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The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (PC) |OT| Enter Erebonia

Eria

Member
Holy shit just tried the game for a few minutes and the port is amazing so far.

Great job xseed and Durante!
 

fuzaco

Member
Damn, just lost a few hours of progress due to a power outage. I got too spoiled by Sky's autosave feature.
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
You're using a DS4, right?

It's kind of a clunky process to get the DS4 dpad working with Steam's native drivers. I had to do some menuing to get my dpad to work.

Using a Wii U Pro controller, it's seen as a 360 controller with Xinput. I did try with the DS4 as a backup.

What you described is what I initially tried when I saw people saying to configure the controller in BPM. That didn't work for either controller though, except in the launcher. What did is going into the general settings for BPM and setting a desktop configuration. Trying to change the desktop configuration outside BPM gave an error.

I have it working, but it just seems like Steam and Windows are detecting the game as having no native controller support.
 

Psxphile

Member
Just started Chapter 2. Noticed on two instances where the new dub lines didn't match what was being displayed in text on-screen: once at the tail-end of Chapter 1 during the scene immediately following the battle with the last boss and again in Chapter 2 right at the beginning of the first Free Day.
 

FLD

Member
Just started Chapter 2. Noticed on two instances where the new dub lines didn't match what was being displayed in text on-screen: once at the tail-end of Chapter 1 during the scene immediately following the battle with the last boss and again in Chapter 2 right at the beginning of the first Free Day.

Yeah, I noticed that as well. IIRC, one time Rean just said a different thing than what was displayed, which I thought might just be a tweaked line where the text wasn't updated. But another time Jusis skipped a line and said the next one instead, so his next few text bubbles didn't match up with what he was saying. The Jusis one was during the Chapter 2 field study.
 

Durante

Member
Yes, we are aware of a handful of instances of audio mismatch throughout the game. They'll be fixed soon (probably not in the next patch, but the one after that).
 

fuzaco

Member
Yeah, noticed those too. There was also a line in chapter 2 or 3 I think where Alisa says "opening ceremony" but it's written as "opening party".
 
I just got the recipe book and R2 now both initiates turbo and opens the recipe book on my joypad.

Anyone know how I can stop it from doing the latter (or remap turbo to r1 or something)?
 

Massicot

Member
I just got the recipe book and R2 now both initiates turbo and opens the recipe book on my joypad.

Anyone know how I can stop it from doing the latter (or remap turbo to r1 or something)?

Is your game fully up to date? There was a patch that removed this. I no longer have the recipe book popping up.
 

Kaldaien

Neo Member
Did the update improve performance with HQ DoF on at 4k or not?

Anyone knows if there really is a big diference between having it on or off?

The difference is MASSIVE. I have some performance stats in my framework, with HQ DoF on, one frame spiked to 2.88 billion pixels shaded. For context, without HQ DoF on, 700 million was the peak. That's a 4x increase, and enough to make a GTX 1080 wet the bed :)
 

Kaldaien

Neo Member
This issue (that is, the general issue of controls generating "repeat press" events too quickly at high framerates) will be fixed in the next version.

You can wait on the SwapChain (not to be confused with WaitForVBlank) on Windows 8.1+ systems, by the way. This offers two benefits, first it can in the best-case cut presentation latency in half because the DWM isn't locking one of the buffers in the swapchain.

The second benefit is that you get V-Sync like throttling if/when you want it, instead of calling Present (...) and having to pay the full wait penalty. This benefit's probably not that significant for a port like this -- you can't magically manufacture extra work to do on the render thread during the time Present would normally block :p

The downside to waitable is that you're locked-in to the dimensions of the swapchain for its entire existence. HOWEVER, since this game uses a launcher and has no possibility of ever changing resolution in-game, waitiable works. I've been overriding the game's swapchain management and using it in my own mod with great success.


It tightens up the normal windowed mode input jitter (only process input events when the chain is signaled and you can get rid of those repeats) and because you also need to use the flip presentation model to use a waitable chain, it smooths out frame pacing pretty dramatically.

