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

Rean

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You're right, that's pretty awesome.
 

Valestein

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In

Rean

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lel

There's only one way to deal with the usual obnoxious, disingenuous suspects and that's by calling them out for what they are.
Remember, these are bad faith actors who, by their own admission, have never touched Cold Steel.

Crib sheet to beat the aforementioned RETARDS over the head with for those who have actually played the games:

- Rean has been the MC in five games. He is the character with the most development in the series, bar none. Don't engage in cyclical strawman arguments with the retards about Rean like 'school setting', 'don't like his hair', 'he fucked my mom' etc. Outside of the couple of jealous shitheads here, Rean is the most popular Falcom character and a JRPG icon.

- There's nothing, literally nothing of significance that's a downgrade from Sky to Cold Steel. Gameplay, mechanics, it's all the same with more added on top. More proof the retards have never touched these games.

- Sky and Crossbell showcase lacking development on their story beats and have hundreds of plot holes, the majority of which are remedied and further developed in Cold Steel. No ifs and buts about this. Cold Steel is a direct continuation of those games and true successor, if you don't like Cold Steel, you didn't like the previous entries either.

- The success of Cold Steel (which Falcom took a big gamble with and invested a lot of money and resources into) has been singlehandedly responsible for the series staying alive and continuing developing at such a fast pace. Kiseki was fully poised to become dead in the water after Crossbell. There's a ton of people who have gotten into the franchise just because of Cold Steel (and those are people who become actual fans and enjoy these games, not worthless freeloaders from some Slavic shithole who do nothing but post their butthurt on forums all day). Don't even get me started on missing out on the fundamental understanding of just how important Cold Steel is to Falcom. There could very well be no Falcom today if Cold Steel I had failed.

Purge the evildoers.
 
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frajaq

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Combat is serviceable but nothing amazing in Trails from Zero so far. Most common mobs are dispatched easily with the 'attack from behind' ambush, and end of chapter boss fights are fun but some of them are just stat blocks
 

Jermu

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The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails Localization Release PC Update
With the localized English version of The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails now releasing, we thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about the improvements we made to the PC version since the original Japanese release.

Original PC Version Features
If you haven't done so already, you can read about that release here. It included a lot of work on ultrawide aspect ratio support, as well as
a bespoke mouse and keyboard control scheme which tries to get close to some of Falcom's previous PC ports such as Ys Origin. We also included high-quality anti-aliasing, and unlimited draw distance, among other things.

As I noted back then, for us at PH3, this was the first time we are porting a game which originally released for a very low-tech -- by today's standards -- platform. Some of the challenges we faced were related to this, and that continues to several of the improvements we made since. However, this relatively low level of technology also makes Nayuta extremely suitable to e.g. the Steam Deck, and we made some further improvements in that regard.

New Features and Improvements

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I'm going to split this discussion into two parts -- the first one for general and smaller changes and tweaks, and the second one for everything that improves the Steam Deck (and portable PC gaming in general) experience in particular. Let's start with the first category:

  • Add an in-game setting to toggle HD textures.
  • Support for arbitrary UTF-8 installation paths (we got you, Björn!).
  • Fix some minor errors, e.g. a partially broken special skill.
  • Improved multi-controller support and settings UI.
  • Many additional map geometry fixes, one example of which is pictured above.



1f075859193f51c668edfa6b525bf4361b982872.jpg



The following improvements are particularly relevant for the Steam Deck, but also improve general quality, efficiency or compatibility:

  • Texture deduplication, reducing the storage footprint by up to 40%compared to the baseline game with high quality textures.
  • 16:10 aspect ratio support, which means you can enjoy the game on the Steam Deck without black bars!
  • We implemented Steam Dynamic Cloud Syncfor smoother switching between playing on multiple computers or devices.


Conclusion
As always, I particularly want to thank all of the great QA testers involved with this project. Without them, the release would certainly be a lot less polished and stable. And of course all the members of PH3 who worked on the port, NISA for the localizations, as well as Falcom for the original game.

- Peter "Durante" Thoman, CTO, PH3
 

frajaq

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ipUDRHz.png


Finished it, really really enjoyed it!

Overall story was alright, but carried with some great NPCs
Absolutely loved some of the soundtracks

onto Azure tomorrow
 

Tse Tse Fly

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Is the Nayuta game playable on keyboard+mouse?


Oh, I just remembered I already own it on Steam. So I will find out it myself soon.
 
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I am three chapters into Kuro no Kiseki.

Calvard feels unpleasant compared to the other countries. In the prior games, you can talk to every NPC and there is a sense of community. The family unit was still intact. Across 10 games and 1,000+ hours, Ellie's family was the only one that was divorced. Gordon family in Trista was the only example of marital disharmony, and it never got real bad. You didn't see anyone struggling to afford things or pay the bills or worry about losing their house. The worst you saw was the occasional casino, but you didn't hear about people losing their entire life savings to gambling. The Trails world was idylic.

