Quick question. Story wise is it fine for new players to just pick this one or the first in the series?. The game blurb seems to indicate this one has new story etc....

The first ToCS is no problem to play without knowing the other trails games, it might spoil a few things from the Trails in the Sky games but nothing which would have a big impact on how much fun you have with the previous games.

the second one which will be released later (no exact date yet) needs some information from the Crossbell games which aren (officially) translated yet and you'll notice that but you can still play it without knowing them BUT it'll contain some major spoilers to the Trails in the Sky story.

ah yeah! happy it's here

Great release! ^_^

they're just costumes ;)

We are missing all of this DLC's.
http://i.imgur.com/TPobuGG.png

GoG version is half.

Publisher always threating us like second class citizens. Why are we playing half game while Steam users enjoys full experience?

Don't be a drama queen. You're not playing half a game. There's no story DLC or anything that makes a difference. Just alternate costumes that aren't even really appropriate for most of the story.

As Durante said, the DLC's not missing on GOG because the publisher didn't want to offer it here. It's missing because there were technical issues getting it activated here. They're looking into it and it'll probably be available in a few days. Game's perfectly playable in the meantime.

Actually it's the XSEED publisher/translator that brought all these games to GOG and HB DRM-Free. Nihon Falcom who, in this case, are just the developers of the game, had no say on which digital distribution platforms the game would get published on. None the less, I'm impressed by XSEED's and I hope they get financially rewarded for their dedication to DRM-Free.
Of course, Durante did some port work. What is this, his 4th collaboration with XSEED? The guy is a machine.

Maybe more Japanese developers will be impressed by his talent, and they'll end up working with XSEED, which in turn would mean more releases on GOG. One can hope.

EDIT: I did some digging and here are the three blog posts from Durante about his involvement in the Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel port: post 1, post 2, post 3.

Instabuy.

Thanks XSeed, for releasing it on GOG, too.

I would have waited on Steam, but without DRM I really "own" the license of the game. So it's worth the price.

The "Trails in the Sky" games from the same series have a fair number of adult-looking PCs, even if the main character is a teenager. In the 2 first games I played, there are 7 adults, 5 teens and 1 child. But this title is apparently about an academy, so a young cast makes sense.
But yeah, having an age 30+ main character instead of a spiky-headed teen may be nice sometime ^^

As for the size : I'd say content. TitS : SC was simply enormous (and had several movies nested inside the game, too), so it might be the case for this one too.

Part of the reason for the large filesize is the uncompressed audio. The music and (apparantly) the voiced lines are all uncompressed wav-files. The good: this game has a really good soundtrack and pretty solid voice acting and you'll get to hear it in all its lossless glory. The bad: it takes up a lot of disk space.

And funnily enough, the games semi-acknowledge the teenage thing by making all the adults much more competent and badass than the teenage protagonists. :)

Wow, I really like the look and sound of this, but never undestood the JRPG games with these tactical fights.

Woohoo! Would have bought if I wasn't broke atm... :-P

Thanks for acknowledging that this was a technical problem so we can put the "XSeed treats Gog-customers as second-rate"-myth to rest.