I don't know if it's worth your time to implement something that Windows 7 systems don't support, but I figured I'd throw this out there anyway. It's my favorite DXGI feature by far :)
 

Kvik

Member
The difference is MASSIVE. I have some performance stats in my framework, with HQ DoF on, one frame spiked to 2.88 billion pixels shaded. For context, without HQ DoF on, 700 million was the peak. That's a 4x increase, and enough to make a GTX 1080 wet the bed :)

Not enough to bring my 2x 1080Ti to its knees. 144fps as usual :p

But at 2880p, yeah it does. 20-25 fps is what I'm getting. Not that I play at that resolution though.
 
The difference is MASSIVE. I have some performance stats in my framework, with HQ DoF on, one frame spiked to 2.88 billion pixels shaded. For context, without HQ DoF on, 700 million was the peak. That's a 4x increase, and enough to make a GTX 1080 wet the bed :)

Luckily for us, Durante is the one behind the port and it seems he's already solved the problem.

Durante said:
I just fixed the exceptional performance penalty of high quality DoF at high res / high MSAA levels. It should be up to 3x faster. As a side effect, normal DoF should also be ~10% faster when using MSAA.

What we don't know is when the update 1.2 is gonna come out, soon I hope.
 
Never played any "The Legend of Heroes" games before. How do they compare to the Tales of series? I've been wanting to play a JRPG lately.
 
Never played any "The Legend of Heroes" games before. How do they compare to the Tales of series? I've been wanting to play a JRPG lately.

Expect Slow Pacing with tons and tons of world building (connects to other games as well) and NPC dialogue that expands them to potentially be characters as valid as any cast member. There are super hype story moments though and tons of character development. Combat is primarily Turn based with movement mechanics (sadly pretty slow overall until this PC port and Cheat Engine speed up). The games aren't the prettiest things in the world in regards to the presentation but they do what they aim to do very well. I highly recommend them if you're a fan of JRPGs.
 

Nyoro SF

Member
Never played any "The Legend of Heroes" games before. How do they compare to the Tales of series? I've been wanting to play a JRPG lately.

It's a great JRPG series.

My recommendation is to approach it like a book. Nice and easy, take time to read, and slot in the bookmark when you're done for the day.

The whole series is interconnected so the real fun is seeing how everything links together.
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
Correction: The Trails games are linked. Just drop the whole "Legend of Heroes" title from your mind, it's not important.

I think there are some links to LoH 3-5, but it's up for debate how superficial those are.

I still think XSEED would be best off dropping the Legend of Heroes prefix on store listings and just keeping it for other formal usage. It's really long, really generic, and only to tie the games to the poorly localized Gagharv trilogy in the west. At best they don't gain anything from having it on there, at worst it creates a negative first impression due to Gagharv PSP.

Someone else has brought this up before, but

1aSPA2s.png


39 characters displayed and you still can't tell the difference between the games from the written titles.
 

ResourcefulStar

Neo Member
If I could trouble you to send all that in to support@xseedgamesDotcom, that would be greatly appreciated. I'd change it myself, but I wasn't involved with the port much outside of the voice acting and a bit of text tweaking.
Very well. I will send a list of encountered issues at the end of my playthrough.
 
Thanks guys. I just bought the game off your impressions, but is it mandatory to play the older titles? or is just some nods and references to the old games?
 

vkrili

Member
Thanks guys. I just bought the game off your impressions, but is it mandatory to play the older titles? or is just some nods and references to the old games?

It will eventually be mandatory, because they're all building up to a conclusion. But at the moment, in this game, you don't need to.
 

Eylos

Banned
Thanks guys. I just bought the game off your impressions, but is it mandatory to play the older titles? or is just some nods and references to the old games?
You can play, you will understand the story and stuff, but all the games are related. So you will know more of the world and some characters if you play all. I started with this one btw.
 
It will eventually be mandatory, because they're all building up to a conclusion. But at the moment, in this game, you don't need to.

You can play, you will understand the story and stuff, but all the games are related. So you will know more of the world and some characters if you play all. I started with this one btw.

Thanks guys. I'll start with Cold Steel first then like Eylos. Hopefully I enjoy it enough to get all of the "Trails in the Sky" games.
 

Levito

Banned
Started this on Friday, this is my first foray into the series. (including Trails in the Sky)


Like it quite a bit so far,
I'm at the point in chapter 1 where the two teams are about to split up and go on their field study.
I've heard folks describe the beginning as 'slow' but I didn't dislike it.
 

