The Legend of Heroes - Trails series

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I could never understand the appeal of this series. I played Trails of Cold Steel and literally nothing happened for something like 60 or 70 hours, then a plot twist and decently executed final 5 hours or so. The combat is dead average. The party building/skills/systems etc. are dead average. The environments and exploration are dead average. There is nothing distinguishable about the graphics or music. Trails of Cold Steel 2 was a little better but I got sick of it when the exploration opened up and the story came to a halt. It seems like the sole appeal of it is the sheer ... volume... like how a new Madden game comes out every year? They're basically what Wild Arms or Breath of Fire would be if the devs didn't know how to properly pace a story and just kept making more, and more, and more average-ish games with no conclusion.

Strong disagree on every point.

Story: CS1 and CS2 had the most engrossing stories for me out of the Trails games. It is a visual novel/JRPG hybrid that got me immersed in the life of one man, the times he lived in be it an overreaching state, the technological revolution threatening to eliminate the warrior class, and an escalating cold war. The cast is huge and yet I found almost all of the characters to be likeable.




Erebonia was an appealing and novel place, being an early modern fantasy Prussia with nobles from rival sword schools wearing trenchcoats and cravats practicing in their eastern styled dojos, the capital city with its percussion that sounds like it's from a South American instrumental album, airship fleets flying overhead, cozy beer villages, etc. The Escaflowne-esque magitek mechas are cool. And I liked the looming antagonistic expansionist republic that assassinates people for wrongthink or dissent. There is also a cool robot highland plot with these otherworldly mechas that regenerate, and early on there was some speculation about what exactly was the nature of the sentient beings that inhabited the mechs (ie were people sacrificed to become the "AIs"? Was Roland stashed into Valimar?).




Pacing wise I thought that the first two games were very good, the first game being the best first game of an arc in the series. There are 7 chapters over the course of 90 hours. You get to go to a brand new town every 10 to 15 hours. Chapters begin and end in a timely manner and have relatively exciting finales that keep you wanting to keep going and find out what happens next. Every other first game of an arc has severe pacing issues where they don't become interesting until half way through (Sky FC), or 50 hours in (Zero), or 70 hours in (Kuro 1), or even until the 100 hour mark (CS3), and most of their chapters feel inconsequential (sadly this feels like the norm for most of the games in the franchise). In CS1, I only felt I was getting a little bored during chapter 6 before the mine explosion happens.

And then CS2 has the best story and pacing in the series, with an engaging first act when he is alone with hardly any allies and having to hike through occupied enemy territory and is constantly getting attacked. I loved the climatic mech duels. The second act is more a fun light hearted adventure segment where you get to go do a lot of quests and fight the optional cryptid bosses. Third act gets back to the serious story stuff, and then it had a very interesting atypical conclusion leading into an unexpected fourth act where you got duped into helping evil win, but it doesn't matter anymore because now the enemy is at our doorstep and we can't be divided now.. The playable epilogue skyrocketed the game in my eyes and made me really excited to find out what would happen next. Sadly Falcom dropped the ball with CS3.

CS3 and CS4 is where the main story becomes quite troubled for a multitude of reasons, but in spite of it all I still found it engaging enough and I would still rate it over SC, the Crossbell games, and Kuro 1. There are still great moments in it. I found it more engaging than a lot of other modern JRPGs like the FF7 Remakes, and I'd take it over a Western game any day.







The combat and character building was one of the CS series' greatest strengths. I first played CS1 on normal difficulty, and was enjoying the combat so much that during the celdic field study, I wound up restarting my playthrough on hard because I wanted to engage with it even more. I really liked trying to figure out how to build characters multiple different ways to take advantage of their different crafts and the properties in their crafts, the different character combo synergies, figuring out which expensive accessories to buy and weapons to upgrade with my limited money, positioning my characters properly, and so on. And then from CS2 onwards I played these games on nightmare or abyss difficulty, whichever was the highest. Beating the mech fights, and then beating Reverie on abyss difficulty and being done with the Cold Steel pentalogy felt satisfying. I wound up getting involved with testing difficulty mods. I cannot recall any other JRPG I had that much fun with the combat in besides maybe Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4.






I quite like the aesthetics of the CS series. The art design holds up even if the PSP visual fidelity of the grass textures and rock modeling is lackluster. The games look really good from CS3 onwards and especially in the Kuro series which is another leap in visual fidelity, though unfortunately Kuro loses the charming art direction of Erebonia.




Nihon Falcom has my most favorite soundtracks in almost any game I can think of. I have a spreadsheet tracking my favorite composers. Falcom has far and away the highest hitrate year after year. With each OST having 100+ tracks at least 20 of them are going to be keepers. I think only Aki Hata's OST for Aselia had a higher hitrate (I liked nearly all of the 20 songs on its OST), but that was one single VN/SRPG hybrid release, not 20+ years worth of games with nearly 100+ songs per game each year every year. Atelier, GBF, FF14, WoW, Genshin, none of them come close in terms of quantity and quality.







CS1 and CS2 English dub is also above average for a JRPG dub. Shame the integrity declined when NISA took over the series starting with CS3. I switched to subs with Kuro.

Trails has far and away the best PC ports for JRPGs. Up until CS1's PC port by Durante (the modder who fixxed Dark Souls' PC port), PC ports of JRPGs were infamous for being broken and inferior to emulating... which sadly remains the case for FF and Atelier ports. But I noticed that after CS1's release, people's standards seemed to have increased and the PC ports of JRPGs overall began to increase.


I do not think Trails is the bestest thing ever. I have a heap of complaints about the games. I became disillusioned with the series after playing Ao and CS3 and then replaying the Sky series. Namely that the overwhelming vast majority of this 13 game long, 1,000+ hour long, $600+ series is repetitive chapters where you chase around supervillains and fail to catch them, fake stakes, you never get to make progress on killing the 8 big bads (actually your progress gets undone because the big bads who do actually die wind up getting almost immediately replaced, so you have made zero progress after 13 games), only two characters have gotten married and everyone is stuck as a bachelor, etc. I had a long discussion about that with Cipher earlier this year. But the flaccid overarching plot aside, I find the games to be overall worthwhile. Good art direction, novel setting, likeable characters, some funny scenes, engaging combat and character building (from CS onwards, not for original Sky or Crossbell), fantastic music, etc. Absolutely worth it in my book.

[DDC]

This is exaggerating more than just a bit. You're cherry-picking screenshots from cinematics in the PC version with mechs that show up in the last few hours of the game after you've spent 70 hours running around fields killing squirrels. This is a lot more representative of what you spend most of Trails of Cold Steel doing and what the game really looks like:



I was being pretty generous by calling the visuals "average" given that it launched on the same console as Final Fantasy 13. Or to go apples-to-apples with the screenshots, if we want to take another game that looked pretty blurry and bad on consoles and then cleaned up a bit for the PC, the environments look a lot worse than Xenoblade Chronicles (!!!a wii game!!!) running in 4K with a texture pack. Technically the games were almost a full generation behind where they should have been, which is not on its own fatal, but the art is also pretty generic.

As for the story, you make it sound sort of interesting, but what really happens is that you spend 70 hours doing slice-of-life school nonsense alternated with taking field trips to various regions and solving local problems with low stakes. There is no compelling antagonist, no overarching plot or mystery driving things forward. It's just a collection of episodes that are each boring on their own and don't add up to much. I absolutely loathe these episodic "visit the regions" RPG structures that fail at telling a larger story. Sometimes it can work, like to some extent Grandia 2 if there are other elements to add tension to the plot, but it usually doesn't. And sometimes the slice of life school nonsense can work (like Persona 4) if it's paired with something otherwise interesting, but in Trails of Cold Steel, the field trips definitely aren't carrying the plot so you just alternate between two boring types of storytelling. I don't see how you can claim to disagree with everything I say, when you are also saying this:

The overwhelming vast majority of this 13 game long, 1,000+ hour long, $600+ series is repetitive chapters where you chase around supervillains and fail to catch them, fake stakes, you never get to make progress on killing the 8 big bads (actually your progress gets undone because the big bads who do actually die wind up getting almost immediately replaced, so you have made zero progress after 13 games)

My biggest complaint is that I played 70 hours and nothing of note happened. It sounds like you've played more than 10x that much, and still, nothing has happened. That's absolutely terrible when so many JRPGs have been able to tell compelling stories with satisfying conclusions in 40-50 hours. They are failing at the primary purpose of a JRPG and writing it off as "world-building."

The character arcs are completely banal, things like "here is this noble that is prejudiced against poor people or foreigners or whatever it was ... he will interact with the people he is prejudiced against for 70 hours and learn to be less prejudiced." I don't remember a lot of the details because I played this game when it came out on the PS3 and it was a forgettable game in general, but in general all of the party members were similarly trite. You say almost all of the characters are "likable," but I don't consider that good writing. What about despicable characters that the player absolutely loathes? Characters the player dislikes but begrudgingly respects? Etc. The writing doesn't exactly inspire a large range of emotions.

Without getting too deep into the music, the one thing I can say is that I can't remember (even vaguely) a single track from Cold Steel and probably wouldn't be able to place any of them if you played one for me. Generally if a game has bangers in the sound track, I remember regardless of how much time has passed. I played Wild Arms 3 once when it came out, but I'll never forget the music from the opening video. I'll never forget the FFX theme, or the dungeon music from Final Fantasy 2/4. And so on. There's nothing like that in Cold Steel.

As for the rest, I don't think it's fair to attribute any kind of responsibility for "better PC ports" to Legend of Heroes, as if it started some industry trend. I could just as easily pick any other random game from that era like Valkyria Chronicles or Last Remnant and say that PC ports "got better" after they were released. The LOH ports look like they just upped the resolution (and I assume the framerate), but I don't see obvious changes to the assets or effects, so that seems pretty standard to me. PC ports in general, across all genres, have become less problematic on average than they were when Trails of Cold Steel came out.

[rusty_shackleford]

I could never understand the appeal of this series

Soap opera games for people that like weeb games.
Not an insult, it's something I'd be invested in if it appealed to me. Mass Effect was sorta this for a bit.

[methoxetamine]

This is exaggerating more than just a bit. You're cherry-picking screenshots from cinematics in the PC version with mechs that show up in the last few hours of the game after you've spent 70 hours running around fields killing squirrels. This is a lot more representative of what you spend most of Trails of Cold Steel doing and what the game really looks like:



I was being pretty generous by calling the visuals "average" given that it launched on the same console as Final Fantasy 13. Or to go apples-to-apples with the screenshots, if we want to take another game that looked pretty blurry and bad on consoles and then cleaned up a bit for the PC, the environments look a lot worse than Xenoblade Chronicles (!!!a wii game!!!) running in 4K with a texture pack. Technically the games were almost a full generation behind where they should have been, which is not on its own fatal, but the art is also pretty generic.

As for the story, you make it sound sort of interesting, but what really happens is that you spend 70 hours doing slice-of-life school nonsense alternated with taking field trips to various regions and solving local problems with low stakes. There is no compelling antagonist, no overarching plot or mystery driving things forward. It's just a collection of episodes that are each boring on their own and don't add up to much. I absolutely loathe these episodic "visit the regions" RPG structures that fail at telling a larger story. Sometimes it can work, like to some extent Grandia 2 if there are other elements to add tension to the plot, but it usually doesn't. And sometimes the slice of life school nonsense can work (like Persona 4) if it's paired with something otherwise interesting, but in Trails of Cold Steel, the field trips definitely aren't carrying the plot so you just alternate between two boring types of storytelling. I don't see how you can claim to disagree with everything I say, when you are also saying this:

The overwhelming vast majority of this 13 game long, 1,000+ hour long, $600+ series is repetitive chapters where you chase around supervillains and fail to catch them, fake stakes, you never get to make progress on killing the 8 big bads (actually your progress gets undone because the big bads who do actually die wind up getting almost immediately replaced, so you have made zero progress after 13 games)

My biggest complaint is that I played 70 hours and nothing of note happened. It sounds like you've played more than 10x that much, and still, nothing has happened. That's absolutely terrible when so many JRPGs have been able to tell compelling stories with satisfying conclusions in 40-50 hours. They are failing at the primary purpose of a JRPG and writing it off as "world-building."

The character arcs are completely banal, things like "here is this noble that is prejudiced against poor people or foreigners or whatever it was ... he will interact with the people he is prejudiced against for 70 hours and learn to be less prejudiced." I don't remember a lot of the details because I played this game when it came out on the PS3 and it was a forgettable game in general, but in general all of the party members were similarly trite. You say almost all of the characters are "likable," but I don't consider that good writing. What about despicable characters that the player absolutely loathes? Characters the player dislikes but begrudgingly respects? Etc. The writing doesn't exactly inspire a large range of emotions.

