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The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Official Thread |OT|

Feel bad for Xseed with these shipping screwups. My Gamespot still doesn't have the game either, and I pre-ordered the damn thing just to help them out on getting a few copies into the store.
 

Syraxith

Member
My order from amazon has said "shipping soon" since last night; the delivery date is supposed to be tomorrow. I'm starting to wonder if I should be concerned.

edit: Nevermind, it finally shipped.

B.K. said:
I went to four different Gamestops today and none of them had any copies of the game.

When it comes to niche titles, I've given up on gamestop entirely.
 

Yuterald

Member
Syraxith said:
My order from amazon has said "shipping soon" since last night; the delivery date is supposed to be tomorrow. I'm starting to wonder if I should be concerned.

edit: Nevermind, it finally shipped.



When it comes to niche titles, I've given up on gamestop entirely.

When it comes to niche titles, Gamestop will carry a good majority of them, but you HAVE to reserve with them. Usually, stores will receive a few extra copies if the niche title is pre-ordered. Sometimes if there are no pre-orders Gamestops will receive a copy or two days/weeks later. I don't like Gamestop as much as the other guy, but they definitely carry more under the radar titles than say Bestbuy, Target, Walmart, etc. But if you are not shopping at those stores you are shopping on Amazon or Ebay.

Anyway, my Gamestop said by April 1st they should have my LE copy.
 
The Gamestop I made a reservation at straight-up lied to me and said the game doesn't release until April 1st, with an expected arrival date of April 2nd.

This is insulting, and it's also making me dread what'll happen to the game in terms of piracy. If I can't find an LE at Fry's, Best Buy or even Walmart then I'm just going to cancel my preorder and get the game off the PSN. It'll be less money for XSEED, but these delays are ridiculous for something I pre-ordered two months ago.

And then people ask me confusedly why Carpe Fulgur doesn't have plans to even bother with physical releases. Good grief.
 

jackdoe

Member
Canova said:
just download from PSN. you'll get to play it again on NGP.

UMD is dead
That was pretty much my line of reasoning. My PSP is no spring chicken; its screen is starting to fuck up and so is the battery. Rather than buying a new PSP when my old one dies, I'll just jump onto the NGP, which doesn't support UMDs.
 
Canova said:
just download from PSN. you'll get to play it again on NGP.

UMD is dead

I'd be right there with you on the PSN download train if Xseed didn't release their nicely down premium edition packages. Also S-E sucked me into buying physical releases of their recent games with their S-E Members points and Dissidia costume codes, jerks.
 

Aeana

Member
I'm pretty sad that the localization so far seems to suffer from the same problem as Ys 7: everybody pretty much talks the same way. Once again it feels like it's had some of its personality stripped away. Oh well. At least it isn't Engrish.

Also it's a bit annoying to see brackets used in place of double quotes constantly. I dunno what possessed them to do that.
 

DiscoJer

Member
Canova said:
just download from PSN. you'll get to play it again on NGP.

UMD is dead

Yeah, but on the flip side, Xseed made a batch of UMDs - if they don't sell, then we won't see the second chapter. It's one thing when a DD title doesn't sell well, but when it comes to physical media, they have to pay for it being made, as well as having to pay taxes on it if its unsold...

So it costs them money, basically, if they don't sell. As opposed to just not making anyway (w/ DD).

Not to mention, as the next chapter is UMD only (probably), they need to be able to convince retailers to carry it a year from now...
 
Speaking of the PSN, that's about ten thousand times less heartache than all this Gamestop nonsense. Also the script is pretty great so far, although I think I'm ruined for RPGs forever 'cause I keep thinking about how I'd handle a line. :x Not totally sure I agree on the voice thing all the time - there are some bits where it's a problem, but Estelle's definitely unique. I also can't really judge yet since I'm still in basically the prologue.

The brackets are really weird, though, I'll agree to that.
 

Hobbun

Member
SpaceDrake said:
The Gamestop I made a reservation at straight-up lied to me and said the game doesn't release until April 1st, with an expected arrival date of April 2nd.

This is insulting, and it's also making me dread what'll happen to the game in terms of piracy. If I can't find an LE at Fry's, Best Buy or even Walmart then I'm just going to cancel my preorder and get the game off the PSN. It'll be less money for XSEED, but these delays are ridiculous for something I pre-ordered two months ago.

