How small is Liberl?!

[SapphireCarbuncle]

After spending a good twenty-odd hours wandering around Liberl, I couldn't help but notice how unbelievably small Liberl is. Like, really small.

[Egon Schiele]

Like how less than 30 people live in a city or a town and the population of Liberl seems less than 500?

[Furry Wrecking Crew]

It's about the size of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

[pibedetorres]

Can you believe it? Ruan has 20 houses at best!

Josette is right, Liberl is really a pissy backwater hole.

Imagine if instead of going for smaller game proportions they went for an accurate scale... walking just through the Bose region would take 6-12 hours straight. XD

[The Very Hungry Caterpillar]

After playing cold steel you can realize how small liberl is and how huge erebonia is.

Even the Nord Highlands themselves are immensly bigger than liberl.

I also thought Grancel had a population of a few hundred but apparently it is a couple hundred thousand. That seems completely rediculous.

[Furry Wrecking Crew]

There's miles and miles of Section 8 housing behind the arena, in East Grancel. That's where most of the rioting happened during the Orbal Shutdown Phenomenon.

[Cid]

Originally posted by "Factory new" skinwithscratches:

After playing cold steel you can realize how small liberl is and how huge erebonia is.

Even the Nord Highlands themselves are immensly bigger than liberl.

I also thought Grancel had a population of a few hundred but apparently it is a couple hundred thousand. That seems completely rediculous.

Comparing them in-game (when there is a significant change in game engine) seems pretty silly to me.

From memory Grancel is meant to have 300k, Crossbell has 500k and Heimdallr has 800k. But yes, Erebonia is meant to be much larger than Liberl

[ZippyVtuber]

I'd say the reason that was the case was for preformance and hardware concerns (and, ya know, this game was made back in 2004 or something). But yeah. It is ridiculous. But then again, nobody wants to walk for 2 hours straight to reach a destination...at least most people don't.

[pibedetorres]

Originally posted by raphaelroberge:

I'd say the reason that was the case was for preformance and hardware concerns (and, ya know, this game was made back in 2004 or something). But yeah. It is ridiculous. But then again, nobody wants to walk for 2 hours straight to reach a destination...at least most people don't.

That's pretty much the main reason I instaquit Runescape Classic after trying it a couple months ago after 7-8 years since I last played. Running would only last few seconds and walking between cities was a chore. (Expecting to be mocked by someone for even mentioning that game)

[LrdDimwit]

Pretty much any RPG hand-waves stuff like this. Trails is better at hand-waving than most, but it still waves its hands. When we go into a town, and there are maybe 15 buildings you can enter and another 10 or so that you can't, you assume that this is a hand-wave, and the town is actually much bigger. You assume other people use shops you frequent, you just never see them. You assume there are other shops, and so forth, that just aren't shown. Few RPG's contain bakeries, or dye factories, or sanitation department headquarters (even though plenty contain sewers!)

Sometimes, games will directly undermine this hand-wave. Zelda: Phantom Hourglass as part of the plot, requires you to make friends with the Gorons by literally talking to everyone in town. If you assume the Goron settlement has a normal-sized population, this makes no sense. And in Trails, it's possible to walk from one end of Liberl to the other in, like, a day.

You pretty much have to ignore it. It's like space aliens speaking in an 'alien language' that gets subtitled in English ... except that the plot of the episode depends on a specific joke or misunderstanding or something in the English translation of what they were saying.

If you really need an explanation, just assume everyone has a special function in their orbment that gives them, like, seven league boots. Or something. And they never mention it in the dialog because, well, people IRL don't stop and infodump about how cool their cell phone is. Do they?

[pibedetorres]

I'm also quite certain that Liberl News isn't the only existing Liberlian newspaper. And in reality their staff is supposed to have many more people and have more than just 4-5 pages on each edition.

(On the other hand, I'm convinced that Bracer Guild branches actually have few people affiliated to them. I guess almost everyone who is brave enough to fight monsters prefers to join the army instead.)

