Trails franchise (Trails In The Sky, Trails Of Cold Steel etc)

If we ever see them, it probably won't be for who knows how long. The amount of text in FC alone (and not just for the story and sidequests, but also for the mammoth amount of NPC text that has to be seen to believed,) was insane; SC trumps it, and while The Third isn't quite as large as SC, some of the later games are. Honestly, it would be great to get the later games, but for now, I'll just settle for SC, and count any other games we get as a nice bonus.

Carpe Fulgur is working on localizing SC right now. It's their legendary "Project 4" that they kept mum about for like a couple years before finally letting on what they were doing.

It's important to know the lay of the land, by the way: Falcom is betting a lot on the sales of FC and SC. Basically, FC on PSP did not sell well, while they noticed that the Ys series did sell well on PC. And now FC is coming back to PC, and SC is in the pipeline. I hear that decisions on TC will depend on the sales of FC and SC.

XSEED's blog on Trails in the Sky and why it took longer than expected to be re-released on PC.

edited 25th Jul '14 12:29:00 PM by Nettacki

I like how the minimum requirements are around 500 Mhz, and the recommended is dual core stuff. Oh well, if I can play Ys without much issue I can play this.

Game's out, at both GOG.com and Steam. If you get it now, you can even buy it for $3 off, at 16.99! For that price, and the sheer amount of quality content, (50+ hours on average,) there's no reason not to pick this up.

The hype is real. Bought.

Fair warning though: you might run into some problems, if this thread is of any indication.

Ok this sucks...the game is quite unstable right now, and is prone to crash...lost a few progress, which is quite annoying...

At least there's autosave I could call on if crash happens...

edited 30th Jul '14 8:27:27 AM by onyhow

Autosave happens whenever you enter/exit a building, so it happens quite frequently. It's on page zero of the saves.

Seems like the latest patch is likely to have fixed many problems for Steam users. GOG users will be getting a patch shortly after this stuff is finalized.

Incidentally, one of the bugs causes the videos to play two instances of themselves, side-by-side, with all the colors changed to green and purple. This happened even if you manually swapped them out to another video.

The result was this:

I'm in Ruan right now (so halfway more or less), then read that SC will be localized "by the end of 2014"...lol

Alright, so I just bought the steam version of the game. Liking it so far, hoping the story picks up once I'm done with these initial bracer jobs.

One thing: on the last page, people were mentioning playing on harder difficulties: are there even difficulties in this game? I haven't found a single thing indicating I can make it harder.

Yes, there are other difficulties, but they can only be accessed after beating the game once. I should've realized this sooner, honestly.

Edit: ignore

edited 4th Aug '14 9:31:54 AM by Nettacki

According to XSEED, Trails in the Sky is their most successful launch ever on the PC, and they hope to bring in more JRPG's (with and without DRM) in the future.

Wow, that's nice.

Also all the bugs should be fixed by now. It had a pretty bad launch with those.

So does the game get harder? Because the chapter 1 boss was a complete joke.

Trails is heavily more story based than gameplay based, though the gameplay isn't shabby. There are some tricky ones later on, but you do get the option to set the difficulty after you beat the game.

edited 7th Aug '14 10:50:29 AM by Marioguy128

Alright, cool. So it'll probably continue to be easy mode.

Ah well, at least the story seems to be pretty decent. Still haven't gotten to an overall "plot" yet, though I do know that there's apparently someone with mind control powers influencing the Sky Bandits, and I'm sure we'll see more of that in the future.

I get the feeling that the game follows a very anime plot progression: it starts out with getting to know the characters and what their motivations are, and then it seems like every chapter after the first is going to be a small plot arc that (a) helps Joshua and Estelle get their next recommendation and (b) has some minor connection to the overall plotline, until we figure out what's been happening at the very end.

I also have to say that I really like how all the characters have their own motivations. In a more traditional jRPG, Scherazard and Olivier would continue travelling with the party just because...well, that's what party members do! It's nice to see Schera and Olivier go back to Rolent because they have their own agendas.

Pretty much. Except that this game is largely just setup for the next one, so in this case, 'the very end' equates to the 80+hours of gameplay that SC is supposed to have. SC is the real story, basically.

http://www.esterior.net/2014/08/licensing-and-international-releases-push-numbers-to-almost-six-times-higher-in-falcoms-latest-financial-report/

They've been pretty successful thanks to Steam. That's not counting Trails numbers by the way, which was their most successful title on Steam.

edited 9th Aug '14 4:50:12 PM by Marioguy128

Reminds me of Grandia.

Glad to see people are enjoying this game. Positive sign for SC and beyond.

If you're wondering why there hasn't been much word on SC, well... Just a warning, there is some heavy stuff in there.

Update on SC.

The not-so-good news: The (admittedly tentative,) release date of Winter has been pushed back again to 'a few months'; some have speculated that this means May-ish. The good news is that all of the text is finally translated, and we also have actual screens of the translation. Of course, it's only two screens, and there's hardly any dialogue in them, but the point is, the leg-work's finally done, and now they just have to get everything in working order and polish things up.

The sad thing though is, at this point, there is a 90% chance that we're never going to see any of the games past The Third, let alone The Third itself. But at this point, I'll just be happy to get SC. FC&SC are supposed to form a complete stand-alone story on their own; with any luck, we won't need the rest of them. In the meantime, my PSP broke and I had to repurchase FC on Steam, so I might play that over the next few months until SC comes out.

edited 5th Jun '15 11:45:46 AM by kkhohoho

Rejoice: The great all-father that is X-Seed has seen fit to bequeath upon usnot just one Trails game this year, but two. SC's coming out this summer, but this fall, we're getting Trails of Cold Steel 1. As for how they did it, they passed off SC's translating duties off to Carpe Fulgar a while back. I'm guessing the main XSEED team has been working on Cold Steel while Carpe's been finishing up SC. But yeah; after 4+ years of not getting a real Trails fix, XSEED's more than making up for that this year. Well, sort of.

See, while we may be getting Cold Steel 1, that also means we'll be skipping over Zero, Ao, and maybe even the Third, unless they pass off translating duties for the latter off to Carpe Fulgar again. XSEED claims that Cold Steel works as a standalone story on its' own, which somewhat holds true as it does take place right alongside Zero and Ao, albeit on a different continent. But I can't help but feel that we'll still be missing out on a lot regardless. Still, I didn't think we'd see any more Trails games after SC, so to get both SC and another game in the same year is nothing short of freaking fricking fantastic.

Let the squeeing commence.

More details here: http://xseedgames.tumblr.com/post/120804314195/the-legend-of-heroes-trails-series-localization

In short:

1. The decision to go with Sen / Cold Steel was due to it being on a system whose life-cycle is winding down, and the Falcom folks being fine with that story being told without Azure and Zero.

2. It was pretty long in the making — considering they have Cold Steel The Hedgeheg fully translated already.

3. Wanna see Sky TC, Azure, and Zero? Buy the heck out of SC.