The Last Story

The Last Story
Developer(s)	Mistwalker, AQ Interactive
Publisher(s)	NA XSEED Games JP/EU/AUS Nintendo
Platform(s)	Wii
Release date(s)	JP January 27, 2011 AUS February 23, 2012 EU February 24, 2012 NA August 14, 2012
Genre(s)	Action role-playing
Mode(s)	Single-player, Co-op (6)
Input methods	Wii Remote + Nunchuk, Classic Controller
Compatibility	4 Playable
GameIDs	SLSJ01, SLSEXJ, SLSP01
See also...	Dolphin Forum thread Open Issues Search Google Search Wikipedia

The Last Story (ラストストーリー, Rasuto Sutōrī) is a JRPG for the Wii console from Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, that lets you take charge of a band of mercenaries and journey with them into a sprawling cinematic adventure. Enjoy the adventure alone in this epic Wii game or jump into online multiplayer modes with up to five other players. Music by veteran Final Fantasy composer Nobou Uematsu.

Emulation Information

Shader Compilation Stuttering

The Last Story is one of the most susceptible titles to shader compilation stuttering. The GC and Wii have no concept of shaders - everything is executed directly by the hardware without an intermediate programming language (API). Modern computers and mobile systems do not work in this way, requiring the use of shaders as an intermediary so your system's GPU can perform the tasks that the GC and Wii GPU performed directly. Shaders have to be generated though, and since GC/Wii games are not designed to create shaders ahead of time as a PC game would, when a new effect appears Dolphin has to delay the CPU thread while the GPU thread performs the compilation; a pause that does not exist on the consoles. For most games shader generation takes only a few milliseconds, but for a few demanding titles, the shaders that they generate are so large that they can result in noticeable stuttering, in severe cases pauses of over a second may occur.

Since 5.0-4869, this problem can be solved by enabling ubershaders. Changing GPU, updating GPU drivers, or updating Dolphin may invalidate the shader cache, requiring specialized shaders to be compiled again. Since 5.0-6461, Dolphin caches shader pipeline UIDs independently of the video backend and compiles them on game start. This allows cached shaders to work across different video backends, platforms, hardware configurations and even Dolphin versions as long as changes aren't made to Dolphin's actual shader pipeline. These shaders are compiled in the background when the game starts, which may cause stuttering for a short period. Enable Compile Shaders Before Starting to avoid this.

Problems

Green Line

A green line will display across the bottom of the screen unless Immediately Present XFB is enabled.

Depth of Field Blur

The games' depth of field effect is not emulated properly. During some blur transitions it may flicker, and in some extreme circumstances (such as cinema scenes) it may become distorted and (very rarely) get stuck. Texture cache accuracy on middle can help.

A stuck blur before the recent fixes

Extreme stuck blur in a cutscene

Texture Cache Accuracy can be set fast with modern graphics card,current versions of Dolphin, and the most recent version of Last Story. This has been fixed since at least 5.0-10560.

Clothes Textures Missing

With EFB Copies to Texture Only, parts of the body and clothing will be missing, some will be rendered as complete black, and a few pieces will be properly textured. This is related to the game's texture color changing effect, and is only present on the main party characters. Disable EFB Copies to Texture Only to fix this. EFB Copies to Texture Only is disabled by the GameINI prior to 5.0-10000.

Missing/black clothing

White Clothes

Releases beyond 5.0-7554 render character clothing white. Refer issue 11149.

Enhancements

Bloom

This title has minor but noticeable bloom issues at resolutions higher than 1x.

As of 5.0-16786, you may use Graphics Mods to remove the bloom altogether or make it be less noticeable by rendering the bloom at native resolution.

