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On the trails again.

<span class="bold">The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel</span>, in a worldwide PC premiere, is available now with a 10% launch discount and free DLC Special Item Bundle, DRM-free on GOG.com.

For veterans and newcomers alike, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel features a rich and nuanced world, expanding gameplay through an all new Combat Link System and streamlined mechanics; as well as all-new content prepared specifically for the PC release.

Now available with 3 DLC bundles of outfits and accessories: Special Item Bundle – free for a limited time; a collection of casual outfits in the Costume Pack; and the Shining Pom Bait Pack.

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The launch discount will last until August 8, 5 PM UTC.
Post edited August 02, 2017 by GOG_Solostran
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CharlesGrey: I only have the first TitS game that was released here. Never finished it, but it was pretty fun and the characters I encountered weren't so bad.

As for the age and design of the main character(s), I think I'll just have to accept that I'm no longer part of their target audience, and the characters are mostly meant to appeal to younger players. That's why I like games such as Dragon's Dogma, since you can just design your own characters.
One of the advantages of a younger character is that it does allow the developer to depict them growing up and developing AS a character.

In a lot of games that doesn't happen, but it really does in Trails in the Sky. Especially when you consider the games as a whole. Estelle has things happen to her, reacts to them in a reasonable/realistic way, and grows up quite a bit. And while there are some pivotal events, it's NOT the usual 'my mentor died, now I give up childishness and am SUPER SERIOUS' bit.

It's harder to do that with older characters. Balthier in Final Fantasy XII is a neat character, but there's no real room for development. He's already done.

(Also, I don't think character development is required for a good game! Vyse in Skies of Arcadia doesn't change much over the course of the game. But if you want to tell that sort of story, a younger protagonist makes it easier.)
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Clearsong: One of the advantages of a younger character is that it does allow the developer to depict them growing up and developing AS a character.

In a lot of games that doesn't happen, but it really does in Trails in the Sky. Especially when you consider the games as a whole. Estelle has things happen to her, reacts to them in a reasonable/realistic way, and grows up quite a bit. And while there are some pivotal events, it's NOT the usual 'my mentor died, now I give up childishness and am SUPER SERIOUS' bit.

It's harder to do that with older characters. Balthier in Final Fantasy XII is a neat character, but there's no real room for development. He's already done.

(Also, I don't think character development is required for a good game! Vyse in Skies of Arcadia doesn't change much over the course of the game. But if you want to tell that sort of story, a younger protagonist makes it easier.)
I see younger characters as a blank slate -- theoretically they have potential for development, as you say, but often they simply turn out to be generic, cliché and kinda boring. Of course it largely depends on the quality of writing of a game, and I'm wiling to believe that this one is above the average level of J-RPGs.

I had to look up Balthier, since I've never played FFXII. That you're saying he's "done" and there is no more room for development, when he's apparently only 22, says a lot about the trends of this genre. :P
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cemacar: It's only have English dub :(
Just sad.
All the negativity about it, and people miss important details like how XSEED hasn't been able to use the Japanese dub in Japan either. At least I haven't heard of the game being region locked for purchase.
Pricey and unfortunately without japanese dub.
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CharlesGrey: By the way, since you seem to know the series well, what are the main gameplay differences between this and the older TitS games? Is the combat different?
The combat's still basically the same system as in the Sky series, but a lot more streamlined. It's faster-paced and all craft/spell animations can be skipped or sped up, not just S-crafts. (the limit breaks) The Cold Steel battle puts much more emphasis on blitz tactics, using status ailments, delays and S-crafts to overwhelm enemies and deny them a chance to attack you instead of trading hits.

Cold Steel also has additional quality-of-life features like the ability to quick-travel to various locations inside a town instead of having to manually walk there. And it has Turbo mode, which speeds up the game by a factor of 4 as long as you keep a certain button pressed.