Squire

Banned
Started this on Friday, this is my first foray into the series. (including Trails in the Sky)


Like it quite a bit so far,
I'm at the point in chapter 1 where the two teams are about to split up and go on their field study.
I've heard folks describe the beginning as 'slow' but I didn't dislike it.

It's a bigger issue in the first game in the prior trilogy, I think. This one really gets off on a good foot by starting in medias res.

What do you think of the cast?
 

Ascheroth

Member
Started this on Friday, this is my first foray into the series. (including Trails in the Sky)


Like it quite a bit so far,
I'm at the point in chapter 1 where the two teams are about to split up and go on their field study.
I've heard folks describe the beginning as 'slow' but I didn't dislike it.
'Slow' does not imply bad. Don't forget to talk to all the NPCs after every little story progression!


-----
Chapter 3 now and I'm still glad I chose Hard. It's thankfully not overly difficult, but it does require you to know your Crafts and Arts and pay at least a little attention to party and Quartz setup.
 

QFNS

Unconfirmed Member
Hoping to jump into this tonight or later this week. Durante's work is looking amazing in everything I've seen. I haven't played through 3rd, yet though. I beat FC and SC though, am I likely to be spoiled on much of a the story or can I go back and play 3rd later?
 

Squire

Banned
OH HI RON


I haven't grown too attached yet but they seem cool, lotta names to remember. That's all I got for now really.

Hey bud! 👋

There are definitely lots of names. I'm continually surprised I can remember most of them lol

The game is structured you get to spend plenty of time with everyone though. You probably read it on this page already, but take your time with the whole thing, there's no rush. (You don't seem to be rushing anyway though, so that's good.)
 

Tonton

Member
Hoping to jump into this tonight or later this week. Durante's work is looking amazing in everything I've seen. I haven't played through 3rd, yet though. I beat FC and SC though, am I likely to be spoiled on much of a the story or can I go back and play 3rd later?
I don't think Cold Steel spoils anything from 3rd, but some of the doors in there are important background for Cold Steel and its sequel
 

Levito

Banned
Hey bud! ��

There are definitely lots of names. I'm continually surprised I can remember most of them lol

The game is structured you get to spend plenty of time with everyone though. You probably read it on this page already, but take your time with the whole thing, there's no rush. (You don't seem to be rushing anyway though, so that's good.)


It takes me forever to to remember names anyways. I kinda appreciate that the whole party is here from the start(or at least a lot of them) rather than the usual 'get drip fed new party members every few hours' thing.
 

Loptous

Member
Can I point mistakes here?

So far, the one change I really don't like about the battle system is how you activate S-crafts. Thought it was a lot more seamless in the previous games.
 

Ascheroth

Member
Hey bud! 👋

There are definitely lots of names. I'm continually surprised I can remember most of them lol

The game is structured you get to spend plenty of time with everyone though. You probably read it on this page already, but take your time with the whole thing, there's no rush. (You don't seem to be rushing anyway though, so that's good.)
I'm making a conscious effort to remember most of the NPC names this time (didn't really try as much during TitS, though I did talk with most of em every time).
I'm really surprised how good I know so many of them already.

There's the mischivous Vivi who always makes trouble for her twin-sister Linde, who is part of the art club and friends with Gaius.
The excentric Clara, head of the same club.

Monica, who is taking swimming lessons from Laura in the swimming club and is overwhelmed but still tries her best.

Klein, captain of that club who loves teaching people and also gives private lesson to Emile in the town. He also really likes his parents.
Emiles parents have a very strained relationship however, as his father only has work in his head and takes everything his wife does for him as granted.
Incidentally, the kids from the town, think that Emile got arrogant and is skipping Sunday School because it's beneath him. Of course Emile doesn't think that.

Theresa and Emily from the Lacrosse club, one noble one commoner. Theresas dad is worried about his daughter being frieds with a commoner.
Emily is the captain and takes morning practice seriously and is glad when Alisa joins her, because Theresa has low blood-pressure.

Etc, etc.
I could write entire walls of text just about this.
 

wrowa

Member
I think there are some links to LoH 3-5, but it's up for debate how superficial those are.

