“Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned…” – William Congreve
I’ve played a lot of RPGs in my life and I have never been so glad to put a game behind me as I was when the credits finally rolled on Snails in the Sky. The credits rolled, but the game didn’t exactly end. Joshua remembered his past and went dashing off for revenge and Estelle is going to spend the next game looking for him. And Falcom actually expects me to spend money on that. **** THAT. If I never see those two again it will be too soon!
Like I said before, it’s not that Trails in the Sky is bad, it’s just that it drags a 10 hour story out to 40 hours by means of extreme padding, pointless scenes, pointless side plots, pointless characters, pointless walking, pointless quests and pointless battles. The end result left me mentally chafed in ways I didn’t even know were possible.
And speaking of repetition, does anyone remember the scene in I, Claudius where Augustus roars, “IS THERE ANYONE IN ROME WHO HAS NOT SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTER?!” I felt the same way after scene upon scene of character upon character going on and on about how wonderful Cassius Bright was. “IS THERE ANYONE IN LIBERL WHO IS NOT IN LOVE WITH MY FATHER?!” In fact, several characters (most notably Zane and Agate) are only in the game because “Cassius asked me to help.” It’s a wonder any of them can talk with their mouths so full of Cassius Bright’s <bleep>.
And then that blasted Cassius had the nerve to show up right when I was putting the finishing touches on the final boss. Blasted scene-stealer. Glory hound. It wasn’t enough for you to ruin the game, now you’ve got to take the final boss as well? I hate you. WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS TROUBLESOME DAD?!
Of course, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Falcom’s dilemma. They have a previous trilogy which presumably made them a lot of money. So even if they barely have a story, they still have to stretch it out to fill three full-sized games. I’m not one of those people who complain if a game is too short, but it’s common in the fandom so I know where’s they’re coming from. But seriously, they could still have condensed Trails in the Sky into a 10 hour storyline, added 10 hours hours worth of fights, sidequests and silly plotlines and ended up with a classic. 40 hours of nothing is way too much.
One more thing: I really must register my dissatisfaction with how boring the kingdom of Liberl was. Apart from a few cliffs, all the terrain was basically the same. The architecture was the same, the people dressed the same, talked the same, acted the same, etc. Even Britain, the king of the boring nations, has a lot of different locations and accents and cultural practices. This is fiction. Don’t make me keep walking though woods and manicured lawns for 40 hours when you could throw in a couple of deserts and icy wastes and ruined jungles. Lie to me!
Luckily, all bad things must come to an end. As a final act of mercy, I will now proceed to spoil the story: everything was a plot by Colonel Richards of the Intelligence Division to take over the country so he could get at the artifact hidden under Grancel Castle. Only it wasn’t really him, it was the really bad guys, who planted ideas in his head. No one in the game is bad, it’s always “The really bad guys made me do it. I have amnesia!” (BUULLSHIITTT) Oh, and Professor Alba is one of the really bad guys. And Joshua used to be an assassin who got taken in by Cassius Bright after Joshua failed to assassinate CB. Did I miss anything? See, that wasn’t anything that couldn’t be cleared up in 10 hours, was it?
Moving on, I usually like to put a little space between games of the same series, but I really want to play Persona 2: Innocent Sin now, so I’m not going to wait any longer. UnchainBlades Rexx has been out for a while, but the reviews are quite horrible. I’m going to go into it with extremely low expectations and maybe I’ll be able to salvage something from that. I also want to finish the second story of Blue Roses to see how things end, but that’s the lowest thing on my priority list right now. And finally Will O’ Wisp has shown me that otome game visual novels don’t necessarily have to suck, so I’m thinking of trying another one of those in the near future. It’s going to be a busy rest-of-2011.
I just read a glowing review of this game here: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/28/the-best-jrpg-you-havent-played-yet/#continued
but I think I’ll prefer your review over his because I loved reading your review more. :b
And I totally get bored of an RPG if the story drags even in the slightest bit!
Thanks for the link to the review, just finished reading it. He’s not lying, the game is charming sometimes and funny sometimes. If it was just shorter, more focused and less repetitive (and didn’t rip off the Laputa theme), it would be a jRPG classic.
I’m a little sad to hear it didn’t sell that well, though. I’m not interested in the rest of the Trails in the Sky series, but Falcom also has Trails of Zero and Trails of Blue out, and those might end up never coming to the west if TITS bombed.
