MX7 wrote:
OK my turn! Really enamoured by the concept of the Kiseki games but every review simply states 'the plot is really deep but it's very wordy lol'. I have no intrinsic issue with wordinness, and I play a lot of of visual novels. One million word scripts are a good thing. Trails of Cold Steel has just been released for PS4. From the few screenshot I've seen it looks fairly bland in terms of mise en scene, but but if the narrative is genuinely intriguing I don't really mind. I got three hours in to Lacrimosa of Dana before giving up, not through revulsion or fatigue but basically through wanting to spend my time playing something more worthy. Should I try Trails of Cold Steel?
Why would you play Cold Steel first instead of Trails in The Sky / Sora No Kiseki? That's like asking "yo I've heard good things about [insert series here] should I go watch [sequel of a spin off of a sequel of a spin off that's not half as good as the original]"
The original Sky Anthology/trilogy is probably straight up the best written video game ever made. And I"m not one to fawn over JRPG stories (to paraphrase M.Knight, it might be the "least Japanese, Japanese writing I've ever seen", though it still has all the warmth, charm, and whimsy one would expect of a Japanese RPG). It's pretty much the game that got me into table top rpg's because after playing it I realized that I wasn't going to get another character driven game story like that for a long, long time, so I'd just have to make one.
Cold Steel - from what I've seen into it - is still entertaining but degrades into more standard anime/jrpg territory (albeit still a cut above the rest), whereas Sky unfolds like a lovingly written novel that's not afraid to spend its first 10-30 hours establishing characters and setting with slice of life.
It's also a fun game, I enjoyed the combat (methodical as it is), and the exploration, and the general interactivity added life to it. But yes, if you care about character driven adventure, Trails in The Sky absolutely delivers.
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RegalSin wrote:
Japan an almost perfect society always threatened by outsiders....................
Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
Aeon Zenith - My STG.