TO0Gbor.jpg


Then you get to Kuro no Kiseki, and Calvard seems spiritually ruined. Lots of divorcees. Abusive alcoholic fathers and wives sick of their husband and fights breaking out within the home. Widespread drunkeness. Drunks puking on the street in Tyrell District. Men on the streets at night soliciting prostitution services. Calvard has a big movie industry and apparently R-17 stuff is very popular. A police officer flips through girlfriends like the phone book. We see people losing a considerable portion of their savings to gambling and lying to their wives about it. We see insane consumerism, with people taking out 15 year loans to buy the latest cool car, people just having to buy the latest laptop, etc. We also see people having spent their whole lives as unhappy wage slaves, but having never managed to save up enough money to start their own business or build a big family. An unmarried middle-aged man is fired from his job and tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train. Also, you can't talk to all of the NPCs. You run past hundreds of nameless NPCs, so it feels there isn't a tight knit community.

And that's before getting to the widespread corruption, with foreign crime syndicates like Heiyue controlling the second largest city in Calvard and the government does nothing about it. The newspapers and governments tell straight up lies. We see some police officers so demoralized with the system that they resign to become bracers.

Kuro isn't aesthetically dreary. At a first glance it doesn't look like Shadowrun, for instance. But it doesn't feel like a place I want to spend 3 games and 300+ hours in unlike Liberl, Erebonia, or even Crossbell.


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Aesthetically, Calvard looks boring. So I haven't seen any native Calvardian architecture. All I see is either boring, brutalist modern architecture or Chinatowns. Also, the steampunk and cassette futurism tech aesthetics of prior games are gone. Instead you just have modern looking technology. Slim laptops, slidephone orbments with LED screens, modern looking trucks, etc. Apple stores instead of the old timey shops. Even that cool looking half-dome orbment machine of the last 10 games has been replaced by a boring ATM looking orbment machine. People wear modern clothing like hoodies. Also, the journey feel of prior games is gone. Rather than hiking through a vast wilderness to the next town, or riding an old steam train, or riding an airship, the heroes instead drive a modern looking truck along the freeway and get stuck in traffic jams (yes, that happens in chapter 2). It doesn't feel like a romantic, wide open fantasy world I want to explore like in the prior games. It just looks like the boring one I already live in, along with the same destitution of society.


FAhBuNG.jpg


Those gripes aside, I am overall enjoying the game. Combat is fun as usual, sadly this is the easiest Trails game yet. There is not Abyss difficulty, only Nightmare. In prior Trails games, I would struggle on the first couple chapters on Nightmare, but in this game it has so far been a walk in the park. Haven't gameovered yet, though it could be that the game allows you to build Van as a beefy tank who can draw aggro and position him away from your casters from the get go, and Agnes' S-craft is a raid-wide heal to full that can also rez.

Thus far the soundtrack isn't really catching my attention. I like the theme that plays in the tavern below Van's apartment, and the action mode battle theme, but that's it.
 

Lyre Mors

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Sooner than I thought actually. I was poised and ready to use the fan translation, but maybe I'll just hold out.
 

Rean

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Yeah, less than a year from now ain't bad at all.

The trailer was a bit too frantic for my liking, once again they decide to focus on the wrong things and portray it like an Ys.

Still not sure what to think about the combat. We'll see how it actually plays, I hope they don't downgrade the TB experience in favor of realtime.

But the Calvard arc has had quite a bit of buildup, eager to explore it.

Anyone read the VNs at the end of Reverie?
 
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I hope they don't downgrade the TB experience in favor of realtime.

So far the turn based gameplay feels almost the same as Reverie. Key differences are:

  • You can move around and position your character during your turn AND do something, whereas in prior games you had to pick between moving or using an action.
  • To activate link abilities (now called shard skills), characters usually have to be standing right next to each other. There is only one link ability that can be activated with two characters standing on opposite sides of the map (the shield shard skill).
  • United Front and Team Burst is gone.
  • Orders are gone.
  • You can no longer steal turn order bonuses. They are attached to the character/mob. Even if you manage to delay a mob, the mob's turn order bonus is delayed with them. You can now only steal turn order bonuses from a mob if you break (now called stun) them, which is hard and you might only do it once per boss fight.
  • S-crafts no longer deal more damage at 200 CP.
  • To use an S-craft, the character must have 2 stacks of Boost activated. Boost only lasts 3 turns. The boost gauge is only built up by physically attacking enemies, so if your team is spamming arts then you won't be able to build up the boost gauge to S-craft spam. In past games you could have a mixed team of S-craft and arts spammers, but in Kuro you are heavily incentivized to pick one or the other.
  • I've noticed that some bosses will immediately pop their S-craft on their next turn if you pop yours. Fortunately these boss S-crafts don't seem to be raid wide so you can move the rest of your team far away from your tank and they won't get clipped by the S-craft if your tank is S-craft spamming.
  • Abyss difficulty is gone. Nightmare is once again the hardest difficulty but it very easy. Haven't gameovered once so far.

Anyone read the VNs at the end of Reverie?

Talked about it towards the end of my Reverie notes.
 