Without getting too deep into the music, the one thing I can say is that I can't remember (even vaguely) a single track from Cold Steel and probably wouldn't be able to place any of them if you played one for me. Generally if a game has bangers in the sound track, I remember regardless of how much time has passed. I played Wild Arms 3 once when it came out, but I'll never forget the music from the opening video. I'll never forget the FFX theme, or the dungeon music from Final Fantasy 2/4. And so on. There's nothing like that in Cold Steel.

As for the rest, I don't think it's fair to attribute any kind of responsibility for "better PC ports" to Legend of Heroes, as if it started some industry trend. I could just as easily pick any other random game from that era like Valkyria Chronicles or Last Remnant and say that PC ports "got better" after they were released. The LOH ports look like they just upped the resolution (and I assume the framerate), but I don't see obvious changes to the assets or effects, so that seems pretty standard to me. PC ports in general, across all genres, have become less problematic on average than they were when Trails of Cold Steel came out.

There's a reason it's an extremely niche series despite being so long running. It appeals to a certain kind of person, that person is just not you. The people who love it really love it

Also Cold Steel is my least favorite arc in the series. The best games are the first 5, though I wouldn't try to convince you to play them with the way you feel about the series in general

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I was being pretty generous by calling the visuals "average" given that it launched on the same console as Final Fantasy 13.

The situation of the Final Fantasy series and the Trails series were completely, utterly different.

By the mid 1990s, SE was making a concerted effort to get their games brought to the West, was sending their guys overseas to California to test SGI machines and buy them for millions of dollars and bring them back so they could produce cutting edge visuals, was working directly with the hardware manufacturer Sony to extract the most out of their systems and for promotions, etc. The blockbuster revenue from FF7 as a global hit enabled SE to split the Final Fantasy team into three (working on 8, 9, and 10 respectively), open a studio in Hawaii to work on 9, and shortly after begin work on 11 and the movie. Then the 11 MMO charging a monthly sub became SE's biggest revenue source during the 2000s, allowing them to fund lavish projects like FF12, FF13, Versus XIII, and FF14 which spent years languishing in development hell, with FF13 overproducing so many art assets they couldn't all be fit into one game and an additional two games were commissioned to get the most out of those models (in addition to Yoshi-P being handed a hard drive with even more previously unseen FF13 models for him to begin dropping into FF14). By the PS2 FFs, the games virtually had unlimited budgets and were being subsidized by the MMO, and the time tables did not matter that much.

Chairman Kato of Falcom however made several blunders that hamstrung Falcom's chances at making it big like Square.

Falcom was one of the most "prestigious" (relatively speaking) video game developers in Japan in the 1980s. Falcom devs were the rockstars of Japanese game dev in their time and participated in many interviews. Their game Ys 1 and 2 became a hit in Japan. But Chairman Kato wanted to capitalize on the Ys brand name, and forced the devs to rebrand an unrelated side scroller as Ys 3. At the time Falcom was a PC gaming company, but the staff saw which way the wind was blowing and wanted to transition to making console games, but Kato forbade it. This killed confidence in Kato and led to a staff exodus and many of the talent went to Square. Only THREE core developers remained at Falcom. Square profited off of Falcom's brain drain. The departure of big name developers from the studio caused a highly publicized disaster. Kato then didn't want a repeat situation to happen where devs had "clout" so he instituted a policy where nobody except the president is allowed to talk to the press about Falcom games and the bizarre crediting situation. Obviously people are not inclined to work at a company where they will never become renowned and can't take credit for their work, which led to Falcom struggling to acquire good talent. Falcom became a black company in Japan. Also, Kato did not make a serious effort to push Falcom games in the West like Square did.

Falcom ardently stuck with PC even as that ship was going down and it nearly bankrupted them when Zwei 2 was a flop in 2008. The only reason Falcom even lived that long while every other Japanese games studio was going extinct or abandoning ship to handhelds and mobile left and right was because Kato tightened Falcom's belts, forcing them to keep costs low.

After Zwei 2, Kato took the company public and made the promise to release at least one Falcom game per year. But unlike Square which was had enough talent and money to have multiple different studios working on multiple different games that could be rotated (ie three Final Fantasy games being made simultaneously, so one FF game came out a year one after another), Falcom did not have the luxury of that manpower or resources. They only have the one team and they have to push one game out the door per year regardless of the state it is in. Falcom games can never have anywhere near the same level of man hours poured into them like Square games. Also, it was not until the mid 2010s when the Japanese birthrate was declining (and thus young customers to buy Falcom games in Japan) that Falcom began taking overseas expansion more seriously, and by that point they were fighting an uphill battle because marketing was becoming more expensive than ever in an age when everybody has adblock and there are more and more games releasing on steam every year.

I would also point out that the graphical quality of FF13 was the exception, not the norm. Most Japanese game dev teams did not survive the transition to 3D HD. Many of them tried and failed and then died or got disbanded or absorbed into another studio, or they realized that they just did not have the expertise to compete and instead went to handheld and then to mobile. The visual novel industry died and the few remaining VN devs joined the handheld devs in making mobile games. Now the last of those mobile devs are dying off because they never managed to get better at 3D games while Japanese customers have jumped ship to 3D Chinese gacha games that run on phones.

Bear in mind that CS1 and CS2 were developed to run on the PSP, a handheld. With CS3 Falcom dropped handheld, which allowed them to remake Erebonia at higher fidelity, but again you have that talent issue where they are learning from scratch. Apparently one of the reasons why Japanese 3D HD development suffered so greatly is that Western game devs discovered that Japanese game devs did not have a culture of talking to people in other companies and sharing techniques and proliferating knowledge like in the West.

if we want to take another game that looked pretty blurry and bad on consoles and then cleaned up a bit for the PC, the environments look a lot worse than Xenoblade Chronicles (!!!a wii game!!!) running in 4K with a texture pack.

It would be more prudent compare CS1/2 screenshots at 4k with a texture pack with Xenoblade at 4k with a texturepack, rather than comparing a PSP game with original textures to a console game at higher rez with a texture. I don't have screenshots for both on hand so I am not going to bother. Trails and Xenoblades also have different worlds. Xenoblades goes for a grandiose high fantasy world with towns nestled within huge mountain canyons on the knee of a humongous titan, glowing forests, giant crystals everywhere, etc. Trails aims for a more mundane landscape to better sell the geopolitical conflicts and turmoil.

You are also getting into that talent, resources, funding, and time issue again. The Xenoblade Chronicles dev team originated from the Final Fantasy dev team. When it came time to figure out what FF7 was going to be, Takahashi pitched his game. Sakaguuchi rejected it as being FF7 but given Takahashi the go ahead to pick his guys and go make his own game. That game was Xenogears. After Xenogears released, it became clear that Takahashi wasn't going to get more funding to make the games he wanted to make, so Takahashi left the company for Bandai Namco and his staff followed him there. They made the three Xenosaga games. Then the situation repeated where Namco declared that Xenosaga 3 would be the end, so again Takahashi and crew jumped ship to Nintendo. Nintendo being a console manufacturer afforded them expertise to get the most out of the console hardware. Now Monolith Soft are such experts, that they are being called in to help the Zelda team with their games. Falcom has never had the luxury of such mentorship and support like that. Also, XBC was in development for 4 years, while Falcom's one team has to push out a game once every year. Ofcourse XBC is going to have far more manpower poured into it.

but the art is also pretty generic.

I would not say generic. If you just look at the anime faces, then yes. But there is more going on to Falcom's artstyle that was beginning to mature by this point, namely the way they use their shaders and lighting and atmosphere. Their monsters and spell effects were also pretty distinctive by this point. I think this becomes much more obvious by the time of CS3 and then especially Daybreak that the Trails games look unique when compared to a lot of other "anime" games like Tales Of, Atelier, etc.

As for the story, you make it sound sort of interesting, but what really happens is that you spend 70 hours doing slice-of-life school nonsense alternated with taking field trips to various regions and solving local problems with low stakes. There is no compelling antagonist, no overarching plot or mystery driving things forward. It's just a collection of episodes that are each boring on their own and don't add up to much.

Again, disagree. After finishing the prologue, I wanted to find out what was happening with that violent, urgent attack and the railway guns going off, and I wanted to find out what was up with that red noble and his plan. After chapter 1, I wanted to find out what was up with those two guys talking in the middle of the woods at night, and why Rean was hiding that he was a noble. In chapter 2 I was invested in trying to rescue Machias from prison. Chapter 3 was urgent with the mortar attack on the watchtower and the threat of war and Gaius' family being caught in the middle. By chapter 4 I was very invested in the cast, and then there was there was more Rean family drama. Terrorists instigating an uprising with the dock workers in the middle of the night. Chapter 5 had my interest piqued with the now more eerie old schoolhouse with Elise being trapped in front of the red door, and then the tension starts building when Duke Cayenne visited Laura's home trying to sway Victor to his cause. Chapter 6 was building up more tension with the confrontation between Rufus and Claire and I wasn't sure who we were going to align with, and then the mine explosion. The teaser at the end with Sharon serving some unknown master had me piqued. And so on. And then chapter 7 grabbed me at the bonfire scene when Crossbell breaks the truce and it looks like people are gonna get drafted.

I thought that the ILF were pretty compelling antagonists, particularly the ILF since they are relatable average joes who got screwed over by eminent domain, get thrown under the bus by so-called "friends" because selling out was more profitable, or lost their teaching position for calling out state propaganda and trying to do their job and teach the truth. There was an overarching plot with the overt building up of civil turmoil, the background build up of an international showdown between superpowers, Rean's mysterious origin, the eerie Black Workshop and Divine Knights and their connection to Erebonia's history, and so on.

I don't see how you can claim to disagree with everything I say, when you are also saying this:

As I said, that has to do with the overarching storyline of the Trails franchise, rather than the Cold Steel plot specifically.

The character arcs are completely banal, things like "here is this noble that is prejudiced against poor people or foreigners or whatever it was ... he will interact with the people he is prejudiced against for 70 hours and learn to be less prejudiced." I don't remember a lot of the details because I played this game when it came out on the PS3 and it was a forgettable game in general, but in general all of the party members were similarly trite. You say almost all of the characters are "likable," but I don't consider that good writing.

Trails characters stand out in my mind much more than most JRPG characters. I remember the names of Xenoblade Characters but none of them stick out in my mind besides Riki and maybe Dunban. I cannot recall any personalities from The Last Remnant. Most of the characters from Valkyria Chronicles were so so. Etc. I can go on. Unless you start counting SRPG/VN hybrids, the only JRPG characters that stand out in my mind as being noticeably more interesting would be certain Final Fantasy characters like Lulu and Ashe. (EDIT: others have come to mind such as certain Granblue Fantasy characters)

Part of the issue here however is that CS1 and CS2 is not the full story arc. Rean, Jusis, especially Rufus, Laura, George, Claire, and others have more stuff going on the latter CS games. This is where Falcom's promise to the shareholders to shove out one game per year (with the deadline usually being late September) combined with only have 60 devs leads to further complications of the story. Games are getting shoved out before the whole story is finished, and then what is left of the story to be told is not enough to constitute a whole game on its own for next year's release so it has to be injected with filler to stretch it out. Falcom was scrambling to put together the final dungeon of CS3 days before the cut off date to ship which is why that game ends in the middle of a cutscene and the final dungeon had severe performance issues on PS4. If Falcom was not under such conditions, then the entire 500 hour long Cold Steel pentalogy could have been told in two games max, perhaps even one game.

Another issue is, again, Falcom's business. One game per year, and low costs, and they are confronted by the enormous cost of marketing today. Falcom's solution is to create a franchise where a customer base is relatively stable from installment to installmemt rather than trying to persuade a new audience every year. And to reduce costs and achieve speed, they create assets for one new country every 5 years or so and make several games out of those assets. They model Liberl and make 3 games out of it. They model Eastern Erebonia and make 2. Western Erebonia and 3. Calvard and 4. That affects how you write the story. If you finish the original story in one game and try to make a new, unrelated story, it becomes conspicuous if you keep revisiting all of the same plot locations as the original story. So it is better to connect them. That's how you get 500 hours of Divine Knights in Erebonia as opposed to the 1990s FF format of multiple different 30 hour stories in different worlds.

