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The story takes a while to really get going. Trails is somewhat infamous for being a bit of a slow-burn at first, but it gets much better the farther along you get in the game.
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Oct 27, 2015 06:51
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Zaggitz posted:Man does Agate ever stop being such a wet blanket? He's easily my least favorite character of FC, and that tagline for SC of "go with Agate or Schera" doesn't even come close to making that choice difficult. Eh, he's a tad overbearing when you first meet him, but Estelle and Joshua slowly earn his respect throughout Chapter 2 and 3 and the final scene of Chapter 3 had the three of them part on fairly respectful terms. Agate was kind of hard to deal with on my first playthrough, but I warmed up to him significantly throughout subsequent playthroughs. I'm actually kind of curious about Estelle's and Agate's partnership. FC gave me a fairly good indication of what Estelle and Schera are like when they're alone, but the same isn't true for Estelle and Agate. Agate's fairly cordial to his fellow senior bracers throughout FC, so I don't really worry about him being a jerk all the time. And then there's the opportunity for scenes where Agate's forced to put up with Olivier's antics. Anticipation rising rapidly.  Oh, and his improved Wild Rage craft is just insane.
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Oct 27, 2015 10:47
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One of the most telling things about Agate is one of his lines when you first run into him on your way to Ravennue. When Schera says she thought he was in Grancel and asks him if he's in the region to look into the missing airliner, he replies that he's merely here for some "chump errants". If you pay close attention (and have played the game before), you're able to find out just what those "chump errants" were and it pretty much tells you all there is to know about Agate. (it's also pretty d'awwww-worthy) People are either scared shitless of Agate (the Ravens and the special ops) or they make fun of him. There is very little in-between.
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Oct 27, 2015 15:11
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Yeah, his Wild Rage crafts now take 70% of his HP away and in return give you 100 and later 150CP, meaning that in theory, you can launch an S-craft at enemies at any time his turn comes up, as long as there's a healer to patch him up afterwards. In FC, it wasn't really so much that his stats were underwhelming (highest atk, second highest def, second highest hp), but the fact that final-dungeon enemies (with the exception of the weakest two droids) all had really high defense that was difficult to overcome with physicals as opposed to arts being OP. Falcom apparantly tweaked the balance a bit in SC so physical attackers are less handicapped this time around.
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Oct 27, 2015 15:21
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Not sure if I'd call it deeper. The Materia system's ability to link materia and make combinations like countering damage with an attached ability or absorbing HP/MP with certain attacks allowed for a vast number of (usually gamebreaking) tweaks. Trails' process of putting together arts by racking up elemental points is only deep on some of the characters. With the more physically oriented characters, you're merely determining what stats to boost.
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Oct 27, 2015 20:34
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From what I've heard, 3rd on PSP didn't receive *major* additions like additional characters to play around with, but received a lot of tiny little balance tweaks. Oh, and one "sidequest" that existed in the PC version was censored out on PSP.
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Oct 28, 2015 10:25
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From what I saw, I got the impression that all the attacks in a chain craft are part of the same turn, meaning it's a good way to milk damage-boosting turn bonuses.
