Trails through Daybreak II continues the Calvard arc of the Trails series, building on the foundation established in the first Daybreak title. For this PC port, we continued to leverage our PH3lib framework while expanding the feature set even further. We not only included all PC-specific features from the first game but introduced substantial new enhancements.

One of the most technically demanding additions was the implementation of Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) and NVIDIA DLSS support. This required a complete overhaul of the rendering pipeline to generate accurate motion vectors, a feature not natively supported by the game engine. The result provides dramatically improved image quality while enabling higher performance on compatible hardware, as detailed in our TAA and DLSS implementation announcement.

The port includes numerous other enhancements as well, from improved water rendering to optimized performance for devices like Steam Deck. We also introduced subtle improvements to shadow quality, cloud rendering, and color processing precision. For a comprehensive overview of all PC-specific features and technical details, see our PC Features Overview.

Ys X: Nordics is the second Falcom game built on their new game engine, and utilizing the PH3lib framework for the PC port. With a lot of technical work transferrable from Trails through Daybreak, we were able to focus on optimization to an even larger extent than ever before. You can read more about our optimization journey in this Steam post, which goes into detail on how we achieved an almost 3x speedup in CPU-limited scenarios.

This time around, we also managed to complete full local cooperative play support for PC in time for the release (rather than as a later patch), allowing players to experience the entire adventure together on the same system. This co-op implementation is the most polished and feature-rich yet, with fully integrated UI, custom co-op mechanics, and more. Of course, we also included a very broad swathe of PC-specific features and enhancements. For a comprehensive overview, including draw distance improvements, graphics settings, and quality-of-life enhancements, check out our complete feature tour.

On a new and interesting note, this is also the first project where we were tasked with providing a multi--platform continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) system. We generated daily builds for all relevant platforms, and these were also used by the NISA localization team to work on this aspect with far lower latencies than previously.

Phantom Brave: The Hermuda Triangle Remastered is a remaster of the classic tactical RPG from Nippon Ichi Software. Our primary job was to port the game to PS5 -- and add appropriate enhancements for the platform -- but we also were very keen on updating the PC version to carry over all of these improvements (and even a bit more). This Steam post summarizes the most important updates, changes and improvements we made to the game.

The most interesting aspects of this project from our perspective were working on PS5, which was our first time developing for that console, and working with a code base originally developed by Nippon Ichi Software for PS2 in the early 2000s. The game also already had a history of a number of (enhanced) ports, with some new features, but also a few issues introduced in that process. We are now confident that our versions of Phantom Brave on both PS5 and PC are the definitive versions of the game, and we are very happy with the final result.

Trails through Daybreak marks the beginning of a new arc in the Trails series, introducing a fresh setting and gameplay systems. More importantly from our perspective, it is the first game built on top of Falcom's new game engine, which overhauls almost all engineering aspects of the game. With such major changes, we also decided for this project to be the first one where we used our entirely new PH3lib framework for the PC port. This brings with it a number of improvements, though most of them aren't directly user-facing.

One aspect that is visible to players, at least to some extent, is the P3A archive format, which we introduced in this project. It allows efficient packaging of game assets, custom compression, efficient patching, modding, and dynamic asset caching on load which scales with the system capabilities. You can read more about this in this lengthy Steam article.

An interesting aspect of this project was its long overall time scale. We needed to provide a Japanese-only version of the game on PC early in 2023, while the English localization was just starting out. This gave us ample opportunity to further refine the port -- even beyond our usual high standards -- with the international release in 2024 being the culmination of this work. Perhaps most interestingly, this included what is perhaps the only full integration of SGSSAA in a large-scale game to date, and you can read more about this, and all the other features we added, in this Steam post.

Trails into Reverie has an interesting place in the franchise, serving as an intermediate entry between the Cold Steel arc and future games. From a technical perspective, we aimed to provide all the features we have introduced in our ports of the Cold Steel games, while also carrying over improvements we made in the Crossbell arc, including action-based button rebinding and fully in-game settings. Particularly the rebinding proved to be a substantial effort, given the sheer amount of minigames and unique gameplay interactions, as outlined in this Steam deep dive post.

One of the most novel aspects in this port for us was implementing PC VR support. Even though the game only features VR in a particular minigame and the model viewer, we were very keen on fully maintaining these aspects in our PC version, and providing an optimized VR build. Since Steam is not really well-equipped to support games with VR interactions that only occur for short intermediate sections, we had to come up with some custom solutions for this, but we are proud of the final result.

Trails to Azure is the second and final part of the Crossbell arc, and the game shares many technical similarities with Trails from Zero. We already summarized all our efforts to create the definitive remaster version of these games while describing Zero, and all of that also applies to Azure.

However, these two titles were also our first-ever console ports. We were responsible for bringing both of them to Nintendo Switch, and managed to do so with almost 100% feature parity with the PC version. Despite the age of the games, ensuring that our remaster runs at a consistent 1080p / 60 FPS on docked Switch across the entire game still required a few targeted optimizations, but we ultimately succeeded at this goal.

