|
Supremezero posted:Incidentally, there's this old research on the subject that I don't remember what it's called, but it dictated that there was a certain age that people can start to get to know each other that lets them feel attracted to them romantically. It's since been debunked, but the point is, Estelle and Joshua fit it's bill. Elise very much does not. Speaking of Joshua and Estelle, though, I hope Falcom bring back a duo of protagonists for the next arc, cause those seemed to always benefit character development in their respective titles: Jurio was better with Chris, Avin was better with Mile and Rutice, Una was better with Forte, Kevin was better with Ries, etc. I guess Crossbell was kind of an exception to the rule by virtue of a relatively small and static cast, but I don't think future arcs are gonna abide by that model.
|
#
¿
May 10, 2019 23:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:19 |
|
|
Hwurmp posted:they look "strangely flat and inanimate" because it's a 2d drawing Reminds me of that one Amazon review of some Cold Steel title that called cutscenes with large cast presence "boring puppet shows". I think it's a pretty apt description.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2020 00:05
|
|
|
Crow is like a lovely attempt to followup on a character like Randy - with none of the believability in his writing and story arc.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2020 00:27
|
|
|
MythosDragon posted:On the Crow discussion there's one major thing you need to take into account, CS1 clearly defines the time taken, and while the game skips over 90% of it, it still happens, so Crow lived and bonded with everyone every timeskip in addition to the content we actually saw. It took less time for Joshua to fall in love with Estelle(Who can blame him), so our equally bleeding heart class 7 would totally value that bond. Well, the difference between Joshua and Crow is that Joshua actively sought to avoid bringing harm to Estelle by leaving. Crow, on the other hand, led a terrorist group that kidnapped Alfin and Elise, helped the Noble Alliance take over Thors, threatened to attack Ymir with the Pantagruel, et cetera. For Class VII to still hold a largely positive view of the guy after these incidents and just be sad that he's not with them is rather silly. Crow doesn't seem particularly remorseful of his actions and even his backstory doesn't justify the lengths he took to carry out his revenge against Osborne. Cold Steel's fixation with friendship and camaraderie becomes this preachy platitude the more the Cold Steel arc goes on and Crow is a good example of that. There's also the popular fan theory Crow and Rean's dynamic is the remnant of a love story between two canned protagonists that never made it into the final version of Cold Steel 1. The blonde girl here was supposed to be the protagonist and the black-haired boy was going to have something akin to Crow's role in the story. 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2020 01:39
|
|
|
Trails' tendency to keep everyone but red shirts alive has gotten pretty ridiculous.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2020 03:41
|
|
|
I think the only character in the series with an on-screen body count is Shirley. For everyone else, it's either implied, mentioned in their backstory, or they simply don't kill anyone.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2020 04:33
|
|
|
Ao no Kiseki is where the trashy pandering really took root. Previous games had some minor things here and there, but Ao cranked up the fan service considerably with stuff like the beach episode intermission.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2020 14:02
|
|
|
I'm suddenly reminded of this old discussion about Angie where someone theorized that despite her flirting with every girl in sight, she actually had a thing for George, given how much the two hung out alone in Thors' orbal factory. I'd go in more detail, but uh... spoilers for the second half of the arc.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2020 15:19
|
|
|
The number of "<insert name here>..." lines and giggles at the beginning of sentences in the Japanese scripts of Trails games is bonkers.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2020 17:43
|
|
|
CS2 is a lot easier to like if it's your second ever Trails title (after CS1) or if you've never played 3rd, Zero, or Ao like everyone else in the west circa late 2016. Otherwise, it's kind of a mess.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2020 21:26
|
|
|
Veryslightlymad posted:For real though, can we take a moment to talk about how CS3 is a game that came out of loving Japan and got away with a sequence where the protagonists discover that the government has covered up a massive atrocity and war crime and every member of the cast is of the opinion that the coverup is evil. Well, to be fair, the government themselves weren't the perpetrators of the atrocity, but rather a small and generally maligned faction of nobles seeking to move up in the ranks with war trophies.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2020 22:32
|
|
|
Hey, you never know. Some Space Engineering grad student at Columbia might have really liked Kenny Loggins!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2020 19:02
|
|
|
I don't know if NISA is even gonna bother with Zero and Ao, honestly. The Crossbell games seem to find the best ways to come out at the worst times. Even if someone had localized them shortly after their Japanese releases, they would've done so at the tail end of the PSP's life cycle and the peak years of its custom firmware piracy scene. The PSP's software sales outside of Japan were horrendous, so it's no wonder nobody wanted to work on those games. Then Falcom kind of forced XSeed's hand with Cold Steel cause they wanted those games out abroad as soon as possible. And now we're near the end of the PS4's life cycle, three games into CS in the west, and NISA are likely already busy with Ys IX in addition to CS4.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2020 15:13