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Oct 29, 2015 08:36
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There's a semi-hidden bracer quest to do somewhere in the Bose region that's not on the board. Also, you get the option to recruit Kevin for the last loose ends in Bose. If you didn't do so in Grancel, you might want to upgrade some of his orbment slots since he'll be coming along on the next mission.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:31
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Decus posted:Actually Zero is problems since Falcom isn't the only license holder for its PC version--it has a chinese license holder since it was for china/korea rather than japan. Japan only later got a localization of that. From what I've heard, Falcom can just license the Japanese PC version of Zero to XSeed without having to go through Joyoland. That's what Tom always implied. The main issue is the fact that Ao hasn't been backported into Japanese yet and the crazy amount of text both games have.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:14
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Cake Attack posted:Probably I actually did two and it's indeed a more high-effort version than simply the occasional partner line. Pretty much every conversation has an Agate and Schera variation. I did both and a couple of things stand out. - With Schera, the interaction between Estelle and her partner takes on the typical sibling-flavor you see in Chapter 4 and Schera clearly has a lot of fun poking Estelle over her fear of ghosts. When you first meet the ravens again, they provoke that fight in order to take on Estelle. (with Schera then cracking her whip and reassuring the frightened guys that their spines will surely grow back) When you interrogate Belden afterwards, Schera uses her assets to make him talk and Estelle snarks that sex appeal isn't supposed to be weaponized like that. When you deal with Phelio in the Ruan casino, the order is Estelle-Olivier-Schera, with only Olivier's role remaining unchanged. Estelle manages to use her gung-ho attitude to bluff Phelio and make him fold. Schera uses her skill at card tricks (completely with S-craft cutout) to cheat herself into getting a royal flush. When you briefly meet up with Agate and Anelace in the Kaldia tunnel in Chapter 2, Tita uneasily notes that Agate is travelling with a woman. Whenever Olivier crosses the outrageous-line and Estelle doesn't feel like threatening him, it's usually Schera who gets him back in line. - With Agate, the interaction between Estelle and her partner is obviously a bit more awkward, with Agate trying to act a bit older brother like and getting embarassed and backing off whenever Estelle pokes him over it. When you first meet the ravens, the fight is provoked by Rocco who doesn't like the fact that Agate is still acting like the boss and he wants a match to permanently get Agate off the gang's back. (which obviously fails) When you interrogate Belden afterwards, Agate puts on the strict older-brother role and tells him he ought to man up and make something of himself already. When you deal with Phelio in the Ruan casino, the order is Agate-Olivier-Estelle, with Olivier's round being unchanged. Agate has a bad hand, but when he challenges Phelio, he shoots him such a murderous glance (complete with S-craft cutout) that Phelio promptly wets himself and folds. (or, in Estelle's words, gets folded) Estelle gets the final round and Olivier saves the day by distracting the dealer with his ear-blowing trick and then quickly manipulating the cards while the dealer's trying to figure out what's happening. When you meet up with Schera and Anelace in the Kaldia tunnel, Anelace goes full-blown cuteness-proximity over Tita, glomping her and insisting they're taking her with them. When Olivier joins the party, he quickly categorizes Agate as a massive switchboard of buttons to push and Agate has absolutely no idea on how to deal with that weird guy who's suddenly flirting with him all the time. Yes, it's pretty funny. When you get to Zeiss, Agate's dialogue indicates he's gotten close with the Russells while Estelle was in boot camp. He uncharacteristically brushes aside the insult Russell dishes out when you first visits their home and frequently pokes fun or facepalms over Tita's tendency to space out in front of machinery. In all honesty, despite Estelle and Agate not having the sibling-like closeness that Estelle and Schera have, I still liked Agate's route best. Since he was involved in the events in the Ruan and Zeiss region in FC, he frequently comments on them during the first two chapters, so his presence felt more natural. His extended interaction with Tita also serves as nice build-up for the events in Chapter 5.
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Nov 19, 2015 11:14
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Really Pants posted:I'm starting NG+ and it feels like buffs are wearing off much more quickly. They all lasted for an entire combat in my first playthrough. Is that just part of NG+, or something else? Did you start NG+ with carried-over levels? Buffs in normal gameplay start out running out very quickly and their duration increases as you move through the game. The way the buffs (and debuffs and status effects) work is that they run on a hidden timer that runs independently from the combattant turns. Basically, as your speed stat increases as you go through the game and you get more and more turns per "combat round", buffs seemingly stick around for a lot longer.
