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Trails of Cold Steel (and the Kiseki series in general)


Zurvanight

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Yeah, Falcom redid the engine between CS2 and 3, incorporating feedback from Ys VIII and Tokyo Xanadu, which were their their transition games from Vita/PS3 development to the PS4. They look a lot nicer and it's quite apparent when there are flashbacks that use the original engine (usually with filter effects to somewhat disguise the difference) but Falcom has never been focused on eye-popping graphics so they're never going to look like a AAA title visually. They prefer to focus that effort on the writing and gameplay instead.

That said, Falcom games can look absolutely gorgeous but they tend to be more stylized than photorealistic, and their spritework in older games is really good.

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Well that really is quite the difference and explains the $ hike compared to 1&2. I spent $107 on that Japan sale and 3 was alone was half that.

Speaking of Japanese my lessons aren’t going to great. I can’t speak to save my life though I’m learning to hear and understand a tad more.  I just can’t get around 40 yrs of SVO vs SOV structures. This is extremely complicated for me. I technically could learn and speak English structured Japanese but I’m learning this would be hella jarring to them if I was ever in a conversation with these people. 
 

Some of these sounds are just incompatible with my southern twang when it’s my turn to speak. I would really like to be successful at this pet project.

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7 hours ago, Weltall said:

Yeah, Falcom redid the engine between CS2 and 3, incorporating feedback from Ys VIII and Tokyo Xanadu, which were their their transition games from Vita/PS3 development to the PS4. They look a lot nicer and it's quite apparent when there are flashbacks that use the original engine

All 4 Cold Steel games and Tokyo Xanadu use the exact same engine: the PhyreEngine, which is made by Sony. Ys VIII runs on Falcom's own engine, Yamaneko. CS1 was initially developed on the Yamaneko engine, but Falcom had too much difficulty. The project was salvaged by Sony, who moved development of CS1 to Phyre. Tokyo Xanadu is also on Phyre, which is when Falcom began toying with lighting. CS3 + 4 just look different because of the redone character models and the different lighting.

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12 minutes ago, Val the Moofia Boss said:

All 4 Cold Steel games and Tokyo Xanadu use the exact same engine: the PhyreEngine, which is made by Sony. Ys VIII runs on Falcom's own engine, Yamaneko. CS1 was initially developed on the Yamaneko engine, but Falcom had too much difficulty. The project was salvaged by Sony, who moved development of CS1 to Phyre. Tokyo Xanadu is also on Phyre, which is when Falcom began toying with lighting. CS3 + 4 just look different because of the redone character models and the different lighting.

You're telling me that new models and lighting changes eat twice as much RAM?

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20 hours ago, Eluvianii said:

You're telling me that new models and lighting changes eat twice as much RAM?

Could be the higher rez textures taking up more memory, but the Cold Steel games have been finnicky. Could be something on the programming side. McBurn in CS2 set PS Vitas on fire. The CS3 final dungeon lagged hard on PS4. Falcom says they can't fit more than 40 character models onscreen in a single shot without the game lagging. "PhyreEngine is not really equipped to support that", Kondo said.

I suspect that this ties into Nihon Falcom's management history. Nihon Falcom is run by chairman Masayuki Kato. Kondo is "the president" but really he's just the guy who leads development on the games and is the PR person. Kato is the one who actually runs the company. Kato has forbidden Falcom staff from doing interviews and interacting with the fans (out of the fear that fans would become upset if they heard that employees left the company). Kato forbade console development right when it was taking off in the late '80s and early '90s. Kato skimped out on his employee's salaries at a time when Falcom was making bank. In 1989, the staff of Nihon Falcom finally had enough and a mass exodus ensued, with only two programmers and a single composer remaining after everyone else walked out. It was a huge blow to Falcom's reputation and dampened their chances of being able to recruit new talent (not that Kato being unwilling to pay competitive salaries helped). Kato's policies means that Falcom churns through talent; good people aren't enticed to stay at Falcom, and fresh developers don't stay long enough for Falcom to cultivate good talent. (Click here for the full story)

Furthermore, Falcom's employee count hovers around 60 people, with the management being unwilling to use their profits to expand and hire more people. Kondo has said in an interview that he "doesn't want to manage people, he wants to make games", but I suspect that might just be him covering for Kato's unwillingness to spend extra money.

In an interview with Kondo last year, Kondo said that they wanted to use a different engine, but that the team was split between using Unreal, or making their own. Then, when Hajimari no Kiseki (the latest Trails game) was announced, Kondo said that the team is making a new engine. Probably because Kato doesn't want to pay royalties to Epic Games.