I still think XSEED would be best off dropping the Legend of Heroes prefix on store listings and just keeping it for other formal usage. It's really long, really generic, and only to tie the games to the poorly localized Gagharv trilogy in the west. At best they don't gain anything from having it on there, at worst it creates a negative first impression due to Gagharv PSP.

Someone else has brought this up before, but

1aSPA2s.png


39 characters displayed and you still can't tell the difference between the games from the written titles.

I'm going to assume they aren't allowed to drop the prefix, otherwise I don't understand why they didn't change this years ago. The long title is a problem on every storefront and it's been criticized time and time again.

Personally, I think putting "The Legend of Heroes" at the end of the title would work best. You'd still have the proper name of the franchise in the title, but it wouldn't overshadow the more important parts anymore. "Trails of Cold Steel - Legend of Heroes", "Trails in the Sky - Legend of Heroes", "Trails in the Sky: SC - Legend of Heroes" and so on.
 

Squire

Banned
It takes me forever to to remember names anyways. I kinda appreciate that the whole party is here from the start(or at least a lot of them) rather than the usual 'get drip fed new party members every few hours' thing.

It very much bucks tge trend in that way. You don't have access to all of them at all times, but yeah, you've already met 80% of the playable cast.

I'm making a conscious effort to remember most of the NPC names this time (didn't really try as much during TitS, though I did talk with most of em every time).
I'm really surprised how good I know so many of them already.

There's the mischivous Vivi who always makes trouble for her twin-sister Linde, who is part of the art club and friends with Gaius.
The excentric Clara, head of the same club.

Monica, who is taking swimming lessons from Laura in the swimming club and is overwhelmed but still tries her best.

Klein, captain of that club who loves teaching people and also gives private lesson to Emile in the town. He also really likes his parents.
Emiles parents have a very strained relationship however, as his father only has work in his head and takes everything his wife does for him as granted.
Incidentally, the kids from the town, think that Emile got arrogant and is skipping Sunday School because it's beneath him. Of course Emile doesn't think that.

Theresa and Emily from the Lacrosse club, one noble one commoner. Theresas dad is worried about his daughter being frieds with a commoner.
Emily is the captain and takes morning practice seriously and is glad when Alisa joins her, because Theresa has low blood-pressure.

Etc, etc.
I could write entire walls of text just about this.

Yeah, they're all great. I also love the "will they/won't they" between Alan and Bridget. And Friedel and Loggins seem to have trouble before as well.

It dawned on me recently just walking around the school and catching up with all of them has a sort of calming effect.
 

Ascheroth

Member
I'm going to assume they aren't allowed to drop the prefix, otherwise I don't understand why they didn't change this years ago. The long title is a problem on every storefront and it's been criticized time and time again.

Personally, I think putting "The Legend of Heroes" at the end of the title would work best. You'd still have the proper name of the franchise in the title, but it wouldn't overshadow the more important parts anymore. "Trails of Cold Steel - Legend of Heroes", "Trails in the Sky - Legend of Heroes", "Trails in the Sky: SC - Legend of Heroes" and so on.
When one of my friends starts playing a TitS game, the small popup shows "The Legend of Heroes: Trails in..."... No way to even find out with a glance which of the 3 games it is. I suppose you can at least differentiate between Sky and Cold Steel, because the latter would probably show up as "The Legend of Heroes: Trails of..."
Still, terrible.
 

Tonton

Member
I'm making a conscious effort to remember most of the NPC names this time (didn't really try as much during TitS, though I did talk with most of em every time).
I'm really surprised how good I know so many of them already.

There's the mischivous Vivi who always makes trouble for her twin-sister Linde, who is part of the art club and friends with Gaius.
The excentric Clara, head of the same club.

Monica, who is taking swimming lessons from Laura in the swimming club and is overwhelmed but still tries her best.

Klein, captain of that club who loves teaching people and also gives private lesson to Emile in the town. He also really likes his parents.
Emiles parents have a very strained relationship however, as his father only has work in his head and takes everything his wife does for him as granted.
Incidentally, the kids from the town, think that Emile got arrogant and is skipping Sunday School because it's beneath him. Of course Emile doesn't think that.