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Nov 23, 2015 15:16
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Buffs, debuffs and status effects worked the same way in FC. I remember tweaking my quartz so I could have Chaos Brand as early as the prologue in FC and laughing evilly upon casting it on a miniboss I knew wasn't immune. This was followed by me crying like a little girl when the confusion wore off before the affected monster even got a turn. Anyway, early on, buffs run out really quickly. By the end of the game, they last pretty much throughout the entire fight and are very much worth casting. Morale is okay, even early on, since it affects everyone nearby and can be useful for a quick on-the-spot buff to give Agate's crafts/s-crafts some extra punch, but applying individual buffs like clock-up early on is just a waste of time. Later games replace it with buffs lasting a fixed number of turns (like 3 or 5) regardless of when you use them. That comes with its own downsides as arts are considered two turns, so especially speed boosts run out really quickly and overall you have re-apply them more frequently.
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Nov 23, 2015 17:27
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Cake Attack posted:So that's why buffs were useless in FC lol Morale was pretty handy even then since it also affected arts in that game, so I'd often open a battle against chest monsters/extermination monsters by having folks like Joshua and Schera prepare a spell and have Estelle do a quick boost before the arts discharged. Speed boosts became useful about half-way through. What really hurt spells like Crest and Forte was the fact that they were single-target only, meaning you'd spend way too much time applying them. SC adding La Crest and La Forte was very welcome.
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Nov 23, 2015 17:33
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Some Numbers posted:Morale affects arts damage?! In FC, it did. Likewise, Kämpfer reduced ATS and ADF as well if it hit. In SC they most likely unhooked the physical and the magical buffs from one another since there's a separate spell for lowering ADF now as well as a separate spell for buffing ADF.
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Nov 23, 2015 21:46
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I'd argue that Estelle's speeches, both at the end of FC and SC weren't really about the power of friendship, but rather about the power of banding together to overcome common obstacles that seem insurmountable to tackle individually. She argued this at the end of FC, pointing out that it wasn't Cassius on his own who ended the war, but the efforts of the entire royal army as well as many more. At the end of SC, she pointed out that one of the main reasons the aureole ruined the very civilisation it was meant to improve was because it isolated people by taking away all reasons to interact with their fellow man. You could argue that this is something that every JRPG throws in there at the end, but both FC and SC give Estelle plenty of examples to back up her point. This is different from the power of friendship since many of both games more effective alliances were between parties who either had little interaction with each other before or were at odds with one another before banding together to fight for a common goal.
Erpy fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Nov 24, 2015 |
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Nov 24, 2015 18:39
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Slur posted:Yet it takes on such an extremist tone, as if to say that independence and the ability in order to fight on one's own will and strength is completely hopeless in the first place. If we were to take a look at Joshua, who tried to handle his problems on his own, he was displayed as unnatural to the light of the player. So even if your argument was true, it still comes back to the idea of everyone having to be codependent on others for any form of success in life, doesn't it? Extremist, huh? Yeah, I'm sure that's it. If only more games were willing to promote the POWER OF BOOTSTRAPS. The Colonel posted:I'm still on chapter 4 but I'm gonna maintain my opinion that Joshua is a jerk, and I hope Estelle hits him in the face and makes it clear that even if he's all goddamn depressed what he did is literally the worst course of action and only served to hurt people who genuinely care about him. It wouldn't be Kiseki without a patented Bright Slap. quote:Josh is absolutely right that Estelle is too good for him tbh. Eh, I think they complement each other pretty well. Though if it were Anelace stepping up as Joshua's rival, I might be willing to consider agreeing with you. :P Erpy fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Nov 24, 2015 |
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Nov 24, 2015 20:13
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:I tried to use Tita in both games but aside from craft-based healing when there's no better alternative (like Kevin when he finally gets around to joining for real) her fragility reeeeally damns her. Tita's Vital Cannon 2 is actually the best healing craft in the game, easily beating Kevin's Sacred Breath. Sacred Breath has an (L) radius, true, but it's always centered on Kevin and it only heals 2500 HP. Vital Cannon 2 heals 3500 HP (better than La Teara) and heals all status ailments just like Kevin's craft does, in addition to removing debuffs, which cannot be done by any other means aside from one particular item. Vital Cannon 2 has a smaller range than Sacred Breath, but it's grid-targetted and its reach can be augmented with Long Barrel accessories, so it's much more versatile. I generally like to keep my levels evened out among my party members, so I frequently switch and I personally didn't see Tita as a load. Sure, she's kind of fragile, but her Long Barrel accessories allow her to generally stay away from the frontlines and snipe things from afar and her attack, while not as high as Joshua's/Agate's/Zane's is still on par with Estelle and both of her crafts are very useful.
