I enjoyed Sh2 but its barebones as hell. Also very short.
SH2 Is basically what their ps2 jrpgs were like but with much better graphics.
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You can easily complete it if you commit though were looking at 30 hours per week as 3 weeks is around 90 hours for the game. And you dont need to buy pokemon at launch.
Or at allā¦lol
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Haha true true, but Iām a Pokemon fiend tbh. Itās my guilty pleasure. No matter how lazy gamefreak gets I will always love Pokemon.
Iāve finally cleared out a little backlog and have found the time to start getting into Kuro no Kiseki II! Unfortunately Iāve got the Japanese reading ability of a kindergartner so itās taken me about 10 hours to complete the prologue 
! I am using this game to get better though, and thereās been scenes where I understood everything no problem. I am using Jisho.org and Machine Translation software for more ādifficultā scenes (admittedly, most of them lol)
But enough of that part, the game is very good so far, the action battle mode was refined and you can cast arts now in it (Kuro 1ās action mode was basic melee only). And HOLY SHIT at that prologue ending!!! This might be one of the darkest Trails games yetā¦ And it looks like that āRadiant Historia timelinesā feature is coming into play now
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NEW Ys COMING TO SWITCH/PS!
but also:
YES! YES! FALCOM IS FINALLY LEARNING!
For those not in the know, for over a decade now Falcom games have launched exclusively on PS, and were then had outsourced ports to Switch and PC by third parties like NISA and CLE around 2 years later. It was a bizarre strategy that ultimately was starting to hurt Falcom (PS exclusive launches)
Falcom doing a multiplat release day and date is monumental for them.
Now the next thing they really, really need to fix is their gameās English releases being 3 years after the JP releases. Itās insane how high quality the Kuro games are and yet theyāre Asia only for now.
As for Xbox relation to this, itās no surprise Falcom doesnāt care for it, being an ultra JP market focused developer. Just gotta hope NISA is working on ports.
And Iām very excited to see Ys on the Kuro engine!
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Are they at least going to optimise the damn game for switch? Ys9 runs like shit.
Yeah no xbox no surprise. No pc version is stupid though. Its like they dont care to see the Ys franchise evolve
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Weāll see. This is the first Falcom game being developed with Switch in mind. NISA ported Ys IX to Switch, 2 years after itās PS4 release, while this port is being developed in house at Falcom, launching day 1 with the PS version.
As for PC, I guess all we can say is ābaby stepsā lol. Falcom has been incredibly adverse to multiplat development hence why them doing a Switch version in house is so surprising. Before 2010 they used to be a PC only developer, would be great to see them return to it in house.
30FPS for Ys X Switch is definitely a guarantee. Hard to say how quality the port will be, being Falcomās first attempt at Switch.
It all screams baby steps but better than no steps at all, and your enthusiasm is infectious.
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A rather interesting Article i found. on Window Central by Miles Dompier.
Found it quite interesting to share which Jrpg franchises that are the most talked about in regards to getting a port for Xbox. Although am not really surprised by the demand of both Mana and Trials games.
Speaking of Jrpg port for Xbox. Is it really possible that Xbox tries to port the likes of Yo Kai Watch from Level-5? If so i think it would be very interesting to see it happening and blossoming the relationship Xbox had with Level-5 once more.
Also, which Jrpg Titles( Not franchises) to you all think Xbox would try and put a lot of effort to bring to the xbox community? I would like to imagine given the relationship with Sega, the possibility of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim(Which i only heard good things about) sounds mighty enticing and a possibility to look forward to.
Playing Kuro no Kiseki 2. Letās see if any Trails fans here recognize the battle music I have set up 
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Trails in the Sky 
Just finished Cold Steel 3+4 back to back. Rather enjoyed my experience, but dear lord Cold Steel 4 is hilariously long.
Think Cold Steel 3 might be my favorite Cold Steel game. Having a smaller class VII was a great move, shame that Cold Steel 4 having a massive cast kind of undid the more focused approach of CS3 with itās massive amount of playable characters.
CS4 still had some great moments, but it suffers from having a massive cast and simultaneously underutilizing that cast.
In essence:
CS3 pros:
More focussed cast, with old class 7 making some choice appearances.
The addition of a second master quartz was interesting
Some heavily one note characters from CS 1 and 2 got some much needed development.
Rean works a lot better as a teacher than a student.
The visited settings in this game where more interesting than the previous games.
Cons:
The more developed characters from previous CS game hardly got any development at all.
The class 7 wankery was a bit much at times.
