Falcom thread (Trails, Ys, Xanadu, etc.)

[toxicitizen]

None of their games generate enough discussion here to justify dedicated threads but might as well have one covering all things Falcom. If only so Mal and I can stop derailing other threads. Also, I guess threads don't have subtitles anymore, uh? That's a shame, for once I had one I kinda wanted to use. 

 

Anyway, currently confirmed upcoming releases:

 

Trails of Cold Steel II. PC. February 14th.

 

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. Indefinitely delayed on PC because NISA sucks

 

 

Out now:

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

Edited January 27, 2018 by FLD

[Mal]

I've forgotten about Tokyo Xanadu. While Xanadu Next was a fine game, it just doesn't generate quite the same pull for the Xanadu series as the games in the Ys or Trails series. Besides, I don't think you can judge how Tokyo Xanadu will be like based on Next. They're pretty set by themselves, like Final Fantasy, from what I recall. From what I've seen, Tokyo is close to a Platinum game or more like God Eater in tone. Next was a dungeon crawler in ways similar to Ys (Ark, Origin and Oath) but slower and more moody. Tokyo should be at least worth a shot. It's just a bit troubling that Tokyo and Cold Steel for that matter is more based on school and, for a lack of a better term, modernity. They're trying to be hip.

[FMW]

Okay, here's a question. I tried (finished) Trails in the Sky FC and didn't like it. The reason is that the combat was slow but easy without many interesting risk/reward decisions, the dungeon level design was just really bottom of the barrel featureless hallway stuff, and the story was about two teenagers with super obvious crushes on each other that are ashamed to admit what's obvious to the player from minute 7. That's one of the worst anime clichés, and both main characters have a SEVERE case of it. Also the game doesn't let you play for like 10 minutes ever without stopping to talk about every single little thing.

So Legend of Heroes isn't for me. That's fine. What about Ys? By reputation that's much more of a gameplay focused franchise. Given my specific complaints with Legend of Heroes, would Ys fit my criteria for fun better? I like challenging snappy combat with good level design and minimalist story (I tolerate high story quantity only when it's good). I like atmospheric music, I like meaningful customization, and I like simple controls. Any chance Ys is for me?

Edited April 30, 2017 by FMW

[toxicitizen]

Well, you clearly have terrible tastes, so probably not?

But yeah, Ys is much more gameplay focused with little to no story (although that's been changing in recent entries). It's all about fast-paced action-RPG gameplay and sweet music. The only advice I can give you here is grab either Ys: Oath in Felghana or Ys Origin on Steam when they're on sale and give them a shot. They both generally get large discounts during sales and are considered some of the best in the series. Felghana is only about ~10h long, has a fairly minimal story and solid gameplay. Origin has the same gameplay but is structured more like a dungeon crawler (the entire game takes place in one large tower that you're exploring floor by floor). Otherwise, watch some gameplay on youtube and see if it looks like something you'd enjoy?

One thing worth noting is that the upcoming Ys VIII is apparently the most story-heavy Ys game ever. People that have played the Japanese version jokingly refer to it as Trails of Ys, which is saying something.

Also, I just wanna point out that while Trails often starts out with characters that are based on obvious tropes and clichés (most egregious in Cold Steel), any fan of the series will tell you that they virtually always subvert them completely. The series has its reputation for stellar world-building and character development for a very good reason. While everything else you had issues with is entirely subjective, that particular complaint is way off the mark. Which, to be fair, you've essentially only played 1/3 of a game. SC isn't actually a sequel, it's the rest of the game you've started. 

[Mal]

Ys games are on sale on GOG so it's a good as time as any to give them a whirl.

For the series as a whole, I think the most major flaw of Ys' gameplay is just how clear cut of a difference one level up can make. This comes into play when dealing with normal enemies where one level up is all the difference it can be between not being able to kill them to being able to do anything to them or straight up murder them. Bosses are fine though since at that point you're essentially dealing with a puzzle and reflexes.

It should be noted that Origin has three playable character arcs. You have to play all three to get the real ending. Each character are built differently from each other so how they go about the tower are quite different. I think this is where the argument of whether Oath or Origin is better comes from. I would say that Origin is more varied but the boss designs are less refined, I suppose? In Oath you only play as one character, Adol the Badass (essence of the whole Ys story). In turn Falcom was able to tune the whole game around him.

