Backlog 2019

[Kikki]

I'm done Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, now. Can't really talk about it yet; still processing. I think my overriding feeling is anger. But it needs to settle for a bit before I can be sure. It was certainly...big.

I need something cute and sweet (and relatively uncomplicated) to play, now. Guess I'll be heading back to the Switch to see if I've got anything fluffy on hand, or on my upcoming list.

It was, though, my Game of the Year. Of course it was.

[ryume]

Wow, the last chapter seems to have gone by fast for you. Congratulations on finishing! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts/why anger is your initial reaction. Feel free to PM me if you just want to vent about the game

[Kikki]

The 'final chapter' is different from the main body chapters...it's a lot more direct with less individual little bits to pay attention to. Makes it a lot shorter. I think it only took me 4-5 hours to go through it. I don't know what's typical, though.

Thanks I couldn't vent without mentioning ending details, though, so I'll just wait a while and if I still need to in a few days, maybe I'll do it then.

So, I have no definite purchases for the rest of the year. Games this year that I've wanted but passed up on, and could go back and get now that I've got a gap, are...

• -Caligula: Overdose
  -Last Remnant
  -Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  -Astral Chain
  -AI: The Somnium Files (too gory)
  -Code Vein (probably also too gory)
  -Neo Cab
  -Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth
  -Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers

Left within 2019 that I'm considering:

• -Astroneer (PS4)
  -Pokemon Shield (Switch)
  -PINE (Switch)

And that's it. And I don't want any of them urgently, so I have no idea what my next game will be. My next must-have is probably RF4S, which I hope will be out in January. Things won't really pick up for me again until March.

[Pachi]

Congrats getting published Bluie. That's amazing!

Finally finished the last route in Hustle Cat, so my backlog blitz is back at 0 lol. It's a neat LGBTQ+ VN, if anyone's looking for one. I'm thinking of playing VA-11 Hall-A next, instead of a FE3H Blue Lions run because it doesn't look like I'll finish the latter before Pokemon comes out.

Spoiler:

Currently playing:
Fire Emblem Three Houses

Backlog (4 games):
VA-11 Hall-A
Rakuen
World's Dawn - I may drop, but hmm
ANB - Summer Y2, need to plow through to grow those yams in Fall for TRP 4

Finished (7 games):
SMT IV
SMT IV: Apocalypse
Alicemare
LiEat
1bitHeart
Rune Factory 4
Hustle Cat

[ryume]

Congratulations on being published, Bluie.

I finished ToCS 3. Not really sure what to say haha. I’m mostly just glad I finished it before my vacation was over!

[Kikki]

It needs some digesting before you can even figure out entirely how you feel, doesn't it? That was a doozy. Well, in true Trail style, though. And now we wait for a localization announcement for CS IV! Since NISA has the series now, I don't think it'll be as long. Also there was only one year between 3 and 4 in Japan and we've gotten ours spaced pretty much the same, so I'm hopeful.

[Bluie]

Thanks guys!

And in seeing how upset the end of Cold Steel III is making people (not just on here, haha), I'm glad that I'm holding off on it until the fourth entry comes over. I've already had several games (emotionally) hurt me this year, so I think I need a break LOL.

I did as I said and played Ryza all yesterday, and I'm gonna do it again today. I'm about 20ish hours in and I just got Lila in my party. The story is intriguing but I also have no problem putting it on hold and doing quests for the townspeople. Still don't think it's gonna last me until Pokemon next Friday, but I'll jump back into SAO Fatal Bullet if need be.

[Kikki]

Funny thing is though, in my case at least, the ending didn't make me want to have CS IV right away. Rather, it made me want to take a break. The mental health type, I guess, lol. Or perhaps emotional health. (Not clear on if those two things are the same or not.) If I had CS IV in my hands right now, I wouldn't play it. I seriously need some time off. Though I'm pretty sure once I start to get the desire to play the game a second time, THEN I'll be dying to have the next game. I figure it's going to take a few months before I get there.

