Naruto: The Broken Bond — Recomp

Naruto: The Broken Bond — Recomp

A static recompilation for PC powered by ReXGlue
Native Direct3D 12 and Vulkan renderer • Setup screen and in-game menus • Streamed audio fixes

Getting started · Renderers · Build and run · Configuration · Troubleshooting · Support

About

A PC recompilation of Naruto: The Broken Bond, released by Ubisoft for Xbox 360 in 2008. The project uses the ReXGlue SDK to translate the game's PowerPC code into C++ and compile it for native execution. The SDK runtime provides system services, audio, and input.

The game draws with a native renderer on Direct3D 12 or Vulkan, starts on its own setup screen, and keeps its settings in in-game menus; there is no separate launcher. The native renderer, the setup screen and the menus are adapted from the Naruto: Rise of a Ninja recomp.

Releases ship a portable ZIP for Windows x64 and an AppImage for Linux x86-64, which runs on Vulkan. Both also build from source; see the build guide and the Linux build.

Current state

The port has been 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 the game's 30 fps and at 60 fps, without missing draws. Later sessions of up to about three and a half hours ran at 120 fps on Direct3D 12.

The Xbox Live features and most of the story have not been tested yet. Other graphics cards, drivers, and game revisions have not been tested either.

Features

Graphics

• Native renderer: the game's Direct3D calls run on Direct3D 12 (the default) or Vulkan, with the shaders translated when the port is built. See Renderers.
• Internal resolution from 1× to 4×, up to 16× anisotropic filtering, FXAA, FidelityFX CAS or FSR, fullscreen, and VSync.
• Native renderer options: frame rates above the game's own (the frames between its logic steps are interpolated), MSAA (2×, 4×, 8×), transparency antialiasing, fractional internal resolution (such as 1.5×), brightness, frame latency, triple buffering, graphics card selection, and wide aspect ratios. Most graphics options apply while playing.

Audio

• Streamed voices and music that play to the end. Local fixes to the SDK's XMA decoder keep the frames that cross a buffer boundary, so cutscenes no longer wait forever for a voice line, the music no longer stops, and the crackles at buffer boundaries are gone.

Menus, controls and distribution

• Setup screen: the game opens on a screen with its own logo, where you play, choose your ISO (read in place, without extraction) or an extracted copy, and change settings. The supported revision is checked before the game starts. See Configuration.
• In-game menu: F1 or Back + Start opens Settings and Exit game over the game, in seven interface languages.
• Four players' controls: each player has a controller or keyboard and mouse, with its own bindings and dead zones. Controllers are assigned automatically.
• DLC: marketplace packages copied into the data folder's dlc/ are installed at start. See DLC.
• Data folder: settings, saves, logs, translation packages and DLC packages live in one data folder, apart from the program: data\ beside broken_bond.exe, or the XDG data folder for the AppImage. The first start copies a 0.1.0-beta copy's files into it and keeps the originals; Settings → Advanced shows it and can move it. See Data folder.
• Translation mods: packages in the data folder's mods/ replace the game's English texts by ID without changing the game files, and the menus list them as game languages. See Translation mods.
• Diagnostics: each session leaves a record in the data folder, with the crash dump when the game crashes, and Settings → Advanced exports it to share. Crash reports go to the developers through Sentry only if you agree when the game asks, at its first start. See Local diagnostics and Crash reports.
• Portable ZIP: the release is a ZIP to extract and run. Installations of 0.1.0-beta, which used a launcher and an installer, move to it with a bridge installer that keeps game files, saves and settings. See Release packaging.
• Automatic function discovery: a ReXGlue patch finds the functions the game reaches only through pointer tables or addresses built in code, so the port needs no hand-written function list. See Automatic function discovery.

Renderers

The game draws with the native renderer: it intercepts the game's Direct3D calls and issues them with Direct3D 12 (the default) or Vulkan, with the shaders translated at build time and embedded in the executable. See Renderers for the frame rate option, validation limits and known issues.

Requirements

• Windows x64, or Linux x86-64 with glibc 2.43 or newer for the AppImage.
• A GPU supporting Direct3D 12 or Vulkan 1.2.
• Your Xbox 360 copy of the game, as an ISO or extracted files, in the supported revision below. The source tree and the releases do not include game data.
• The build tools listed in the build guide.
• An SDL-compatible controller is recommended. The SDK's keyboard emulation is also available.

