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

I'm fine with major character details, at least, being hidden behind bonding events, as long as they're not directly story-relevant. Stuff like Randy's final event in Azure going into detail about the incident that made him desert the Red Constellation is fine since his story arc is complete without it, but it does serve as a nice optional capstone.

Were it up to me:

• Characters besides Rean and Lloyd would have bonding events with each other. I'm fine with them getting the lion's share, though, since they're protagonists.
• No limited bonding points. It would be possible to see all bonding events (except final ones, if they stick around) in a single playthrough. And even the final ones would at least be easy to set up and save-scum on a second playthrough.
• Remove the harem elements. If you want the protagonist to have a choice of romantic interests for the final bonding event then fine, whatever, I can tolerate that to an extent, but don't sabotage the rest of the game's writing just to enable it. It bothers me how the males and females of Class VII are barely allowed to interact with each other across gender lines at all (with the sole exception of Jusis and Millium) just because Aidios forbid Rean have anything even remotely resembling a romantic rival for even a single girl.

The Romantic Plot Tumor is definetly one of my most disliked part of the Cold Steel tetralogy. I'm glad it seems Kuro doesn't really lean into that from what I heard.

It's basically down to 3 girls, and it's more light than anything. One just happens to be a long-running character, so it's small, but very heated.

Is the long running character Renne?

Yep, though from what I can tell, it's seems to be more a sibling-like bond than anything though it could just be me.

I mean from what I saw and know about Kuro, Elainie seems to be the only real choice.

Honestly these multiple-choice romance options were always a square-peg-round-hole with the Trails franchise, they just don't work in a multi-game spanning series with a continous storyline. Rean is in a Schrodinger's Harem situation where he both hasn't banged anyone but at the same time banged every single girl in the Cold Steel arc.

And it leads to a situation where, because the story has to allow for every possibility, there can never be any kind of actual relationship progression.

Estelle and Joshua still based.

Decided to replay TOCS I in preparation for Reverie and here some things I noticed off the bat:

• I forgot how petty Jusis and Machias were in the first game. Honestly they really seem like those two classmates who argue constantly. Though in this case it's actually funny.
• Jesus are the models rough. I remember playing the games for the first time and my older brother told how ugly the models looked. I mean, is he wrong? TBF, the game came out around 2013 and was made for the Vita but still strikes me that Tokyo Xanadu, another PS Vita made by Falcom that came two years after TOCS I and II, looks way better than the first two games.
• I actually muted the first part of the prologue and kinda skipped because of THAT scene. Honestly, I hate when Japanese media does that, it's just plain cringe. Big shout out to Fujii Kaze's song damn for giving enough mental power to go through that scene.

Double post but apparently NIS just acknowledged the "Rean head pats" meme.

What strange day it is today.

It was literally the company's first 3d game.

I tried to explain that to my brother but he still inssited things like "its modeled by a 6-year old" and "are they stupid or something". Yeah, he is pretty mean to the game.

CSI has some good plot hooks early on, with the questions of what every student's story is, but they really didn't pick good ways to start off with Alisa and Machias.

Zero IMO is probably the slowest start from introduction to things actually happening, but the first CS really relies on the cast as a crutch harder than any other first game as motivation. There's being a fresh starting point, and then there's just not giving much context to anything that's really going on in the wider continuity.

Machias's intro was fine. When I first played through the game I thought the choice you made at the start was going to affect a lot more.

If anything Machias's intro made it seem like he would be more involved with the reformists.

Compared to the way other vita games looked... it was a lot better than most.

Edited by Memers on May 3rd 2023 at 3:12:24 AM

Yeah, Machias was largely forgotten after the second chapter of CSI, and the "Reformist Faction" barely even felt like a thing, since it apparently consisted of Chancellor Osborne and Machias' dad.

It was more than that, the military, Heimdallr's populous and quite a large portion of the common people were the bulk of the Reformist faction support. Just well... normal people are normal so they don't get that big of a focus.

I just realized something: How the hell did Rex manage to get photos of Ouroboros' members without getting killed?!

Honestly, I could see Mariabell and Shirley finding him funny.

There was a post on that just today over on Falcom's subreddit.

Shirley and Mariabell are posing for the photo so I guess they are happy to be photographed. Still really impressive that Rex had the balls to approach them in the first place and enough rizz to convince them to pose.

That post actually made me realize that.

The most shocking is defo Elise. Im surprised that Rean didn't kick his ass when he gave him the pic.

Pretty sure that's one he sends during the first act, so Rean isn't around to kill him for it.

But I wouldn't be surprised if sensing that photo being taken is what caused Rean to finally break his chains and begin escaping the Black Worshop.

I could see that happening

Man, Zero really isn't in any hurry for its story. I'm up to Chapter 3 - almost 30 hours in - and it still feels like I'm waiting for the real plot to start.

Get used to waiting. Things pick up near the end, but it's mostly setup for Azure.