handling geometry edges, with the usual weaknesses in motion and for sub-pixel artifacts.
Among the set of settings available in Tales of Zestiria, Draw Distance may be the most interesting one, and likely the one with the most immediate visual impact—outside of resolution of course. Just like one would expect from the name, it affects the draw distance for a wide variety of scenery objects and even creatures.
The comparison image above illustrates the difference between the near and far settings. Look at the full-size image to get a more accurate impression of these differences. Not only is a lot of vegetation missing with the near setting, the same goes for some rocks and even the goats to the right. Again, the medium setting slots in between the two. As is always the case with draw distance in games which have you moving around in larger areas, the lower settings are very distracting, with grass and objects visibly appearing out of thin air.
It s good to see Anisotropic Filtering among the in-game settings, although it is generally easy to enforce at the driver level. Its effect on both the clarity and filtering quality of textures at an oblique angle is profound.
The final option available in the game s graphics settings is LOD Detail. Despite taking a number of direct comparison screenshots at multiple points in the game, I could not determine any impact of this setting so far. This doesn t mean that it is completely without function—it could e.g. change model quality in parts of the game I haven t reached yet, or have some subtle impact during battle scenes, where it s almost impossible to create direct 1:1 comparisons. If anything turns up later, I will update the article to reflect this, but for now I believe this setting can safely be disregarded.
Performance
First of all, it needs to be said that Tales of Zestiria s PC port performs amazingly well. So much so that one might even be tempted to wonder why settings such as shadow quality or draw distance were included at all—of course, more settings are never a bad thing. Anyway, the obvious fly in the ointment regarding performance is that ToZ is another JRPG locked at 30 FPS, and since its battle system is quite active that lock makes a difference not only to perceived fluidity, but also in terms of gameplay.
Now, given the quality of the port in other areas, and my own attempts which I ll summarize later, I m willing to believe that it would not have been easy to unlock the framerate for the PC release. And in Namco-Bandai s defense, they did announce the framerate situation prior to the release. However, none of this changes the simple fact that a 30 FPS cap—any framerate cap really—is both anachronistic and a strike against any PC game, much more so if it is action-based.
In any case, if you can live with a 30 FPS limit, ToZ does not disappoint performance-wise. With all settings at their maximum, at a 4k (!) resolution, it never even reaches more than 50% GPU utilization on my GTX970. There have been reports of the game running well at more modest settings even on Intel s recent integrated GPU, and given my measurements I don t doubt these results. Frame delivery is also exceptionally consistent, with none of the micro-stuttering issues that plague some in-game frame limiters (looking at you, FF13!).
This level of performance, combined with a 30 FPS framerate cap, makes evaluating the impact of individual options both challenging and somewhat pointless. Nonetheless, I gave it a try for the most obvious candidates:
- For Draw Distance, going from near to far causes an increase in CPU utilization by about 8%, and an increase in GPU utilization by 5%. This result makes sense, as drawing more objects, particularly with the DirectX9 API, generally requires more CPU performance.
- Shadow Quality does not seem to affect CPU utilization at all, and going from off to high only increases GPU utilization by 4%.
- FXAA also has negligible CPU impact, and its impact on GPU performance is also around 4%.
Input and controls
Given that the most recent port I investigated previously was Final Fantasy Type-0, I went into trying to play Zestiria with mouse and keyboard with some trepidation. However, my concerns proved unfounded and I m happy to report that Zestiria s mouse and keyboard control scheme was clearly designed by someone who had previously played PC games.
Movement (WASD) and camera control (mouse) work as you would expect from a third person game, and all the other keybindings make sense as well. Also, there are options to invert the mapping of inputs to camera movement both horizontally and vertically. I know that games which omit these are almost impossible to play for some people, so I thought it worth mentioning.
All the inputs for every player—as is tradition for Tales games, local co-op is supported—can be mapped individually to either mouse and keyboard or other input devices. Furthermore, individual bindings can be set independently for normal gameplay and for battles. The game also features well-designed images not only for gamepad inputs but also for all the keys on a keyboard, and the latter even appear to be localized.
