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

[Briar King]

2 hours ago, aneonfoxtribute said:

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They have their own take on gnomes. They're not LITERAL gnomes. 

 

I didn’t know if it was a translation thing with the whole CS5 ch 5 stuff

Earth Sept Terrion. Gnomes are definitely Earthy beings.

 

Grr having this progressive day was great after so long of inching along for months and I want to keep going but I have to give my tv to son now.

Morning time it’s definitely going down once more atleast until Saints game starts.

[Weltall]

You're getting hung up on the terminology here while failing to understand that the word does not mean the same thing to Zemurians that it does to us and also failing to recognize that the term does not have one universal meaning in English either.

Spoiler

Tolkien used 'Gnome' to refer to the Noldor, who are the opposite in appearance from 'foot-tall'.

While we're at it, a sylphid is an air-spirit and not a teenage girl, Vulcan was a god of crafting rather than a mercenary with a big gun and Merkabah is a complicated concept in Jewish mysticism and not a series of airships.

[Eluvianii he/him]

I swear, Step Ahead is the best boss theme since Fateful Confrontation. 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Step Ahead and Fateful Confrontation are pretty good.

I quite like the heroic boss battle themes: Great Awe from SC, Eliminate Crisis from CS1, and Abrupt Visitor from CS3

[Briar King]

Popping in

I just stopped game mid battle as I saw there was no way forward with full survival and exp. Think I ll just go do some more lvling up before I attempt to clear 1st floor. This game has been a redo plague for me.

[Briar King]

Oh yes! I just saw that I’m getting droplets from breakables and it’s awesome! I’ve got like 45 of both power and magic bout to start sinking them and I think it’s getting close to shiny Pom bait time for that extra little omphf.

[Eluvianii he/him]

I'm temporarily stuck here. CS3 Chapter 2.

Spoiler

The battle against McBurn and Campanella is so weird. It's not like they kill you too fast but you can't do anything on a party level because they just keep moving you, or forcing you to heal due to the storming flames. At some point La Forte stopped working too and I have no idea why.

I might just go back inside to get some cp and bp back so I can do literally everything within the first few turns. If I can just take care of Campy then buffing adf and setting reflects from time to time to hold up against McBurn shouldn't be too difficult. I hope. 

Edit: I want to hit something, really hard. I beat the battle, all the battles in fact. Thrice. This thing just keeps crashing during the cutscene dump. Just how far can the prompt to save be? It's not even like I can fast-forward through the thing to lower the chances. Each time the game changes areas has a chance of crashing, no matter how small the new area is. There's way too many of those here. 

Edited September 23, 2021 by Eluvianii

[Briar King]

Popping in

I am so pissed off! CS3 ch 5 stuff

so the other day I shut off mid battle between Maiden and McBurn cause I couldn’t keep all party alive and decided to grind before I redid them. I gained another lvl or 2 plus a good bit of droplets on the required fighters. Fwd to redo and I still got stomped on main party quickly and yet managed to prevail with full reserve party in a 37 min 12 sec slugfest and rewarded with a pretty massive exp count that Gaius, Laura and Emma got nothing out of. Man that fight was brutal but I’m confused because the duo stopped using their power moves once they knocked out. It’s kinda bugging me why this is so. I’m super pissed losing those points and I’m considering going back to prefight save to get another few lvl ups but man that would take so long to do plus that boss fight. Ugh I just don’t know. 

 

Annnd the ones who were ko stayed behind to fight still while the rest of us press on.

I want those points though! UGH!

[Weltall]

The last Kuro livestream has come and gone (along with a print review of the game) and there was a dungeon exploration segment showing off both types of gameplay, a monster elimination quest and a miniboss fight. Also, they showed off a bunch of S-Crafts in a compilation clip.

Spoiler

- The first four of the main cast all have theirs shown and we also got to see Fie, Shizuna, Walter and Olympia's. Fie and Walter have all-new ones.

- S-Craft cutin art is gone.

- S-Crafts are shown draining Shard Boost points as well as CP but it seems to recover at a pretty quick rate.

- Falcom is taking a page from Ys IX and adding non-interactive NPCs to towns.

- Alignment-based character participation isn't necessarily based on a single stat as Shizuna is implied to require high Law and Chaos to get her to work with you.

- Load times sound like they're currently longer than previous games (especially when entering areas with a lot of characters) but that a patch will improve loading.

 

13 hours ago, Briar King said:

Popping in

I am so pissed off! CS3 ch 5 stuff

  Reveal hidden contents

so the other day I shut off mid battle between Maiden and McBurn cause I couldn’t keep all party alive and decided to grind before I redid them. I gained another lvl or 2 plus a good bit of droplets on the required fighters. Fwd to redo and I still got stomped on main party quickly and yet managed to prevail with full reserve party in a 37 min 12 sec slugfest and rewarded with a pretty massive exp count that Gaius, Laura and Emma got nothing out of. Man that fight was brutal but I’m confused because the duo stopped using their power moves once they knocked out. It’s kinda bugging me why this is so. I’m super pissed losing those points and I’m considering going back to prefight save to get another few lvl ups but man that would take so long to do plus that boss fight. Ugh I just don’t know. 

 

Annnd the ones who were ko stayed behind to fight still while the rest of us press on.

 

I want those points though! UGH!