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cemacar: It's only have English dub :(
Just sad.
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theclaw.661: All the negativity about it, and people miss important details like how XSEED hasn't been able to use the Japanese dub in Japan either. At least I haven't heard of the game being region locked for purchase.
Most people complaining about it on the Steam forums didn't miss it. The Asia-only voice contracts were something that was pointed out frequently since the console version had the same issue. The complainers just ignored these circumstances because why let circumstances get in the way of a perfectly good persecution complex? :/
The free DLC still doesn't seem to be on Steam apparently. When you say it's free for a limited time, do you mean it will cost something after a while, or will it be gone from GOG completely?
Insta-bought it. Thank you Xseed, thank you GOG. You keep my JRPG addiciton alive.
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theclaw.661: All the negativity about it, and people miss important details like how XSEED hasn't been able to use the Japanese dub in Japan either. At least I haven't heard of the game being region locked for purchase.
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Erpy: Most people complaining about it on the Steam forums didn't miss it. The Asia-only voice contracts were something that was pointed out frequently since the console version had the same issue. The complainers just ignored these circumstances because why let circumstances get in the way of a perfectly good persecution complex? :/
I don't pretend to know how things works in this case and in particular the agreement about Trails of Cold Steel dub.
It's a fact that however NIS America was able to secure both english and japanese dub for the upcoming Ys VIII Lacrimosa of Dana. That could simply mean that the previous dub agreement done by Falcom was more favorable (than the one for Trails of Cold Steel) and able to allow further use of the dub for the international release at a reasonable cost, or that NISA was able to make a better deal and secure it. We don't know.
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CharlesGrey: I had to look up Balthier, since I've never played FFXII. That you're saying he's "done" and there is no more room for development, when he's apparently only 22, says a lot about the trends of this genre. :P
I actually just had to go look that up, and wow. I never would have pegged Balthier as in his 20s from anything in the game - he looks and acts a lot older. Experienced and world-aware.

I'd have said Balthier was in his late 30s at least. I wonder why they set his official age so low?
I took the bait (and I don't mean the DLC pack) and so far I have mixed feelings. The transition from isometric top-down to low-poly 3d feels somehow wrong (and makes me want to jump constantly, reflex from hd neptunia :)). I only finished prologue and entrance-ceremony-orientation-dungeon-crawl, I expect I can get used to it, but feels like a step backwards. All the characters feel pretty flat. In TiTS they had wide array of facial expression to go with the text, here - mouth moves, rest of the face is usually still image mapped on a 3d baloon (there ARE few variations, but I still like TiTS expressions much better).

English dub isn't much of a problem, the problem is that not everything is dubbed. You quickly get used to main char thinking aloud, then enter a local cathedral in the school town, and suddenly the nun is silent and speaks only in text. It's not much of a suprise given how large these games are, but I think they'd do better to avoid voiceovers completely than to only do it halfway. I'll have to try with VO turned off when i get home.

The handling of certain accident during class VII introduction is cringeworthy. If this is how teenagers behave, I'm glad I already forgot.

I had trouble with video driver crashing at one specific point (after cutscene with a butler), but clean reinstall of drivers combined with update (AMD card) seems to have fixed it for now.
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MIK0: I don't pretend to know how things works in this case and in particular the agreement about Trails of Cold Steel dub.
It's a fact that however NIS America was able to secure both english and japanese dub for the upcoming Ys VIII Lacrimosa of Dana. That could simply mean that the previous dub agreement done by Falcom was more favorable (than the one for Trails of Cold Steel) and able to allow further use of the dub for the international release at a reasonable cost, or that NISA was able to make a better deal and secure it. We don't know.
The most likely scenario is the simple fact that Ys VIII is Falcom's newest game. When the Japanese version of Cold Steel 1 was developed, back in 2013, the only Trails game available in the west was the PSP version of Trails in the Sky FC, which had rather mediocre sales. Sky FC wasn't even out on Steam/Gog yet (which is where it truly took off) so there was no reason for Falcom to go the extra mile and negotiate international contracts for their Japanese cast, not with them not seeing an immediate future for the series in the west. Ys VIII was developed after both Ys and Trails in the Sky made it to Steam/Gog and Falcom knew there was a market out there in the west.

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huan: I took the bait (and I don't mean the DLC pack) and so far I have mixed feelings. The transition from isometric top-down to low-poly 3d feels somehow wrong (and makes me want to jump constantly, reflex from hd neptunia :)). I only finished prologue and entrance-ceremony-orientation-dungeon-crawl, I expect I can get used to it, but feels like a step backwards. All the characters feel pretty flat. In TiTS they had wide array of facial expression to go with the text, here - mouth moves, rest of the face is usually still image mapped on a 3d baloon (there ARE few variations, but I still like TiTS expressions much better).