I d classify this as a good job all around already in terms of input for a PC port, but it doesn t stop there. The menus have been adapted to work very well indeed with keyboard and mouse, a rare treat really when it comes to these ports. All in all, the way input was handled in Zestiria s PC version truly deserves praise.
Issues and tweaking possibilities
In the short time since the game s release, a few issues have cropped up, but they appear to be easily circumvented, and hopefully easily patched. Note that I haven t experienced any of these on my setup, but I m reporting both them and their workarounds here for completeness.
- Audio-related issues ranging from noise to the game not launching at all. These appear to be related to the sound settings on a system, and can generally be eliminated by setting the hardware to 5.1 (or 6) channels and 48 kHz.
- Refresh rate mismatches if the game chooses e.g. a 59Hz resolution instead of a 60Hz one. This can be fixed with external tools (e.g. forcing the highest refresh rate in the driver) or worked around by using borderless windowed Fullscreen mode.
- Input mapping a new device without restart doesn t always work reliably, to work around this issue just select the device, restart the game, and then perform the input mapping.
I expect all of these to be patched promptly; they don t seem like issues which would be very hard to track down or fix.
One of the greatest strengths of PC as a platform are the myriad tweaking possibilities it offers beyond what was envisioned by the original game developers. In Tales of Zestiria s case, I ll present a few simple but very effective tweaks, outline some more advanced ones, and report on the likelihood of a FPS unlock after my initial experiments.
One of the simplest tweaks which might improve your experience with Zestiria is downsampling. As the game has very low requirements, even on a mid-range gaming PC it can be viable to run it at resolutions of 4k or even higher. Your options for downsampling include driver-level solutions such as Nvidia's DSR and AMD's VSR, as well as my own GeDoSaTo. With GeDoSaTo, I ve also already enabled the possibility to toggle the game s UI, as well as taking screenshots without the HuD showing. Do note, however, that the most recent version of GeDoSaTo is unstable for many users and it might pay off to wait a bit until this situation is resolved.
Talking about resolving issues, one disappointment for some fans prior to this release was that the original opening theme song for the game would be replaced with another, likely due to licensing issues. On PC, restoring the original was even easier than anticipated, as it shipped with the initial release version of the game. This error has since been corrected, but the file is already out there and easy enough to find and replace. If you are interested, just search for AM_TOZ_OP_001_JPN.bk2 and replace the file AM_TOZ_OP_001.bk2 in the RAW/MOVIE folder with it.
I spent around three hours looking into how the game performs its frame pacing and regulates animation speed. That s not a lot of time when it comes to reverse engineering, but at this point I d say the odds for a simplistic framerate unlock are rather bad. I did get the game to run at different framerates, both lower and higher than 30, with a lot of unstable and ill-advised hackery: changing the results of various Windows API functions which report and measure time, preventing the game threads from sleeping, and other heavy-handed adjustments which could just as well break a program entirely. Zestiria didn t break during my short testing, but as expected everything I tried affected the number of frames delivered as well as the speed of animations and gameplay equally, with no sign of any possibility to independently adjust the two.
Thoughts and conclusion
I would classify Tales of Zestiria s Steam release as a success. From all evidence we are privy to, it appears the porting team did the best they could under the circumstances, and the result is a strong port, with excellently adapted controls, great and consistent performance, arbitrary resolution support and a range of graphical options.
Despite that, or perhaps because everything else is up to such a standard, the FPS lock hurts. I think my only choice at this point is to repeat my appeal from a previous article: Don't engineer your future games in a way which makes it apparently impossible for even what is clearly a technically competent porting team to change the framerate. This is the 21st century.
Free DLC
Other than that, I am impressed by this release. Namco-Bandai also did a good job bundling some free DLC, the most important of which is still freely available to buyers until November. On the other hand, the availability of what amounts to a trainer for 20 on Steam evokes something between amusement and disgust. However, apparently this type of DLC has been standard for the series for a while now, and, well, you don t need to buy it.
Returning to the essentials, this port of Tales of Zestiria is about as good as you could ever expect it to be given the locked framerate, and the best version of the game available on any platform.