[…] even sequel material. There’s nothing to make a sequel about. You can compare this to Trails in the Sky, which also ended on a cliffhanger. There they evidently took the decision to milk the game early […]
Well because of the Steam PC release, guess I’ll try to play this? For the heck of it. Mostly want to try to see if I can still stomach narrative-focused JRPGs.
Wonder how much time I can cut if I just do the bare minimum to progress the game, which I think will have an additional side effect of making the game harder since I heard it was easy.
I hear it’s only about $15 or so, so you don’t have much to lose. Most people seem to like it.
Well, like I said, I went and played it and completed it.
Wow, I thought you were exaggerating about the whole Cassius “Poochie The Dog” Bright and Joshua putting his sister to the test but you totally weren’t. I think literally every NPC with a portrait can’t stop themselves from raving about how great Cassius is. Every single one.
Incidentally, with my knowledge of “this game is paced badly/way too slow”, I did as I planned and only did a bare minimum of sidequests (usually the ones that were along the way of the main quest such as monster extermination) and running away from most battles. I actually managed to clock in a time of 24 hours and 30 minutes… and I STILL felt the game was paced badly with a lot of time wasters like having to run back and forth huge plains of nothing.
Combat is in the weird bad spot of “not mindless enough that you can just mash buttons and win instantly so you can read the story” and not strategic enough to be interesting. By the way, experience actually scales to your current level vs enemy level so it’s never worth it to fight enemies after their EXP values drop to a certain point (I draw the line around 30 exp per way), which makes battles even more time-wasting than usual.
Since I ran away from most battles and skipped most sidequests, the game became harder like I expected, but it really didn’t become any better despite me disliking easy games. It just made battles take longer because I needed more damage to kill enemies. Oh well.
Well my final “nice comment” about TiTS is that the characters were colorful at least and uh, it suddenly has giant robots near the end and um, that’s it I guess. Not sure why this game is so highly rated. I should have listened to my instincts that I probably wouldn’t like the game so much since I prioritize gameplay over story but thems the break I guess. I’m not quite sure if I should trust people now when they say the sequels are improved…
24 hours and 30 minutes! How did you manage that?! O_O I think all the Legend of Heroes games are badly paced – though I’ve only tried 4 – and it’s a matter of how much dilly-dallying you enjoy in your RPGs.
I could have warned you that making the game harder would only make the battles drag out longer, but I didn’t want to poison your mind any further. The battle speed was improved in Trails of Zero to the point where it was actually enjoyable. The other flaws of the Legend of Heroes games are still present but at least battles weren’t such a chore any more. If these new releases do well enough, maybe you might get lucky and ToZ will come to Steam.
As for the Trails in the Sky sequels, I would take what the hardcore fans (of which TitS has many, many) say with a pinch of salt. If you’re interested in the story and in finding out what happens next then yes, it’s probably worth following up. But if you’re looking for changes to the fundamental aspects of the game I doubt any drastic changes were made. I mean, why should they when so many fans are crazy about it anyway?
Skipped a lot of battles and sidequests, that’s all I can say, because I was pretty darn surprised when I looked at the final time too, because the game was so slowly paced it felt like I took twice as long to hit that time. I think the net gain in time was still worth it despite slower battles.
Quite! I’m seriously impressed. If you end up playing the sequel when it comes out, do let me know what you think about it. Not like I’m ever going to play it, but I want to hear what you think.
Well, me playing the sequels depends on whether they take many many years to release it in English and I remember it exists. I’ll let you know if that ever happens though.
So they actually released Trails of Screwing Your Brother Part 2 in a somewhat timely manner… uh, relative to when I played it anyway but definitely not relative to the JP release where they’re already coming out with a remake (WHY?) and I beat it – 45 hours or so according to the in-game time and my playstyle of “not caring about completing the entire thing” but I sure feel sorry for the chaps who’s trying to beat it all.
Anyway, I don’t really know what to say about it. Now that this is part 2, things are finally starting to move (though there are still some draggy parts) and there are some cool story parts, but Falcom apparently can’t design “Traditional JRPG” gameplay worth crap if Trails is any indicator.
It’s probably super generous to call this a sequel – it’s more like one game split into two except with an arbitrary resetting of all your stats and items, which is probably literal since I’ve heard there was some budget issues on the game.