The port supports one executable revision; the build and the setup screen refuse any other:

Field	Value
Title ID	55530825
Media ID	09FFE047
Executable version	0.0.0.3
default.xex SHA-256	8f70e79443e36b38e44b6a105dad51fb8909fb615d982753cabaac9b15f0d576

Getting started

From a checkout, in PowerShell 7 with the Visual Studio C++ tools installed:

git -c core.symlinks=true submodule update --init --recursive
./scripts/extract-game.ps1          # extracts your ISO into game/
./scripts/build-sdk.ps1             # builds and installs the patched SDK
./scripts/build-game.ps1            # generates the C++ code
# Prepare pinned native dependencies as described in the build guide, then:
./scripts/build-game-native.ps1 -PlumeSource out/plume `
  -XenosRecompThirdparty tools/xenosrecomp/thirdparty
./build/native/broken_bond.exe

The build guide explains each step, the native renderer build, and the ways to run the game.

Documentation

Guide	Contents
Build and run	Toolchain, SDK, game files, code generation, the native renderer, and running
Configuration	The setup screen, the game menu's settings, the controls, the configuration file, and user files
Data folder	Where settings, saves, logs and packages live, the first start's import, moving the folder, and backups
Translation mods	Translation packages, their format, validation, and limits
DLC	Installing marketplace packages, their folders, and diagnostics
Renderers	The native renderer, the frame rate, the pipeline list, and known issues
Release packaging	The ZIP, the bridge for 0.1.0-beta installations, and their tests
Architecture	Project structure, SDK patches, and areas to address
Troubleshooting	Build failures, runtime issues, and diagnostics
Local diagnostics	The session records, thread snapshots, exports, and retention
Crash reports	The consent question, what is sent to Sentry, the build, and the symbols
Recompilation notes	Executable identity, function boundaries, and validation evidence
Automatic function discovery	The discovery patch, its rules, and its tests

Roadmap

Planned work. Performance and stability come first, since everything else depends on them:

• Performance and stability.
• Accessibility options.
• Multiplayer.
• Achievements.

Contributing

Read the architecture notes before changing the runtime or code generation files. When reporting an issue, include reproduction steps, the commit you built, CPU, GPU, driver, the renderer you use, your configuration, and the log of the run (build/logs/ with run-game.ps1, otherwise the data folder's logs/: data\logs\ beside broken_bond.exe, or build/data/logs/ for a build in the repository).

Work happens on the develop branch; main is the primary branch. Keep game files, derived shader data, pipeline lists, and generated code out of commits. SDK changes go into reproducible patches in patches/. Code, comments, documentation, and commit messages are written in English, as AGENTS.md requires.

Support

If you enjoy the project, you can buy me a coffee. It's optional and unlocks nothing; releases stay free for everyone.

Credits

Projects and libraries

• ReXGlue, recompilation SDK and runtime.
• Xenia and XenonRecomp, foundations and references for the Xbox 360 recompilation ecosystem. Several of the XMA decoder fixes are ports of Xenia Canary commits.
• XenosRecomp, shader translation for the native renderer (forked in tools/xenosrecomp/), and Plume with D3D12 Memory Allocator for its Direct3D 12 backend, and volk, Vulkan Memory Allocator, Vulkan Headers and SMOL-V for its Vulkan backend.
• RmlUi and FreeType for the menus, and SDL, Dear ImGui, toml++, and extract-xiso.

References

• Naruto: Rise of a Ninja Recomp, source of the native renderer, the setup screen and the menus.
• Unleashed Recompiled, the model for the native renderer's design and its pipeline handling.
• Ubisoft Montreal, for the original game. Logo source.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Jorge Barbosa. The source code of this port is licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL-3.0-only).

Third-party code keeps its own license: the ReXGlue SDK (sdk/, BSD-3-Clause) and its dependencies, the XenosRecomp fork (tools/xenosrecomp/, MIT), Plume, D3D12 Memory Allocator, volk and Vulkan Memory Allocator (MIT), SMOL-V (MIT and Apache-2.0) and the Vulkan Headers (Apache-2.0), built into the executable with the native renderer, RmlUi (MIT) and FreeType (FTL), built into it for the menus, and the Roboto fonts (ui/fonts/, OFL-1.1). The retired launcher's Lato fonts (launcher/assets/fonts/) are OFL-1.1.

Naruto: The Broken Bond, its content, and its artwork and trademarks, including the icon in ui/ and the artwork in launcher/assets/ and docs/assets/, belong to their respective owners and are not covered by this license. The license does not cover the original game executable, its assets, or the code translated from it. No game data is distributed with this project.