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Nov 25, 2015 18:12
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He's obviously talking about the first game, what with the "giving me a place to train"-stuff, though I was confused for a second too.
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Nov 26, 2015 12:41
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quote:"this is a delicious meal, far more refined than the person who invited us" this game has made me laugh more in an hour than most games do in a playthrough Yeah, there's truckloads of amusing lines throughout the game. And to think they locked up Olivier to avoid political incidents.
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Nov 26, 2015 15:33
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Okay, thanks. I did it this time with Agate + Zane and I mostly tried to burst them down one at a time with S-Crafts and Earth Lance and that finally worked. Uh...did you finish the quest? If so...It turned out that the recipe you found WAS the original recipe. Or rather, the recipe Radford dreamed of. The recipe DID have many variations, but the one Radford remembered (and wanted to eat) was the variation that his childhood friend on whom he had an eye in his youth used to cook for him...Mrs Bloom being that childhood friend.
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Nov 26, 2015 20:34
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That's really underlevelled for that point. The only way to stay that low is to pretty much ignore every monster and every chest and go straight to the bottom of the final dungeon.
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Nov 27, 2015 09:00
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Regarding the spoiler-tagged part: Yes, he does. After Weissmann teleports away and the other three characters rush towards Loewe, Kevin delivers a "..." line and quietly slips away without saying anything while the others are occupied with mister silver-hair.
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Nov 27, 2015 21:54
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Second Chapter - Does anyone know the song name and the number for the ED6xxx.OGG for the song that plays in Bose (Chapter 5) after the market incident? and the same for the new Ancient Dragon's Lair dungeon later on? The songs you're looking for are: Town where the lights went out. (ED6111.OGG) and Visions (ED6556.OGG)
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Nov 28, 2015 11:28
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I recall that Estelle's canon bracer rank was B...which might explain why SC gives you such a horribly small error margin to reach the A-rank. Reaching A-rank doesn't require max BP, but it does require you to get 380 of the 382 available BP, so for pretty much all intents and purposes, you need perfect BP. Getting a single question wrong during certain choice points is enough to screw you out of the A-rank. In addition to getting an armor that has a crapton of defense, the reward you get in 3rd for importing with bracer rank A is apparantly the equivalent of a gladiator belt...which does admittedly sound pretty useful.
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Nov 28, 2015 14:47
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quote:They really didn't care too much about hiding that one, did they. No, they didn't. That might have been kind of the point. Kevin's words after the robot battle on the Gurune Gate wall were kind of indicative on the chapter on the whole: "It's easy enough to fool someone who already wants to believe." Renne was as suspicious as the letter from "Joshua", but Estelle fell for it because she didn't want to believe that Renne was an Ouroboros agent and that Ouroboros employed more child soldiers aside from Joshua. Even after Amalthea mentions she got manipulated by a little girl and Renne reveals her presence, Estelle remains in denial and tells her "let me help you get down from there" until Renne pulls out the scythe and confirms she's an enforcer. It's a little throwback to the pre-prologue part where Estelle also remained in denial until the truth became impossible to deny. This is kind of the other side of the coin of Estelle's relentless optimism and insistence to see the best in people no matter what.
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Nov 29, 2015 01:59
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I actually kind of liked the high risk/high reward of Wild Rage 2. Agate's kind of meant to be a craft spammer and 50 CP gave you 3 crafts at most before you had to spend another turn recharging. I never crunched the numbers while using him, I simply made sure not to use it unless his life bar was full or nearly full and since most of my characters have water quartz equipped, getting him out of the critical zone didn't take too much effort. It WAS ridiculously broken and abuse-prone though, so I can see why they dialed the craft down to 60 CP for 30% HP in Zero.