And then people ask me confusedly why Carpe Fulgur doesn't have plans to even bother with physical releases. Good grief.

Same problem I’ve run into at my local Gamestop. They also have an April 2nd arrival date. They act like “Well, it must have been delayed everywhere.” I am “Uh no, the official release date is still March 29th.” Besides, why the fuck would the release date be delayed to a Friday? It would just be moved to next week.

That being said, I still prefer physical copy. I will use DD when I have to with NGP, but still prefer to getting physical copy over DD. Besides, as of right now, I don’t see SC being released digital due to the 2 UMDs.
 

Phenomic

Member
BadWolf said:
Is the story in this game any good?

As pretty much the a lot of the thread points out the story and the characters are apparently what drives the game.

Also, it got a 92 for story in RPGFan Review if you follow those things.
 

Gunsmithx

Member
Hobbun said:
. Besides, as of right now, I don’t see SC being released digital due to the 2 UMDs.

Well Xseed themselves(both in an interview and in an email) have said they still aren't sure how SC will be released, partly because they aren't even sure about UMD availability. They have also said they will try to get the code up on PSN. I've also wondered if there's some way to just put it on an NGP cart since I figure the game wouldn't be ready till this time next year with the amount of work to do on it.

Only a few hours into the game but I'm enjoying it so far, the script has been good and the characters seem to have alot of personality so I can't wait to see how they develop.
 

krYlon

Member
Playstation Lifestyle just gave this 8/10

"+ Addicting battle mechanics that will keep you coming back for more.

+ Huge world that has a deep and rich history, especially for a PSP title.

+ Relatable characters, that play an important part in a great story."
 

BadWolf

Member
Phenomic said:
As pretty much the a lot of the thread points out the story and the characters are apparently what drives the game.

Also, it got a 92 for story in RPGFan Review if you follow those things.

Awesome, thanks.

Can't really enjoy the genre without a good story so will give this one a shot.
 

Varion

Member
Like Phenomic said, the story and characters are the game. And they're excellent.

SpaceDrake said:
Also the script is pretty great so far, although I think I'm ruined for RPGs forever 'cause I keep thinking about how I'd handle a line. :x
That's desperately what I'm trying to avoid, heh. It doesn't help that as a former member of the translation project team I actually have translated a whole bunch of the lines before.

I'm past the prologue and on to Chapter 1 now, and on the whole I'd have to say I really like most of the dialogue. Estelle and Joshua in particular are coming out wonderfully, and their chemistry has survived completely intact. Some of the lines are just hilarious too.

I do have niggles though. The brackets thing is one. The dialogue having everything as numbers is another ("They might have gone up to the 2nd floor!"). The names are still the biggest one though, I don't know whether their translator didn't learn katakana at school or is just deliberately being contrary a lot of the time. I've posted a few of the character name changes already, but there are more, and I keep running into other term changes and such that as a series fan are driving me nuts (Sept-Terion to Septillion? Where did you get that from, it's an actual word that has nothing to do with this! It's even written as セプト=テリオン, so he should've known it isn't supposed to be one word.)

The fact that I can afford to complain about this kind of stuff should tell you it's in a completely different league to the earlier Legend of Heroes translations though - and it is, on the whole the editor at least has done a fine job, and the fact that some bits have made me laugh harder than they did in the Japanese is probably the biggest compliment I can give. And it's not like any of the name changes are going to bother the majority of the thread playing the game for the first time anyway.
 

Hobbun

Member
Gunsmithx said:
I've also wondered if there's some way to just put it on an NGP cart since I figure the game wouldn't be ready till this time next year with the amount of work to do on it.

I would much prefer XSeed kept the trilogy on the PSP as I doubt it will be at launch and not even sure when I will be purchasing one.

However, I would certainly understand if it went to the NGP due to how long it will take to translate the other two games (of the trilogy). And even though my preference is to see the three games remain on the PSP, my first concern is just seeing the games being localized, period.

I know XSeed has said they are making every effort to do so and the voices have already been recorded for the other two games of the trilogy, but nothing is a sure thing, especially in regards to localizing niche RPGs.
 
Aeana said:
The main character dialog is mostly all right, I suppose, but the NPCs are really bothering me.

