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[Falcom] The Legend of Heroes: Zero no Kiseki announced, 2010 on PSP
- Thread starter duckroll
- Start date
True, though they're going to have to find a new platform to work on after the PSP is done.DiscoJer said:
Incidentally, just noticed that the regular edition retail price for Zero is about 300 yen higher than all of Falcom's PSP releases have been so far. Sign that this'll be 2 UMDs like Sora SC was?
A ton of new screens in a collage thing. Click for the full size.
And some more here: http://www.hmv.co.jp/news/article/1007050027/
And some more here: http://www.hmv.co.jp/news/article/1007050027/
Like Aeana said, we dunno for sure yet. It'll definitely have a load of connections to the Sora series though (seeing them already) and considering how much story they've got set up I seriously doubt this'll be the concluding chapter. Would be really surprised if there wasn't at least a Zero no Kiseki SC or something.duckroll said:
I doubt it's going to be a prequel when the pre-story manga hasAeana said:
Estelle in the Empire searching for Renne.
Also... is that Bleublanc on one of those screenshots? 3rd row down, second column from the left.
Hours Left
Member
It looks like it's shaping up great. I really dig Ellie's design.
Well that's just the way Falcom do things. They've been teasing this one for way longer than usual as it is. I like it much better when there's a small gap between announcement and release, so the hype never really burns out and the wait isn't horribly torturous. It feels like forever since the 3rd was released.Grimmy said:
Also, site's up and Falcom're taking preorders now, though their online store preorder extra is crap. Just preordered it on CDJapan with express, really want the Konami Style extra but they don't ship internationally so that's out unless I want to wait the extra time with a deputy service.
No point in making a new thread for this since I think only two others care about it, but I'll post it anyway.
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/1284144571
12 minutes of gameplay footage from near the beginning of the game.
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/1284144571
12 minutes of gameplay footage from near the beginning of the game.
duckroll made a thread for the video
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=406964
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=406964
Legend of Heroes 1 and 2 are related storywise.Bebpo said:
Legend of Heroes 3, 4, and 5 are related.
Legend of Heroes 6 (Sora no Kiseki) makes up a trilogy of games that are directly related (First Chapter, Second Chapter, and the 3rd).
Legend of Heroes 7 is Zero no Kiseki, and is a new story. It may have some connections to Sora no Kiseki, but it doesn't seem like they'll be very deep.
The Sora no Kiseki trilogy is, by far, the highest quality and the most popular. 3-5 are 'okay' as long as you play the original PC versions and not the PSP disasters. 1 and 2 are fairly straightforward DQ-alikes and, while good, aren't must-plays.Bebpo said:
Only Bandai's terrible PSP remakes have been localized. XSEED is localizing Sora no Kiseki FC, SC and 3rd.Drkirby said:
Legend of Heroes 1-2 are their own thing, I really know nothing about them.Bebpo said:
Legend of Heroes 3, 4 and 5 are all connected and referred to as the Gagharv Trilogy. They're not in chronological order, but they are all connected. They've also been localised for the PSP by Bandai, but the translations are babelfish-tier and really best avoided. The original games are supposedly good, but they're pretty much ruined in English and not really worth playing.
Legend of Heroes 6 is made up of the three Sora no Kiseki games - FC, SC and the 3rd. They're all direct sequels to one another, SC starting the day after FC ends, and the 3rd starting a few months (iirc) after SC does. All have the same cast and are set in the same country.
Zero no Kiseki is basically Legend of Heroes 7. It's set after Sora ends (not sure how long after) and in a neighbouring country on the same continent, with a bunch of returning characters and likely a pretty connected story.
While Falcom is saying you can play Zero without playing Sora, I'd say new players will still miss out on a fair bit in terms of the story, seen as Sora introduced you to the villain organisation which will likely play a huge part in the game eventually, a bunch of the heroes and villains, lots of world backstory and the like. The 3rd was supposed to connect Sora and Zero, and as such it has whole lists of unsolved plot points which'll be important to the rest of the series.