What about despicable characters that the player absolutely loathes? Characters the player dislikes but begrudgingly respects?

Oh boy, this is a major issue with the series. Actually it's not exclusive to Trails and is unfortunately common for modern Japanese pop media such as Utawarerumono, FF14, Granblue Fantasy, and has spread to Chinese games like Wuthering Waves, Genshin, and Honkai Star Rail. Basically you have 1. financial motivation to keep characters alive so that they can be brought back for a sequel/future story event and entice fans to keep coming back, and 2. Japan's rejection of God leading to a framework of moral relativity in which hardly anyone is allowed to be truly judged as being "evil". So what you end up in a lot of these narratives is that you have antagonists massacring policemen in the streets for the lolz, mercenaries shooting up theaters for the lolz or transforming into 30 foot tall demons and trampling houses for the lolz, people committing betrayal and murdering their friends, knights betraying a personal promise they made to their emperor and choosing to side with usurpers trying to overthrow the princess, people deciding to wipe out all life in the universe, etc. But no, these people can't be judged as evil as killed off, or else we can't bring them back as party members, and we would make people uncomfortable with the idea that evil exists and must be destroyed.

So over the course of 1,000+ hours of Trails, there has been I think exactly 2 characters in the whole series that the audience was intended to and successfully allowed to loathe, and then they get killed. There are two other characters that I think someone at Falcom might have wanted you to loathe, but they come off as so ridiculous that it is hard to really care. There is another "character" who was a literal black blob monster with hardly any lines and was used as a scapegoat to try to excuse a couple dozen other villains of their actions. That then leads to most of the other villains in this franchise, of which there are many, who Falcom over the past few years has been bending over backwards trying very hard to memoryhole their heinous actions and pass them off as the cavalry who come in and save the day or as fanservice you should be excited for and want to see our characters hang out with. There has been a moment where one relatively heroic antagonist kills a heinous villain who is accomplice to many mass murders and child experimentations, but the game's narrative tries to film the first antagonist as being somehow more evil than her, when what that scene did just made me admire him even more for doing what the protagonists were unwilling to do and take out the trash.

I could just as easily pick any other random game from that era like Valkyria Chronicles or Last Remnant and say that PC ports "got better" after they were released.

VC1 I recalled had issues and ofcourse did not have anywhere near the amount of PC port options and QoL features poured into it. The Last Remnant's PC port had almost no PC options and had screentearing with AMD cards that I was never able to fix. I would advise reading Durante's or PH3's interviews and news releases on the work they did for the Trails PC ports because it is quite substantial.

[Melo]

I also prefer the first five games in the series. For me Cold Steel is dumb fun while the first five games are something truly special, though Val isn't the first person whose opinion I respect to say they prefer Cold Steel, so to each their own.

I would vote for Trails in the Sky FC for the adventurers' guild if it was nominated. Ii would motivate me to finish my replay of it in NG Nightmare, a certain unmasked boss is kicking my *** despite me stacking all possible odds in my favour. I might just accept the loss and move on, since victory is optional, but I wanted to 100% the game. We'll see.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

A little worrying that Sky 2nd chapter has been announced to release by September 2026, while there is no word on Kuro 4/Kai 2. If 2nd chapter doesn't release earlier in the year and ends up taking the September slot, then it seems likely that Kuro 4 wouldn't come out until 2027 (unless Falcom did something unprecedented and had Kuro 4 come out in December, 3 months after 2nd chapter, which would be unfavorable as they would be competing with other Christmas purchases).

Best case scenario is that SC releases in June or something and then Kuro 4 in September, but that seems unlikely.

[methoxetamine]

A little worrying that Sky 2nd chapter has been announced to release by September 2026, while there is no word on Kuro 4/Kai 2. If 2nd chapter doesn't release earlier in the year and ends up taking the September slot, then it seems likely that Kuro 4 wouldn't come out until 2027 (unless Falcom did something unprecedented and had Kuro 4 come out in December, 3 months after 2nd chapter, which would be unfavorable as they would be competing with other Christmas purchases).

Best case scenario is that SC releases in June or something and then Kuro 4 in September, but that seems unlikely.

I'm disgusted man I loved the remake and am excited for SC remake but i ******* need Kai 2 after that ending of Kai

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The steam page for the Trails in the Sky SC remake has gone up. Slated for 2026, release month unknown.




From recent interviews with Kondo, it sounds like the business state of Trails series not good.




We are able to track Japanese sales which ofcourse had been declining (TLDR aging Japanese population, fewer young customers, Kuro series was Playstation exclusive when most Japanese gamers do not have a Playstation), but my impression was that they had sufficiently expanded the franchise overseas in the West and in Korea and China - which when combined with their cost savings measures - would mean that weak JP sales would not be that bad. But now in today's shareholder meeting, Kondo is saying that they put new games on hold (and thus not finishing the story that veterans are invested in) because they think they would make more money off of remakes to bring in new people (some of whom will then get invested in the story and then buy a back catalog of 13 games).

Question: Regarding the sales strategy for the Trails (Kiseki) series. Personally, I was disappointed that Kai no Kiseki did not conclude the story. Wouldn't it have been better to release a remake after the series was fully complete? Was the decision to insert a remake at this juncture the result of weighing the benefits of gaining new users against the risk of existing users leaving?

Kondo: I know we are keeping you waiting regarding the conclusion of Kai no Kiseki, and I apologize for causing any concern.

The primary objective of inserting the Trails in the Sky remake now is to acquire new users. While Kai no Kiseki is a PlayStation exclusive, it has become clear that the user base [on that platform] is dwindling. Partly because we had limited the platforms [for recent entries], we made the decision to interject with the Trails in the Sky remake before Kai no Kiseki heads toward its conclusion. We did this to increase the likelihood of bringing back players who had "graduated" from the series, as well as onboarding those who are interested but have shied away because jumping in midway is too difficult.

Furthermore, Kai no Kiseki involves massive development costs due to its sheer volume. The Trails series has been running for 20 years, and the development team is exhausted—much like they would be from operating a live-service online game. There is an internal reason for this decision as well: we wanted to give the team a break—or rather, to help them boost their motivation for the conclusion of Kai no Kiseki—by returning to our roots and taking a fresh look at Trails in the Sky.

Kondo: Personnel costs for game development and outsourcing fees have also risen significantly over the past year. On the other hand, we haven't been able to pass on price increases to the products, so the company is absorbing them. That's the tough part. As for how we'll proceed in the future, we'll focus mainly on overseas markets and multi-platform strategies.

Note that bolded section. Let us recall an interview with Kondo last month about the Trails in the Sky remake:

Kondo: We kept it a secret when we started development, but somewhere along the line, it got discovered, and other team members started saying, "I want to get involved," or "I want to participate." One of the veteran staff members who was the background leader for 'The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky' even said, "If it's 'Trails in the Sky', I'll be even more motivated, so please let me do it" (laughs). I replied, "That's a bit of a problem," but I was also happy.

It's unclear how many people wanted to transfer off of making new games to the remake team, but when you combine this with the statement in the shareholder meeting, it sounds like the Falcom dev team overall no longer wants to continue making the Calvard games. . So who knows how long the conclusion will be delayed.

This is a problem that Kondo made for himself. Remember when the five game long Cold Steel arc finished and Kondo was interviewed saying that he wasn't going to make the arcs anywhere near as long? And that there were three more arcs left after Cold Steel, and he would like to have finished the series and retired by 2030? And yet here we are, half way to 2030, 3 games into the next arc (of 3), with no meaningful plot advancement and the writers are parodying how nothing ever happens in these games, and there is still at least 1 more Calvard game before this arc is finished, and if Sky 2nd Chapter is going to occupy the September 2026 release slot, then that means Kuro 4/Kai 2 won't release until 2027 at the earliest... which means no arc 2 game 1 until 2028 at the earliest...






Furthermore, we have a pretty big and somewhat scary shift in Falcom's policy. After Zwei 2 bombed and nearly killed the company, Falcom's MO has been to keep their headcount low at around 50ish people and push out one game per year every year (regardless of the state it is in) and thus keep expenses low. This is how Falcom lived when most other midsized devs went extinct or went mobile. Kondo also said in old interviews that he preferred to keep headcount low so he could better manage the teams and could directly go to people with few to no middle managers. But now Kato is dead and Kondo holds the keys to the kingdom, and is saying he wants to scale up operations, that he wants to release 2 games per year and to do that he needs a lot more people.

Q (Suzuki) Regarding the outlook for the number of employees. We're operating with a small, elite team and have gradually increased to 69 people, but lately, I've been seeing a lot of job postings for programmers. With demands for new titles as well as remakes in development, will the company actively increase its staff? What's the image for how many people it will be in 3 years? #JapanFalcomShareholdersMeeting

Kondo:
Currently at 69 people, which is about double what it was when we were smaller. Regarding the fact that recent game development requires more personnel and man-hours, our company is no exception and is following the same trend of increase, but even now, we feel it's not enough. Especially this year, we're strengthening recruitment and plan to hire an unusually large number of people starting in April compared to previous years.

As for 3 years from now, since we're hiring year-round, we're seeking personnel broadly. We don't have a specific target; we might add 10 people or 20 people, or if there are many people who don't fit Falcom's culture, there might be years with fewer hires.

With the current multi-platform deployments, even if we increase the number of people, the workload doesn't ultimately change, so we think we need around 100 people. We want to actively recruit the personnel necessary to release more than 2 titles per year.

Kondo: Going forward, as package sales become increasingly tough, I think we'll see the emergence of a semi-operational model that's somewhere between online and packages. Chinese and Korean game makers are moving in that direction. While keeping an eye on that situation, if it's something users will accept, I'd like to actively try it out.

Kondo on how they want to use AI:

Q Are you considering using generative AI to reduce costs? #JapanFalcomGeneralMeeting

Kondo:
Amid rising development costs, AI is an effective means of reduction. On the other hand, due to legal challenges, we are proceeding cautiously with its use in areas involving products.

Examples of using generative AI internally include creating simple image boards to convey ideas, as well as having it serve as a brainstorming partner for scenario writers. Fact-checking is necessary, but rather than researching at libraries and such, by first having AI do a rough check, what used to take 2-3 hours can sometimes be done in 10 minutes. We want to actively utilize it in areas where there are no issues.

Since everyone points out typos and omissions in scenarios a lot, we have started research on whether it can be done to some extent with AI. By automating the scripting of scenarios, there have been cases where it was achieved at about half the previous speed. Although initial investments require time and money, we want to actively utilize it for things that can produce long-term effects.

[methoxetamine]

The steam page for the Trails in the Sky SC remake has gone up. Slated for 2026, release month unknown.




From recent interviews with Kondo, it sounds like the business state of Trails series not good.




We are able to track Japanese sales which ofcourse had been declining (TLDR aging Japanese population, fewer young customers, Kuro series was Playstation exclusive when most Japanese gamers do not have a Playstation), but my impression was that they had sufficiently expanded the franchise overseas in the West and in Korea and China - which when combined with their cost savings measures - would mean that weak JP sales would not be that bad. But now in today's shareholder meeting, Kondo is saying that they put new games on hold (and thus not finishing the story that veterans are invested in) because they think they would make more money off of remakes to bring in new people (some of whom will then get invested in the story and then buy a back catalog of 13 games).

Question: Regarding the sales strategy for the Trails (Kiseki) series. Personally, I was disappointed that Kai no Kiseki did not conclude the story. Wouldn't it have been better to release a remake after the series was fully complete? Was the decision to insert a remake at this juncture the result of weighing the benefits of gaining new users against the risk of existing users leaving?

Kondo: I know we are keeping you waiting regarding the conclusion of Kai no Kiseki, and I apologize for causing any concern.

The primary objective of inserting the Trails in the Sky remake now is to acquire new users. While Kai no Kiseki is a PlayStation exclusive, it has become clear that the user base [on that platform] is dwindling. Partly because we had limited the platforms [for recent entries], we made the decision to interject with the Trails in the Sky remake before Kai no Kiseki heads toward its conclusion. We did this to increase the likelihood of bringing back players who had "graduated" from the series, as well as onboarding those who are interested but have shied away because jumping in midway is too difficult.

Furthermore, Kai no Kiseki involves massive development costs due to its sheer volume. The Trails series has been running for 20 years, and the development team is exhausted—much like they would be from operating a live-service online game. There is an internal reason for this decision as well: we wanted to give the team a break—or rather, to help them boost their motivation for the conclusion of Kai no Kiseki—by returning to our roots and taking a fresh look at Trails in the Sky.