|
|
|
Red Red Blue posted:PS5 is backwards compatible isn't it? It's not a matter of availability. It's just that most people who care about Falcom's IPs are gonna be more interested in their new releases rather than ports of decade-old games. NISA would most likely want to focus on the former than the latter since it'll make them more money.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2020 18:20
|
|
|
I don't get Kondo's fanboyism for LoH3. Almost nothing happens in that game. It has riveting story sequences like... talking to people around town to get ingredients for a cooking contest and uh... talking to an old lady in a swamp to get a new string for some traveling bard's lyre.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2020 22:20
|
|
|
Metroixer posted:Not sure what you mean this sounds great. What I mean is that most of LoH3 is a soporific borefest. Most scenarios in the game up end up feeling like BP/DP/AP fodder requests from Trails, but with none of the cool world building flourishes that makes those fun the in the latter. It's one of the few JRPGs I've played where I'd firmly say that the story is low key to a fault. It's very hard to get invested in the world and characters in that game.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2020 22:56
|
|
|
MythosDragon posted:First of all its a game from 1994, right before the big console switch that nearly killed Falcom, so Falcom was still a household name in Japan. Which obviously does wonders since Falcom was just as popular as Enix and Square before that. ...no they weren't. Falcom was long past their prime by 1994. The vast majority of their senior staff had quit by 1989 thanks to their founder and ex-president Masayuki Kato being a greedy dickhead. By the mid-90s, they were already a niche developer mostly relegated to the otaku gaming market on NEC platforms like the PC-98 and PC Engine.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2020 01:16
|
|
|
MythosDragon posted:Really now? I honestly knew nothing about that. I just attributed the death of PC gaming in japan to the playstation due to it ending Nintendo's near monopoly on consoles which lead to more options which lead to people saying "eww non dedicated gaming devices". I've also never seen a sega console in my life so I forgot they exist. Falcom's decline didn't really come part in parcel with the decline of Japanese PC gaming. Hell, the only reason they stayed in that market is because Masayuki Kato wanted them to. You can attribute a lot of Falcom's failings to his poor management. He's very much an old fashioned bean counting business executive who cares more about pleasing shareholders and his bottom line than supporting his creative staff. Back in the 80s, he didn't give kickbacks or salary increases when Falcom's games surpassed sales expectations. He also forbade Falcom's developers from working on console games for quite a few years, thinking the he could rely on third party ports to cover that market. He also hosed up Ys III's development, or rather the development of an original side scroller title that got turned into Ys III at the last minute. After Ys III released to mediocre sales and reception, many senior developers had grown tired of Kato's poo poo and all but four quit Falcom before 1989 was over. Needless to say, this mass quitting spree dealt a massive blow to Falcom as a company - one that I still think they haven't recovered from.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2020 05:09
|
|
|
MythosDragon posted:Thanks for the history lesson, can't find anything like this anywhere. I first heard about the fiasco in this video, which includes a bunch of interview bits from former Falcom and Hudson employees that went into it. Some people in another Falcom community managed to corroborate it with other interviews and publications. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxbq1uxGHcA&t=803s
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2020 06:07
|
|
|
Ys Book I & II are definitely worth it if you can stomach old games. And yeah, Dark Fact is way less bullshit compared to his Eternal/Chronicles counterpart. Dawn of Ys is even more worth it. That game is genuinely fantastic and probably the best bump combat Ys overall.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2020 14:32
|
|
|
Tesseraction posted:Still need to find a way to play Azure that works. People are doing further fixes to the PC version as we speak. Unfortunately, there's no legitimate way to buy that version right now. Worst comes to worst, you can always emulated the translated PSP original.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2020 15:40
|
|
|
Nothing's stopping you from discussing Ys VIII here.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2020 01:54
|
|
|
Play Dawn of Ys. It's really good.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2020 19:17
|
|
|
Amppelix posted:really??? Really really!
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2020 20:32
|
|
|
What about his cousin O'Freeze?
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2020 22:59
|
|
|
It only gets better from there. The second half of that game is peak Kiseki.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2020 13:48
|
|
|
Nate RFB posted:There are times in Ao when I ponder why people bother playing other video games. 
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2020 22:19
|
|
|
Mirello posted:There's one big problem: no Haze quartz! Actually, Ao has one but it doesn't work. Constantly getting into random battles really slows down the pace of the game, and theres so much bullshit they throw at you at the end. Why not just set Elie or Dudley as your party's leader, stunlock enemies with a ranged field attack, and walk by?
