v0.1.0-beta

Warning

This is a beta of a work in progress. Expect bugs and crashes, keep a backup of your saves, and report problems on the Issues page. No game data is included: you need your own Xbox 360 copy of the game.

Thank you to everyone who supported the Naruto: Rise of a Ninja recomp. The hard work that went into that project, from its native renderer and launcher to its installer and audio fixes, is what made it possible to bring The Broken Bond this far this quickly.

What this is

A PC recompilation of Naruto: The Broken Bond (Ubisoft, Xbox 360, 2008), built with the ReXGlue SDK: the game's PowerPC code is translated to C++ ahead of time and runs natively on Windows x64. The game draws with a native Direct3D 12 renderer adapted from the Rise of a Ninja recomp, with the shaders translated at build time; nothing is emulated at run time.

Highlights

• Native Direct3D 12 renderer with internal resolution up to 4× (fractions allowed, such as 1.5×), MSAA (2×/4×/8×), transparency antialiasing, up to 16× anisotropic filtering, FXAA, FidelityFX CAS or FSR, brightness, frame latency, triple buffering, and graphics card selection.
• Frame rates above the game's own. The game's logic keeps its original step (30 Hz in the open world, 60 Hz in fights); the renderer interpolates the frames in between. frame_rate accepts 30 to 240; 60 has been played, higher rates have not.
• Streamed audio fixes. Voices and music play to the end: cutscenes no longer wait on a voice line that never ends, the music no longer stops, and the crackles at buffer boundaries are gone.
• Launcher with settings, graphics card selection, keyboard and mouse mapping, seven interface languages, and game-folder verification.
• Windows installer with optional import of your original ISO, supported-revision verification, updates that preserve your data, and a portable ZIP alternative.

Requirements

• Windows x64 and a Direct3D 12 GPU. The Microsoft Visual C++ x64 runtime must be installed.
• Your own copy of the game, in the one supported revision: Title ID 55530825, Media ID 09FFE047, default.xex SHA-256 8f70e79443e36b38e44b6a105dad51fb8909fb615d982753cabaac9b15f0d576. The installer and the launcher verify it.

Installing

• Installer: run BrokenBondInstaller.exe. It can import the game from your ISO, or you can point it at an already extracted game folder. Updates keep your settings and saves.
• Portable: unzip broken-bond-recomp-win-amd64.zip, place your extracted game in game/ next to the launcher (or select the folder under Game Files), and start broken_bond_launcher.exe.

What has been tested

Played on Windows 11 with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and a DualSense controller: the menus, the start of Story Mode with its first fights and cutscenes, Fight Mode, and the open world, in sessions of up to about 30 minutes, with English and Japanese voices, at 30 and 60 fps. Other graphics cards and drivers, the Xbox Live features, and most of the story have not been tested.

Known issues

• A short pause when something new appears for the first time: its graphics pipeline compiles on first use on your driver. New areas of the open world can stutter on the first visit; later visits do not.
• Frame rates above 60 have not been played.
• Sounds missing late in a session were reported once before the audio fixes and not seen since, but have not been checked specifically.

See Renderers and Troubleshooting.

Checksums

0d82daf0660635ffd67d75097799b69ab557d09dc0e3176b01165b5575a9b5eb  BrokenBondInstaller.exe
5f38c9d52da3027d9b882055d10298aaaaa36022ff3a5277854ce7a5074ce6c7  broken-bond-recomp-win-amd64.zip

Project code is GPL-3.0-only; third-party notices are in licenses/ inside the package. Game data, artwork and trademarks belong to their respective owners.