You literally start the game a day after Joshua tongue’d his sister and the plot is paced like you just jumped straight in from the first game rather than having a self-contained pace which explains things like why FC had a random fighting tournament and sewer dungeon at the very end of the game (because those make a lot more sense if you see them as “mid-game” story events)
A lot of the art assets/areas in the game are reused from the first – you’ll be running through the same dungeon over again that maybe it was a blessing in disguise for other people that this took like 4 years to localize because maybe it’ll feel like a “fresh” experience to them. It’ll probably be very tedious for people who waited to go straight from FC -> SC though.
Oh, and I swear Falcom has a real lack of self-awareness because they designed the plot progression to be as annoying as possible – it’s bad enough that you’re traveling the same areas again until like the late game so you won’t get the feeling you’re seeing new things, but then they design it so that e.g you reach a new area and the Guild Master asks you to go kill 3 monsters and all these monsters are located in completely different locations from each other so you end up having to retread the entire area all over again which will DEFINITELY make you go “wow, I am artificially being forced to run around old places because they don’t have enough money to create enough new dungeons to actually make a new game”
And the 2nd last chapter where you have to traverse the entire world map and visit every town ON FOOT while slowly losing your ability to use magic, What. The. Hell.
To be kind of frank, I think the gameplay is rather terrible that I would probably enjoy Trails a lot more if it was in just about any other medium such as an Anime – cut out all the pointless sidequesting and I think you could make a solid story out of the entire thing without the boringggggggg gameplay, but I digress.
Well, SC finished up the whole Estelle/Joshua plot and its self-contained plot but it also introduced a whole bunch of concepts and characters with unresolved backstories to sequel bait. I know there’s a “Third Chapter” but I did hear it was more of a “fan-disk” game rather than a fully fledged one. I’m not really excited enough to be waiting anxiously but maybe if they translate it and it’s convenient, I’ll play it out of boredom.
Incidentally, man, they really sucked off Cassius Bright all the way up to the end – I swear a lot of the scenes in the game are the Bracers being quite incompetent and then suddenly something happens to turn the tide and an NPC will go “THIS IS ALL DUE TO CASSIUS SUPER AWESOME FORESIGHT”
I heard it was out. I’m really happy for all the Trails fans who’ve been waiting so long for the sequel, though obviously I have no intention of ever playing it myself.
I’m impressed you finished it already since it’s only been out like a week. That’s pretty hardcore. That said, you don’t make it sound like any fun at all. Forced backtracking is one of the things I hate most in JRPGs, and much as I like sidequests I probably wouldn’t do those of the “kill 3 widely-scattered monsters for no good reward” sort. And re-traveling the whole world? On foot? Your mini-review is just reinforcing my decision not to touch this with a barge pole.
As for the format, one game split into two is Falcom’s new modus operandi if Zero/Ao and Sen/Sen II are anything to go by. It obviously prints money, or they wouldn’t still be doing it. Btw, there IS a Trails in the Sky OAV anime, isn’t there? I haven’t seen it but maybe it wraps up the leftover mysteries at the end of SC. Either way congratulations on making it through both games and thanks for the informative comments.
“I had a lot of free time” is… one way to put it, I guess.
I’ve been hearing the Double Split games thing of the series from several people. I usually kind of see it more of a sign of desperation rather than money-making itself – I think they used to be a lot more common in the PS2 days with things like Xenosaga and .Hack but for obvious reasons became really unpopular.
As for the OVAs, I looked it up and it seems to be “Not Recommended” because it supposedly only does a very cut down form of Chapters 1-6 (the game has 8) and apparently does it rather poorly (such as completely bungling several of the plot twist moments without proper setup).
Since it doesn’t even finish the ending, I doubt it would resolve the cliffhangers (which I suppose will be done in TC), and probably wouldn’t make a very good substitute even on the storytelling front, so I guess Falcom bungled that opportunity.
A pity, then. I thought it would make a decent anime too since it has a very anime-ish story (unrelated siblings in love, angsty hero with dark past, mysterious shadowy organization). I still wouldn’t watch it though, but it would be a nice thing for fans to add to their collection and a good introduction to the series for anyone who’s interested.