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 01:04
|
|
|
Yeah, at least half the songs from the Zero no Kiseki Super Arrange Version album are used in Ao no Kiseki.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 19:30
|
|
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:Now more than ever, I feel like Cold Steel 2 is an unnecessary and outrageously padded game. They could have easily fit everything there into an additional chapter of CS1, as Ao demonstrates. On one hand, I agree that CS2 has a lot of problems with its writing, pacing, and excess of menial dungeons and side content, but I'm not sure you can easily compress CS1 and CS2 into a single game without shrinking the cast and rewriting a few significant parts of the story.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2020 08:16
|
|
|
Endorph posted:cold steel was their first full 3d trails game and they have deadlines to hit, and the team was clearly inexperienced at full 3d because they managed to make a game that looks like freaking trails of cold steel a laggy mess. i doubt it was anything resembling a deliberate choice on their parts. How could Falcom be inexperienced at fully 3D games when they already released Gurumin, Xanadu Next, Zwei 2, Ys Seven, Nayuta no Kiseki, and Ys: Memories of Celceta prior to Cold Steel? Not to mention most of the character and enemy sprites in the Trails games come from converted CG models.  Granted, there were major development problems with Cold Steel. Falcom had so much trouble with the Phyre Engine that Sony had to step in and help with Cold Steel's development directly. It also didn't help that the Erebonia arc went through a number of scrapped drafts, including ones where it was meant to immediately follow the Liberl arc instead of Crossbell. Idkbutlike2 fucked around with this message at 13:39 on May 16, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 16, 2020 13:34
|
|
|
Tesseraction posted:Ehh, I get what they mean though - those are fixed camera.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2020 14:21
|
|
|
MythosDragon posted:This is actually a HUGE plus. I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but Falcom's use of canned battle animations during cutscenes is pretty bad.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2020 18:00
|
|
|
The Pantagruel section in CS2 is one of my least favorite moments in the entire series. It's such a lovely rehash of Estelle's stay on board the Glorious.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2020 14:07
|
|
|
Amppelix posted:??? that doesn't make any sense (CS2) The Pantagruel section pretty much encapsulates a lot of what I don't like in CS2's writing. First, there's Crow's entire backstory dump and how easily Rean is moved by it, despite all the lovely stuff that he's done. Then there's going around and casually chatting with every antagonist in the arc like they're coworkers in a break room, which I feel is tone deaf as gently caress given the situation. Like Rean, some of these people attempted to murder your friends on multiple occasions and just threatened to attack your hometown. What the hell are you doing humoring their conversations? And to top it all off, you get this painfully cheesy power trip escape sequence where Rean suddenly gains the ability to jump twenty feet in the air and do ninja kick flips around veteran jaegers. It's sooooo bad.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2020 14:37
|
|
|
Endorph posted:And for real if you dont like that bit i dont think trails has anything to offer you besides town npcs updating their conversations with 17 variations of 'i like apples' Well, those NPC conversations and such can lead to a bunch of entertaining subplots and lore bits. One of my absolute favorite moments in the series is from an optional event in Ao where you're asked to look for Reins from the Crossbell New Service after infiltrating Crossbell City in the final chapter. You manage to track him down to an unused Geofront facility near the Old Dragon Inn. Turns out, he's an undercover agent working for Richard and has been using a newer version of the anti-orbal shutdown phone that Professor Russell invented in SC to relay information back to Richard, who's currently on a business trip to Altair. Needless to say, I had the biggest poo poo eating grin on my face during that whole conversation. It's little things like that which the series special to me. EDIT: Fixed one bit of lore I got wrong. Idkbutlike2 fucked around with this message at 16:49 on May 17, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 17, 2020 16:44
|
|
|
dmboogie posted:it felt like a scene that should have been tailor made to let Estelle stand strong on her own for once but nope, gotta give Joshua the spotlight back. What? Most of SC leading up to that point is all about Estelle learning to stand strong on her own. And immediately after it comes the famous beach scene. Plus, it's kind of absurd to expect Estelle to stand up against all of Ouroboros on her own. Even Joshua technically couldn't do it.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2020 21:39
|
|
|
Clarste posted:They have nothing against Rean, and Rean has nothing against them, and that makes sense to me. What do you mean he has nothing against them? At the very least, he's got a bone to pick with the ILF, who tried to kill him and his classmates on multiple occasions, committed multiple terrorist attacks during Class VII's field studies, kidnapped Princess Alfin and Elise back in Heimdallr, and helped storm the Thors campus in CS1's ending. And then there's the Noble Alliance in general kidnapping Elise again and threatening to attack Ymir if Rean didn't come with them. This isn't some peaceful, diplomatic outreach on the NA's part. They're totally coercing Rean in this situation and he should be pretty pissed about it.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2020 01:39
|
|
|
ChiTownEddie posted:ALRIGHT. I finished Trails in the Sky 3 last night. I definitely enjoyed the story bites to flesh out characters and the world. Yeah, Zero can be bought on DLSite legally. You're poo poo out of luck for the PC version of Ao, though. IIRC that one is China only and impossible to legally purchase outside of it.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2020 14:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:19 |
|
|
ChiTownEddie posted:Well that's great. Does Zero end on a cliffhanger or is it alright to play just that without hating your life haha? I mean, if you're super anti-piracy, just purchase a console version of the game officially and then get the PC port via less-than-scrupulous means. You won't have to go through too many hoops to get the latter to work.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2020 14:52
|
|