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The Legend of Heroes Thread - Trails of Cold Steel in the Sky

Somberlain

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Schera has the stats and quartz line of a caster though Kloe and Olivier are better. Schera's Heaven's Kiss craft is very good, however, so she's still useful even though she is the weakest of the "real" casters. Estelle fits in any role since she's so balanced, though she's best used as a support caster who heals and uses buffs & protection spells, if you want an optimal party :balance:
 

Jack Dandy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Yeah, already got Agate as a melee figher.
Although it seems Zin is a bit better at that role.. plus he's an overall cool guy.

I'll try speccing Estelle as a tank!
 

Jack Dandy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
How do you install these? Just replace files in main installation folder?

Edit: nvm it worked thanks ;)
 
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TigerKnee

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Schera's only niche is to abuse Heaven's Kiss - you want her to be slightly slower than the other 3 members of your party and just spam it non-stop.
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Completed my NG+ playthrough of TOCS on nightmare. Got Rean to lv 70. Only remaining achievements are use rush 100 times, burst 50 times, cancel enemy arts 100 times which would take a stupid amount of grinding. I'm ready for my TOCS 2 PC playthrough now.
 

Jack Dandy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Hear my woes-
Apparently I broke a cutscene trigger in SC, due to weird bugs caused by the Turbo button...

I hope they can fix it.. I made it to the last chapter and can't wait to see how it all wraps up!
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Hear my woes-
Apparently I broke a cutscene trigger in SC, due to weird bugs caused by the Turbo button...

I hope they can fix it.. I made it to the last chapter and can't wait to see how it all wraps up!

Out of interest, why did you use the turbo button?

I can understand why you would use it on repeated playthroughs but even if there were no bugs you'd just be missing things if you used it first time.
 

Jack Dandy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Oh wow- well basically, because I found the game an awful slog when I played FC.
I always thought "Hey, this would be great if it was about 2x times as fast!". The fucking spell animation durations! What a bore! Made battles a pain to sit through.
And then I realized that I can use CheatEngine. It was like a whole new world! Suddenly the game was fun. Playing it on normal feels like slow motion, honestly.

But apparently boosting it with the Turbo button added in the patch, made some of these bugs appear. I saw another poor dude on Steam who had the same problem.
 

Jack Dandy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Some good soul on Steam forum helped me out. Beat SC!
Nice game. Will play Third sometime. Wish the combat was a bit better tho. Felt good that I stockpiled a shitload of Zeram Powders, thinking "These'll be useful for later, don't waste 'em!" And then I just splurged them all on the final boss and had Joshua S-craft him repeatedly.

Hmmm... what else.

Also, want to see a grimdark take on the Trails series sometime. We got hints of it, but never full grimdark.
But then again, I suppose full grimdark wouldn't be Trails at all.

Also also, the final game of the Cold Steel series is about to be released - whaddya think the next setting will be? We had Liberlian bracers, Crossbell police, Erebonian school.. What next ? Would be cool to have jaegers!
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Some good soul on Steam forum helped me out. Beat SC!
Nice game. Will play Third sometime. Wish the combat was a bit better tho. Felt good that I stockpiled a shitload of Zeram Powders, thinking "These'll be useful for later, don't waste 'em!" And then I just splurged them all on the final boss and had Joshua S-craft him repeatedly.

Hmmm... what else.

Also, want to see a grimdark take on the Trails series sometime. We got hints of it, but never full grimdark.
But then again, I suppose full grimdark wouldn't be Trails at all.

Also also, the final game of the Cold Steel series is about to be released - whaddya think the next setting will be? We had Liberlian bracers, Crossbell police, Erebonian school.. What next ? Would be cool to have jaegers!

I think it will be Calvard.

Also, if you extrapolate from this article where Falcom say the entire Trails series is 60% done, if we get a Calvard trilogy we'll probably get another duology or trilogy set in another country too. I'm enjoying this world too damn much for it to end so soon!

http://gematsu.com/2017/09/legend-h...rings-trails-series-story-60-percent-complete

At the end of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, the series as a whole will be a little over 60 percent complete. Elements that hint at the future of the series, such as sub-quests and casual conversations with the characters that appear, are strewn around the game.
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
This looks really promising and therefore I expect it will get shutdown by Nihon Falcom.

I am hoping it does demonstrate the ease of an English translation and PC port if only they are willing - but personally I'm hoping for a new port from the ground up by Sara and Brittany at XSEED as I don't trust Chinese programmers.
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
I don't own any J-pop but I do like hearing the stuff they make for the Trails games.

If the intro is any indication, it looks like the new characters plus Altina are the main focus of Cold Steel 3. Still, I hope that Class VII, Sara and Claire get their due.
 

Somberlain

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A playthrough of ToCS3 has started so you can see real, unedited gameplay footage. I don't want to spoil myself so I won't be watching too much but I just couldn't resist watching this part :love:

 

Deleted member 7219

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Gaaaaah I want to watch but can't at the same time, I don't want to be spoiled either.

To try to scratch the Trails itch I've just started my 2nd playthrough of TitS 1, this time on nightmare.
 

Deleted member 7219

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flyingjohn

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According to the sleuths at GAF, xseed got zero: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpos...8c9b00b33a68f7d1d&p=251115746&postcount=10851

Also might be worth participating in the email campaign regarding Ys 8: https://www.reddit.com/r/Falcom/comments/74gurg/unhappy_with_the_localization_of_ys_viii/
since its rumored that xseed might lose sen 3 to nisa as well.