CS 4 Pros:
Best side content in the franchise. Vantage master was introduced is CS3, but was a lot better is CS4. Tons of plot relevant side quests, fishing and cooking being a lot more rewarding and the reintroduction of Pom Pom Party.
CS4 went the extra mile to give every Thors student introduced in the first two games some sort of resolution.
CS4 cons:
The length of the game
Loved seeing the Liberl and Crossbell main characters, but despite the game bending over backwards to make them seem important to the CS plot, they end up doing little of note.
Optimizing a group of characters is too easy in this game making the difficulty non existent.
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Tell me about it, hahaha. This is from one playthrough. Though I do literally everything in these games, all books, sidequests, NPC dialogue, minigames, etc. Itās a packed game for sure though padded to hell with filler.
Hajimari/āReverieā offers a much more condensed story. Though it definitely has the most amount of side content in any Trails game, and the biggest party. Itās also an extremely easy game to ābreakā, but they do offer a really difficult difficulty called āAbyssā which is even higher than Nightmare, thatās how I played it. Itās really āunfairā, but the game lets you go crazy and be āunfairā back. Hajimari is the peak of Cold Steelās battle system.
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Ended up logging a similar amount of hours on CS4. Probably am never going to replay them due to the length lol.
Full series (besides the just released one) for $26! I am still playing Mask of Deception right now, and itās still quite the slow burn. Thereās a lot of interesting plot hooks popping up though and Iām extremely curious to see how they pay off.
As I said before this series is 80% Visual Novel and 20% Strategy RPG. For me I like streaming the game to my phone and reading the VN parts while in bed. Thereās a lot of slice of life stuff and itās very cozy and relaxing (but I am expecting insane stuff to start happening, it certainly did in Prelude!)
Are we thinking Dragon Quest Treasures is going to be good? I wouldnāt say Iām āconcernedā, but the recent performance issues with Bayo3/PokĆ©mon has me wanting to set expectations for this spin-off.
And now the game just threw a several hour long segment with battle after battle and lots of blood spilling my way, whew! The brakes came off pretty suddenly. Saw some crazy stuff Iām excited to see the plot elaborate on.
I finished the game
I would guess my actual playtime is more like 50 hours, I left it idle a lot.
From the last 15 hours or so of the game the brakes never stopped. That got crazy and insane and I was just dumping all my free time into this and the hours felt like minutes. I loved it and that ending was pure goosebumps, damn, they really want me to IMMEDIATELY jump into Mask of Truthā¦ Iāll hold off for a little while though, donāt wanna burn out. Thereās some post game battles to do but I wasnāt really playing this game for the battles so Iām gonna move on now.
The characters were also all really great and memorable, I enjoyed the new cast a lot more than in the previous title, though SPOILER It was awesome to see almost every character from the previous game return, now older and basically masters of fighting. I was very happy to see little Aruru now all grown up 
For complaints I donāt have much, I would say from the early-middle section there is perhaps too much slice of life/filler scenes. I know what theyāre trying to do, and it does work, the slice of life segments help with the weight of events in the late game, but really, you can go through like 5 hours of āLetās cook togetherā āLetās go shoppingā type scenes with no action or battles in between. As I said, for these moments I streamed the game to my phone and just enjoyed them in bed lol. I think even with some of these segments cut out, it would not affect the weight of the story very much. I thought the previous game, despite also having many of these filler scenes, managed to better pace the balance of slice of life and battling.
The battles themselves, while they are fun to play, are not very deep, just throw your strongest guys at the enemies with no thought and you win. I only died once on the final boss because he used some cheap kill everyone move, and he didnāt use it again the next time.
From what I can tell, Mask of Truth is gonna be a much more serious game, so Iām expecting better pacing there.
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Do I have to start with trails in the sky. Man arenāt they like 100 hour jrpgs 
Itās a very rewarding experience to start with Sky, yes. Some people start at Cold Steel instead, but IMO the Sky games are masterpieces and youāre missing out on a lot of context.
The earlier games are actually reasonable length. The Sky games are probably about 30-50 hours each depending on how much side content you do. Sky 3rd is actually a very short game for a JRPG too. Cold Steel 2 is another one I found a bit short.
The 100+ hour romps are Cold Steel 3 and 4, as well as Kuro no Kiseki. Trails to Azure I think would also push close to 100 hours
For me I took my time doing all the content in each game and playing over the course of a year and a half, spacing each game out by about a month. Iām so glad to have played them all as itās become my favorite JRPG series.
And hey, what do you know, an opportunity to post these sales:
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