I don’t know enough about Falcom’s finances to know whether they’re doing it out of desperation or whether it actually works, but I lean towards the latter simple because the thing about the Trails series is that people who like it REALLY REALLY like it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are lots of people out there buying the two parters plus all the endless remakes and ports as well. I’m happy some game companies seem to be doing well in these dark days.
I finished Trails the 3rd recently given it’s recent English release and man it would be great if all the Trails game followed its general game structure. Well, in my opinion anyways.
It’s basically Trails as a dungeon crawler. The first chapter has a lot of talky stuff at the start but then I think someone told Falcom they didn’t have money any more and it becomes a dungeon romp with some plot to connect it all together.
No running around the world doing banal odd jobs for people, just a dungeon, treasure chests to grab and some optional doors you can enter to view a vignette sidestory that you can do at any time and doesn’t make you compelled to do them all immediately before it’s lost.
What little story it has is actually pretty damn good and probably the darkest of the series for some reason IMO, though it’s completely non-stand alone sadly.
It’s not perfect and I think the biggest flaw is that once again, it’s made up entirely of reused assets from the previous games. I’ll give them some credit that a couple of areas they decided to reuse as dungeons were not dungeons in the original games, so they had some novelty when you have to run around them now, but I’m actually kinda glad it took so long to localize because if I had to actually play them directly from one game to another, I would most likely be annoyed instead of just being slightly nostalgic at seeing these places again.
Oh and they kind of dropped the ball gameplay wise (the plot was fine) in the final dungeon, because for some reason, the deranged designers at Falcom decided that you needed to use all 16 party members split into 4 groups to tackle the last dungeon (which is a point of no return), and it took me hours just to raise them up to speed and gear them up. Given that I had a lot of fun before then and the ending was strong, I guess I’ll cut them a bit of slack.
So in general I think it’s probably the Trails game I enjoyed the most. Too bad from what I learned of the future games, they didn’t learn their lesson in not wasting their player’s time. Ah well.
Good to hear it went out on a good note. From playing Zero no Kiseki and Ao no Kiseki after Trails, I can confirm that Falcom is slowly improving on what was already a promising battle system. More battles, better story, fewer pointless sidequests can only be a good thing.
Can it be played by skipping straight from the first game to the third? And how often do I have to deal with those disgusting Bright kids and their much-worshipped Dad?
“Can it be played by skipping straight from the first game to the third?”
Probably not, I’m afraid – a lot of the emotional scenes are based off the fact that you experienced their character development from the events in SC.
Though I think you’ve played Zero/Ao so it might be a bit odd going backwards anyway, I suppose? Like, Kevin is the main character of The 3rd (he was introduced in SC but isn’t really that important) and the Renne subplot begins in SC, gets a bit of plot in 3rd and then finishes in Ao so it’s like jumping around in the timeline.
“And how often do I have to deal with those disgusting Bright kids and their much-worshipped Dad?”
Dad still kinda gets sucked off but there’s certainly a scene where you may liked to experience anyway… or maybe not. This is me trying to be non-spoilery.
Estelle and Joshua join around the early-mid game though they’re not the main character any more. Each of them individually is forced for one dungeon as part of the plot though that isn’t really that much of favouritism – at least half of the playable characters have a spot in the game where they’re forced in your party for a dungeon and as characters that aren’t 2nd banana, they get a go at it.
Eh, I can always read spoilers for SC and play 3rd. I’ll boot it up the queue a little bit and give it a chance in a bit. Thanks for the heads up.
So recently they went and added a “Turbo Mode” feature to the Trails games on PC which speeds up the game.
That makes me really salty – bet I could beat SC way faster with it.
But I guess this would be a good time to play it now if any.
Heard about it and it’s the tipping point that made me decide to play The Third.
I just finished reading summaries of the second game:
http://kiseki.wikia.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_Heroes:_Trails_in_the_Sky_SC#Synposis
One of the most annoying things I’ve ever read. I lost track of all the times the bad guys randomly showed up and randomly toyed with Estelle and co. before leaving undefeated. Even in the end almost all of them get away or are redeemed. I hate it when that happens.
And look, even an ancient dragon in a cave somewhere is a member of the Cult of Cassius Worshipers, how is this even possible? Why doesn’t Cassie just beat the whole game himself?
And so on, and so forth. So glad I didn’t play it. Ready to start the third game as soon as I finish Operation Abyss.