Fine. There's a few niggles because they weren't designed for the PSP (the guild request text is really small and looks like they basically took a screenshot of the PC version and resized it in paint), and obviously the graphics aren't as good, but they're good in-house ports unlike the Gagharv ones. They also added some difficulty settings and stuff (and a couple of extra items in 3rd), which are nice if you like that sort of thing.Bebpo said:
I preordered Sora No Ksieki 1, 2 and 3 a while ago. This means none of those games were this game? This is confusing.Aeana said:
edit:
it looks like this:
1 x The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky "3rd Chapter" - PSP (Preorder) $44.99CDN
1 x Ys: The Oath in Felghana - PSP (Preorder) $44.99CDN
1 x The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky "1st Chapter" - PSP (Preorder) $44.99CDN
1 x The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky "2nd Chapter" - PSP (Preorder) $44.99CDN
1 x Ys Seven - PSP (Preorder) $34.99CDN
The same goes for several of my psp games. But my analogue nub has begun to act on its own at times. I'll have to buy a new psp once it's clear that they'll never make models with umd drives in them anymore.Teetris said:
Varion said:
Ah, thanks. I don't speak japanese, so these titles are confusing me
But I love rpg games, so I wanted to show my support early.Thanks for the info Aeana/Varion.
I think I'll wait until I play Zero no Kiseki and if I really like it and want more, I'll drop Falcom an e-mail and pick up either the PC or PSP Sora no Kiseki set. Even if I wanted to play them first, I'm pretty sure I have no time to play three full rpgs before September 30th
I think I'll wait until I play Zero no Kiseki and if I really like it and want more, I'll drop Falcom an e-mail and pick up either the PC or PSP Sora no Kiseki set. Even if I wanted to play them first, I'm pretty sure I have no time to play three full rpgs before September 30th
So did anyone in Japan pick this up? Any thoughts?
NCSX had the game split across two shipments and the one mine was in (the normal edition shipment?) got delayed in route so they won't have it until Monday and so I should get mine on Wed/Thur.
I'd rather someone else playing makes the OT because if I have to make it next week, it will be very, very bad ^^;
NCSX had the game split across two shipments and the one mine was in (the normal edition shipment?) got delayed in route so they won't have it until Monday and so I should get mine on Wed/Thur.
I'd rather someone else playing makes the OT because if I have to make it next week, it will be very, very bad ^^;
I'd have made an OT but with this few people playing it I didn't think there was much point :lolBebpo said:
Anyway, got this expressed and been playing it all through the weekend during pretty much my every waking hour, and so far it's been really, really good. It is pretty merciless to those who haven't played Sora though, despite how much Falcom's PR have been saying you can play Zero first the writers seem to have no time for such people. So while most of the story is based on the new Zero party, you will miss a fair bit already and a fair few scenes will lose their impact.
Anyway at the rate it's going this'll be toppling SC for me, which I didn't expect. The music, story, characters, gameplay and setting are all excellent.
Would either one of the (two) series fans in this thread mind selling me on the Sora no Kiseki trilogy a bit? The series looks really interesting to me and I know nothing about it other than what's in the rather spare Wiki pages and watching bits of a couple youtube videos.
What do you guys like most about these games? Right now I like the way the game looks and the modern-ish setting looks appealing, and I think I heard somewhere that the games are really long and have great characterization, is that true? Other than that I don't really know anything so a brief little primer would be awesome.
What do you guys like most about these games? Right now I like the way the game looks and the modern-ish setting looks appealing, and I think I heard somewhere that the games are really long and have great characterization, is that true? Other than that I don't really know anything so a brief little primer would be awesome.