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Nov 30, 2015 08:28
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Yeah, the Carnelia series is in the Erebonian Embassy. Baral obviously never had access to that place.
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Nov 30, 2015 17:15
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At least they were kind enough to let you know in advance there was gonna be a boss (and thus no further opportunity to explore the tower) by placing an orbment charging station right next to the final teleporter.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:04
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Some Numbers posted:Trails in the Sky and SC were originally made for the PC, so there was existing PC code for XSeed to use for the English versions. Not completely from the ground up, since Trails of Cold Steel makes use of the PhyreEngine, an engine made by Sony that has built-in support for PS3, PS4, Vita and Microsoft Windows. But I'm fairly sure you'd still have to go through the entire project, remove all PS3/Vita-related system calls and replace them with equivalent directX calls. It's hardly an impossible task, there have been quite a few PhyreEngine games released over the years and several of those were given PC ports. The issue is that one of the two parties involved would have to handle the porting process and neither of the two parties is all that suitable. - XSeed only has one programmer, Sara, who handles ALL their PC-related projects and unless we find some means to clone her, it's unlikely she'll be able to handle porting an entire Trails games to a different platform on her own, even if she knows her way around PhyreEngine. - Falcom has around 50 employees, but those are all console programmers. They haven't done any PC development in years and Sara once mentioned that she now has a bigger understanding of the workings of the PC Ys and Trails games than anyone at Falcom. Also Falcom isn't really that large and prefers to dedicate their programmers' time to the creation of new games. Since PC gaming is a niche of a niche in Japan, they have no incentive to put their own people on the porting process either, since Cold Steel for PC probably wouldn't sell well enough over there to cover the costs. - Ideally, a 3rd party with experience in PhyreEngine games on PC would handle it, but who would finance the whole thing? Falcom or XSeed? If either Falcom or XSeed were a bit larger, we'd have seen a PC version of Cold Steel already, most likely. As things are now, the odds of seeing Cold Steel on PC at this point are still very slim.
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Dec 4, 2015 09:16
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Slur posted:None of us are saying that SteamSpy is an accurate way of converting over the sales of a product on Steam or not here, nor are any of us pretending to be financial experts due to it. However, as you implied there, the game has sold less than 100k copies. That's kind of unfortunate considering the 2-3 year localization cycle this was in, don't you think? And didn't FC sell 100k in 2 weeks? Heh, the article that mentioned FC sold 100K since its release was actually from March this year, 8 months after the game hit Steam/GOG. I think some number-double-checking is in order before jumping to conclusions about the game's failure and demise of the series.
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Dec 6, 2015 23:54
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Yeah, when the players of the original Japanese PC release finally fought him after the tricky battle against him on the balcony in FC and several acts of badassitude and hype in SC and realized he was actually kind of easy, they complained and Falcom released a patch that buffed his stats, making him faster, tougher and hit harder. That patch was incorporated into the PSP port and XSeed's version afterwards.
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Dec 7, 2015 07:16
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Regarding the tarot numbers: - Death is also the card of transformation, rebirth and change. Joshua undergoes several "transformations" over the course of his life, going from a carefree and innocent kid to a soulless assassin to a smart-rear end yet mild-natured bracer and back and forth between the latter two, so the card of change fits him quite well. - The Devil is the card of bondage. (not that kind) It commonly depicts a man and a woman chained to the devil's seat. One of its meanings is a person being "chained" by something, the past for instance, and unable to move on. This does seem fitting for Renne, who until she meets Estelle, seems bound and unable to move on because of her own demons from the past. Regarding the blog post, I've been part of voice recording sessions myself and I can confirm the crazy amount of work that goes into the preparation and coaching the VA's. It's cool to see how much time and dedication XSeed put into it to make sure the dub's quality is as good as possible. It's not gonna change the minds of anyone who's part of the "I don't care about the effort, NO ENGLISH EVERRRRRRRR!"-crowd intent on boycotting the game, but it might ease the minds of those still on the fence.