Kondo: Personnel costs for game development and outsourcing fees have also risen significantly over the past year. On the other hand, we haven't been able to pass on price increases to the products, so the company is absorbing them. That's the tough part. As for how we'll proceed in the future, we'll focus mainly on overseas markets and multi-platform strategies.

Note that bolded section. Let us recall an interview with Kondo last month about the Trails in the Sky remake:

Kondo: We kept it a secret when we started development, but somewhere along the line, it got discovered, and other team members started saying, "I want to get involved," or "I want to participate." One of the veteran staff members who was the background leader for 'The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky' even said, "If it's 'Trails in the Sky', I'll be even more motivated, so please let me do it" (laughs). I replied, "That's a bit of a problem," but I was also happy.

It's unclear how many people wanted to transfer off of making new games to the remake team, but when you combine this with the statement in the shareholder meeting, it sounds like the Falcom dev team overall no longer wants to continue making the Calvard games. . So who knows how long the conclusion will be delayed.

This is a problem that Kondo made for himself. Remember when the five game long Cold Steel arc finished and Kondo was interviewed saying that he wasn't going to make the arcs anywhere near as long? And that there were three more arcs left after Cold Steel, and he would like to have finished the series and retired by 2030? And yet here we are, half way to 2030, 3 games into the next arc (of 3), with no meaningful plot advancement and the writers are parodying how nothing ever happens in these games, and there is still at least 1 more Calvard game before this arc is finished, and if Sky 2nd Chapter is going to occupy the September 2026 release slot, then that means Kuro 4/Kai 2 won't release until 2027 at the earliest... which means no arc 2 game 1 until 2028 at the earliest...






Furthermore, we have a pretty big and somewhat scary shift in Falcom's policy. After Zwei 2 bombed and nearly killed the company, Falcom's MO has been to keep their headcount low at around 50ish people and push out one game per year every year (regardless of the state it is in) and thus keep expenses low. This is how Falcom lived when most other midsized devs went extinct or went mobile. Kondo also said in old interviews that he preferred to keep headcount low so he could better manage the teams and could directly go to people with few to no middle managers. But now Kato is dead and Kondo holds the keys to the kingdom, and is saying he wants to scale up operations, that he wants to release 2 games per year and to do that he needs a lot more people.

Q (Suzuki) Regarding the outlook for the number of employees. We're operating with a small, elite team and have gradually increased to 69 people, but lately, I've been seeing a lot of job postings for programmers. With demands for new titles as well as remakes in development, will the company actively increase its staff? What's the image for how many people it will be in 3 years? #JapanFalcomShareholdersMeeting

Kondo:
Currently at 69 people, which is about double what it was when we were smaller. Regarding the fact that recent game development requires more personnel and man-hours, our company is no exception and is following the same trend of increase, but even now, we feel it's not enough. Especially this year, we're strengthening recruitment and plan to hire an unusually large number of people starting in April compared to previous years.

As for 3 years from now, since we're hiring year-round, we're seeking personnel broadly. We don't have a specific target; we might add 10 people or 20 people, or if there are many people who don't fit Falcom's culture, there might be years with fewer hires.

With the current multi-platform deployments, even if we increase the number of people, the workload doesn't ultimately change, so we think we need around 100 people. We want to actively recruit the personnel necessary to release more than 2 titles per year.

Kondo: Going forward, as package sales become increasingly tough, I think we'll see the emergence of a semi-operational model that's somewhere between online and packages. Chinese and Korean game makers are moving in that direction. While keeping an eye on that situation, if it's something users will accept, I'd like to actively try it out.

Kondo on how they want to use AI:

Q Are you considering using generative AI to reduce costs? #JapanFalcomGeneralMeeting

Kondo:
Amid rising development costs, AI is an effective means of reduction. On the other hand, due to legal challenges, we are proceeding cautiously with its use in areas involving products.

Examples of using generative AI internally include creating simple image boards to convey ideas, as well as having it serve as a brainstorming partner for scenario writers. Fact-checking is necessary, but rather than researching at libraries and such, by first having AI do a rough check, what used to take 2-3 hours can sometimes be done in 10 minutes. We want to actively utilize it in areas where there are no issues.

Since everyone points out typos and omissions in scenarios a lot, we have started research on whether it can be done to some extent with AI. By automating the scripting of scenarios, there have been cases where it was achieved at about half the previous speed. Although initial investments require time and money, we want to actively utilize it for things that can produce long-term effects.

Lot of words to tell me I'm ****** on Kai 2 any time soon, thanks Kondo you dicksucker

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The English localized release of the current latest Trails game, Kai no Kiseki/Trails Beyond the Horizon, will release tomorrow, 1.5 years after it initially released in Japan. After 22 years of the West always being several years behind the latest Trails games, we will finally be fully caught up! Hooray! (Inb4 the next Trails game does not have a simultaneous global release and we will be waiting 1 to 2 years for it to come to the West again, haha...)

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Kai no Kiseki/Trails Beyond the Horizon

Prologue

► Show Spoiler

The prologue was exhausting because you had to run through the same dungeon twice, one from both POV parties. Technically both party have a different layout but the assets and gameplay is exactly the same.

The wyvern/dragon mob makes me once again disappointed that there is no beastmaster party member in this franchise (normal looking small birds like Sieg and Zeo don't count). Falcom has such cool monster designs but you only get to command cool monsters in their old Vantage Master SRPG game.




The dialogue has the usual Falcom-isms of "oh it's been 6 months since we last met, huh?" and all that jazz.

I reloaded and replayed the conversation with English voices. Rean doesn't sound quite as good as he did back in the earlier Trails of Cold Steel games. Lapis was okay. Rufus, Crow, and Kevin are very good. Feri was okay. The rest I thought were pretty meh, so I switched it back to Japanese voices. Bergard does not sound like a grizzled old man and Kasim does not sound powerful.

The prologue final fight was interesting in that instead of fighting against a boss monster, you instead fight against another party of five characters who can use their crafts, arts, S-crafts, and brave orders just like you, which was interesting. I think this is the first fight in the entire series where you fight against 5 enemy characters at once (instead of four max like fighting against Kurt's team in the tournament in FC, the four Ironbloods at the end of CS3, or C's party in Reverie chapter 2).




At the banquet party, it would have been nice to have met some brand new characters we had never met before who were working as Marduk contractors or who had been called in. Other people who had been living their own lives or were heroing or villaining in lands we haven't been to yet (or even other parts of Erebonia/Calvard). Instead we only see people we have already met before, so it makes the world feel small.




It is frustrating that Rean once again shows no patriotism for his people in the face of these other characters who worked for enemy states and militaries that killed his people in the war, and are now benefitting from the impoverishment of his people due to Olivier's and Carl's insanity. It is very frustrating to see that all of the characters (and by extension, the game/narrative/writers) seem to just dictate that "Mille Mirage was good, Erebonia evil" when that was NOT the case. The historical revisionism continues.




It is ridiculous that Rean thinks that the people of Calvard would have forgotten the Ashen Chevalier, the highly publicized war hero of Calvard's great enemy. And no one should have forgotten Rufus Albarea. 25 years after 9/11, people still know who Osama Bin Laden is who killed 3,000 Americans. Rufus Albarea was - to the Calvardians - their Hitler's right hand man and involved in the world war, and was the one who took over Crossbell (twice), declared himself emperor of a rogue state that intended to take over the world by threatening to blow up cities with weapons of mass destruction until the nations of the world capitulated.




I was not a fan of the skyscraper banquet hall having full holodeck technology. The thick facility below with the large machinery on the exterior made me think that was what was required for the full room holodeck effect. It'd suck if any normal looking room could actually be a fully functioning holodeck.

I would like to have seen Campanella contact two older enforcers rather than bloat the cast with even more young babyfaces.




Rean and Crow should have some sort of earpiece that keeps them in constant contact with Valimar and Ordine, or gives them a warning if the connection is lost. It'd be the only way to know that the Calvardians or Marduk aren't trying to encroach on the Erebonian Tyrfings and examine or scan them.

For some reason, the devs make us watch the same full length unmanned space launch sequence four times.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Trails Beyond the Horizon: Van chapter 1

This game came out almost a week ago, but I haven't found myself super motivated to play a lot each day. Van chapter 1 has you once again running around Edith catching up on hundreds of NPCs for the third game in a row. And then just once you thought you had finished talking to everyone, the game moves to evening and does an NPC update, so now we have to go around talking to people AGAIN. And then we go to the Blacklight District and have to talk to everyone there... and THEN they introduce the Chardin district...

Falcom had it just right with Trista in Cold Steel 1. It was just two districts (instead of over half a dozen) and you only had to make the NPC rounds once per chapter, and then you shipped out to the new field trip location of the chapter. But in these Kuro games, we are spending quadruple the time in the hub town of Edith on NPCing before we can finally get on with the adventure.

► Show Spoiler

Those evil white nationalist, anti-immigrationists are back!











This new [del]Marchen[/del] Grim Garten environment is neat.






The shop screen being themed as Altina in a witch's altelier is neat.








Once again, I like the return of the main menu screen changing depending on where you are in the story.






These "contaminated" buffed boss enemies are ridiculously HP spongey. Even when I stock up CP, boost gauge, and buff up before the boss' stun bar fills up, and then pop the attack buff brave order and launch all of my S-crafts, I still don't do that much damage.


They added a new district to the capital city of Edith. Ah yes, my favorite part of JRPGs. Going to the casino and gambling!









They even got races you can bet on!









It is bizzare that Calvard does not have an unseemly reputation, when the first thing people see when arriving in the capital is getting accosted by a guying soliciting brothels. This Barker Tracey guy has been here in front of the train station every single chapter for 300 hours across a year of in universe time. This does not happen in any other capital city in Trails. Erebonia's redlight district is removed to a town called Raquel rather than being allowed in the capital of Heimdallr.





Never meet women at bars.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

This game came out almost two weeks ago. For most Trails games, I would have beaten them by now. But the Van prologue chapter and Van chapter 1 being such long drawn out slogs in Edith really put a damper in my sails, so progress was slow. Once I finally got out of the boring Van chapters, the game began to pick up for me.




Finished Van Chapter 1

► Show Spoiler

Goodness gracious why does everyone have to jump on Van for the umpteenth time across 300 hours of Calvard games? Why can't he walk around with a cute girl without being accosted at every other turn?












HIP AND WITH IT PARTY GRANDPA!

More EVIIIIL white nationalist anti-immigrationists!






Back to the contradictions. Zemuria is a setting where there is only one religion - people worship the Goddess Aidios, people go to a Catholic/Orthodox looking Church on Sundays, people talk "Goddess" this "Goddess" that... but the characters are spiritually secular Japanese who don't actually pray to God for help or think about their standing before God, or believe that there is an absolute right or wrong dictated by God, etc. We get more moral relativism.




It is disappointing she turned him down. We are 13 games, 1,000+ hours, and $600+ into this series, and nobody aside from Olivier and Schera have gotten married yet. Everyone is a lonely bachelor (and getting old too).






There is a brief auction segment. It is weirdly done in that you have the option to raise the bid either in small or huge increments, but you can just keep spamming the small increment increases until all of the other NPCs sit down. There is no reason to hit the large increment increase.








It is disappointing that the bonus objective for this battle is to try to get him down to half HP and knock his hat off, but then you get him below the threshold and in the following cutscene he still has his hat on.






More Ouroboros filler where people waffle around and mumble about everything going to plan and leave.

Rean chapter 1

► Show Spoiler

Rean gets a warm welcome from the enemy for BETRAYING his country and his people! .












Don't shake his hand Rean! He bombed your people!




WE WERE WINNING THE WORLD WAR! Even in the face of the combined might of Liberl, Remiferia, Calvard, terrorist cells in occupied territories, and a rebel army funded by the nobles within our own country, Erebonia was still had upper hand! It was YOU and Olivier and Carl who ****** it all away! Worked with the enemy, gave away our secrets, killed your father, gave away the territories of Crossbell and North Ambria which we shed blood to acquire, and then paid reparations for a war we were winning and were not the aggressors of (remember the platoon of Calvardian marines stockpiling weapons underneath Heimdallr in preparation for a decapitation strike?).




I am drawing a blank as to who this could possibly be. Mint wasn't close to any men in the Trails of Cold Steel games. Probably a new character.




He ditched the motorbike we spent two 100 hour long games building for a bike built by the enemy? It feels really bad when your protagonists are traitors. YET AGAIN!