To be fair, for the incidental NPCs we'd be talking about maintaining "voice" across hundreds of different actors across the entire game. Making sure everyone, including the incidentals, in Recettear had unique voice was a minor challenge, and that was a core cast of about ten characters with another half-dozen or so incidentals. I can't even imagine trying to keep what basically amounts to the population of entire cities straight and making them all read distinct from one another.

The one big complaint I have is the brackets, though, and the explanation XSEED posted on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/XSEEDGames) is something I... can't entirely buy. (I don't like dragging stuff out onto the wider Internet like this, but this is particularly weird.) The game "couldn't support quotes"? I can't even see how that's possible. Quotation marks are standard on pretty much every keyboard in the world, including Japanese ones; the keystroke and resulting bit-identifier are common to every operating system in the world. I find it impossible to believe the game can't recognize the quotation keystroke, and adding the actual symbol to the font-set, if it isn't there already, should be trivial and not at all hard to make legible, especially since Trails' font size is rather generous.

Let me put it this way: Recettear's font, which was built just for Japan at first, had quotation marks (and really full ASCII support) built in from the start. If a small indie group - not to mention everyone else in the industry, large to small - can manage quotation marks in their English version, why can't Japan's most venerable PC-centric developer pull it off?

It's not a huge thing, I suppose, but after a while it really starts to stand out as a polish issue. It's a good thing the rest of the game is so great, otherwise I might really raise a stink about it :V
 

Aeana

Member
They could have added quotes to the font if it doesn't have them. That's a dumb excuse. Better yet, they could have used a different font that isn't super terrible to begin with.

And SpaceDrake, they could have at least made sure that children aren't talking like adults.
 
I did kind of notice that in the one kid, at least, who you get the "shiny rock" for. It does seem a little inconsistent, as that one brat who wants to be Estelle's rival sounds his age.

I've mostly been satisfied with the incidentals in Rolent so far, though, especially in light of how terrifying I'd find it to work with that many characters myself. :x
 

Varion

Member
SpaceDrake said:
I did kind of notice that in the one kid, at least, who you get the "shiny rock" for. It does seem a little inconsistent, as that one brat who wants to be Estelle's rival sounds his age.
If you talk to his mother outside the bar it seems like they're a family of gigantic snobs though. Not really surprising he'd sound more mature.
 

Syraxith

Member
Delivered today and played up to beginning the Pezel farm quest. So far I'm really enjoying it! Battles are challenging (for me at least) which is refreshing. Five year wait was worth it, keep 'em coming XSeed.
 
Good, looks like my Gamestop will have my LE Friday morning. Also noticed they had Legend of Heroes: Tear of Vermillion for $5. I have heard bad things, but at that price why not.

Edit: Looks like the other Gamestop down the street had the other two PSP LOH games for $5 and $7. Thats four LOH games in one day. Pretty much got for completion sake, and if anything those three will be "charming" RPGs with good music. At that price I couldn't resist.
 
This is my first time playing a Legend of Heroes game, and I'm surprised with how enamored by it I am. I was expecting something a little more generic and a little less endearing, but it's really doing a great job of capturing that old-school 16-bit RPG nostalgia while keeping the pace fast and the quests (both main and side) interesting.

Also, I just realized how silly it is to say that the pace is fast when I'm about 10 hours in and still on the prologue. STILL.
 

Aeana

Member
KefkaTaran said:
This is my first time playing a Legend of Heroes game, and I'm surprised with how enamored by it I am. I was expecting something a little more generic and a little less endearing, but it's really doing a great job of capturing that old-school 16-bit RPG nostalgia while keeping the pace fast and the quests (both main and side) interesting.

Also, I just realized how silly it is to say that the pace is fast when I'm about 10 hours in and still on the prologue. STILL.
It isn't at all indicative of any of the Legend of Heroes games that came before it, anyway, which do in fact fit with your expectations.

Glad you're enjoying the game, though. I hope others can see how wonderful it is, as well.
 
Aeana said:
It isn't at all indicative of any of the Legend of Heroes games that came before it, anyway, which do in fact fit with your expectations.

Glad you're enjoying the game, though. I hope others can see how wonderful it is, as well.

Yeah, I've talked to a couple of my coworkers who played the previous ones for review, and they seem genuinely shocked that I'm enjoying this one so much. I'm kind of relieved to hear that the older ones are pretty widely considered a lot worse and it's not just my taste.
 