Oh the gameplay won't be a problem, a fair few things have changed around and there's a skippable battle tutorial and stuff. It might take a bit of getting used to, but it took a bit of getting used to starting from Sora as well. It's no harder here.Bebpo said:
The problem is the story and the recurring characters. Most of the story I'd say you'll probably be okay so far, seen as it's mostly centred around Crossbell's Mafia organisations who were only very passingly mentioned in Sora 3rd, although I expect it'll loop back to the villain organisation introduced in Sora by the end, which they don't really seem to want to take any time to explain here (it's pretty much just 'Estelle and Joshua tell everyone about the events in Liberl' in the narration and that's it). The story of
Renne
So yeah, I'm sure it'll still be enjoyable, but you'll miss a fair bit in the overall scheme of the things and a lot of scenes won't quite have the impact they would've. It can be done but I'm not sure it's something I could recommend.
The story and characters are what I'm in it for really. Both Sora and Zero take place on the continent of Zemulia in two different countries - Sora in the Kingdom of Liberl, and Zero in the State of Crossbell, though the other countries on the continent do play a part in how the story goes to varying degrees as well (especially the Erebonian Empire and the Republic of Calvard). Because it's all just set on one continent though, you get a whole lot of detail in the setting, and after finishing FC and SC I felt like I knew Liberl like home :lol You know its major industries, you know all about the individual towns and villages in it (they're not just random places you pass by on your big adventure to Save the World), you know all about their neighbouring countries, some bits about the history of the region, etc. The more you play the more you can really get lost in the game's world, and that's one of the things I really love about it.randomkid said:
The characters are the other half of it - they all have their backstories and different sides to their character, although some more than others, and the games' parties all have great chemistry together so you can't help but like almost all of them. Sora has the relatively rare distinction of having a female protagonist too, and a really great one at that. Estelle is no damsel in distress, that's for sure.
The games are pretty long though, 40-50 hours for a native, longer for someone like me who does have to look up kanji from time to time (the vocab level in the game is relatively high). But more than that the series is going to be long - with the exception of FC's cliffhanger ending the games can usually stand on their own to a degree, but leave loads of loose ends about the overall plotline for future games in the Kiseki series to pick up. I don't know how many there are going to be, but I imagine it'll be 2-3 more games at least in this series before it's all over.
Anything else?
Varion said:
One thing I never really hear much about is the gameplay. How is it? Do the games use a good combat system? Are battles fast-paced? Challenging? Are there lots of gameplay systems? Optional sidequests? Etc..etc...
I've never played a turn-based Falcom game before, so I have no idea what to expect.
Great info, thanks Varion. I'll echo Bebpo's questions, and I'm also wondering how the time is split in these games between exploring towns and talking to people and battling in dungeons. Also difficulty info would be good, are the games like Final Fantasy level? Or SMT level?
Nice to hear that story and characters and setting have a big role too, I'm definitely keeping my eye on the Xseed release.
Nice to hear that story and characters and setting have a big role too, I'm definitely keeping my eye on the Xseed release.
The battle system is... pretty interesting. It's almost like a miniature SRPG, though the arenas are quite small so you the fights don't take anywhere near as long as those in an SRPG (though you don't have as much depth, either).
Easier to describe with a screenshot:
The bar down the left is the turn order, much like in FFX's battle system. When it's your turn you can use regular attacks, items, move (you can move as part of the attack/craft commands or just move on its own), etc. Some turn slots have bonuses attached to them (which you can see to the right of some of the character portraits). If your turn has one of those attached you get that bonus - be it increased damage, EP (MP) recovery, CP recovery (Craft Points, regenerates when you attack/defend and is used for special attacks), increased chance of an item drop, more sepith (explain this in a minute), etc. Of course, the enemies get the bonuses too, which is where S-Crafts come in. These are your real... I guess I'll just call them limit breaks. You can use these at any time providing you have more than 100 CP, and when you activate them that character will be automatically inserted into the turn order after the current attacker. Which is awesome if you want to either use a healing S-Craft in a pinch, or make sure that you get a Critical turn bonus (or even use an S-Craft you didn't really want to use simply to avoid an enemy getting the critical).