Why are we staying over at the house of the enemy? So far, each of the three Disciples founded national companies in different countries, all of which are involved in developing armaments and infrastructure for their nations to use in war. Albert made the airships that blew up Erebonian soldiers, Schmidt and his apprentice made the Soldats. What are the chances that Professor Hamilton here has been involved in making stuff that blew up Gaius' village in Nord or nearly blew up Juna in Crossbell? Or killed Rean's countrymen? What about Hamilton's apprentices? Was Cronkite involved in making the RAMDA units that the Calvardian marines used to run around under Heimdallr preparing for the decapitation strike, or that squad that was blowing up railway lines and grain houses? We should have just rented a nearby log cabin, or just booked a regular hotel.






The new Basel music is neat.







How many years has it been since the war ended? 3 or 4 years ago? It's the same problem as Zin where Crow has game, is handsome, is successful, etc. But years later he is inexplicably still alone. If he asked out one woman per week, he should be married by now.








We ALLOWED an enemy engineer to not only touch but open up and look inside our Tyrfings!?!? Did he find out that the two mechs are possessed by real souls, not just algorithymic AIs?




Bait and switch to show Altina riding on Claiomh Solais in his default configuration in the new main menu screen, but you can't use Claiomh Solais in that form ingame. Only as his new shield or satelite shape.




Are the writers for real? This guy was in one of the airships that Rean sent hurtling down to the earth and exploded and killed everyone on board? The fall from that height was unsurvivable. And this guy holds no grudges? What about his comrades who died in that battle for Crossbell?




This battle took half an hour, having to always keep the 0.3x incoming damage brave order up and spamming my excess boost gauge for the party wide 25% HP heal. The music heightened the drama of Rean and Crow desperately fighting to protect Erebonia's reputation (why did our leaders agree to this fight? We get nothing if we win. We only stand to lose).






Gramhardt is rushing to get this mech put on a rocket up into space to fight something. Why are Professor Cronkite and General Harring okay with Calvard's supposedly best pilot and mech losing to the Erebonians? Is whatever threat they are about to fight not actually as formidable as they have been insinuating it to be, and they are okay with their mech and pilot being "good enough"? It sounds like they should be shipping Rean and Crow up there, not Emilia.

Kevin chapter 1

► Show Spoiler

I like how for once, Trails protagonists are allowed to disagree with each other rather than being a hivemind. But in this case, it does not work. Kevin is not an assassin working for a fallible state. Kevin is a holy hitman from God. He is Right. These ostensibly good, goddess fearing heroes should not have any consternation about Kevin's mission. If the man on a mission from God needs to kill someone, then it should be done. The heroes are being written by secular Japanese who do not believe in God, so these Japanese anime heroes do not believe in the absolute authority of God.






We now have homelessness now in Trails too.

Wow, this magic spell to see events that happened in the past sure would have come in handy for the prior 12 Trails games! The Gralsritter could have used it to find out who the Grandmaster and the Anguis are, find out where their bases are, find out what they are planning, etc. Could have used it to find out what Osborne was planning and what his weaknesses were. Could have used it to find out what Gramhardt is up to. Etc.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Van chapter 2

► Show Spoiler

I am becoming really annoyed with fencesitter Van. As in he is dragging down my enjoyment of the game like with Lloyd. The guy has been stringing this poor woman along for 250 hours across 3 games spanning over a year in universe. A year is more than enough time to get to really know someone and decide if you want to marry them. Don't "blah blah I have demon stuff inside me so I have to keep stringing you along" me. Are you going to marry her or not? If not then tell her so she can move on with her life while she is still young.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished Rean chapter 2

► Show Spoiler

It is shocking that the blackmail option was available as Rean.










Having romanced Towa in the Cold Steel pentalogy, it is very annoying that 2 years later their relationship has been reset and for Falcom to rub it in like this. There is no reason why Falcom couldn't have done something like what Sakura Wars did, where your romance could be carried across games and even different arcs.








The telescope scene was good.

The Rean storyline is overall interesting. But the Falcom-isms have become unbearable.

First, the flanderization of the characters is the worst it has ever been. Crow in CS1 only once overtly talked about some lurid activity, and only once or twice talked about trying to get with girls. In this game, I have lost count of how many times Crow has talked about women or has talked about going to a nightclub or a strip club. And it is almost always followed up with Towa going "Crow.". It was funny the first or second time it happened, but when it happens 10+ times it's not funny anymore.

The same thing happened to Mint. I am glad that a background character was able to get picked out and promoted to a secondary character, but the writers haven't fleshed her out at all. Most her screentime is her being an incompetent klutz who breaks things and needs other people to clean up after her. The joke was funny the first time, but when it keeps happening over and over it's just kinda sad. It makes her look like an actual incompetent, and makes her one dimensional.

Another example is Nadia. When she was introduced in Reverie, she made a couple comments about being a lazy slacker. Fast forward to this game and she is constantly talking about slacking in every other scene. I can't go to the Grim Garten without her talking about it.

Or Van with his car and sweets. In the first game, it was a nice way to give Van a couple extra things going on in his life. Now in Horizon, he is bringing up cars and sweets far too often.

I could go on.



The next major problem is it is incredulous that so many characters are friends with each other. Van and Dingo apparently knew bloody everybody and participated in everything. And then you also have a lot of stuff like some random movie director being chummy with discount Olivier and in on the conspiracy or whatever. Rocksmith just HAPPENS to know the Montmart family. Roy Gramhardt gets retconned into the Hundred Days War and just HAPPENED to be involved in everything and is super amazing. And so on.

We have the usual problem of characters knowing what's up or having their suspicions (particularly Bergard and Risette), but they don't say anything.

Risette has been a non-character for most this game. All of the Arkride people except Bergard have been pretty pointless in this arc, but Risette feels the least existent.


There are so many other problems compiling here that I haven't gotten to.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Van Chapter 3

Please, make the bad soap opera stop. Get on with it!

► Show Spoiler

Goodness gracious they made me do the NPC rounds around Edith a fifth time in this game (and this is... what? The 20th time or so in this now 3+ game, 270+ hour long arc so far? It really sucks my motivation to play knowing I have to do 1 or 2+ hours of NPC catching up chores before I can finally get on with the plot again.


Really? She didn't have ANY other coat besides the one in the dryer? Renne and Odette didn't let her borrow one?






It is disappointing that the Khamsin aka mr "world's most powerful warrior who was never once spoken of by the martial artists masters in this series until game no. 11" once again just squeezes the trigger on his laser gun for his ultimate, rather than using an actual martial arts techniques like everybody else. So strong.




Harwood stepping out from hiding behind a rock, and then Ulrika mindcontrolling Agnes and Aaron to give Harwood helpers in his boss fight, and then Kasim calling HQ to bump Ulrika up to near the top of the hit list was pretty funny.








The Marchen Garten levels look nice, as usual.




It never stops being infuriating seeing Bracers, holy hitmen, senators, and now police officers taking their families to dinner at the Chinese mob's restaurant. Raid it and throw everybody in prison or deport them!




Also frustrating to see that the NPCs are matriculating their romance subplots, but the main playable characters can't.






Well on the one hand, I hope Hawker gets a happy ending here. On the other hand, Harry isn't thinking ahead. Has he never heard of what happens to the first child when a stepmother comes into the picture?




Goodness gracious can Van go anywhere without being accosted and vilified?




Goodness gracious Falcom, how do you sell people three, 100+ hour long games for $60 each with a love triangle, only for the protagonist to blow off BOTH women after 270+ hours of buildup? Joshua and Estelle confessed their love by the end of their first 50 hour long game. Rean and Towa had a kiss by the end of Cold Steel 2. Are you going to drag this out for another 100+ hours in whichever game comes after this?










Why does Nina drive to Van's apartment in the middle of the night to say hi and then leave? They are acquaintances, not dear friends, and not even dear friends would assume that their friend is awake at midnight to bother them with a hello.

Van Chapter 4

► Show Spoiler

Finally, our first new town in 160 hours since Messeldam was introduced in Kuro 2 Van chapter 1. Unfortunately, it is yet another grey blocky Kuro town.






Why even give me the option to let him shoot the guy if he's not going to shoot?






Now that Zin has joined, I can now make a party of real men. Only way it could be better is if Victor was playable in this one.




It is very frustrating to first prioritize burning down the masked woman boss (because she can use ZOC to get three turns in a row) and then defeat the golem, but then in the following cutscene the masked woman is still standing as if I hadn't beaten her.

The Van chapters are a pain. I dread doing them. There are twice as many Van chapters as the Rean and Kevin chapters, and the Van chapters go on for twice as long. But the moment to moment experience is dull. Running around talking to all of the NPCs in the dozen Edith districts over and over again for 2+ hours each time. Van's crew is overall boring. And Van has nothing really interesting going on. Meanwhile, Rean and Kevin are cool dudes running around with fun parties, in their chapters they only have 1 or 2 districts at max to do the rounds in, they are on interesting missions like Rean having to work with the enemy or Kevin knowing secret information that will cause consternation with Van's group, etc.

It is also disappointing how Kuro 3 pretty much just takes place in all of the same locations as the last two games. By Cold Steel 3, Falcom didn't have you still running around Trista, Bareahard, Roer, etc anymore. They created half a dozen new towns for you to go to. Leeves, Parm, Saint-Arkh, Ordis, Raquel, etc.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Kevin chapter 2

► Show Spoiler

How did the Church even get tipped off about Hamilton in the first place?







I lost a lot of respect for the characters after this. This is character assassination for Kevin and Rufus too. And these are clever, handsome men. They could attract women if they wanted. They don't have to do this crap.









So what is up is Jack and Halle? Are you telling me that they have been in a situationship for seven years? Are Olivier and Scherazard the only people able to matriculate a relationship in Trails?









Why is this the first time the Chrono Drive spell has ever been used outside of combat in the story? People should be whipping out their orbments and accelerating all of the time.





Hold up. Is the water in the oasis, is that all of the water in the entire world after the year 1210? From every other river and stream and lake in Zemuria, like the Valleria Lake in Liberl, Lake Ebel by Legram, Lake Elm in Crossbell, etc? So Hamilton thinks that there is no way to reverse the encroaching desertification coming from the East. If that is all of the water, then it seems like the desertification would have rapidly accelerated a few years after 1209.





Also, how was this kept perfectly secret? At the discussion in the hotel, Zita said she asked Hamilton if she could replicate the oasis for other cities and countries in the East, only for Hamilton to give a vague answer, and Zita did not press further. I am sure there would be many, many scientists, eastern refugees, and wealthy people who would have pressed Hamilton to elaborate on exactly what was going on so that they could fund R&D to replicate those conditions. If Hamilton did not answer the inquiries of fellow scientists (particularly the Epstein Foundation and the Septian Church, who are all about spreading quality of life), then I'd imagine that would cause a kerfuffle in the scientific community, since they are all about publishing processes and replicating them.

If this is all the water in the world after the year 1209, then does that mean the moment it becomes January 1st 1210, all of the water in the world will vanish because it got sent back to the oasis in years 1189 through 1209? So every person in the world will die of dehydration within a few days? So what is Hamilton's plan here? To invent portals and lead an exodus to another world, or to change the timeline? So did Hamilton tell Cronkite that he had to get Emilia up into space and save the world by New Year's Eve and that's why Gramhardt is expediting the rocket launch? But it seems like Rene didn't knew and the CID has a warrant out for Hamilton's arrest.

And why did she place the oasis at Tharbad? Is there something strategic about Tharbad in whatever plans she might have to save the world? She didn't risk getting discovered just for sentimentality for some random place in this desert, did she?

For the first time in years, it looks like Trails' other main plotline might be finally moving again. Fingers crossed this doesn't turn out to be ultimately irrelevant like the Phantasmal Blaze plan and the Great Twilight did.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Van chapter 5

What the **** falcom?

► Show Spoiler

"Normally?". This is a setting where the people believe in Aidios and go to Church on Sunday. People should be going to the clergy for help, not secular priests called psychologists. The entire field of psychology is a secular attempt to reconstruct traditional Christianity and its view of sin and the way sin affects people. Once again written by godless Japanese who don't understand what they are writing about.




Goodness gracious, the two gays you helped confess their love to each other at the end of the first game are back.




Why Falcom why








Great. Now we are pilfering illegal hormone drugs from under the police's noses to help Quatre transistion.




I feel like every Kuro game thus far has had at least once scene where Quatre is gay towards Van and we get some ****** stuff. First in Kuro 1 with Quatre and Van at the hot springs and then looking through the telescope on the rooftop, and then Kuro 2 when Van walks into Quatre's room and finds out he is a streamer posing as a girl.