We'll see how that turns out, but I'm not optimistic. I don't pretend to know the skill of Falcom's programmers, but given Falcom's policies I'm not too confident that they have the talent to pull this off. Not that Unreal doesn't come with its own caveats. Unreal comes with a lot of lighting and shader effects stuff installed that is meant for photorealistic games, and is VERY difficult to remove unless you know what you're doing, which is unfortunately why a lot of games using a colorful and abstract cartoon/anime artstyle tend to look like washed out grey concrete, see Darksiders 3 and the upcoming Tales of Arise. If the devs of those games couldn't manage to pull out those systems, I doubt Falcom could either, so I guess the one good thing here is that our Trails games aren't going to look like washed out grey concrete), but... yeah.

Fingers crossed.

Edited by Val the Moofia Boss
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Subtitled Hajimari no Kiseki trailer, behind a spoiler tag because the thumbnail is (sort of) a spoiler if you haven't beaten CS4.

Spoiler

 

Also, a translation of a recent interview with Falcom's president which has a lot of interesting material on Hajimari and the series' future.

Edited by Weltall
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I remember playing CSII on my old laptop when it came out. It was a nightmare. It was updated a month or two after it came out so it runs smoothly now, but when it initially came out it would reload everything in the environment every time there was a transition, and my laptop wasn't even decent quality when it came to playing games. I had to wait thirty seconds every time there was a transition, as in, every time I got attacked in a dungeon, thirty seconds to load the fight, ten seconds to actually fight, and thirty seconds to reload the dungeon. It took me hours to complete each one of the individual shrines. Thankfully, that was patched so the game remembered the last area you've been to which meant that dungeon running became much smoother. The CSI andII computer ports were (eventually) really good port.

Thankfully my laptop is slightly better these days so I had no problems running CSIII.

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Well, in my case the first pc I tried to run the game on, it was a beautiful wild card where everything was fine except loading screens. Meaning the time a battle took to load, the time a cutscene took to load, the time a new area took to load, etc. They could be normal or they could last 20 minutes. I was afraid of opening doors. In the end I got like 70 hours in but skipping a lot of dialog with NPCs and with long breaks between sessions, as they felt more and more like a chore. So I decided to just drop it and start over once I had something that could actually handle the game.

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Tetiny bit more progress today that doesn’t really need a tag but I managed to move story enough to get the assignments and I have managed to do the 1st standard monster hunt one.

Now this does need to be tagged but I have slowly come to the realization over the past 2 weeks that I really hate CS2 stuff:

Toval as a playable character. He is the worst when it comes to the miss rate I’ve complained about in the past. I want my people back and for him to go away to background again. He misses so rusting much and then gets countered requiring healing. It’s annoying.

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Here's the thing: Characters in this series are to an extent specialized. If you're trying to use someone like Emma or especially Toval for physical damage you're completely wasting their potential. Toval isn't just a caster, he's an insanely fast caster and one of the most powerful playable characters in the series if you use him properly.

It doesn't matter that EP is limited early in the game; by the time you're done you'll have more restoration items than you'll know what to do with so you might as well start using them now. Related to this, balance out your use of harder-hitting but expensive and slower Arts with cheap and quick ones that don't hit quite as hard. There are times when you'll want to go big but quite often a cheap single-target spell will be all you need and casters do way more damage that way than they're going to with their weak regular attacks. The only caveat to this is when you have someone who can inflict magical damage with a regular attack (Elliot and Emma mainly) and you're fighting enemies with low ADF, in which case their attacks will frequently do a lot of damage.

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There was a Hajimari site update this week but nothing huge. A new update to the rotating downloadable wallpaper focusing on some of the supporting Crossbell characters and an announcement of the drawing contest they're holding (as they have for the last few games) where you're eligible to be chosen as one of the winners if you can fill in a blanked-out line from the game. In this case the line is (minor spoiler for the back half of Cold Steel)

Spoiler

What punishment Erika is meting out to Agate for putting her precious Tita in danger during the events of CS3/4. Because that was totally his fault...

Which is bound to be hilarious.

9 hours ago, Eluvianii said:

Ok, the fact that Rean is so weirded out by seeing a girl pick up an earth worm makes me laugh way more than it should. 

Oh just wait, there's a scene near the end of the game where one of Class VII's members reacts to something that has for years been way more hilarious than the developers probably intended to begin with, though they seem to have taken the idea and rolled with it in subsequent games.

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23 hours ago, Weltall said:

Oh just wait, there's a scene near the end of the game where one of Class VII's members reacts to something that has for years been way more hilarious than the developers probably intended to begin with, though they seem to have taken the idea and rolled with it in subsequent games.

...now I'm intrigued. I'd better make some progress.

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Yeah, not only can you go back to those later but some of them are flat-out impossible to even attempt when you first encounter them. Generally speaking, CS2 will allow you to revisit everything with the exception of some one-time dungeons that are usually pretty obvious from context.

