Unchained Blades

[Kolrath]

I've been goofing off a good bit lately with the graphics settings available in PPSSPP, mainly trying to see what all options would aid in counteracting the sprite glitches that get caused by upscaling / filtering the games sprites.

I was testing some things with Unchained Blades since its "face box" situation is very easily noticeable and occurs almost immediately upon starting a new game. I found a way to minimize the amount of glitching on the animated portions of character dialogue sprites that results in a less pixelated image than you'd get by just forcing the filtering to nearest.

Works well in fullscreen at high resolutions. Not perfect but a suitable alternative to just dealing with the boxes or having highly pixelated sprites.

*Under the "Settings" > "Graphics"
* Set "Screen Scaling Filter" to "Nearest"
* Set "Texture Scaling" to "Auto, Hybrid"

Comparison Screenshots
Default Settings : Sceen Scaling
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Default Settings : Sceen Scaling
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*Note: This will NOT work with the latest stable release of PPSSPP as the "Screen Scaling Filter" option being used isn't in that build. Instead, grab one of the builds from the buildbot as those will have the option.
Addiotionally, I only tested this early portion of the game. I haven't played the game beyond that second example shot using these settings so I can't promise that it "fixes" all the glitches or that it doesn't make some other things worse.

Edit - UPDATE 11/13/2014 : I finished running through a full playthrough of the game using the above mentioned settings and figured I'd give a quick update on what I found.

The above settings do eliminate a vast majority of the "face boxing" on just about every character. The Medusa-girl though was still quite noticeable and in one or two poses the Mandrake-girl still had very visible glitching going on, but the rest of the characters and NPCS were hardly noticeable. I didn't notice any issues with any of the enemy monter sprites or anything else being made worse by these changes. I played through the full normal game and a few floors of the extra Inifinite Ark accessible after clearing the game so at least up until that point everything was great. If anyone out there is a masochist with all the time in the world on their hands they are more than welcome to see how those settings work through the entire Inifite Ark (and all 50 runs of its 101 floors...) for themselves.

I also wanted to point out two bugs that I encountered in the game, one of which can crash the emulator and the other is just game ending.

The first is from using the Square-Button "Repeat" command when in battle. Normally it will simply make your people perform the actions they had performed last round in the current or last battle. However, if you did something that can't actually be repeated because its no long a valid option, such as having unchained a creature last round and there aren't any to unchain this round or simply not having the mana to recast the same spell you used last round, then the game can crash.

What happens when you try to repeat under these conditions is it will inform you that you "can't perform that action" but move on to selecting actions for the second party member. If you somehow blunder through and try to Repeat for each of your four party members despite the warning... the game may crash, especially if you had turbo / unthrottle engaged when you pressed repeat. So long as you are mindful of what you're doing this possible bug / crash is incredibly easy to avoid.

The second bug I encountered involves the spike floor traps that relocate you to an adjacent tile when you step on them. Normally when you step on one and it relocates you there is a brief period where and control input is ignored. In rare instances when you trigger one of these traps the game never gives you back control after being shifted to another tile. Everything else is working fine but the game simply ignores all further control input. Much like the above issue turbo / unthrottle seems to vastly increase your chances of it occuring! Avoid using turbo when around such traps or you may find yourself having to just quit out and risk losing progress. So far as I'm aware you can't simply use a savestate to prevent yourself from losing progress if this bug occurs as when I tried it out the savestate also saved the fact that the game was ignoring all my control inputs.

Aside from those two issues, which aren't related to the graphics settings at all, the game worked great. Good luck and have fun to anyone playing this out there.