Way to condone insanity and mutilation, hero. Also, you are a terrible friend.




It is disappointing that after 3 games and 300+ hours, Alvis and Daswani never became playable party members. Daswani isn't even an uncontrollable guest NPC who lobs grenades or shotguns from afar.








This is the fifth time I have fought this long annoying golem boss. Once every chapter. Wow.




The theme for the Anchorville Logistics Center warehouse dungeon was neat.






The chapter villain feels a little derivative. His design looks identical to the villain of the last game, the Gardenmaster. Same plot about it being a long dead tyrant having come back to life due to the Oct-Genesis shenagains too.

Well at least I am finally done with the Van chapters.

[methoxetamine]

It is disappointing that after 3 games and 300+ hours, Alvis and Daswani never became playable party members. Daswani isn't even an uncontrollable guest NPC who lobs grenades or shotguns from afar.

"There's not enough ******* in my JRPG party" sure isn't the complaint I expected to be lodged today Daswani is actually cool though, I get it

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Van chapter 6

Welp, turned out there were actually 6 Van chapters. I looked up a walkthrough and this is definitively, for real, the actual last Van chapter in this game (besides the final dungeon). I am free.

Lloyd Bannings strikes again!

► Show Spoiler

I hope this will be clarified later on, because right now it is a little confusing.

• It seems that from the name of the Eternal Recurrence Plan, and Professor Hamilton talking about an imminent Reset, that the Trails world is stuck in an apocalyptic cycle, probably something like the Cycles in Amphoreus in Honkai Star Rail. Gramhardt and Hamilton appear to have become aware of the impending apocalypse due to someone from the prior world somehow surviving to this to pass on the information, which is why Campanella was alarmed since he thought that the people in each cycle would have been unaware that they were even in one.
  
  
  
• We know that Hamilton teleported all water in this world that existed past the year 1210 into the Tharbad oasis spanning years 1189 to 1209. So life in this world cannot exist past 1210 since everybody would have died of dehydration within the first week of January 1210.
  
• Marduk - now apparently the most technologically advanced company in the world - used all of their resources to try to identify Risette, but could find no record of her having existed in this world. She apparently just came out of nowhere (was she found in some ancient ruins?).
• We know that Risette seems to have been married in her prior life. She also remembers these golems operating on unknown nanomachine technology that does not exist in this world, and there is some sort of connection between her and Shannon the waitress.

Since life on this world cannot exist past the year 1209, and Risette never existed in Zemuria prior to her discovery by Marduk, then the only possible explanation is that she is a survivor from a prior world or cycle. The golem nanomachine tech would also have come from this prior world, perhaps it is what that world invented instead of Orbal technology.

As for Risette's connection to Shannon, Risette cannot be future Shannon. The man in Risette's flashback looked older than Shannon's boyfriend Louis, but this world is about to be destroyed tonight. So Risette definitely came from a prior world. Shannon's resemblance could be chalked up to something like FF14's souls where some people have multiple different similar incarnations of themselves across the worlds. I don't know why Risette could have had deja vu eating the food at the cafe or looking at the Anchorville City Hall. Perhaps it's just another coincidence/similarity in her life in the prior world.

My guess is that the Vestiges/Alter Dawn are people trying to survive to the next world, probably by using the Oct-Genesis replicas. That technology is what might have allowed Risette to survive to this world.


But then it gets confusing at the end of this chapter, when Melchior uses the Oct-Genesis replica to flip between the present day 10 AM July 12th 1,209 Anchorville, to the similar destroyed building in the dead world. Quatre and Elaine think that it must be in the future. But that does not line up with the prior information. There is no water in this world past the last day of year 1,209, because Hamilton teleported it all into the past. There would be no one left to invent the nanomachine golems. Risette wouldn't be able to remember her home being destroyed by them. Elaine and Quatre must be mistaken.




It is very annoying that apparently, we have had all of these benign and heroic Church characters in the series. Not just the playable Gralsritter, or helpful major Church NPCs like Thomas and Rosine and Abbas, but also all of these parish priests and bishops in every Trails city. And apparently they were in on the true nature of the world and that there was an imminent apocalypse. And nobody ever told us? Gaius never told Rean and Olivier and co once he became a Gralsritter? If he had told us the moment he became one in year 1205, we could have had four years to try to mobilize all of our know how and resources to something out - maybe have the witches find a time spell that lets us go back and learn how the cycles began or something - or at least to try to pass on information to help save the people in the next cycle/world. Same issue with all of these Ouroboros characters like Joshua/Renne/Duvalie/Vita/etc who joined our side, but then didn't tell us where their factories producing robot armies and huge red airship carriers so we can go blow them up, etc.

Also, if the higher ranking priests know that the worlds keep being wiped out and that this is cyclical, then I have to wonder what their theology on this would look like. Do the people of the previous worlds that were deleted go to be with Aidios? Or were they actually deleted? Why would their goddess allow the cycles to occur? Does the Church believe that there is an ultimate end to this?






Oh wait, someone did try to warn us about this four games ago. Only for Lloyd to shut him down. Thanks hero!





This Lost Art to summon an demon to smite my enemies is awesome.




Once again, as expected for an Asian RPG, the battle animations are superb.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Rean chapter 3

This is probably the third or fourth chapter I have most enjoyed in this game thus far (behind Rean chapters and 1 and 2, and then Kevin chapter 2). I like the characters involved of Rean, Zin, Simeon, etc. I like the Asian setting of Longlai and the heroic trek up the mountains. Cool fights. But as I was going through my screenshots folder and rereading the story, the writing is just... wow.

► Show Spoiler

Once again, I quite like how the title screen changes depending on where you are in the story.

Wait a minute. The Reinford mechs (thanks to Franz' Black Workshop technolgy) now have cloaking devices. And in the Calvard arc, the series is now being depicted as being futuristic sci fi. But they haven't invent foldout chairs for passengers like in Muv-Luv or Hathaway's Flash?








Hold up. No. How did they not know that Rean's master, Yun Ka-Fai, led one of the world's top Jaeger corps? In the very first ever Trails game, Trails in the Sky FC, the middle sized kingdom of Liberl's intelligence division had managed to profile the leadership of a new, small upstart Jaeger corps called Jester. That's how Colonel Richard found out about Loewe and recruited him into Liberl's ID as a 2nd Lieutenant. If the countries are paying close attention to the jaeger scene - even the small ones - then they would absolutely have profiled the leadership of one of the most long standing and most powerful Jaeger corps in the world. At any point over the past several years, the Erebonian ID officers Altina, Claire, Lechter, etc, would have found the information and told Rean about it. Or Colonel Richard - a disciple of Cassius, who was a disciple of Yun Ka-Fai - would have come across this information while scouting the jaeger corps, and would have passed it on to Cassius, who in turn could have told Rean in CS4 when he passed Yun Ka-Fai's letter on to Rean.




I like how populated Longlai is due to the rocket launch. It highlights how barren a lot of the Calvard districts and cities feel outside of Edith and maybe Tharbad.






Are we not able to contact our own Erebonian agents in Calvard? Why are we having to rely on getting and sending info via newspaper reporters, foreign princes, and the Chinese mafia? Why does Liberl get to contact their own agents Lilia and Reins in Calvard (and their embassy in Edith), but apparently we don't get anybody?






Oh crap we got spotted in the enemy nation. Wait, why are you wowing over us? We are the prolific war heroes of your enemy! Rean was the vanguard of Erebonia's conquest of Crossbell and North Ambria! Did none of you people lose fathers or brothers in the skirmishing or the world war? I guess Crow might get a pass because he didn't participate in any of Erebonia's foreign conquests, and is best known for having shot the Chancellor and having fought against the Imperials in the first civil war. So I can see him being seen as Erebonia's Rommel for foreigners. But Rean would get no such sympathy.




It think this is the fifth woman Crow has asked out in this game spanning a three day time period. Surely over the last 3 years, Crow would have hit and gotten married by now.




As with the prior game, the Marchen Garden environments look beautiful.












Amazing ability animations








One thing I like is how a lot of the sidequests are sequels/followups to sidequests in the prior Calvard games. But this time, they are from the POV of different protagonists, which helps keep it fresh.




Since this appears to be the final chapter of the game in which I will get to leisurely walk around a town/city, I decided to check out all of the side content I had been putting off.

I S-ranked a couple Grim Garten floors and decided I didn't want to S-rank the rest. The pain point is when you get main objective requirements where you have to defeat enemies in field battles/action combat mode, which takes considerably longer than just rolling up to enemies, pressing X, and popping Rean's max strength S-craft build to one shot everything. And then you have to do 3 runs of the same floor to S-rank it. The rewards aren't that good, so I'll pass.

For fishing, it is nice that they let you pick from three different Grim Garten fishing locations to fish up all of the fish in the game that you missed. The minigame this time is neat. But after fishing a dozen times, I didn't want to have to put up with the RNG of getting the same two basic fish and consistently missing the other three from the drop pool, even though I was using the deluxe bait that said the droprates for all five were equal. And then I'd have to get all five fish and do that three times for each tier before I can go on to do the final fishing sidequest, so I dropped that.






I cooked all of the food and uploaded the pastry reviews. We visited two dozen restaurants but none of the characters gave a review lower than 3 stars. If I was someone reading Van's pastry blog, I would be suspicious.




Looks like that's all of the side stuff. Time to get on with it.

The historical revisionism continues. They are referencing that scene in Ao where there is a break during the Trade Conference, and the SSS visit each head of state in their room. Only the Erebonian, Liberlian, and Remiferian representatives were benign. The Erebonian and Calvardians were antagonistic. When the SSS visited President Rocksmith, he was an *******. The Calvard games make that scene even worse in retrospect, because he mocked Ellie's father, who has now been revealed to be Senator Ryan, a member of Rocksmith's own party. These Kuro games have said that Senator Ryan was one of Rocksmith's greatest supporters, and we know that Ellie kept in constant touch with her father (just last game in Kuro 2, you can find Ryan on the phone with Ellie in Trion Tower square during one of hte night segments). But here we are 8 games later, and either 1. whoever wrote this scene didn't play that game and just read a synopsis that Rocksmith had met the SSS. Or 2. the writer is hoping that the player has forgotten (who does Falcom think their customers are?), and is trying to pass off Rocksmith as having been a good guy.




Here we go again, working with the Chinese mob as if they are good guys rather than villains we should stamp out like every other mafia in this series. It's incredible how much the Kuro arc bends over backwards for Heiyue. It's also hilarious that Rocksmith relies on Heiyue, rather than calling up the CEOs of powerful banks and corporations that he is friends with, members of his party, etc. Wasn't Senator Polanski - the head of Rocksmith's Republican party - friends with the head of the Bank of Edith, which IIRC is one of the largest if not the largest bank in Calvard? Wasn't Polanski also friends with Huck, who is also the enormously wealthy head of a investment company or something? Surely those guys could employ agents or private militaries and send them to Rocksmith's aid, like how Dieter hired the Red Constellation or how Heiyue has their own Kowloon Bank with assassins and small armies.




Woah. I had always assumed that the Bracer Guild had a chairman, but over the prior 13 games, it was never actually said that there was a top executive of the Bracer Guild. Probably a non-combatant old man along with the Guild's other backers such as the Epstein Foundation. Whenever Cassius or Arios received orders or a request, it was from a vague "the Bracer Guild in Leman requests you to do it". And then in the last game when Zin lead the coup to overthrow President Rocksmith, Alvis said that they got "Leman HQ's approval", which seemed to imply that maybe the guild just had a committee or a council and no executive.

But now this character has just been introduced, and he is out and about and apparently powerful enough to be relevant? Where was this guy during all of these crises happening over the last 13 games!?!? It was only S-ranked Bracers Cassius and Arios being asked to go around Western Zemuria doing stuff, and then when they quit the guild to become supreme commanders of state militaries, there were no replacements assigned to Western Zemuria, and this guy didn't show up himself. Was he too busy in the underdeveloped East we barely heard any going ons in, or was he just lounging around in his executive chair and finally decided to take action himself this day?




This also retroactively weakens the plot of Trails in the Sky FC. In that game, Ouroboros' entire plan was that they were so afraid of the S-ranked Bracer Cassius, that they created a crisis in another country as a diversion hoping that the Bracer Guild would send Cassius over there. That would leave Liberl devoid of any strong Bracers and leadership, allowing Ouroboros to swoop in and unlock the Aureole before Cassius came back. But if there was this super strong guildmaster all along, then how would Ouroboros be certain that Cassius would have been the one sent to resolve the branch bombings in Erebonia, and that the guildmaster himself wouldn't have come?