EDIT: Since I hadn't spotted it before but someone brought it to my attention, Dengeki has shown off their special PS4 theme for Hajimari which includes a teaser of a particular location's normal battle BGM. Got a rather nice rotating selection of character art as part of it, though there's an inherent Crossbell spoiler in there for anyone skittish of such things. And there's going to be a final Dengeki stream this Thursday including new gameplay footage.

SECOND EDIT: The first Hajimari leaks are starting to come from this week's Famitsu. Spoil-tagged for obvious endgame CS4 stuff:

Spoiler

- The name of Rean's new custom Soldat as revealed in Chinese interviews is confirmed and the minigame involving it has been named 'Project Tyrfing'. The story for it is that it shows Rean helping Professor Makarov develop a next-generation Soldat. Various other characters will appear as enemies. I've got my fingers crossed that this includes Wallace because his tricked-out Hector is awesome and we've never really seen it in action.

- The arena-type Episode is named The Boundless Sword. A screenshot shows that Cassius, Arios, Zechs, Victor and Aurelia are all in attendance.

- Another new Episode was introduced called The Fallen Prince. Shirley is trying to toughen Cedric up by training him.

All this and in less than twenty-four hours we're getting new footage too. xD

Edited by Weltall
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Yeah, Noel managed to combine her love of motorbikes with her love of shooting things with way too many bullets. It's interesting that while she had two S-Crafts to pick from she isn't using either of them in Hajimari. As a guess I'd say it's probably because they already had a bunch of modeling work for her on a bike and/or because she's missing some of the component animations that went into Blast Storm and they didn't want to recreate them just for her S-Craft.

Speaking of which, there's a lot of stuff to unpack from that stream and the subsequent review. Some CS4 spoilers involved.

Spoiler

- There's a gacha mechanic that allows you to get a randomized assortment of accessories, quartz and costume items from the True Reverie Corridor and which characters are available to you seems to be at least partially gacha-based (I assume at least some are automatic, Rean if nobody else) though the usual methods of acquiring items remain. I'm pretty sure it's already been noted here but the hub location is really similar to the Recluse Garden from The 3rd.

- There's now an Ultra Rare level of quartz but all we've seen of it so far are the spell-granting ones. Might be there's new quartz at this level, might be that the Gem-tier quartz and similar are now UR instead of SR.

- Likewise there are some CS1/2 Master Quartz returning for Hajimari and even an Azure one but their elements are being played around with and their abilities are almost certainly changed since the ones we've seen so far are duplicated by current ones. Gungnir for instance already does what Murakumo used to do and Regulus covers the main function of Brave (now Earth-elemental) so that's likely to change both due to redundancy and the element change. Pixie returns from Azure and with its element unchanged but as Titania already does the same thing it's probably getting a tweak. There's also a new one seen in the form of the Water-elemental Elixir, effects unknown.

Another possibility they could be going for is that Master Quartz are somewhat duplicative of each other but they're restricted to specific routes so they only overlap in the True Reverie Corridor.

- Between operatives of the CID pulling guns on Lechter, a Gambler Jack II reprint and Swin talking about 'an actress from Calvard' I'm now more confident than ever that the Republic is the next arc no matter how Kondo sometimes dances around the issue and that Jack, Halle and Nike are going to be major players in it. Oh, and that the Rocksmith Agency/CID are going to form our core protagonist group. It makes extra sense in light of the Republic's situation currently that internal intelligence would play a huge role in events.

- Noel mentions that Sara's record for youngest A-rank has been broken and that there's a new S-rank. If the former doesn't refer to Estelle and Joshua getting promoted (which we knew was imminent seven months previously) I will be shocked.

- There's a shot confirming Olaf and Wallace are participants in the arena Episode. Another shows that Tita has developed an Orbal Gear 04, or more likely upgraded her previous model since there are parts of the new one that share 03's paintjob. Lastly we see that Fie is one of the people who acts as an opponent for Rean as part of Project Tyrfing, piloting a simulated Kestrel Beta with custom weapons. I want to know who decided that the Jaeger Tot needed to be even more dangerous than she already is...

The official site also updated with the latest round of character profiles, Episode/minigame information and the final volume of Three and Nine. Someone pinch me, we're really only a week from release date. :D

Edited by Weltall
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CS2 Act 1 stuff

hmm this hooded man.. I want to say he is Baron Bleublanc but it is so obvious that I’m likely way off on that. Gotta follow him and I’m not sure when I ll get the time to do this next. Probably tomorrow’s 4pm session as I gotta take my ex wife home from new job at 5 so not gonna get all into it only to leave on today’s would be session.

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