 

Assuming I'm following what you're trying to say, enemies in the back half of Cold Steel (generally) only use S-Crafts when they're in the Enhanced status, and that gets triggered mainly by their HP threshold. Odds are they stopped using S-Crafts because they already exhausted Enhanced around the same time they knocked out those characters of yours and they didn't go back into again before being defeated.

Spoiler

Also, there's no real point in going back and redoing that fight for the EXP for those three characters; you aren't going to be using them again.

In the future, remember that the Incense items work on your entire party including anyone who's been knocked out if you had to bring the full reserve in. Unless your situation is so desperate that you think you'll lose a fight if you don't end it ASAP or you're trying to preserve your supply of the item, there's rarely a reason not to spend one character's turn using at least a Spirit Incense to ensure that your whole party gets the EXP reward from the fight.

 

Edited September 24, 2021 by Weltall

[Briar King]

I will continue on then. Son is coming in an hour so I ll get my 4pm session in anyway but the game is popping off so hopefully he will get into it which he did last week in the lead up to this point of game.

[Eluvianii he/him]

2 hours ago, Weltall said:

- Falcom is taking a page from Ys IX and adding non-interactive NPCs to towns.

I'm kind of worried and excited for that. I'm guessing towns had low populations before because giving dialogue to everyone in a metropolis is a massive amount of extra work. So not being able to speak to everyone will feel weird but if this means the "There's too much people here" moments will now involve more than ten npcs in a really big area, I really want to see it. 

[Weltall]

Apparently the trophy list for Kuro has already leaked but I'm not interested in spoiling myself on anything so I'm not touching that. I'm also not gonna be doing any sort of play by play when the game is out but I'll write up my impressions afterwards, whether it's per-Chapter or once I'm done with the whole thing.

On 9/24/2021 at 1:21 PM, Eluvianii said:

I'm kind of worried and excited for that

Like you're guessing, it seems likely to me that it won't affect the overall number of interactive NPCs, it will just mean adding a bunch of extras who don't have dialogue on top of the people they'd already be including, to enhance the feeling of locations being busy.

[Briar King]

Popping in 

I completed the next section today and I sure didn’t like the feels it brought. I spent a few days farming for U mats between sections to trade for ore for weapons. Still haven’t used my Pom bait. I think it shall be soon though.

[Briar King]

Anyone remember their CS3 ending lvls? I’m at 61-60 now with 2 Pom baits to use.

[Weltall]

60 or below for everyone for me on my initial run, playing on Hard.

[Eluvianii he/him]

I'm only on Chapter 3 of CS3 so there's probably more to discover but can we talk about Fie's family for a moment? 

Spoiler

Her dad specifically. He's from a, shall we say shady line of work, adopted a protégé who later followed his steps from a different angle, died in front of a lot of witnesses, came back from the dead, and has scars on his arms.

Sound familiar? The similarities are astounding. 

 

[Weltall]

9 hours ago, Eluvianii said:

I'm only on Chapter 3 of CS3 so there's probably more to discover but can we talk about Fie's family for a moment? 

  Reveal hidden contents

Her dad specifically. He's from a, shall we say shady line of work, adopted a protégé who later followed his steps from a different angle, died in front of a lot of witnesses, came back from the dead, and has scars on his arms.

Sound familiar? The similarities are astounding. 

 

If Brandon decides in the future that:

Spoiler

Kelsier needs a giant robot, we'll know where he got the idea from then.

Also, I see that parallel of yours and raise you Van Arkride, who seems to have A-Steel powers as one of his revealed Crafts (which he even shows off in the opening movie) as it involves flicking a coin at enemies with lethal force.

Edited September 29, 2021 by Weltall

[Eluvianii he/him]

13 hours ago, Weltall said:

If Brandon decides in the future that:

  Reveal hidden contents

Kelsier needs a giant robot, we'll know where he got the idea from then.

Also, I see that parallel of yours and raise you Van Arkride, who seems to have A-Steel powers as one of his revealed Crafts (which he even shows off in the opening movie) as it involves flicking a coin at enemies with lethal force.

You know, I remember you making years ago a little story connecting Brandon with Kondo. It seems more likely by the minute. 

[Briar King]

Popping in

Just beat CS3. That was a long 8 months.

Starting 4 after credits roll(or atleast the opening anime bit of 4 anyway) been a long 4-5 hour play session today and I’m sitting through a long opening right away.

[aneonfoxtribute]

Just now, Briar King said:

Popping in

Just beat CS3. That was a long 8 months.

Starting 4 after credits roll(or atleast the opening anime bit of 4 anyway) been a long 4-5 hour play session today and I’m sitting through a long opening right away.

How was the ending

[Briar King]

6 minutes ago, aneonfoxtribute said:

How was the ending

Fantabulosonastick.

[Eluvianii he/him]

That's the most positive opinion I've read about the ending. 

[aneonfoxtribute]

Not really? The ending is generally looked at very positively

[Eluvianii he/him]

Is it? I generally see people saying they hated the ending or that the cliffhanger sucks. Granted, by text is hard to know if they mean that or if it's a way of saying it's intense and left them itching for 4 but I usually get the former impression. 

Though either way it makes me excited. Sounds like this cliffhanger is bigger than the other 2 we've had. 

[aneonfoxtribute]

I've never seen anyone say bad things about it