Trails of Cold Steel II: Do Archaisms Dream of Creepy Sheep?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Trails of Cold Steel II: Do Archaisms Dream of Creepy Sheep?

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

It begins!

Aw, you didn't go with my suggestion to take the bonus mira and sepith. Prepare to be strapped for supplies for much of the game!
And along those lines, you will be wanting the Extra poo poo Free DLC packs at some point. Probably not all the Zeram Powders and Capsules, but some. (Even for the most overpowered bosses I only needed to throw around one or two.)
Crafts cost more CP in this game because frankly they were spammable in CS1 with the tools you had. CS3 made the average cost more expensive still, so clearly they're still very good in CS2.
While Celine is in theory the more knowledgeable party here, Rean's very right to call her out for obscurantism when he'd been the prospective Awakener for months.
"Are we next to Ymir?" I'm guessing they would have put a whole CS1 dungeon here in the cancelled intermission if not for reasons of budget.
Eh, Yun Ka-Fai isn't the only master of Eight Leaves One Blade. We've already seen several others in prior games; they get called Divine Blades for expertise in at least one form of the school. Yun Ka-Fai gets called Master because he's got that in all forms.
Celine and Elise are both voiced by Kira Buckland. Which makes the juxtaposition of the two roles back-to-back kinda funny.
This is not Duvalie's first appearance, she first showed up in Trails to Azure which runs concurrent with the events of CS2.
McBurn is a fashion disaster and is one of my three favorite characters debuting in CS2. (The others are Altina and Mx Rarely-Appearing-In-This-Game.)
I cannot think of a funicular now without conjuring up "Funicul�, Funicul�". Can we get Matt Mercer to sing it in his Prince Olivert voice?
Machias uses the carbine shotgun, and now that you mention it I don't think the longer model ever shows up beyond the mantelpiece.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2021 09:06

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:45

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Stabbey_the_Clown posted:

Totally doable without those, even in Nightmare. Especially doable on Normal. The biggest loss is the 200 of all color sepith from not reaching level 70 by the end of the first game.

I meant exactly what I said. :colbert:

That stuff isn't strictly necessary, but is extremely helpful to avoid tedium or frustration later on.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2021 19:35

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

END ME SCOOB posted:

lmao they upped it to 80 CP after this?!

edit: holy poo poo that's not a joke, how absurd

You can spam 30-40 CP crafts with some setup in CS3. There's a bunch more poo poo going on there and presumably CS4, and the games absolutely want you to use that stuff to grind encounters beneath your heel.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2021 11:29

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Something nice to see in CS2 is how everyone has actual fingers now; there are no longer PS2-era mittens on the generic NPC models.

Funny you should joke about Rean being Joshua, look in the free DLC stuff. :v:

That painting is indeed the Trojan horse, specifically a piece from the real-world 18th century by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo.

For me the TXE hot springs speech is less inspirational and more...introspective before the poo poo hits the fan. About summing up the current context of Kou's life before Chapter 6 and onward because nearly everything in the attract mode trailer has already happened. It still needs tightening up because, hey, TXE. But it's not trying to serve the same purpose.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2021 08:32

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Toval's outfit choices were inspired.
I'd consider Ymir to be less "fantasy Northwest Territories" and more "fantasy Minnesota". The first two games talk a lot about how all the onscreen action is in eastern Erebonia, after all, and the whole country is roughly the size of India from my sketchy estimations.
Rean has some ongoing issues regarding Elise, yes.
You can tell which side of an enemy is the front by the minimap.
Now that you mention it, yeah Ymir Valley is a bit obvious about being a video game dungeon. I don't think anything else is that overt but I may be wrong.
What warrants the comparison to Brandon Sanderson? I haven't paid attention to his works since Alloy of Law, honestly got bored by the workmanlike prose. (Then I got burned hard by Hannu Rajanemi; at least Brandon Sanderson can write a satisfactory ending.)
I really like the invasion of Ymir scene at the end of the prologue. It raises the stakes real quick into CS2 while not actually killing anyone (it takes effort to die in a Falcom game), it lets a villain chew the scenery, and it shows that even your opponents are all sorts of people with their own varied agendas.
How much would you like me to say on the Aion in Crossbell? (In spoiler tags, of course.)

# ¿ Feb 2, 2021 10:55

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Stabbey_the_Clown posted:

Personally speaking, I'd suggest absolutely nothing. Honestly, just the little which was revealed in CS 2 and the CS 3 demo was spoilerific enough. Related, the Geofront fan translation patch for the second Crossbell game is entering the testing phase.

With all due respect, this isn't your thread and that isn't your call. Despite being marketed as a new entry to the series, the CS games do assume increasing familiarity with the broad strokes of the Crossbell games. So I made an offer to give a bit of context (at most three sentences) as a least bad option. Level 1 Thief and END ME SCOOB are welcome to accept or reject it as they see fit, and whatever they say I will abide by the spoiler policies in the OP.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 01:44

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Tokyo Xanadu (well, Tokyo Xanadu Ex+) is a game I would like to see on LP at some point precisely because of what it is. Falcom tried to make a self-contained character-driven game as a Trails derivative. And while TXE has a lot of promise, it suffers from being made as a secondary project that got farmed out to a secondary translation team. (For all that NISA isn't Marvelous, they would still have made a more polished effort than Aksys and Ghostlight.) If the game had a few more months to cook, if the translation had a few more months to cook, then it would really shine instead of existing as a cracked gem in Falcom's library.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 10:47

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

If you want all the chests for the achievement or something, I recommend stapling that Detection quartz to Rean and never letting up until the game says otherwise.

