Trails franchise (Trails In The Sky, Trails Of Cold Steel etc)

Well, that's one more Trails game done with. Truly enjoyable.

Now back to complaining about the lack of games to play.

edited 28th Feb '18 4:52:40 AM by TerminusEst

Just finished the 3rd. Man, talk about a bittersweet ending. Not in terms of anything particularly sad happening in the ending, but it's a lot saying goodbye to the Liberl cast after spending so much time with them. I may not love all of them equally, but I'm sad to see them all depart through the gate.

BTW, Tita was a huge help getting through the boss this time on Hard. She was pulling 12 K damage with her Charge after applying Saint.

My only real complaint is the sheer insanity that is Loa Luciferia. Who thought that was a good idea?

It’s not a complete goodbye, everyone playable in sky has appeared in a future game in some form. Favs and disliked?

On to CS 2?

edited 1st Mar '18 3:30:36 AM by Memers

Were you playing at a high difficulty or something? Or perhaps didn't pick up the Lost Arts? That fight was no sweat, first try.

edited 1st Mar '18 10:37:49 AM by burnpsy

I don't even know what Lost Arts are. Beat it on my second try, by just using all the mirrors. Even then it got really close to TPK several times. Literally the only boss I had any real difficulty with.

edited 1st Mar '18 11:33:26 AM by TerminusEst

Estelle's speech was so great. It was nice to see her briefly take up the gauntlet after being on the sidelines. I guess that's a criticism I have for the 3rd, there's neat character interaction, but it drops a lot of interplay in favor of player choice, and narratively there's a lot of potential we don't get to see. Especially in the Garden, you can easily imagine a lot of characters mingling we don't get a look at. Like whatever's up with Schera and Olivier.

That would explain it. There are a series of optional fights you could have done earlier in the game that would give you quartz for Lost Arts. These could be used once per fight, each, for a broken effect with no wait time.

edited 1st Mar '18 1:46:59 PM by burnpsy

Yeah there are Bonus Bosses in act 2 that give you a level 3 quartz that can only go in attuned slots (IE a fire slot) that have an insane skill but literally take 100% EP, Like say sticking a skill that gives CP +100 and +30 CP Regen for 3 turns on Laura who doesn't use EP... spam S-crafts all day if she lands on a free spell turn.

The fights are FUN as well as pretty freaken hard.

They do do mingling though, bring 1 of the two characters you want to interact with and they will interject in on the conversation and occasionally just strike up entirely new convos. After every event I spend like 30 minutes bringing every possible party to every convo for unique lines and they happened really often, cold steel also does this an absurd amount when you can choose parties.

edited 1st Mar '18 5:42:58 PM by Memers

IIRC you can take measures to avoid actually spending 100% EP in any event. But yeah, free spell turns make it very ridiculous.

I did know of that, but I guess I gotta take the plunge and do a new game plus. Does difficulty selection effect minigames? I can't beat Josette's to save my life.

No, the minigames have their own difficulty options in them. EDIT: except for the arena.

Did you do CS 2 yet? if not I would say do that first then go back to TC and see all the refs.

edited 1st Mar '18 7:42:21 PM by Memers

Haven't even beaten the first CS yet.

First details of Cold Steel 4.

(Heavy Cold Steel 3 spoilers all over it.)

Yeah, staying the fuck away from there. I've not even played Crossbell yet! Really considering just taking the plunge and trying the rough patch.

A fan translation of Trails to Zero Evolution has released. It appears to be a far more cleaned up script than the beta that leaked for PSP, but is not the Geofront team's translation.

Unlike the beta script leak which was for PSP, you need a hacked Vita to play this one. There are no Vita emulators and this is a fan translation of the Evolution version.

Shit, so I will not be able to play it.

Hmm... I have a Vita but I'm not sure if hacking is risky in any way.

Hacking a Vita requires it to be on version 3.60. Unless you simply have not been updating your Vita, simply using the one you already have is likely not an option anyway.

Damn that really sucks. Ah, the things we do for what we love.

Alright, so I'm just getting into these games now. I actually started with the Cold Steel games, because while I actually do own FC on Steam (I haven't gotten around to actually playing it yet), they looked like the ones that were more decidedly up my alley. I do think this was a good decision - my only regret is that I didn't play the Liberl games before this, but I suppose I'll get to them soon.

I'm almost done with Cold Steel II now - all I have left is the Epilogue. My favorite strategy is to link Rean and Laura (who I romanced), use Overdrive on Laura's turn, have her buff the party with La Forte (optional, but it's useful to have some extra strength on everyone, I think) and then go for a 200 CP Radiant Lion with Domination equipped, then have Rean use Spirit Unification to keep up the pressure. This does a ton of damage.

I've also realized that I've been handicapping myself by not making more use of Jusis' Platinum Shield in boss fights. Something to keep in mind for the final dungeon, I suppose.

I've actually spoiled myself for...pretty much everything in the third game - I wanted to look up something about Angelica, and...well, it snowballed from there. I'm still excited to see it all play out, of course, and I'll try to avoid spoilers for Cold Steel IV when it comes out. Any guesses for when III will be localized?

It's probably a bad idea to follow this thread when I do want to avoid as many spoilers as I can for the Liberl games, even if I do know several important ones now (though to be fair, Beaublanc namedropped Joshua as someone who had left Ouroboros, so I probably would have figured that out eventually), but I'm willing to deal with it.

edited 11th Jun '18 8:13:41 AM by KarkatTheDalek

Oof, I can imagine how that went.

Yeah...

Here's hoping that's a fake-out.

Now, Victor, I'd be okay with dying (to the point where I sort of created a scenario in my head that either killed him or made it so that he couldn't wield a sword again), solely because I'm very interested in seeing how Laura will deal with it. Is she going to go full-on vengeance mode? Will she come into conflict with Alisa because her dad was responsible, or with Towa because George was involved? I mean, I don't want her to suddenly become a jerk, but she generally has it pretty together - even when the civil war broke out, she made it home with Emma, and unlike with Gaius, things were pretty peaceful there, and while she was worried about her dad, he's tough enough that she wasn't too worried. So I kind of want to know what she'll do when things go very wrong.

As far as the other maybe deaths go, while I like Toval, I'm not super-invested in him, so I can go either way. I actually didn't realize that Olivert was as important as he was - I just thought he was a supporting character in the Sky games that the heroes help out a bit, but apparently he's one of the protagonists? - so I do think that he could probably die in a less anti-climatic fashion.

edited 11th Jun '18 10:44:01 PM by KarkatTheDalek

Sorry for the double post, but I had an idea: would anybody like to guess what my LEAST favorite moment from the first two Cold Steel games was?

I’ll give you a hint - it was a side quest.

Going off on a limb: The Margarita one.

edited 12th Jun '18 6:52:18 PM by LordVatek