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Dec 12, 2015 12:41
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It wasn't the power of "bonds" that led to Weissmann's downfall. Weissmann even brags that the power of friendship did nothing to prevent Joshua from falling under his spell again nor is it enough to shake him out of it. And he's right about that. If Joshua had just trusted in his love for Estelle and nothing else, he would have woken up from his trance with Estelle's blood on his hands. What saved the day was Cassius, Kevin and Joshua succesfully reading Weissmann's personality and using that against him. I doubt we'll ever see the concept of people achieving things through teamwork being deconstructed in favor of the concept of every man being a bootstrap-pulling island. The latter just doesn't feel like an extremely appealing concept. ...maybe that makes me a commie.
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Dec 15, 2015 23:58
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Not to mention it's a good show of support towards XSeed.
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Dec 18, 2015 06:54
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It would actually be more akin to playing a 40-hour game in preparation to a 80-hour game, more on both counts if you take the time to explore and keep tabs on NPCs. These aren't games to play if you don't feel you have time to invest in them.
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Dec 18, 2015 15:13
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Slur posted:I feel a deep level of nervousness in that we aren't going to get CS3, and be left in the west with a cliffhanger worse than any in gaming history. Seeing that it's you saying this, I'm confident we're now certain to get CS3 since the universe has shown a consistent desire to prove your pessimism wrong time and again. Please don't ever change.
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Jan 1, 2016 16:40
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That's the generally accepted explanation. Both are true. Joshua's specialty is striking from the shadows and he has a tremendous advantage against targets are that unaware of him. But it's stated several times in SC that once he loses that advantage and is forced into the open, he's one of the weaker enforcers. Basically Joshua got the drop on Cassius and came close to striking a killing blow, but Cassius was able to regain his footing in time to turn the assassination attempt into a straight fight, which made Joshua's loss a forgone conclusion.
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Jan 2, 2016 11:36
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Infinity Gaia posted:drat man, if Hard is already meant for NG+, what the hell is Nightmare for? Well, in any case, if the curve doesn't let up I guess I'll just restart on Normal. Wish there was some way to skip cutscenes though. The original versions of the Trails in the Sky games had no difficulty levels. The only available level was normal. Difficulty levels were quickly-and-dirtily implemented into the PSP ports by simply putting in an across-the-board modifier of all enemy stats without much regard for proper balance since it was just a way to make additional playthroughs in New Game+ more challenging. Heck, in FC, hard and nightmare were initially only available on subsequent playthroughs. I suppose people complained about that, so in SC (and the patched FC) they were available from the get-go. Things do get slightly easier after the prologue, but it's still a bit of a slog. It wasn't until later games that Falcom started actually testing their difficulty levels to see how well they worked with fresh playthroughs. Anyway, SC is more challenging than FC and normal isn't particularly easy. (but not insanely hard either) You're probably best off starting on normal. No skipping cutscenes, unfortunately, though you can get through them fairly quickly by holding down the cancel-button to skip text.
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Jan 4, 2016 10:55
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Schera will be a mandatory party member for the next chapter and the game will briefly force you to play with an all females-party. With Schera locked to your second slot, you probably want to go with Zane/Agate as your physical attacker and Olivier as your mage. It's often a good idea to have a gender-balanced party since most pieces of unique gear are gender-locked. Anyway, it's hard to go wrong, though I'd suggest occasionally swapping members so all your party members remain somewhat leveled. Occasionally the game forces you to have certain characters along and I've already lost count of the amount of times I've heard someone cry out about how the game forced him to use characters who weren't part of his dream team and now they're too weak to be useful.
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Jan 5, 2016 08:54
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ImpAtom posted:God, I hated the plains. They are a cool idea but in practice just means everything takes 3 times as long to do as anywhere else. Eh, it wasn't too bad with horse riding + dashing. Plus I really loved the music track that played on the plains.
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Jan 5, 2016 23:07
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