What kind of zine were you published in, btw, Bluie? And was it writing or artwork (of yours) that went in?

[Bluie]

It's a Zine for the game Owlboy. I went with writing as it's my forte. It'll most likely be put out in January if everything stays on schedule. Not trying to brag at all here, but I became slightly infamous in the small fandom for writing a handful of fics that uh... apparently make people cry. I was asked to join the zine and write another, so, I did LOL. It's been a lot of fun and I'm still hanging around the zine's discord as a cheerleader of sorts for everyone else.

[ryume]

It needs some digesting before you can even figure out entirely how you feel, doesn't it? That was a doozy. Well, in true Trail style, though. And now we wait for a localization announcement for CS IV! Since NISA has the series now, I don't think it'll be as long. Also there was only one year between 3 and 4 in Japan and we've gotten ours spaced pretty much the same, so I'm hopeful.

Actually, I’ve been completely spoiled on the stories entire Sen no kiseki series since I started playing it, so my reaction to the entire game (and maybe all the games lol) was probably markedly different from yours. At times, there have been moments in the games that I wish I hadn’t been spoiled on already, but overall it doesn’t bother me because I still love seeing the journey unfold, and getting all those nitty gritty details filled in. None of the games really have had any spoilers knowing ahead of time (to me) that were story-breaking like it would be getting spoiled with the Sixth Sense movie, so it’s all been fine in my book. The fact that they love ending these games with cliffhangers is just CRUEL in my not so humble opinion haha.

Being spoiled doesn’t make it any easier to wait for the announcement of the final entry, though!

[Kikki]

I hope the zine comes out well and that your piece is well received, Bluie

I only knew ONE spoiler for the whole series (for one aspect of the end of CS III) and no others, and honestly, I'm glad. It'd lack a lot of impact if I'd known much of this ahead of time. I WANT to look up spoilers for IV, but I'm not, cuz it'll ruin a lot of the experience for me.

Though I did guess a bunch of things that happened in CS III anyway. Once I get a feel for the kind of tropes a series uses, I'm almost always pretty good at having an idea of how things will go, at least in parts, and Trails is actually quite formulaic, all the way from the Sky games, Ao and Zero, and Cold Steel. I mean, it was obvious who

Spoiler:

Black Alberich was going to be, for example, because Lughman was a lone, travelling professor. Though I didn't know he would ALSO be Alisa's dad. I also assumed that either Altina or Millium or both would end up dying, though I thought they'd either kill each other or that Class VII would end up doing it, though against their will. Those things just all fit with the type of storytelling Falcom has used for this series. George was also super obvious, with a last name like 'Nome'.

Those are big spoilers, btw, people who haven't played and want to remain unspoiled.

There were some surprises, though. And the end...in a way, I feel like Falcom cheated me a little bit. They have a few habits that are not what I consider to be ideal story-building techniques. It's certainly one of the very best story-driven game series out there, even so.

[ryume]

I wish you the best with the magazine too, Bluie!

Yes, I agree. Ideally I should not have given into temptation and looked stuff up, because the experience would have been that much richer, but that's water long gone under the bridge by now haha. I definitely am with you on certain things being pretty obvious from a mile away, though.

MAJOR SPOILER for those who haven't played ToCS 3 yet:

Spoiler:

Something I didn't know ahead of time was about the Courageous. You could tell that they were gonna do something VERY bad to the Courageous, though. The way they used the airship and its crew was VERY sparse throughout the game, yet they felt TOO convenient to me when they did make any appearances prior to the final chapter, somehow. That "convenience" led me to believe bad things were in store for Olivert and Victor (poor Toval wasn't even on my radar haha).

It's still incredible how they've been developing this story since 2004!

[Kikki]

Big ol' biggy big spoilers for Cold Steel III...