Theresa and Emily from the Lacrosse club, one noble one commoner. Theresas dad is worried about his daughter being frieds with a commoner.
Emily is the captain and takes morning practice seriously and is glad when Alisa joins her, because Theresa has low blood-pressure.

Etc, etc.
I could write entire walls of text just about this.
It really helps that Trista has the school full of unique NPCs all with their own entry in the character Notebook, really the next step with how Falcom treats NPCs in these games

I'm going to assume they aren't allowed to drop the prefix, otherwise I don't understand why they didn't change this years ago. The long title is a problem on every storefront and it's been criticized time and time again.

Personally, I think putting "The Legend of Heroes" at the end of the title would work best. You'd still have the proper name of the franchise in the title, but it wouldn't overshadow the more important parts anymore. "Trails of Cold Steel - Legend of Heroes", "Trails in the Sky - Legend of Heroes", "Trails in the Sky: SC - Legend of Heroes" and so on.
I think XSEED acknowledged that issue before but didn't really say for sure if they were going to change it
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
I think XSEED acknowledged that issue before but didn't really say for sure if they were going to change it

Brittany said she was considering it. I'd guess she either pitched it and got shot down or changed her mind, since Cold Steel has released with the prefix.
 
I think Falcom did a great job with the NPCs in Cold Steel, specially those in Thors. Really stepped up their game in the academy. It has been a year since I played the game, and I can remember a lot of them and their personal stories, and for me that's really something.

All of them have their own dynamics that change through the game, and their own mini arcs that are carried over and affected by the events of CS2.

Getting to know them and see their evolution during both games, pretty much like class VII, was one of the things that made my playtrough so enjoyable.

And there's that certain gameplay mechanic they introduced in CS2 that made me appreaciate the time spend talking with the people of Thors academy.
 

Levito

Banned
I think Falcom did a great job with the NPCs in Cold Steel, specially those in Thors. Really stepped up their game in the academy. It has been a year since I played the game, and I can remember a lot of them and their personal stories, and for me that's really something..


Yeah there's a lot of personality to the NPCs, most of them feel like they have something meaningful to say.
 

Erheller

Member
I cannot think of another video game high school that feels as alive as Thors. And you only get to explore it, like, 2 days a month.
 
I cannot think of another video game high school that feels as alive as Thors. And you only get to explore it, like, 2 days a month.

Well, Quality > Quantity.

Honestly I want a Persona 6 that cuts the bloat and follows Cold Steel's model, focusing on making a smaller number of days with more depth in them, rather than a billion days you can only do one thing in, or worse, nothing in.
 

QFNS

Unconfirmed Member
I don't think Cold Steel spoils anything from 3rd, but some of the doors in there are important background for Cold Steel and its sequel

OK thanks! I'm sure I'll get around to 3rd eventually (sale this winter would help too). I just don't want to get the story spoiled while I enjoy the new hotness. Thanks for the info =)
 

Nabae

Unconfirmed Member
I'm around the middle of chapter 1 now and I LOVE this game. It's so damn atmospheric and cozy. Just the perfect game to unwind to.

I'm not sold on every English dub performance yet, but so far, Rean, Sara, Towa, Gaius, and Jusis are the standouts for me.
 

FLD

Member
OK thanks! I'm sure I'll get around to 3rd eventually (sale this winter would help too). I just don't want to get the story spoiled while I enjoy the new hotness. Thanks for the info =)

For what it's worth, I originally played Cold Steel 1 on Vita like a year before 3rd came out and if anything I enjoyed 3rd more because of it. There's a few parts that I appreciated a lot more due to having knowledge from Cold Steel.
 
Im in Chapter 1's field study, and I've learned that getting Double/Triple Advantages with Alisa R
toootally not Reinford, don't mind her
is really simple. All you have to do is (spoiler if you want to figure it out yourself)
provoke the enemy, run just outside of their range that they'll chase you in, then as soon they turn to go back to their starting position, shoot em in the back. The speed and range of her bow makes it idiot proof.

Besides the simplification of the orbment system, I'm enjoying the battle system compared to Sky. The only thing is I kinda wonder if I should start over on Nightmare mode instead of Hard, especially with the aforementioned easy Advantage strikes.

People that played Trails in the Sky SC and/or 3rd on Hard, what mode are you playing Cold Steel on and how hard (or not hard) is it for you?
 
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