With that all said, they're still fantastic games. I do a yearly replay of them.

3 hours ago, FLD said:

One thing worth noting is that the upcoming Ys VIII is apparently the most story-heavy Ys game ever. People that have played the Japanese version jokingly refer to it as Trails of Ys, which is saying something.

This should interesting. I wonder if Falcom are going to dive right into the lore stuff that they've been dancing around for so long. Like why is Adol is such a badass.

As for Trails, what FLD said about lore and character.

I also found SC to be harder. FC have a few things that you can do to easily overpower enemies and bosses. For example, Kloe's debuff move can stick to everything besides the last boss and it applies to both physical and arts damage. They're largely been rebalanced in SC. SC also rewards looking and planning ahead for gameplay and story which I don't recall in FC. 3rd seems to go even further and add in more gameplay elements.

Then again, if you don't like the foundation then anything built on it might not interest you.

[TheMightyEthan]

Cold Steel arrived yesterday, and I look forward to contributing to this thread.

[toxicitizen]

Have you already finished Persona 5? You're gonna get burned out on school life JRPGs, man.

I can't even imagine playing those two massive games concurrently or even back to back.

Edited April 30, 2017 by FLD

[TheMightyEthan]

I have no finished P5 yet, but I'm nearing the end and I want more.  Also I'm going on a trip at the end of the month and wanted something to play on my Vita, so this seemed like a good thing for that.

[Mal]

ONE MORE DAY

TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING -------------------- ^^^^^

Obvious spoiler for some stuff in the first two games.

I wonder if Kevin getting rebalance to be a more all-rounder. I had him as a tank healer that fire off okay arts. I could've tuned him to be the third best after Kloe and Oliver but still, it'll be odd to be separated from Estelle. I'm guessing Ries is going to be the offense now but she doesn't shine like the sun. Yet.

I also got to say, the weapons are getting more super, for a lack of a better term. I would say anime but ridiculous super weapons aren't only found in anime. It's not bad but it's odd to see after mostly grounded weapons.

Edited May 2, 2017 by Mal

[toxicitizen]

Really digging that opening theme for 3rd. Might be my favorite of the Sky trilogy. Although, I still think Cold Steel I has the best one.

Man, Falcom Sound Team jdk really know what they're doing. I get so fucking hyped listening to these soundtracks.

[toxicitizen]

Launch trailer! Hyyyyype!

 

[Mal]

Numerically it may be small but hopefully it's enough by week's end for internal murmurs of Crossbell localization at Falcom and XSEED. 

[toxicitizen]

Yeah, it's been in the top 5 on Steam all day. Steam's top sellers list works based on revenue. So, given an equal number of copies sold, a higher priced game should be ranked higher. Which means that to be above Prey it has to have sold at least twice as many copies in the same time period. The game's sales potential still has a fairly low ceiling but it seems to be doing decently all things considered. Hopefully it's at least doing better than SC did at launch. It's been a while but IIRC I think SC was somewhere in the 10k-15k range?

As for Crossbell, I'm probably being naively optimistic but I have a feeling that they might have actually started working on it. They got started on 3rd very quickly after SC and no doubt the translator(s) work on 3rd has been over for some time now. I'm pretty sure the same people worked on Cold Steel and 3rd and we know that Hatsuu has taken over as editor/producer for the entire Trails series. So, either they're working on Crossbell or that team is currently not working on Trails at all for the first time in over 2 years.

Another interesting thing is that we recently learned that Sara is no longer working on contract, she's now an in-house XSEED employee. Now, that wouldn't have happened unless they had programming work to do in-house. We know she's not working on the Cold Steel ports and it's probably safe to assume that she won't be involved with ports coming from Marvelous' Japanese side. That means XSEED have more non-port PC releases in the pipeline and Sara has almost exclusively worked on Falcom stuff before.

I really want to believe that Joyoland deleting everything from Greenlight a few months ago wasn't just a coincidence...

TL;DR: 

[Mal]

Cold Steel 3 releases in Japan on September 23rd. The wait begins. I expect one and a half years from now if XSEED works on it. NISA would be longer and any changes will be jarring. Falcom, please do no fuck this up.