Trails from Zero, the first game in the Crossbell arc of the Trails franchise, is widely regarded as a highlight of the series. Originally released over a decade ago on Playstation Portable, the game received several ports, new versions and modding projects over the years, each with its own unique set of advantages.

We realized early on that rather than just another port, we wanted to create the definitive version of the game. This set off some very intensive work, including a deep-dive to find the best available versions of all assets, some custom AI upsampling tooling , and lots of manual checking and refinement. We documented the entire process over three sizeable Steam posts [1] [2] [3], but continued to add entirely new graphical and quality-of-life features in subsequent patches.

Players seem to appreciate our efforts - as of the writing of these notes, our version of Trails from Zero sits at an impressive 98% positive rating on Steam.

The Legend of Nayuta was our first time working with a very old codebase. It came with some interesting challenges with regards to understanding rendering techniques from the earlier days of 3D graphics. One particularly memorable issue was related to recreating precisely the same Z-depth output for multi-pass rendering from several independent passes which might use different shaders.

Despite the age of the game, we still included several worthwhile enhancements, such as arbitrary resolution and full ultrawide support, MSAA, unlimited draw distance, and an entirely new mouse movement control scheme.

This project was also interesting from a management perspective: the initial port had to be completed rapidly in 2021, but the project would then be at rest for a long time until 2023, where the English translation would be ready to integrate. Luckily, thanks to our small size and flexible scheduling, we are able to accommodate more unusual project time scales such as this without incurring undue overhead.

With a massive city in a single loading zone, and rapid traversal options, all on Falcom's custom engine, porting the excellent Ys IX: Monstrum Nox to PC and Stadia was our biggest engineering challenge yet.

Not only did we invest a lot of time and effort into making various aspects of the game work as intended at arbitrary framerates rather than just the originally targeted 60 FPS, we also added full ultrawide resolution support, and a slew of graphics settings. However, perhaps the most fundamental aspect of our work was performance optimization, with CPU performance increasing two-fold from our initial beta versions to the final release build, at identical quality levels. We documented and shared some of the work it took to get to this result with the community in a "behind the scenes" piece.

While it took some time after the release, we also implemented a full local co-op mode in the game, which goes far beyond the experimental Ys VIII option in terms of polish and feature set.

With Trails of Cold Steel IV being the final entry in its (sub-)series, we focused on providing the - by now - very sizeable feature set expected by its fans on PC. However, we still added some more minor QoL and niche features beyond that, such as the ability to select a specific fullscreen refresh rate or disabling the automatic switching of button prompts for Steam controller users.

While the audio quality of the Opus codec we use in this and all our recent projects should be transparent for the vast majority of listeners, for the most discerning audiophiles in the audience we also released a lossless optional audio pack as free DLC.

The PC port of Ys VIII was not without its issues originally, with a sequence of studios and consultants hired to try and improve the situation. PH3 games was the last in this line, building on the earlier work to provide a PC version which has now climbed from mixed results to a very positive reception on Steam.

In addition to significant graphics, performance, input and stability improvements, our patch for the game also included an experimental 2-player cooperative mode.

Following this successful PC patch, we also worked on porting Ys VIII to Google Stadia, our first project targeting this platform. While we had to overcome a few challenges, players on Stadia loved the performance and quality of the final result.

In the Trails of Cold Steel III porting project, we had our first opportunity to work with NIS America on a full PC port. We implemented all the features that made our work on its prequel stand out, while also ensuring that the game still runs well despite the higher performance target of the original hardware.

One particularly noteworthy improvement in ToCS3 compared to our earlier releases is its asset compression. We investigated various options in order to provide the best possible balance between on-disk size and loading speed for the majority of our users, and documented the results.

After our work on Trails of Cold Steel I, we were provided with the opportunity to take on the complete PC porting project for its sequel from the start. Over the course of this project, we implemented all the PC-specific features of the ToCS1 port, added additional voiced lines by partially reverse-engineering the existing asset conversion pipeline, and also implemented full platform support for both Steam and GoG Galaxy features.

We also devised and implemented a novel instant resume feature which was widely reported on during development, e.g. at PC gamer here.

ToCS 2 is currently rated overwhelmingly positive on Steam, with many reviews pointing out the quality of the port.

For Rez Infinite, we were contacted by Enhance Games to provide additional technical QA and feedback for the PC and VR versions, on a small scale and rapid timeframe.

We examined all modes of the game and provided some feedback regarding controls and performance, which was implemented in the final release. We also identified a specific rendering bug in the classic VR mode.

For Trails of Cold Steel, we were contacted by XSEED to investigate the performance and loading times issues of an existing PC port in development. After extensive profiling, we improved loading times and performance significantly, but noted that far better results could be achieved by migrating to a DX11 renderer.

XSEED gave the green light, and we took over the port, moving to a new renderer and implementing a number of additional features for the PC version: trSSAA, unlocked FPS, HBAO+ ambient occlusion, higher quality shadows, LoD settings, a smart turbo mode, and ultrawide aspect ratio support.

ToCS 1 is currently rated overwhelmingly positive on Steam, with many reviews pointing out the quality of the port.