Falcom want to bring their games to the west, they will not tolerate NISA's failure.
Not if nisa price point is extremely low which is how they got their hands on ys series in the first place.
 

Jinn

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Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
So I finally finished Trails in the Sky FC after about a year of off and on playing at 64 hours ingame time, and 74 recorded on steam. I played it on hard through thick and thin, and I have to say that I probably wouldn't have done it any other way. Just going to do some quick impressions since the game has been discussed a lot already in this thread.

Mixed, but mainly very positive is what I feel at the end of the experience.

First off, the combat system on hard is not nearly as bland or boring as a lot of people make it out to be. Almost every encounter in a new area can easily usher you to your death if you are not paying attention and playing smartly. This elevates TitS FC combat to one of my favorites ever in a JRPG. Sure, it's essentially a lot of elements taken from other games that did it before. But it takes all those conventional elements and makes something that can be truly challenging, exciting, and interesting on a regular basis throughout. I was pleasantly surprised. And I got murdered many times.

In terms of story, characters, and writing: extremely shaky at first for me. I don't need grimdark misery at every turn, but goddamn for the first 20-30 or so hours of this game everyone is living in an insanely optimistic and cheerful world. It was hard to stomach sometimes, with some of the dialogues being so goofy and unfitting with the situation at hand that I couldn't penetrate through to find where those likable characters were that I had heard so much about. But as I forced myself through it, and the world started opening up to me, I was able to accept this absurdity and begin to care for the characters and their well fleshed out personalities. Estelle is still probably my least favorite character, and I even managed to developed a soft spot in my heart for her too by the end. The setting, however, is where this game really shines. What pulled me through my initial misgivings was definitely finding myself immersed in this world at an extremely interesting historical period. There seems to be an indication that humanity wasn't ready for the advancements brought so rapidly on with the advent of Orbment technology. There is the relentless cheeriness of the citizens of Liberl, but also a strange feeling that something is off about how things are going. It seems to be almost a paradise that reality cannot sustain. Without spoiling anything, I feel the tone shift at the end starts to affirm this vague darkness I felt throughout, and I really liked it. I hope it is continued more prominently in SC.

A note on how I played the game: I would play the game in quick 8 or 10 hour spurts, usually over the course of a day or two, then not touch it for months. I feel like I did this a few more times in the first half of the game than the second. I would keep diving in and finding things to admire, then being put off by some over-the-top anime shit, or some stupidly sentimental scene would play out that just didn't seem warranted in regards to what came before it. On the other hand, later on in the game, and as I started to become more invested in the world and characters, these sentimental scenes would actually strike me as quite touching. And so it went for a little over a year. The remarkable thing is, that the storytelling must have done something really right, because whenever I returned after a long stint I could clearly remember what was going on and who was doing what.

The culmination of events in the final chapter and how everyone came together was great. It was an excellent way to see the effect that Estelle and Joshua's journey had had on their maturation, and how it all tied into learning about the truth of Cassius's past.

I remembered noting what a silly and underwhelming character Cassius was in the beginning of the game. But after traveling through Liberl and hearing of all his exploits, that moment when you first see him after the final battle, it was like seeing an entirely different character. For me, to develop a character in such a way without them being actually present is impressive. Cassius became the legend he had always been through the adventure itself.

I feel as though now that I have an investment in this world and its characters, the rest of the series has been kind of unlocked for me in a way. I want to know about the other nations and their denizens, and see how the fates of the characters weave in and out of each other. I think by the end of FC, I was really hooked on the Trails series more than I ever thought I would manage to be. It was sometimes a difficult slog in the beginning, but I'm glad I played through the whole thing and very much so look forward to playing SC and the other sequels (Cold Steel and Zero look amazing!). It's also exciting that you start at around the level you ended at in FC at the beginning of SC. High level battles seem more interesting in this series than lower. Kind of inverse DnD syndrome. I like it!
 
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Deleted member 7219

Guest
Good post. Spot on about Estelle’s Dad. Yes, Cold Steel is amazing. I had much the same reaction to Trails FC as you did - annoyingly cheery and optimistic characters, people just being too nice and optimistic. Unfortunately that is just how these games are.

Like you I found the early part of the game hard going. I just felt no investment in the story, very little drama or tension (except the mystery plot with the missing airship), and the characters were just too nice. For me this went away when the stakes got higher half way through the game and I became obsessed with seeing it through, and also seeing more of that universe. SC and TC are great. Cold Steel 1 starts off slowly too, but Cold Steel 2 is great all the way through.

I also just realised that you never actually kill anyone. There are times when characters die, and people get killed, and it is very shocking as a result. But I guess that is because it is Japanese.

Good pick up on the difficulty. Crooked Bee’s first post in this thread about not needing to grind doesn’t make sense to me at all. While it is true that the Trails games don’t contain the grinding requirements of, say, Final Fantasy, you do need to spend time levelling up if you don’t want to be destroyed in the bounty hunts and the boss fights.
 
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Jinn

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Messages
4,930
Good pick up on the difficulty. Crooked Bee’s first post in this thread about not needing to grind doesn’t make sense to me at all. While it is true that the Trails games don’t contain the grinding requirements of, say, Final Fantasy, you do need to spend time levelling up if you don’t want to be destroyed in the bounty hunts and the boss fights.

Yeah, to make it through a lot of new areas competently you usually have to gain a level or two, which basically just amounts to engaging most enemies you see. Some of the bounties are the hardest battles of the game on hard. You really need to use all the tricks at your disposal.

I guess it doesn't end up feeling too grindy in general, but there certainly is a little bit necessary on hard.
 

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