And I realized that for people who only follow Cold Steel, they won't know who some of these characters are.

Edited May 9, 2017 by Mal

[toxicitizen]

Yeah, Falcom have this annoying habit of not giving their partners access to their games until after the Japanese launch. So, at the very least a year later for the english release. Then there's the possibility that it might be another massive script like SC, which would likely push it even further. That's just me speculating on script length but it has been 3 whole years since Cold Steel 2's Japanese launch. That's a hell of a gap compared to the single year between CS1 and 2.

On the bright side, that leaves us with plenty of time to wait for the PC ports and play them. It's also pretty much the first Trails game to be guaranteed an english release, so it's nice to not have to worry about that for once.

Gonna have to ignore all news relating to it for a while, though. I've already had something from Cold Steel 2 spoiled for me and I'd like to avoid any further spoilers...

[Mal]

3rd really hits a nice sweet spot in terms of difficulty. In SC I never traded in sepith for money and I did it quite rarely in FC. 3rd is pretty much right off the bat you need money and it appears to keep you quite money starved. The doors are quite rarer than board requests and you need certain character(s) to trigger them. Reviving is quite the feat at the moment since nobody has the revival art and the revival items are quite expensive.  I think I might be forced to use the cooking! I rarely used it in the previous games but I do recall I cheap sounding revival items in the recipe book... As for the battles, most of them you have to think as I resource manage so I don't get beaten back to base since I'm pretty under-equipped at the moment. I can hit hard but I also can quickly be overwhelmed if I'm not careful enough.

As for the narrative, I'm really enjoying it. I guess it comes with the territory of knowing these characters through two full length RPGs.

I should note though, 3rd's performance seems to be the worst of the three. I'll have to fine tune it but frames drops are kind of annoying.

Edited May 14, 2017 by Mal

[toxicitizen]

Yeah, it's a completely different beast. I had heard that it was the hardest of all the games but I wasn't quite prepared for how brutal it could get. The boss fight I stopped on last night was just... well, if I told you who it's against you would probably understand right away but let's just say I got utterly destroyed. Not even sure how to prepare for it today, honestly.

Personally, I'm not crazy about the new structure and main plot but the doors more than make up for it. I was kinda shocked by how insanely long the first sun door I did was. And I really love how there's a star door that's basically nothing but exposition and foreshadowing for Cold Steel. You wouldn't know it if you're playing the games in order, though. So, I'm really glad to have at least played Cold Steel 1 and it makes me wonder if I'm missing any obvious Zero/Ao tie-ins.

[Mal]

If you put it that way, I guess I have to prepare my anus since I have a feeling I know who you are talking about. 

Spoiler

Pretty sure he died but since we're fighting literal demons of Trails' Hell, it make sense Lawrence is around. Lawrence was the only one that gave me real trouble. Also for whatever reason he appears on a wallpaper art for 3rd. Then again this dream world can make whatever happen.  However, the Man in Black looks awfully a lot like Lawrence. He also knew Kevin's mentor and Ries' sister. She nearly beat his ass. Makes you wonder what took her out.

The structure is nice in that it allows for these expositions that otherwise cannot happen.

Spoiler

Like how else can you get Vander and Julia together? That was a nice fight. I needed to restart to barely beat Vander.

And yeah, that first door was really long but I enjoyed it. As more about the structure, I doubt you or anybody would've like a Grand Tour of Librel again. Only way I would do it is if we have full control of where to go and do like we did towards the end of SC. Being a bracer was fun.

[toxicitizen]

Hahahaha, nope. Now I really want to tell you just to scare the shit out of you. I'll just leave it in a spoiler tag and let you agonize over whether to click or not. All I'll say is this. The boss' identity might seem like a big spoiler but it really isn't. That person's presence in Phantasma isn't really a big deal considering the context and when you reach a certain area in a certain chapter, it becomes really obvious that you'll be running into them.

It's Cassius.