They're... well, average in terms of pacing I guess. Usually you can reach the enemy on the battlefield in a turn or less, so they're not really that time consuming, although some enemies can be a little annoying. The difficulty level isn't that high really, some enemies can be annoying and give you a tough fight, but I don't get game overs very often (and if you do you get a 'retry' option that just puts you back to the start of the fight, no progress lost).
There's a whole lot of optional sidequests though. In Sora FC/SC you play as a group of Bracers, who basically travel around dropping into the local Bracer Guilds, where people can leave requests to hire your services to do stuff for them in exchange for money and quite often other rewards too. You only really have to do the bare minimum of these, but there's a whole lot of them, most of which appear on the notice boards in the Guild for you to check with details of the client and money rewards, but some are hidden. Doing them gets you money and BP (Bracer Points), and when you get a set amount of BP it increases your rank and gets you a (usually useful and rare) reward from the Guild. Some of them have other optional objectives or choices which determine whether you get any bonus BP or extra rewards, too, and if you get all the BP in FC or SC you get a bonus at the start of the next game. In addition to that there's hunting for volumes of a novel (get them all for Estelle or Joshua's ultimate weapon) and collecting issues of the local newspaper every chapter. The novels actually turn out to be surprisingly connected to the story, too, and the great thing about the quests is while there are lots of typical RPG style fetch quests or whatever, quite often it's worth doing them just to see the character banter. Rather than simply walking up to someone and them saying 'get me this', there's always a conversation before and after, and some of them reveal some interesting things about the world, while others are just funny.
The other gameplay system worth mentioning would be the Orbment system. This is probably easier to explain with a picture too I guess.
Every character has an Orbment similar to the one on the right. Every character's is different in design and how the lines are ordered though - more magic (Orbal Arts) oriented characters generally have less (or only one) lines than characters that are primarily fighters, who usually have loads. In each of the Orbment 'slots' you can set a 'quartz' which has a set effect (Attack up by X%, Defence up by X%, HP recovery in battle, monsters ignore you on the field, etc etc). Some characters have slots in which you can only set a certain element of Quartz. Anyway, each Quartz has some set elemental values (see the numbers under 'Line' in the top right), and these decide what Orbal Arts that character can use, like a low level healing spell may need 6 blue, or whatever. This is where the lines have an effect, because the numbers are added up for each line, so if you have 4 blue in line 1 and 2 blue in line 2, while that may add up to 6 that doesn't get you that low level healing spell. The middle quartz is added to the values for all lines.
Anyway, you can get the quartz in a number of ways - either dropped from monsters (very rarely), through quests occasionally, or, more often, by exchanging coloured fragments called Sepith that are dropped by monsters at the town workshop. Or, alternatively, you can exchange the Sepith for money there - monsters don't drop money, so you get it by selling items, doing Bracer quests, or exchanging Sepith. Usually you'll want to get Quartz with them though. The whole Orbment system is very important to the story.
As for the split between doing various things, depends how many Bracer quests you do really. If you don't do many at all then perhaps you could push it to 70/30 in favour of dungeons, but if you do them all you're easily going to spend more time around the town than you are in dungeons and fighting. Falcom always puts the games down on their IR reports under the genre 'Story RPG' and it shows.
Okay I think that'll do for now.
Easier to describe with a screenshot:
The bar down the left is the turn order, much like in FFX's battle system. When it's your turn you can use regular attacks, items, move (you can move as part of the attack/craft commands or just move on its own), etc. Some turn slots have bonuses attached to them (which you can see to the right of some of the character portraits). If your turn has one of those attached you get that bonus - be it increased damage, EP (MP) recovery, CP recovery (Craft Points, regenerates when you attack/defend and is used for special attacks), increased chance of an item drop, more sepith (explain this in a minute), etc. Of course, the enemies get the bonuses too, which is where S-Crafts come in. These are your real... I guess I'll just call them limit breaks. You can use these at any time providing you have more than 100 CP, and when you activate them that character will be automatically inserted into the turn order after the current attacker. Which is awesome if you want to either use a healing S-Craft in a pinch, or make sure that you get a Critical turn bonus (or even use an S-Craft you didn't really want to use simply to avoid an enemy getting the critical).