Aeana

Member
That's why I wish XSEED would not have used that name with this. Trails in the Sky would have been fine by itself. Legend of Heroes as a name is already ruined here thanks to Bandai's disasteremakes on PSP.
 
Aeana said:
That's why I wish XSEED would not have used that name with this. Trails in the Sky would have been fine by itself. Legend of Heroes as a name is already ruined here thanks to Bandai's disasteremakes on PSP.

So did Bandai actually fuck up the gameplay too in some way or was the translation just so atrocious that it wasn't worth gamers' time to get past it?
 

Aeana

Member
Basileus777 said:
Is there any way to tell which quests expire when? I had to load up an earlier save when a monster hunting quest timed out.
A good rule of thumb would be to do all quests before you leave one town to go to another. Otherwise I don't think there's a way to tell; you just need to prioritize quests that say to hurry in the description.
 
KefkaTaran said:
So did Bandai actually fuck up the gameplay too in some way or was the translation just so atrocious that it wasn't worth gamers' time to get past it?

For the translation, let me put it this way: as much as Aeana and I are nitpicking the translation because we're HUGE NERDS, the Trails translation is to the earlier LoH translations what William Shakespeare is to William fucking McGonagall. The two aren't even remotely comparable, and yes, the earlier LoH games are that bad. I think Aeana and Varion can throw up some particularly choice quotes if they want to.

Namco did change the gameplay, too; the original Gagharv LoH games on the PC98 had this kind of real-time-ish map combat system, which got changed out for a "standard" battle system in the PSP remakes we got.

So yeah, people are being serious when they say the Namco LoH games are incomparable fuckups. It's kind of hard to list just how many things they did wrong.

Basileus777 said:
Is there any way to tell which quests expire when? I had to load up an earlier save when a monster hunting quest timed out.

To expand on Aeana's suggestion, generally you'll get a few new sidequests whenever a new, major plot quest comes up. If you do those side quests first and then the main quest, you won't miss anything.
 

UberTag

Member
I booted this game up for the first time last night and I can tell right away I'm going to adore it.
Character-driven JRPGs are like crack to me.
 

Shouta

Member
KefkaTaran said:
This is my first time playing a Legend of Heroes game, and I'm surprised with how enamored by it I am. I was expecting something a little more generic and a little less endearing, but it's really doing a great job of capturing that old-school 16-bit RPG nostalgia while keeping the pace fast and the quests (both main and side) interesting.

Also, I just realized how silly it is to say that the pace is fast when I'm about 10 hours in and still on the prologue. STILL.

The First 3 LoH PSP games were awful awful remakes/ports/whateverthecrapitis. Bad combat, utterly poor translation, etc. I managed to play through a Tear of Vermillion but man was it terribad compared to the old games.

NPC dialogue doesn't surprise me though. It's one of those extra mile things that is really nice to have but usually not going to happen in most games. It's just one big pain in the butt to do that across all NPCs especially with a game that's dialogue/story intensive as Trails is. Japanese also has it a lot simpler in that area than English does.
 
Just wrapped up the prologue after 12 hours (!!) and will be moving onto chapter 1 tomorrow. I was pretty thorough with sidequests, etc., so I'm sure you can get through it a lot faster, but I really enjoyed taking my time. The end of the prologue/beginning of chapter 1 has a lot of great character building. Can't wait to play more tomorrow.
 

Varion

Member
KefkaTaran said:
I would be interested in seeing these!
Here's a few favourites:

Silva: (Coughing) I didn't have eaten a unusual today...
Mile: He is not the kind of person who can walk out of a girl who can use his help and keep on a journey. He could be annoying, but please forgive him.
Shannon's Dad: Oh your consciousness.

Then there's just general screwups everywhere, places being called several different things during the course of the game, bizarre grammar everywhere, etc. One day I'll actually play 3-5, but it'll be the Japanese PC version and not the horrendous PSP versions.


...And now back to this game. Finished chapter 1 and got a bit of the way into chapter 2 last night. About 23 hours playtime. Impression's basically the same as yesterday, still really enjoying it. I'll reserve final judgement until the end, but right now people playing the English version instead of the Japanese one aren't missing much, and that's how I really hoped it would be. Olivier's hilarious dialogue is still hilarious, the more serious Estelle/Joshua scenes are coming out surprisingly well, their chemistry is still perfect. It's definitely not a literal translation by any means and there's a fair few dialogue changes, but as it really feels like the editor 'got' the characters, none of it feels out of place, and thanks to that even on my third playthrough of the game I'm getting to enjoy a bunch of scenes in completely new ways, which is great. It's an effort keeping myself from going back to my old habits of not checking chests twice though! I think I've checked almost every one twice so far, and some of them are really great (My favourite so far, from the Potluck in a Shell (food item) chest: "You should ask yourself how long this has been here and how lucky you really feel.")