I've been replaying CS3 lately and I have some thoughts on what I'd fix if I had a time machine and/or the writing crew's ear. There's one particular scene near the end of CS2 that I'll want to talk about, hopefully I can recall when that eventually comes up.

Damage "classes" are a bunch of obfuscating buzzwords, but IIRC the progression is roughly linear from D -> C -> etc. And even Class D damage is better than a regular attack.

Veryslightlymad posted:

~ Fie has an innate 30% evasion, by the way. Instead of 0. Before any other equipment, quartz, etc, she starts with an absolutely massive evasion score. Fie is arguably the best character in the game between this and her speed, and the competition from Machias/Alisa is as stiff as it was before, and the competition from Elliot/Emma is stronger than last game, because magic in CS2 is much better.

Fie never left my CS2 party unless trial chests or other game mechanics demanded it. Ironically Machias was probably my least used character; his moveset is just too gimmicky for the ultra-fast play I'm used to in the CS games.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2021 10:02

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Getting the extra AP for a speed victory is possible with what you have here, but it requires a certain change in strategy to pull off that you haven't figured out yet.

CS3 got better about informing the player of the exact victory conditions needed. Any time you're not required to beat everything in an encounter, it will tell you.

Veryslightlymad posted:

CS2 is just some kind of Mecha or Gundam show. Valvrave the Liberator maybe? I'm struggling to come up with a good one.

Lancer but with liberalism.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2021 05:48

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Irish orthography is an odd duck shaped by the politics and culture of its time. When it was first written in the Latin alphabet in the 8th century, the Irish language at the time had a bunch of weird rules like variable consonants that might have explained the mh <-> v business. A bunch of monks and scholars came up with it for the sake of quill pens on parchment, so any kind of diacritics were quite literally future tech. Since then the language has had 1200 years of changes like you'd expect it to have. Ordinarily you'd expect them to have a spelling reform, except that for several centuries the Irish had been colonized by the British. The end result was that the Irish language is now a minority language in its own homeland.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2021 11:08

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

How much has even been said about Calvard at this point in the canon? Most of what I can track down comes from Azure (maybe spoilers), Cold Steel 4, or Hajimari (mega spoilers). Calvard does have an obvious interest in siding with a bunch of federalist conservatives like the Noble Alliance over liberal centralists/imperialists in the Reformist Faction, but discussing things beyond that seems dangerous.

With what we have here, an easy parallel is how the US occupied the Mexican city of Veracruz for seven months in 1914. You've got a foreign power meddling in a border region to support their chosen faction, and while it was an affront to the local sovereignty it didn't unite them against the invaders. They were sensibly more concerned about beating up each other. Pancho Villa famously responded by saying that anything that hosed over the current president Huerta was fine by him!

# ¿ Apr 26, 2021 05:56

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Level 1 Thief posted:

I'm not sure what the actual term is, if there is one. Both Elliot and Gaius have extra pant legs hanging from their belts that go over their regular pant legs:

Gaius's are actually 3D modeled so it has to be intentional.

They definitely had some exposition in the embassy in Sky and from Zin in general, but I don't remember much of anything specific from it.

They're chaps. The term refers to any kind of leg covering that goes up to the waist/belt level without a seat. "Assless chaps" in particular are designed to accentuate this, but in more practical circumstances you might encounter riding chaps (like what Gaius has) or chainsaw chaps (made of kevlar to limit accidental damage). No, I don't know why Elliot is also wearing them.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2021 07:37

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

IIRC if you don't do this bonding event with Gaius, you pick it up "naturally" when he reaches level 75. As you can tell he isn't quite there yet, and you aren't expected to get him there until sometime in the next chapter.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 04:47

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Veryslightlymad posted:

I have never used hit quartz outside of characters that start with one, and even then, I replace them as soon as I find a decent quartz. This should... Stop being a problem soon.

It never does stop being a problem, and even though stapling a +hit quartz or accessory to all physical attackers is annoying it's still better DPS than generic STR+30 or +50 quartzes by endgame. More generally I hope Falcom corrects this problem so that +hit is either baked into characters or not so crucial to builds, but until then them's the breaks. "Feats Should Be Nice, Not Necessary" is a surprisingly old problem.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2021 07:10

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

secretly best girl posted:

I have definitely been eyeballing the Valimar kit. A large part of what's stopping me is a roommate is playing CS1 slower than we did and I don't want a thing around which is a walking spoiler.

You may as well buy the kit anyway and hide it until they finish the game. Once they do so you can invite them to help out with construction! :getin:

# ¿ Feb 17, 2022 19:57

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Hwurmp posted:

the girl Fie mentions is in Azure and the next two games, and is awful

fukken heather misquoter lmao

She's not the worst person in CS3 only by virtue of her not showing up much.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2022 19:52

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

secretly best girl posted:

I would just like to state once again for the record after our latest recording session: loving Crossbell

Ah yes, you saw that. Wait until you get to Cold Steel 3 where the text all but gets in your face with "have you played Crossbell or read Kiseki Wiki to get the context here?"

# ¿ Apr 18, 2022 12:49

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Cyouni posted:

Altina is great. "You most assuredly would go splat and die."

Altina is tied for my favorite CS character with Aurelia. :allears:

I don't think the writers intended to give her a certain personality trait (take a guess), but I am all on board for some representation through Death of the Author.

# ¿ May 18, 2022 15:49

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:45

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Bottom line is, the Cold Steel series kinda suffers from a case of "writers making it up as they go".

# ¿ Aug 1, 2022 15:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Trails of Cold Steel II: Do Archaisms Dream of Creepy Sheep?