They're... well, average in terms of pacing I guess. Usually you can reach the enemy on the battlefield in a turn or less, so they're not really that time consuming, although some enemies can be a little annoying. The difficulty level isn't that high really, some enemies can be annoying and give you a tough fight, but I don't get game overs very often (and if you do you get a 'retry' option that just puts you back to the start of the fight, no progress lost).
There's a whole lot of optional sidequests though. In Sora FC/SC you play as a group of Bracers, who basically travel around dropping into the local Bracer Guilds, where people can leave requests to hire your services to do stuff for them in exchange for money and quite often other rewards too. You only really have to do the bare minimum of these, but there's a whole lot of them, most of which appear on the notice boards in the Guild for you to check with details of the client and money rewards, but some are hidden. Doing them gets you money and BP (Bracer Points), and when you get a set amount of BP it increases your rank and gets you a (usually useful and rare) reward from the Guild. Some of them have other optional objectives or choices which determine whether you get any bonus BP or extra rewards, too, and if you get all the BP in FC or SC you get a bonus at the start of the next game. In addition to that there's hunting for volumes of a novel (get them all for Estelle or Joshua's ultimate weapon) and collecting issues of the local newspaper every chapter. The novels actually turn out to be surprisingly connected to the story, too, and the great thing about the quests is while there are lots of typical RPG style fetch quests or whatever, quite often it's worth doing them just to see the character banter. Rather than simply walking up to someone and them saying 'get me this', there's always a conversation before and after, and some of them reveal some interesting things about the world, while others are just funny.
The other gameplay system worth mentioning would be the Orbment system. This is probably easier to explain with a picture too I guess.
Every character has an Orbment similar to the one on the right. Every character's is different in design and how the lines are ordered though - more magic (Orbal Arts) oriented characters generally have less (or only one) lines than characters that are primarily fighters, who usually have loads. In each of the Orbment 'slots' you can set a 'quartz' which has a set effect (Attack up by X%, Defence up by X%, HP recovery in battle, monsters ignore you on the field, etc etc). Some characters have slots in which you can only set a certain element of Quartz. Anyway, each Quartz has some set elemental values (see the numbers under 'Line' in the top right), and these decide what Orbal Arts that character can use, like a low level healing spell may need 6 blue, or whatever. This is where the lines have an effect, because the numbers are added up for each line, so if you have 4 blue in line 1 and 2 blue in line 2, while that may add up to 6 that doesn't get you that low level healing spell. The middle quartz is added to the values for all lines.
Anyway, you can get the quartz in a number of ways - either dropped from monsters (very rarely), through quests occasionally, or, more often, by exchanging coloured fragments called Sepith that are dropped by monsters at the town workshop. Or, alternatively, you can exchange the Sepith for money there - monsters don't drop money, so you get it by selling items, doing Bracer quests, or exchanging Sepith. Usually you'll want to get Quartz with them though. The whole Orbment system is very important to the story.
As for the split between doing various things, depends how many Bracer quests you do really. If you don't do many at all then perhaps you could push it to 70/30 in favour of dungeons, but if you do them all you're easily going to spend more time around the town than you are in dungeons and fighting. Falcom always puts the games down on their IR reports under the genre 'Story RPG' and it shows.
Okay I think that'll do for now.
TheFLYINGManga_Ka
Member
I think I asked this before, but any chance of this coming over to the states?
I guess it depends on the sales performance of the Ys games?
I guess it depends on the sales performance of the Ys games?