[toxicitizen]

I'm just about ready to head out to the final dungeon, I think I'm almost done wrapping everything else up. I really love how, unlike FC and SC, there's barely any truly missable stuff. You can backtrack to almost every single chest in the entire game and the achievement for the chest messages doesn't require all of them this time around. The only thing you could potentially miss out on is the books in the garden and that's easily fixed if you keep backup saves for every single chapter. The only achievements I'm going to be missing are the ones that require at least another playthrough anyway. I am not looking forward to my first Nightmare difficulty Trails run...

Also, star door 14 has some pretty juicy overall lore stuff. Make sure you do all of them, Mal! And goddamn, star door 15 is some seriously dark shit. O_o

No wonder Renne is so screwed up...

[Mal]

I'm hauling ass at a leisurely pace. I cannot get enough of the various doors.

But that fishing minigame. That's a crime against humanity. While rod and bait determines what collection of fish you catch, it's more or less down to RNG once you get hook one.

[toxicitizen]

Yeah, the last round is straight up bullshit. Felt like I totally lucked out when I got it. I had a good run and he had a bad one, that's all there was to it. Only tip I can give is to pay attention to which kind of fish can be used as bait for bigger ones and try to focus on catching as many of those as possible.

[Mal]

On 5/14/2017 at 7:58 PM, FLD said:

  Reveal hidden contents

It's Cassius.

 

Got up to this and I got to say, damn do I love the sixth floor. As for this...

Spoiler

I love how it's just him and no one else. Everybody else who's were powerful had some sort of help, like say Lawrence. Cassius is by himself. That's all that need to be said about the difficulty.

I probably will need to use Kevin's ultimate to block Cassius ult. I can probably predict his first one but his next one might be harder. 25-20% health probably since that's a trend I've noticed. Extra defense also wouldn't hurt too since even Kevin as a tank is just barely staying alive. I also debating if I should group up or split up. Julia and Kevin (arts) then Richard and Estelle (physical). There's a problem with splitting up since then I can't get everybody in Kevin's ult since Cassius' seem to hit the entire stage. Julia can shield herself though. Maybe Kevin just have to tank Cassius' ult.

Fun fight!

 

[toxicitizen]

25 minutes ago, Mal said:

Got up to this and I got to say, damn do I love the sixth floor. As for this...

  Reveal hidden contents

I love how it's just him and no one else. Everybody else who's were powerful had some sort of help, like say Lawrence. Cassius is by himself. That's all that need to be said about the difficulty.

I probably will need to use Kevin's ultimate to block Cassius ult. I can probably predict his first one but his next one might be harder. 25-20% health probably since that's a trend I've noticed. Extra defense also wouldn't hurt too since even Kevin as a tank is just barely staying alive. I also debating if I should group up or split up. Julia and Kevin (arts) then Richard and Estelle (physical). There's a problem with splitting up since then I can't get everybody in Kevin's ult since Cassius' seem to hit the entire stage. Julia can shield herself though. Maybe Kevin just have to tank Cassius' ult.

Fun fight!

 

I ended up having to abuse retry offset for that fight. Twice. It's that fucking brutal. There inevitably comes a point in the fight where if you're not able to finish him off very quickly it's essentially over. He just fucking wipes your party like it's nothing. It feels appropriate given who you're fighting but it's legitimately unfair lol.

But yeah, that plane has some pretty good character moments. And the way Silver Will starts playing just as he tells Richard "Defeat me." So good!

Edited May 19, 2017 by FLD

[Mal]

I just did it. Second try with the new build outlined above (decking them out for their respective roles). Though it went down a bit differently since...

Spoiler

Even the Divine Blade cannot get through Earth Guard spam by Julia and Kevin. Though it requires the team to be together. Additionally, there's no way you can out heal Cassius' damage output. With that said, the one time Cassius did his ult I didn't have any guard. It was a rush to get everybody healed up and for Julia to be defense buffed so she doesn't get one hit KO'd. The rest was just earth guarding or its equivalent, plus healing when needed. Richard did most of the damage with his Sakura ult which does 10k in damage and I can built it up quickly. I manage to get one critical for 20k (with Strike orbment). Estelle helped patch things up with buff, damage and heals.

Also, Silver Will is so good! Especially how this version starts.

Edit: Final chapter. I just got to figure out the the rest of the doors then I can finish the fight.

Edited May 19, 2017 by Mal