English dub isn't much of a problem, the problem is that not everything is dubbed. You quickly get used to main char thinking aloud, then enter a local cathedral in the school town, and suddenly the nun is silent and speaks only in text. It's not much of a suprise given how large these games are, but I think they'd do better to avoid voiceovers completely than to only do it halfway. I'll have to try with VO turned off when i get home.

The handling of certain accident during class VII introduction is cringeworthy. If this is how teenagers behave, I'm glad I already forgot.

I had trouble with video driver crashing at one specific point (after cutscene with a butler), but clean reinstall of drivers combined with update (AMD card) seems to have fixed it for now.
Only important cutscenes are voiced. The game contains way too much text (and Falcom is way too small a company) to do a full-voice version of a script of that magnitude. And yeah, it can be a bit rough. Cold Steel was Falcom's first project with the 3D engine they've used since and the assets take some getting used to.

Regarding the characters, yeah that incident makes most folks cringe. One hurdle Cold Steel has that instead of starting out with a small group (like Estelle and Joshua in Sky) that gruadually expands, all protagonists are classmates, meaning the entire cast is introduced at once and the writers set up some quick ham-handed conflicts between some of them. It gets a lot better over time though and "that incident" is thankfully quickly resolved. (I think they set it up purely so they could pull an unexpected resolution out later on, which was not an elegant way to handle it)
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MIK0: I don't pretend to know how things works in this case and in particular the agreement about Trails of Cold Steel dub.
It's a fact that however NIS America was able to secure both english and japanese dub for the upcoming Ys VIII Lacrimosa of Dana. That could simply mean that the previous dub agreement done by Falcom was more favorable (than the one for Trails of Cold Steel) and able to allow further use of the dub for the international release at a reasonable cost, or that NISA was able to make a better deal and secure it. We don't know.
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Erpy: The most likely scenario is the simple fact that Ys VIII is Falcom's newest game. When the Japanese version of Cold Steel 1 was developed, back in 2013, the only Trails game available in the west was the PSP version of Trails in the Sky FC, which had rather mediocre sales. Sky FC wasn't even out on Steam/Gog yet (which is where it truly took off) so there was no reason for Falcom to go the extra mile and negotiate international contracts for their Japanese cast, not with them not seeing an immediate future for the series in the west. Ys VIII was developed after both Ys and Trails in the Sky made it to Steam/Gog and Falcom knew there was a market out there in the west.
Just for knowledge would be cool to know how much would cost to get the license for the japanese audio and how much it would cost as a separate paid dlc (and how many people would need to buy it to get even). Not that I want that to became the default option, but maybe that could fix the issue.
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Erpy: The most likely scenario is the simple fact that Ys VIII is Falcom's newest game. When the Japanese version of Cold Steel 1 was developed, back in 2013, the only Trails game available in the west was the PSP version of Trails in the Sky FC, which had rather mediocre sales. Sky FC wasn't even out on Steam/Gog yet (which is where it truly took off) so there was no reason for Falcom to go the extra mile and negotiate international contracts for their Japanese cast, not with them not seeing an immediate future for the series in the west. Ys VIII was developed after both Ys and Trails in the Sky made it to Steam/Gog and Falcom knew there was a market out there in the west.
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MIK0: Just for knowledge would be cool to know how much would cost to get the license for the japanese audio and how much it would cost as a separate paid dlc (and how many people would need to buy it to get even). Not that I want that to became the default option, but maybe that could fix the issue.
https://discord.gg/0p2ysp1kY6xlNkSf - information can be found on the discord... in the #welcome post
Post edited August 04, 2017 by Bigs
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MIK0: Just for knowledge would be cool to know how much would cost to get the license for the japanese audio and how much it would cost as a separate paid dlc (and how many people would need to buy it to get even). Not that I want that to became the default option, but maybe that could fix the issue.
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Bigs: https://discord.gg/0p2ysp1kY6xlNkSf - information can be found on the discord... in the #welcome post
I know, I meant officially. I'm interested in finding out if is there a sum of money that can allow the japanese dub to be in the game.
Costs weren't the issue, it was the fact the contracts Falcom made with the voice acting agencies only allowed for the voices' distribution in the Asia region and the contracts couldn't be renegotiated. XSeed mentioned multiple times it wasn't an issue of money.