There are still niggles though, yesterday's bunch:
- A quartz being called Eagle Vision when you get it, and in your Orbment list... but Eagle Eye in the Bracer Notebook. I assume this is just because they were cramped for space in the notebook graphics, but Eagle Eye is clearly the better name and they should've just stuck with it.
- When you complete the quest to kill the monster on the West Bose Highway, it tells you that you just killed the monster on the East Bose Highway. When you didn't.
- One of the Bracer choices in chapter 1 somehow got completely mistranslated. Small spoilers I guess:
Schera asks you why you think the Sky Pirates didn't just take the Linde back to their base. The last, and correct, choice has been changed from "Because their hideout is in an unusual place" to "To keep the location of their base a secret" somehow - and when you choose it, Schera says "Yes, that's exactly right. From my guess, I would imagine that their hideout is in a slightly peculiar place."
So they translated it right for the rest of the chapter, but screwed up the initial choice, leading to this bizarre disconnect between what you said and what she hears you say.

Shame pointing these out does no good at all because it's not like you can just easily patch the game or anything, but just throwing them out there - mainly because there's bound to be someone who runs into them and finds them odd other than me. Especially the third one. Wouldn't want them putting anyone off, I expected to find way more errors in a script of this length pushed out in this length of time. NISA could learn a lot from XSEED.

I'm really happy to see the people who've actually managed to get the game despite Gamestop's utter stupidity are enjoying it though. Got to spread the Kiseki love. Can't wait to see some of the reactions when people get to the end. Hopefully I'll be able to get up to where Tita joins today, which is the one character whose dialogue I'm still a little bit worried about. Hopefully I won't be disappointed.
 
Varion said:
It's an effort keeping myself from going back to my old habits of not checking chests twice though! I think I've checked almost every one twice so far, and some of them are really great (My favourite so far, from the Potluck in a Shell (food item) chest: "You should ask yourself how long this has been here and how lucky you really feel.")

Yes! Posted on Twitter about this last night -- I just realized then that every chest in the game seems to have a unique second saying when you click on it after emptying it. It struck me as totally unnecessary but wonderful and endearing.
 

Gunsmithx

Member
KefkaTaran said:
Yes! Posted on Twitter about this last night -- I just realized then that every chest in the game seems to have a unique second saying when you click on it after emptying it. It struck me as totally unnecessary but wonderful and endearing.

Yeah, I missed the first couple of chests and found myself going back to check them out.

Only about 6 hours into the game due to work and life but I plan to put some serious time into it this weekend. Really loving the characters and dialogue so far the world very much feels alive and I really love seeing what the npc's have to say thus far. Waiting on SC(however it comes out) is going to be torture.
 

Hobbun

Member
Varion said:
I'm really happy to see the people who've actually managed to get the game despite Gamestop's utter stupidity are enjoying it though.


Actually, Tom (from XSeed) indicated the delay of the game was due to the distributor. I thought it was solely a Gamestop issue as well, at first.

My copy is coming in today and plan on picking it up after work.
 
My copy should be delivered to my office today, but I won't be playing until Monday as I've taken the day off to go hang out in San Francisco with my wife.

And no, I won't go into my office over the weekend, that's ludicrous.
 

Varion

Member
Hobbun said:
Actually, Tom (from XSeed) indicated the delay of the game was due to the distributor. I thought it was solely a Gamestop issue as well, at first.
Gamestop are the first in my mind as they're being spectacularly dumb about it ("The publisher said the release date was the 31st!" No, no they didn't Gamestop.) It does seem most other shops are having problems as well though. Which is typical when you're dealing with a game that needs every sale it can get.
 

Aeana

Member
Reluctant-Hero said:
My copy should be delivered to my office today, but I won't be playing until Monday as I've taken the day off to go hang out in San Francisco with my wife.

And no, I won't go into my office over the weekend, that's ludicrous.
Pfft.
 
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