In addition or instead of, you may use the following code to cut the intensity of bloom by half:

$Bloom radius & intensity reduced by half by sergx12
04C948C8 3F000000

(Note: default value 3f800000(1.0))

HD Textures

• The Last Story - HD Texture Pack is active and currently maintained by linckandrea, incorporating textures from the Matrix2525 GUI pack. It has 6,063 files (5.3 GB) at the time of writing.
• The Last Story - HD Texture Pack (1.3 GB) was maintained by themriron2, but it seems abandoned. It incorporated textures from the Matrix2525 GUI pack. It has 1,591 files (1.37 GB) at the time of writing.
• The Last Story HD GUI+ Texture Pack by Matrix2525.

60 FPS

This code will provide 60 FPS with a few issues.

• Crashes on the JP version
• The second boss that rolls and other unique enemy actions do so at double speed
• Some rare dialogue issues
• There may be other timing issues too

It's usable, but prepare to disable the code by: saving their game (not savestate)-> disable the code -> restart (game off / then on) -> then reload their save.

NA/EU

$60 FPS
04C94DB0 0000003C // 60 fps
04C94C04 3F000000
04885a08 3F860000 //Camera editable
04885a50 3F333333 // Aim camera
C213CC80 00000002 // Separate movement logic
C00303A4 EC000024
60000000 00000000
C213CB74 00000002 //Move speed
396106B0 C0A29408
EC420172 00000000
04881A08 3EAC8B44 // Shuffle speed
C23B6A14 00000002 // Fix speech
7C631A14 907F0058
60000000 00000000
C21F68C8 00000002 // Fix UI animations
C0030054 C0428668
EC0000B2 00000000
C21F4418 00000002
C0428668 EC0000B2
C04300A0 00000000
2087FE78 00000001 // 30 fps cutscenes
04C94DB0 0000001E
04C94C04 3F800000
E0000000 80008000

Simplified Shadows

There are times where the game will display blocky shadows. This code removes them in favor of high quality shadows.

$Disable simplified shadows by sergx12
04C94C70 00000000

Color Correction

The game will do color correction with a post processing pass. This code removes that.

$Disable color grading by sergx12
04C94B84 00000000

DOF

The game uses a strong depth of field when the camera gets close to an object. This code reduces that effect:

$DOF radius fix by sergx12
04C9495C 3EC00000
04C94960 3EC00000
04794DA0 3EC00000
04794DA4 3EC00000

(Note: default value 3fc00000 (1.5))

God Rays

The game provides strong light shafts that are typically called "god rays". In game, these are very intense, this code reduces that effect:

$Godrays intensity reduced by half by sergx12
04880E2C 42FF0000

(Note: default value 437f0000(255))

Configuration

Only configuration options for the best compatibility where they deviate from defaults are listed.

Graphics

Config	Setting	Notes
Shader Compilation	Asynchronous (Ubershaders)	Fixes stuttering
Immediately Present XFB	On	Prevent display of green line across bottom of screen

Version Compatibility

The graph below charts the compatibility with The Last Story since Dolphin's 2.0 release, listing revisions only where a compatibility change occurred.

r6284

3.0-484

4.0-4203

5.0-11518

Δ

5.0-20584 (current)

Δ

Δ

Δ

Δ

Δ

2.0 (r5384)

Compatibility can be assumed to align with the indicated revisions. However, compatibility may extend to prior revisions or compatibility gaps may exist within ranges indicated as compatible due to limited testing. Please update as appropriate.

Testing

This title has been tested on the environments listed below:

Test Entries
Revision	OS	CPU	GPU	Result	Tester
r6505	Windows 7	AMD Phenom X4 965	ATI Radeon HD 4870	Dolphin-r6505_DKTOS_MH3_FifoBs, turn off fifo busy under iso properties, use JITIL not JIT, Use Xaudio as HLE, for graphic use dx9 set to RAM, DOESN'T HANG	IcemanSR
r6505	Windows 7	Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.5 GHz	AMD Radeon HD 6870	PAL version tested; Used 6505 by Lectrode, which is the speediest build I've tested. The game is fully playable, but suffers from random freezings, despite using JIT or JITIL. (Happens less often with JITIL)	Garteal
3.0	Linux	Intel Core i5	ATI Radeon HD 5700	Playable (60FPS)	tomtoom
3.0	Windows 7	Intel Core i5-2500	NVIDIA GeForce 560 Ti	Playable (25-30FPS)	Deathykins
3.0-415	Windows 7	Intel Core i7-2600K	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580	Playable (30FPS, sometimes fall to 21FPS.)	dnishimura
3.0-763	Windows 7	Intel Core i5-2450M	AMD Radeon HD 7610M	Playable, 30FPS	Chinmorph
3.0-766	Mac OS X 10.8.1	Intel Core i7 @ 2.7 GHz	NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M	Playable, 60FPS	TresCoole
3.5-127	Windows 7	Intel Core i5-2500K	AMD Radeon HD 5670	The Last Story on Dolphin Emulator	LaImpetoOscuro‎‏
3.5-141	Windows 7	AMD Phenom II 955 BE @ 3.2 GHz	AMD Radeon HD 6850	Playable (30FPS). Slowdown in huge areas (15-30FPS).	ramaGZ.‎‏
3.5-269	Windows XP	Athlon II X2 215 @ 3.56 GHz	NVIDIA GeForce 440	Game completed! FPS at town 11-24Hz, in dungeons 20-30Hz, in rendered video cutscenes - better set "EFB Copies to Texture" to get 27-30Hz. Get random crashes/hangs during savestate save/load. Sometimes fog based lightning (fog of war) work's incorrectly. Also blurring depth set incorrectly (normally it should blur close? and very distant 3D-surfaces). Loading savestate seems to recalculate some variables and fix it.	†.fl.l).‎‏
4.0	Windows 7	AMD APU A10-7700K	AMD Radeon R7 Series	Minor FPS Drops, 2xIR	Zcair
4.0.2	Windows 7	Intel Core i5-3570K	AMD Radeon HD 7870	Graphics Settings Lowered to run in full 60FPS	Zcair
4.0-3482	Windows 8.1	Intel Core i7-2600K @ 4.3 GHz	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680	With internal resolution set to 1x native, runs at 30FPS much at the time. Drops to low 20s occasionally with associated audio skipping, making the game somewhat unplayable. If EFB to RAM is explicitly disabled by editing the game INI (and set to EFB to Texture), the game runs unthrottled, using the same settings, at ~100FPS, but with the missing/garbled texture anomalies described at the top of the page.	Damaniel
4.0-4366	Windows 7	Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.2 GHz	AMD Radeon HD 6870	JITIL Recompiler, Framelimit: Auto, HLE, OpenAL, D3D, 2.5x Resolution @ 1920x1080p, Widescreen Hack, Aspect Ratio: Force 16:9, AA 2x, AF 8x, Scaled EFB Copy, EFB Copies: RAM, Texture Cache Accuracy: Fast, (Properties -> DISABLE: Idle Skipping, VBeam, Sync GPU, Speed up Disc, ENABLE: Dual Core.) // FPS: 26-30 - VPS: 60 - 100%.	ArchaeA
4.0-4652	Windows 7	Intel Core i5-4690K @ 4.5 GHz	AMD Radeon R9 200 Series	OpenGL, HLE, 3x IR, 0xMSAA, EFB:RAM. Texture accuracy medium still req'd for DoF effect. Playable throughout with small slowdowns in places. Cutscenes often are under 30FPS. Temporarily setting EFB to Texture fixes performance issues, but ruins character textures if they're loaded.	Keller999
5.0-4869	Windows 10	Intel Core i7-5820K @ 3.3 GHz	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti	D3D11, 4x IR, 4xMSAA, EFB to RAM, Ubershaders Hybrid. Runs at 30FPS 100% of the time with no serious frame stutter. When the frame limiter is turned off, max framerate is around 45FPS.	Damaniel

Gameplay Videos

Dolphin Emulator 4.0-5416 - The Last Story (1080p HD) - Nintendo GameCube

Dolphin Emulator 4.0.1 - The Last Story (1080p HD) - Nintendo Wii