Rean

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  • To activate link abilities (now called shard skills), characters usually have to be standing right next to each other. There is only one link ability that can be activated with two characters standing on opposite sides of the map (the shield shard skill).
  • United Front and Team Burst is gone.
  • Orders are gone.
  • You can no longer steal turn order bonuses. They are attached to the character/mob. Even if you manage to delay a mob, the mob's turn order bonus is delayed with them. You can now only steal turn order bonuses from a mob if you break (now called stun) them, which is hard and you might only do it once per boss fight.
  • S-crafts no longer deal more damage at 200 CP.
  • To use an S-craft, the character must have 2 stacks of Boost activated. Boost only lasts 3 turns. The boost gauge is only built up by physically attacking enemies, so if your team is spamming arts then you won't be able to build up the boost gauge to S-craft spam. In past games you could have a mixed team of S-craft and arts spammers, but in Kuro you are heavily incentivized to pick one or the other.
  • I've noticed that some bosses will immediately pop their S-craft on their next turn if you pop yours. Fortunately these boss S-crafts don't seem to be raid wide so you can move the rest of your team far away from your tank and they won't get clipped by the S-craft if your tank is S-craft spamming.
  • Abyss difficulty is gone. Nightmare is once again the hardest difficulty but it very easy. Haven't gameovered once so far.

I'll remain cautiously optimistic for now.
The difficulty is an issue that has traditionally concerned me, but it's not like Falcom has ever put out games that are too difficult aside from early Ys, Sky III, Cold Steel I and Reverie on Abyss.

Talked about it towards the end of my Reverie notes.

I'll read it soon and respond.
 

Rean

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A bit into Nayuta.
This is an old game that came after Azure, finally ported and officially localized.

The setting and atmosphere is fairly Final Fantasy-typical mixed with Ys. The gameplay is 100% Ys (and a lesser-known Falcom title called Zwei), it's all running and jumping around town and during battle. The lore is built around familiar Trails terms, such as 'arge', 'mira', an actual live Mishy even makes an appearance! Characters seem to have some quality traditional Trails development going for them: I'm really liking Nayuta thus far as a character, he seems much more interested in just pure knowledge than other Trails MCs. Yet, in general, despite the presence of various recognizable motifs, nothing feels quite as mature as the usual Trails -- this is fairly traditional fantasy. I'm not sure if it even goes as deep as Ys VIII, we'll see.

Despite having the option to go up to 144hz, FPS doesn't move past 60 no matter whether Vsync is on or off. On the GOG version, we're still waiting for the 1.0.8 update to drop on the offline installer, this might address the refresh rate issue, hoping it does.

Durante mentioned 'improved assets' back in December 2021, but all the textures are nothing more than AI upscaled. They're definitely not redone. New Azure looks better, both due to the variety of assets, as well as attention paid to them.

Coming off the conveniences of Cold Steel and Reverie, you'll immediately notice the lack of being able to fast-forward dialogue and scenes. I advise using High-speed mode (Turbo) at 2x to go through dialogue. There isn't as nearly as much animation or voiceacting as mainline Trails, even from main characters, so it might get a bit frustrating having to wait at times.

Extra: I've seen that Nayuta's sister was originally called 'Asa', but now it's changed to 'Eartha'. I'm not sure how accurate that is, I think they were originally going for 'Ursa' based off the constellation, rather than Eartha (アーサ・ハーシェル). I don't really like Eartha for a name, but whatever. I got off the Falcom drama train when Xseed took down their forums so I can't confirm these things anymore.
 
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I am three chapters into Kuro no Kiseki.
Are you using the fan translation or did they ever release an English version on Steam?

I am using the Zerofield/4chan fan translation on the NISA version of the game. It's better than the official translation of Reverie. No typos and craft/item information is actually correct. Only the occasional issue where text extends outside a textbox.

4chan just finished their fan translation of Kuro 2, so I will be playing that once NISA released their PC port of Kuro 2. CLE has a PC port of Kuro 2 available but apparently it is poorly optimized.
 

frajaq

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finished Azure on Hard, enjoyed it a lot, more than Zero

wonder why they always leave the gimmicky/interesting fights for last tho

bF6m6Z7.png
 

Rean

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Val the Moofia Boss
Late response, sorry, but I did read your notes and commentary.

As for the VNs:
I don't know how canon they will end up being, I'm expecting the Renne one is.

*sigh* S-rank is a secret rank! Only S-rank bracers and their confidants know about it! Making someone an S-rank bracer for publicity purposes is pointless if the public doesn't know about it!

This could be a retcon, but I'm thinking that these VNs just had different writers. The VNs' style doesn't quite fit the ingame writing.
They wrote themselves into a corner with the Bracer ranks back in the Sky days, it's obvious they didn't anticipate how power levels in the presented universe would significantly rise since (although they attempted multiple weird U-turns in Reverie).

Not that I care a ton about them retconning the Bracer Guild in the first place, it's one of the series' least interesting factions -- not quite 'Adventurers' Guild in WRPG' tier, but close.

Ah, so now the Bracer guild's rules matter when you decide it should!

The last paragraph of that screenshot highlights why the Bracer Guild is uninteresting.
 

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