I don't know what the actual plan is here. So the Erebonians, the Bracers, President Rocksmith, and Heiyue want to go to the Zeku space base. Okay. And then do what? Just watch the rocket launch? They can just watch the launch being broadcast on TV. Do they intend to break into the offices and open desk drawers looking for classified files? And then get killed on sight or arrested and cause an international kerfuffle in which Calvard has leverage and will get a massive publicity win? "The Erebonian Empire's great war hero was caught breaking into Calvard's space base!". I am sure Prince Olivier and Chancellor Regnitz will appreciate that.


An army of Chinese mafians just ran past a police roadblock towards the maximum security Area 51 launch site that is supposed to be protected by the armies of Calvard. This is the problem with Shards in Kuro. They can seemingly do anything whenever the author wants. If anybody can just buy XIPHAs and "just use shards" to cast a cloaking field, then what's the point of having security roadblocks like this?








Well we got detected. At this point, why not just call the Tyrfings and fly straight there?




The trek up the mountain does feel climatic. It is made more grand by there being armies of Heiyue fighting against ninjas, and being accompanied by an S-rank Bracer. The music is also good.




Once again, the battle animations are amazing.








This project has been so incredibly secret, and President Gramhardt has been assigning all of the CID, Marduk, and Calvardian military manpower he can to protect the launch. At this distance, I would be afraid of being killed by snipers.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Kevin chapter 3

I can feel my blood pressure rising going through this

► Show Spoiler

Kevin's new Merkabah has a much cooler design. The original Merkabahs looked rather ugly with the balcony on the back.






It sounds like the Merkabah 2 is sealed like a spaceship. It also uses an artifact engine for propulsion rather than a traditional orbal airship engine. Perhaps it will be used to carry the heroes into outer space to tackle Laejarn's Box in the next game?






One thing I have quite liked about the Kevin route is the seriousness hanging over the story, as he has to kill someone who is an adoptive mother to an acquaintance of his. So he will be harming/terminating his friendship, and orphaning someone.






This monster looks neat.




We run into a roadblock of women trying to stop us. First off, that this even happens at all is very annoying. Kevin is a SECRET holy hitman. In Trails in the Sky SC, he joined the party on a mission to kill Weissman, killed Weissman, and left, with the other party members being none the wiser. He doesn't even tell them critical series plot info that the bad guys took off with the Aureole. None of the protagonists learned that Ouroboros had the Aureole until SEVEN GAMES LATER in Trails of Cold Steel 3 when Rean talked to Schimdt as the latter was examining the Aion wreckage and couldn't find its power source, and deduced it had to be powered remotely by a Sept-Terion. A lot of people know that Kevin is some sort of Church knight, but only a very small handful of people are supposed to be in the know about Kevin's real job.




Second, not only is it ridiculous that all of these normal people like mafians, newbie journalists, the princess of some mid sized kingdom, etc somehow know that Kevin is trying to kill Hamilton, but they somehow predict the exact spot to intercept him. They somehow know that he is going to fly around in a Merkabah, that his cloaked ship will land 300 feet South of Creil, that he will walk North along the road towards the village, etc. Rather than him landing anywhere else and walking towards the hill where Hamilton actually is.

Thirdly, the characters (and by extension, the game's narrative) are trying to make Kevin out to be "on the wrong path" for trying to do his job and kill the heretic. What!?!? This is supposed to be a world where almost everybody believes in Aidios/Alusha/The Heavenly Mother, and heed the world of the Septian Church. They implicitly obey papal authority. The pope's holy hitman (literally one of 12 knights blessed with a superpower from Aidios) has been given a mission to kill a heretic. There should be zero discussion about this. These characters are being written by secular Japanese who do not believe in God, do not believe in divine authority, etc. So we get this wishy washy "oh, Hamilton might have done some bad things, but we have to be nice people! We can't hurt people!". They are trying to gaslight Kevin with "don't do something you will regret!".

Also, these women are emotionally projecting THEIR feelings and THEIR hopes onto Kevin, and imagining that HE thinks the same way as them. Classic mistake of conflating empathy with projection.




Even from a secular, materialistic point of view, these normies have no business interfering with the pope's orders. The Septian Church is way higher up in the pecking order than these mafians, mid sized kingdom, etc. Elsaim is not a superpower like Erebonia or Calvard. It can't tell off the Church and get away with it. Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and King John got excommunicated for intruding upon Papal authority and their subjects released from their oaths of allegiance, causing civil war. Henry IV had to stand barefoot in the snow for three days outside the pope's castle to beg for forgiveness. It's only in modern real life that the Church is irrelevant.




There is too much sanctimony over Creil. Hamel, Rolent, Manoria, and the villages that Calvard bombed during the skirmishes got nowhere near this level of lionization. It is also very funny for these Calvardians to be talking about how horrible it is for their one village to be bombed, when their country bombed multiple during the war. Collective amnesia.








When talking to Lucrezia and Rixia, I thought it would be like Kuro 1's chapter 5 where you get to pick which guest party members will accompany you. But there is no choice. Kevin chooses to bring more liabilities along, when they have just expressed how they would prefer for Hamilton to live.




Rufus! In Trails of Cold Steel 2, you raised your fist and KOed the entire Class VII with one art at Ymir. And then in CS4, it took the combined might of SIXTEEN PEOPLE to take you down. And one of them was a Dominion! And you one shotted the SSS in Reverie. And one of them was a Dominion too! You are waaaaay beyond brown Julia.








Your brother and Naje have been beaten by Van's party FOUR times in this trilogy of Calvard games thus far, and two of those times Naje was being powered up by a Genesis. Has this Trails world become some sort of masturbatory community where people talk about how powerful and skilled and terrifying everyone else is, when most people are losers who get beaten over and over again? At this point, there is only a small list of characters left in this series who aren't losers. Kevin and Rufus are on that list. No one else here is on that list.




The hillside overall seems to be the same size as it was before the nuke went off a few hundred feet away. You would think it would have noticeably shrunk in size due to erosion from the blast.




This flying owl creature is neat.




You can't make this up. One moment, they are telling the goddess' holy hitman to disobey the goddess. The next moment, they are praying to the goddess.






Now the other Church knights are turning against their comrade and trying to prevent him from carrying out his divine mission? Do they not realize that their superpowers came from Aidios? She could take them away for this disobedience. At this point, Celis and Leon should be discharged from the Gralsritter. Also, if "providing humanitarian aid" is supposed to be an excuse, then we could let a lot of Trails "villains" off for that. Once again with the wishy washy Trails morality.








This fight is supposed to be climatic, but the silly music kills the tension. This sounds like a lighthearted sidequest boss theme.

Lucrezia was useless in this fight. She dealt negligible damage and I kept having to waste turns to revive her.




Time to do what we set out to do.




JUST SHOOT HER




... why didn't you do the thing you set out to do?




Blueballs. Why even have a holy hitman route about trying to kill a heretic if you don't get to kill the heretic?

[sheet]

Why are all these anime games so generic looking? Those characters have zero defining characteristics to their appearance that can't be found in any other anime game. Those powering up animations, those faces, those generic outfits. What am I missing? How anime appealing when 99% of it has zero character to it? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

[Oyster Sauce]

Why are all these anime games so generic looking?

Throughput

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Why are all these anime games so generic looking? Those characters have zero defining characteristics to their appearance that can't be found in any other anime game. Those powering up animations, those faces, those generic outfits. What am I missing? How anime appealing when 99% of it has zero character to it? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

The outfits and nuances of the character facial design varies with each arc, which has had different lead artists. The Trails in the Sky arc has more classic 90s anime aesthetic with bigger hands and more expressive faces. Trails of Cold Steel has the more unique outfit design with the setting being the late 19th century/early 20th century Prussia inspired Erebonian Empire, so you have a lot of noble swordsmen in trenchcoats and cravats. The 2D illustrations of the Crossbell and Calvard games were drawn by Baccano artist Katsumi Enami and have his unique style.

The Trails setting - namely Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel - is most definitely not generic. There is no other JRPG setting out there set in the late 19th century/early 20th century Europe featuring train rides, early cars, airships, people using magitek devices, etc. FF7 is 1950s dieselpunk and FF8 is more futuristic than that. FF9 and FF12 are Renaissance era. There is the anime series Fullmetal Alchemist, which like Cold Steel is set in early 20th century not-Germany, but has nowhere near as many castles or nobles or magitek. The setting and aesthetics of Crossbell and Calvard leans more generic modern day looking, as I have complained numerous times about.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished Trails Beyond the Horizon. Final ingame time was 101 hours.

I can see why sales have not improved.

I overall enjoyed the game, but there are severe issues with the story.




Final Chapter

Upon finishing the game, I initially didn't want to do another chapter breakdown because there is just so, so much stuff wrong that thorough coverage of it all would be lengthy. And all of these screenshots are probably taking up a lot of bandwidth. But at this point I mind as well just finish.

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Everybody knows everybody. Makes the setting feel small when there isn't a world beyond your friend circle.




The behavior of Van's party is strange. Agnes is President Gramhardt's daughter. If she is going to be announced to the public, then it only makes sense that she has to stop palling around without security where she can be sniped from a rooftop. This isn't the first time official business has required a Trails party member to leave and the protagonists understood that and didn't throw a fuss. Ie, Milium and Altina in Trails of Cold Steel 3. But here the protagonists immediately leap to the conclusion "the President is going to do something bad to his own daughter!" for no good reason.






The Van's group have no just cause to raid their President’s White House. Like with Osborne in Trails of Cold Steel 3 being vilified for passing... a draft law, which is accepted in our world, Gramhardt is likewise being vilified for… detaining people for a little bit. Lincoln imprisoned journalists, and yet nobody gives a hoot about that. And Trails protagonists have worked with the government to detain people many times. Odd to use that as your justification for RAIDING THE WHITE HOUSE!

Nate throws his career away. These people are about to BREAK INTO THE WHITE HOUSE. You are about to become an accomplice to crime. There is no "breaking into the white house within the confines of the law" here.




Bergard, don't "ah yes" me. We are 13 games, $600+, and 1,500 hours into this series. If this guy is as relevant as you make him out to be, then why was he never mentioned until five hours ago? He was not a powerful background figure seeded long ago like Yun Ka-Fai, Ein, Arianrhod, Rutger and Baldur, etc.




Feri. Man made "weapons of mass destruction" did not exist in this series until Reverie with the Retributive Tower, which wasn't even made by any human state. The nuking of Creil was a one off and it is not widely known how they physics behind it works. "WMD" should not be a term in this setting that you are throwing around all of a sudden.




Does Gramhardt have information that Laejarn's Box is a death star? How did he get this info? How did Epstein know that Laejarn's Box is a death star? EDIT: later on, the Presidential bunker is only three basement floors deep. If the bunker was built using the Retributive Tower's annihilation of Juno Naval Fortress as a comparison, then the Presidential bunker is nowhere near deep enough.








Ah, great. Now the foreign exchange students throw their scholarships away to help us become felons!




Go for it man!




I am surprised it has taken 300 hours for Hawker's subplot to finally get this far, when almost every other townsfolk NPC is confessing their love already.




If it's this easy to infiltrate the palace of a head of state, then there is no reason why Osborne couldn't have been assassinated in Valflame Palace, or for the nations to kowtow to Crossbell in fear when they could have just sent guys to Orchis Tower to assassinate the upstart leader. The rest of the world seems to have martialists who can "sense" people coming, unlike Calvard which has no native born martial artists.




Renne is being a mary sue yet again. Didn't need to be rescued as she had already somehow hacked into the White House's security network (in a room with no laptops, she just conjures a holographic screen out of thin air) and was going to unlock the door anyway.

Van, the former Dominion, and the two Enforcers couldn't sense these guys before walking into their ambush?




Shizuna insists that she is a part timer working for Van. Huh? Van never made that much money and would have to split his income amongst a group of 9 people. Peanuts. Shizuna is a princess with a territory to run. Judith is a Hollywood star. Why are they spending their time working for Van?

We should be dead dead dead. We are RAIDING THE WHITE HOUSE, going down the elevator to the TOP SECRET BUNKER on the day of the MOST IMPORTANT OPERATION EVER. The guards should risk no chances and open fire before the doors close and we go down the elevator.