Spoiler:

I actually hadn't been expecting the Courageous to be blown up at all. That's one thing that I was blindsided by. HOWEVER...it didn't have very much impact on me, even though I love Olivert (or Olivier, if you prefer), because of a thing that Falcom did that I really, really hate. RESURRECTION. I hate when people come back to life in stories! It completely ruins the emotional impact of any death, when you know they'll probably just get resurrected. Mind you, I think if someone is BLOWN UP or otherwise completely disintegrated, in those cases they're almost definitely dead for good.

However, I don't think those three guys are dead anyway. They showed it that way, but those are three prodigiously skilled men. I won't be shocked if they ARE dead, but honestly I think they could have teleported themselves away at the last second or something. They had time to say a few sentences before the explosion and so on, so I'm thinking it's easy for Falcom to cheap out and say 'oh, they got out off screen at the last second...they're not really dead, ha ha, fooled ya!'

I just hate that storytelling device. I want deaths to be real so I can feel honestly sad when they die, not be thinking jadedly that they're just gonna come back later. It just makes me flat-line, emotionally, and then I can't feel sad. And what if they ARE dead? If they are, Falcom has robbed me of the ability to feel sad about it when it happened, and if they really ARE, I want to have been able to cry when I saw it. But I couldn't, because I think they'll be back in CS IV.

Millium I believe is really dead, since she is now Valimar's sword, which Rean stupidly lost already because Falcom keeps forcing the poor boy to make the same mistakes over and over. (Which ALSO upsets me, as Rean may lack self-esteem, but he is very strong-willed and hard-working, and I don't think it's in-character for him to continually make the same mistakes.) However, because she's a homunculus, I also think they could make another Millium. -_- She could even have some of the original Millium's memories or emotions in her. Or she could be factory-reset, so to speak.

That wraps up what I mean when I say I felt primarily angry, I think.

Yeah, that's something that amazes me, too. Even when Cold Steel ends, the overarching story will STILL be going, even though CS III has drawn a lot of elements from Liberl and Crossbell together with what has been happening in Erebonia, so it feels like the whole story is starting to wrap up...it really can't be, yet. Only Erebonia's current events can be starting to see a resolution. And Calvard is probably not going to be the last in the series, either. It's one heck of a story...

[ryume]

Response to Kikki’s post - will still be really spoiler-esque if you haven’t played the game:

Spoiler:

I had a feeling some of what you mentioned in the last post had to do with why you were angry. I feel like with Asian story-telling (games, manga, anime, cinema, literature, ALL OF IT), they tend to either be gut-wrenchingly tragic in the end, or NO ONE dies and everyone gets their happy ending. I generally don’t mind the resurrection plot device because I’ve come to expect it in Asian entertainment, but it IS pretty overused.

For instance, the film Grave of the Fireflies. I can’t even watch that movie. I got halfway through it and swore I would never go back again because it was just so incredibly sad and horrifying on so many levels, that not even the ending gives you any hope (from what I’ve been told about the ending, anyway). On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, you have a series like Bleach, where hardly anyone died, characters came back to life, and they all had one big happy ending (I dislike that series anyway, even though I was really into it for the first 150 episodes or so).

I agree about Rean and Millium as well. Rean is such an interesting character to me. I don’t know how I feel about him. I had much more definitive feelings about Joshua and Estelle, but I’m sure because Rean has no idea who the heck he is, that’s why I have no idea how I truly feel about him. I don’t dislike him, but I don’t know how his character is going to culminate, either. He’s been the center of this arc in the Legend of Heroes, but he’s very... nebulous. And I do think that the sword getting taken away so easily was dumb. I actually laughed when that happened.

ALSO - one thing I never would have seen happening is how CLOSE Jusis and Millium became! I feel like this entry really sort of started pushing pairings beyond just Rean/Alisa. Or that Gaius, who NEVER has enough character development out of ALL of Class VII across every single game, would become a Gralsritter! Literally everything with Gaius in this game felt way out of left field for me, and that annoyed the « Puppy Doodoo » out of me, because what happened to him was kind of a big deal, and the game literally keeps putting off having him tell his story until the last second, and then it’s all revealed in about 3 lines of text. He’s not my favorite character or anything, but I truly think he gets the short end of the character development stick. RARGH.