The final dungeon theme is neat. It's got that "run for the love of your life" feel. However, it is a little dramatic, when the story at this point has not strongly conveyed the idea that Agnes is in mortal peril. You would only know that if you had read the script. The only hint we have was that in Van chapter 5, Agnes said that this would be her lasting outing with them, but then this was immediately followed up by Kincaid saying that she would be publicly revealed to be the President's daughter, so it sounded like she just wasn't going to be going out with these people anymore rather than dying.




Like with the Underhold in WoW, it would have been impossible to excavate a space of this size without people noticing mounds of dirt appearing on the surface. Too many laborers would be involved to keep it secret. The place does look a little neat, though.








"We have committed the unforgiveable act of... grounding the President's daughter, and detaining two persons of interest for a few hours! We have gone beyond the point of no return!" goodness gracious people. Remember when Calvardian agents BOMBED passenger busses in Crossbell and a passenger airship to kill foreign adversaries, and how many, many innocents died in the process like Arios' wife in the bus bombing or Towa's parents in the airship crash? Remember how the CID sent 100 heavily armed marines into the sewers underneath Heimdallr, stockpiling weapons in an anticipation of a decapitation strike? This is nothing.




Now we get a bizzare interruption where the game tells us to put the climatic finale on hold and to go finish this side content in another dimension. Okay.

The final floor of the Grim Garten looks neat.








I like this armored monster.




This is a pretty lame way to introduce the most powerful Aion yet. The prior Aions in Trails were too powerful to be defeated on foot. Kevin had to use his Merkabah and his stigma to take one down, at the cost of his airship being destroyed. Joshua, Estelle, and Renne's attacks glanced off of one Aion, so Pater Mater had to grapple the Aion and self destruct. The SSS were unable to destroy the White Aion atop Orchis tower. Instead, its remote power supply had to be cut off and Dieter's pilot access revoked as Dr. Novartis took back his property. In Trails of Cold Steel 3, all of the Aion fights required Rean to call in Valimar, and took three mechs to take down. But here, you destroy an Aion on foot on your first try. Way to undermine its credibility.




After 13 games, the player characters finally meet the series' big bad, the Grandmaster, and it is disappointing. She is not threatening, nothing is revealed. She says hi for two minutes and ports out.






If Renne had already met the Grandmaster before, why had she never spilled the beans before now? Why did she never tell us what the big bad was like?


Bergard. Why are you being cordial with her? Did you forget all of the mass murder that happened under the Grandmaster's watch? Heretic priests manipulating disgruntled Erebonian military officers into a false flag operation to destroy and rape a village to instigate a war that resulted in a country being overrun, towns burned, and countless men blown up by bombs. Slavery. All of the hundreds of people that assassin Joshua killed. Novartis killed at least 60 captive children trying to neurally link them to Pater Mater before Renne lived. Enforcers sprinting through the streets of Grancel massacring policemen left and right for the lolz. Ouroboros hijacking railway guns and bombarding the port city of Ordis for fun. Most of the enforcers are bonafide mass murderers, with Renne being called the Angel of Slaughter, Walter having killed lots of people, Shirley shot up a theater for the lolz, etc.




I check the SP report, and it seems that despite having done almost every sidequest (I only ignored the fishing sidequest in Longlai), completing all Grim Garten floors, seeing all of the Mementos, and doing all of the optional arena battles... I did not get enough SP to reach the final rank. I am 18 points short. Where were those other 18 points supposed to come from? The poker and fishing stuff? Anyway, time to beat the game.




Back to storming the President's bunker. Now that we have found out that Agnes ported out of the bunker, there is no urgency anymore. Van has no reason to stay down here. He mind as well get out. The President invites Van to the control room, and seems to call off of the guards. But the dramatic "save Agnes!" final dungeon music is still playing, which is bizzare.






Remember when Trails fanboys said Calvard was good because you could kill the villains the first game? Hahahahaha




Trails has had a lot of preposterous writing over the years, but this one is a gold medal contender. Being generous, brain death can occur at most 5 to 10 minutes after bleeding out. We killed these guys in a humongous sewer complex underneath Oracion, and we loitered over their dead bodies for a couple minutes before leaving. I find it implausible that Marduk could have somehow moved a big life support pod down through the tunnels and get these guys in it within 3 to 8 minutes of us leaving. Kasim's crew wasn't carrying a big life support pod with them in that battle royale. And wait a minute... does this mean that Marduk brought their ONE AND ONLY life support pod from the future... to a city that was on the verge of being blown up by a nuclear bomb? They jeopardized an extremely valuable asset like that? Was it there just in case Kasim got severely injured and needed to be saved?






It's also funny that Alexandre is just wearing a recolor of his outfit from Kuro 1. It's the exact same model/design. Viola gets an actually different outfit.




So Gramheart's wife or mother in law told him, but how did their grandfather Professor Epstein find out about all of this?




Odd for this major stuff to be pulled out of thin air now. Only the Eternal Recurrence Plan was seeded in the third ever Trails game way back 10 games ago. Everything else is just coming out of the blue right now.




You are a hypocrite Renne. What right did Estelle and Joshua have to thwart Colonel Richard who was trying to save his country from corrupt military leadership, an apathetic inept Queen, and the looming threat of being caught between two superpowers in an escalating world war? What right did Lloyd have to throw away the magick superpower that could have remade the timeline so that there was no cold war and that Crossbell would have always been an independent country? What right did Lloyd have to throw away the information from the future about this very apocalypse we are now facing?




I am not going to post more screenshots of ******** Japanese "hero rebuttals". It's the exact same dumb **** every time every other Trails protagonist opposed their own country's leader (who is always trying to save his country/the world) for no good reason.

Aaron getting angry about Gramheart building nukes. As if the Erebonians hadn’t built railway guns or the Liberians (who Gramheart aided in the Hundred Days War) didn’t carpet bomb their enemies. It is the nature of superpowers to compete and fear each other, and nuclear deterrence seems pretty successful in preventing direct war. It's weird how even in the first game, before the first ever nuclear detonation, the characters just heard the word "nuclear weapon" and began moralizing about how intrinsically evil they are. Code Geass, FF12, Valkyria Chronicles 4, etc, also moralize about how intrinsically "evil" nukes are. I wonder if has to do with how the Japanese nation's cultural memory of war is just the bombs seemingly raining down on their towns out of nowhere, rather than everything else that led up to that like Manchuria, the islands, etc.


We then get the penultimate fight of the game. The track playing is pretty neat. However, story wise this is a completely pointless battle. There are no stakes. What is each side fighting for? Again, Van broke into the White House and then the Presidential bunker because he wanted to get Agnes back. Only to find out that Agnes had teleported out of the bunker. He has no reason to stick around down there. Van is mad at Gramheart. Gramheart is just a regular guy, not a warrior. So... does Van intend to defeat Gramheart's bodyguards in battle, and then beat up the President aka the commander and chief? When the MOST IMPORTANT OPERATION EVER is happening (planned and led by him), with the stakes being EVERYONE MIGHT DIE?






Visually, the space sequence and Operation Laevatain is well done. The spectacle had me on the edge of my seat, and I didn't have any story complaints for about an hour and a half.




I thought it would have been neat if it had been Yun Ka-Fai's training Rean to learn the Unclouded Eye that would have allowed Rean to see beyond the canopy/fake sky. Maybe the other Disciples could have seen the canopy from their positions (ie General Cassius from Leiston Fortress or Grancel Castle. Arios from Crossbell in shock at what he is seeing and describing it to those around him. Etc). Rather than it just being him and Crow due to having clashed swords with future Rean in Reverie.




I thought it was very neat that the nuclear missiles had shields. It is odd that in most fantasy or futuristic sci fi settings with shields, they don't apply them to torpedos or the missiles, which can be easily destroyed by automated point defense turrets.






The space combat section makes me wonder if the three amigos of Rean, Crow, and Rufus will get shipped up here in the next game. Maybe Reinford will develop space jetpacks for the Tyrfings and the Helmords. Then we can have a full party of four mechs on the field with healer roles, etc.




Invasion time. Calvard, Erebonia, and Liberl are the only countries with notable air forces, so they would have been able to thin the invasion before they reached the ground. Erebonia and Calvard are also the only nations with substantial mechanized armour on the ground. RIP the rest of the world. My guess is that Remiferia, Leman, the Free Cities, etc, are in ashes right now. And all of those hangerons in the dying Far East who don't have orbal weapons yet? RIP.






Rikiya Koyama's voice acting as Gramheart when he thinks the nukes worked and the world has been saved is great. The animation is also good too.




Well that's what happens when you send a mundane gunship pilot up against the strongest threat ever, rather than getting the right people for the right job and shipping the three amigos up there.






RIP




Agnes begins the ritual. Characters begin begging her to stop as if they had read the script and know that this is a selfsacrifice. It is also strange that they are acting as if there isn’t a giant death star about to wipe out everyone in the next two minutes. If Agnes doesn’t do this, she dies with them anyway. There is not one character here looking at the bigger picture or more self interested and thankful for Agnes' sacrifice.

Man, it sure would have been nice if a certain someone hadn't interrupted future Rean when he was trying to warn us about this. Thanks Lloyd!






Before we all died, Yun Ka-Fai and turns to Rean and tells him to "settle accounts with the Black God". Does that mean the Ishmelga up there in space? So what's the deal with that? I thought we had used the Sword of the End to permanently kill Ishmelga? Though Valimar and Ordine's spirits came back in Reverie when Elysium manifested the Great Power again, so perhaps the spirits of the Divine Knights are immortal? Is Ishmelga truly unkillable too? Or is this a THIRD Ishmelga produced by Laejarn's Box? In that case, there are no "accounts" to settle with, since it's not like he is someone we failed to finish off. And what do you mean by "find the tachi within you"? Are we doing the Rean selfconfidence story a THIRD time too? Well anyway, it looks like Rean and Crow are going to have to go up into space and kill him (again...). Hopefully Rufus gets to go up there too. Who knows, maybe even Cedric will show up in a red Aion inhabited by the spirit of Testa-Rossa.






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Final thoughts

If Trion Tower could hack Laejarn’s Box, then why hadn’t they been hacking into it earlier to disarm it or hijack control?

What was Hamilton’s plan after Agnes’ self sacrifice? If the sacrifice only rewinds time by a year before the Box goes off and kills everybody again... what is Hamilton going to do in that one year?

Why did Hamilton teleport the water from the future? How could Risette have come from the year 1259 if Laejarn’s Box is going to wipe the world in August 1209 when the (nonexistant) Septian planets align?

If Grahmhardt knew how important this mission was, why did he get a mere fighter pilot to go up against the greatest threat ever known? Rather than recruiting the Awakeners, who are the most experienced mech pilots and are trained martialists?

How did Epstein even find out that the world was stuck in a reset cycle?

If Agnes was erased, then does that mean in the next cycle, did Gramhardt marry Lilia but they never managed to have children? Does a childless Grahmhardt still join the military and go aid Liberl? Do the bombing airships come too late before Erebonia’s second wave that was mobilizing arrive and conquers Grancel and Leiston?

Why does Nina show up for Hamilton's plan, when Nina ordered Kevin to kill Hamilton?

**** Lloyd Bannings

I still overall like these games (aesthetic, setting, likeable characters, the continuity, NPC storylines, combat and character building, music, etc) and I swear it's not stockholm syndrome. I am not one of those Fandom Menace guys who have been bitching about how bad Star Wars has been for a decade but still continue to watch objectively terrible stuff. There is a lot to like about these games, but people overall don't seem interested in talking about the positive aspects/strengths. It's just really disappointing that I am $600+ deep into this franchise, and Kondo repays me by being increasingly inattentive to the writing. The writers who worked on these games up through Cold Steel 2 are obviously long gone. This franchise is way past its expiration date. The plot died with Osborne and Reverie should have been the ending. I will still buy Kuro 4 or whatever it's called on day 1.

I was writing a TLDR summary of the game (including the things it did RIGHT, I think I keep trying to mention those parts but people seem to only fixate on the bad things I have to say. If I did not enjoy this game, I wouldn't have put BG3 on hold for it). It wound up becoming a thorough review, so I'll just continue working on that as an RPGHQ review.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

[methoxetamine]

First Shizuna steals Spirit Unification, now she steals his hahas? Is nothing sacred anymore?

[DDC]

I have finished Trails Beyond the Horizon. Final ingame time was 101 hours.

I can see why sales have not improved.

I overall enjoyed the game, but there are severe issues with the story.

My goodness. So glad I saw where this was going after playing one game and a chunk of a second and didn't further invest in the series. It's ridiculous. You will probably still be waiting for dangling plot threads to resolve in 2030.