[Kikki]

Yep, more CS III spoilers.

Spoiler:

Pretty much any form of resurrection really ruins stories for me. I'm already invested in this one so I won't quit it, but I've quit plenty of other stories that use it as a plot crutch. (The show The Flash, for example.) Because to me it's just another form of deus ex machina or lazy story-telling, and it destroys my emotional investment, which is hard for me to work up in the first place, so I can't forgive it. I want events to be real...to not have them continually contradicted later on and explained away by some form of magic or pseudo-science. It feels like cheap emotional manipulation to me, which ends up with me unable to feel the emotion in the first place, which itself is sad, because I WANT to be sad if a character I like dies. I don't want to be thinking wryly that there's no point in getting upset because they'll probably be back just fine later on. I mean, I'd have been really sad about Olivert, if I actually believed he was killed in that scene.

Btw, I also find it annoying that any royal woman seems to be obliged by the laws of the universe to swoon if she gets bad news. Alfin is amazingly strong. A wonderful girl who has managed to maintain the stiffest of upper-lips in even the worst circumstances. Yet she had to insta-faint (twice) in this game, upon learning what had happened to her dad, and then again with Olivert. The queen did, too. Others in this game do drop to their knees when they receive news of a death, but only the royal ladies actually faint. It's just ridiculous to me. I can buy Elise fainting faster than Alfin fainting, tbh. Alfin is very self-contained. (I love her. Probably why the fainting annoyed me so much, ha ha...)

I have always felt that Rean's lack of a more typical hero's personality was really in-keeping with his upbringing/circumstances. He has no sense of self-worth, because he doesn't know who he is. For all he knew, most of his life, he was thrown away, and then picked up (as very damaged goods) by a kind, well-adjusted family...but he always felt like an outsider. He loved his family, but rather than BELONGING to them, he felt indebted to them, like he had to hurry up and become someone great to repay the love and kindness he received (which I say he got because he's a natural sweetheart who always works hard and is very considerate. Why WOULDN'T a kindly couple who could easily afford to keep him enjoy having such a sweet and responsible little cutie around?) But he doesn't feel that he is great or special in any way. Plus he's damaged goods. Anything wrong with him, he thinks makes him horrible, and anything GOOD about him he minimizes because he thinks it's nothing special. He thinks he's somehow lesser than everyone around him. He's a great swordsman, but not the best. He's quite school-smart, but never #1 on the charts. He lectured one of the students on this in CS III (the blue-haired Schleiden girl, I think) that you don't have to be the best at something to have your own own value and your own, unique path...but that's the way he actually feels about himself, too, imo.

I love Rean to bits because of all this, because I find his wavering precious and very easy to empathize with, but it sometimes makes him frustrating. It's also another reason why I hate Osbourne so very much...though there are lots of reasons why I hate him. But he started the game out by calling Rean worthless, and ended it by telling Rean that the ONE thing he could praise him for was that he didn't let the whole 'hero' thing go to his head. Of course he didn't! He HAS NO SELF-ESTEEM. Not natively, anyway. Class VII is his self-esteem. Without them, there'd be nothing. And he absolutely IS a hero, in my books...far more than if he were just the war hero people think he is. He doesn't care about helping Erebonia win wars at all. Against orders, he went out of his way to fill his missions while ensuring that NO ONE died (like Juna and her siblings, or the people on the...freighter or airship or whatever it was). And the only reason he follows orders at all is because it allows him to use his abilities to end conflicts as fast as possible, to save even more lives. How is he not a hero? It's just that he's not Erebonia's hero...he's for all of humanity, not one country. Of course, Osbourne has no heart (literally, as it turns out!) so he can't appreciate heart in anyone else, either.

The only reason I care so very much about all these details is not because the story is so flawed, but because it is so wonderful that when what I see as flaws start to snake themselves through the plot, I really resent it. Lol?