EDIT: It even makes sense, because in SC it's revealed that (SC chapter 4 spoilers) Liberl only had a Bracer Guild branch - set in Grancel - when Estelle was a child and her mother was still alive, as we can hear Cassius pondering about proposing to add branches in the other regions when we talk to him in the "dream" scene. So it's not too unnatural to assume that Liberl citizens didn't think of bracers as a big deal and not many would have that as a dream job.

[AnemoneMeer]

Very. Very. VEEEEEEERY tiny.

The place is roughly the size of an Europa Universalis 4 province. In central europe.

An airship can literally fly the entire perimeter of Liberl while stopping for 2+ hours, and still be done well before the sun goes down.

[Onizuka]

In almost every RPG you play, implied size and actual size will differ dramatically. This applies to landmass, population, cities, and just about everything else. Its done in Trails, Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls (especially Oblivion and Skyrim), you name it.

That being said, Liberl is implied as being quite small in world, but nowhere near as tiny as it actually appears in gameplay. Again, Grancel is suppossed to be big enough to support a population of 300k.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

This thread seems useful: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/937451-the-legend-of-heroes-trails-in-the-sky-sc/73041092

Originally posted by adunsavior, OP of that thread:

I just finished Cold Steel, and now I've played 6 of the 7 games in the Trails series. Cold Steel gave some rather specific information on the demographics, and combined with all the information from other games, I've come up with a good estimation of the size of Liberl and the Erebonian Empire.

Information from Cold Steel:
Population of Grancel: 300,000
Population of the Imperial Capital: 800,000
Population of Crossbell: 500,000

Note: Crossbell is the city where the 4th (Zero) and 5th (Ao) game takes place.



Size of Liberl:
From in game dialogue and road signs we know that:
1. Passenger airship cruise at 900 Selge/hour, which is fast enough for people to get swept overboard without the flight field, and faster than a lot of birds can fly with the exception of Seig,

2. It is roughly 1000 Selge to walk from Bose to Ruan and from Ruan to Zeiss.

3. It will take Olivier about 2 hours to run 400 Selge from the dialogue in CS.

4. A bus ride traveling 270 Selge takes about 30 minutes.

5. It will take Lloyd and Randy about 1,5 hour to run 270 Selge from the dialogue and road signs in Zero.

Assume that Oliver, Lloyd and Randy are extremely fit and their marathon scores are on par with top athletes on planet earth (though human in the Trails world is far more stronger, just look at what they can do.), and factor in the speed of all the vehicles mentioned, I concluded that 1 Selge is about 100 meters.

Note: 1 yard = 0.91 meter

The size of Liberl is then roughly a circle with a radius of 100 kilometers (or 62.5 miles), which is roughly the size of Switzerland.

Interestingly, the Zeiss central factory (ZCF) is known for making watches before the orbal revolution, which matches the image of Switzerland.



Population of Liberl:
The scene of the Trails series reflects late 19th century Europe, with the Blood and Iron Chancellor and stuff. Looking at the demographics data, the largest Swiss city of Zurich has a population of roughly 300,000 in year 1888, and the total Swiss population at the time is 2.83 million.

I would imagine that Liberl has a population around that number.



The Erebonian Empire:
The population of Berlin in the 1870s is roughly 800,000, and the total German population at the time is around 50 million.

From maps and the exact same method of gauging distance, the Erebonian Empire is roughly the size of modern day Germany, so it won't be off if I estimate the population of the Erebonian Empire to be around 50 million.

FYI thisperson actually didn't know how large a selge is, and yet accurately derived the official conversion to kilometers.

[Hat8]

Originally posted by Champion6:

I'd say the reason that was the case was for preformance and hardware concerns (and, ya know, this game was made back in 2004 or something). But yeah. It is ridiculous. But then again, nobody wants to walk for 2 hours straight to reach a destination...at least most people don't.

Nah, more walking and traveling makes for a better game, especially in regards to MMOs.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Originally posted by Matt66:

Originally posted by Champion6:

I'd say the reason that was the case was for preformance and hardware concerns (and, ya know, this game was made back in 2004 or something). But yeah. It is ridiculous. But then again, nobody wants to walk for 2 hours straight to reach a destination...at least most people don't.

Nah, more walking and traveling makes for a better game, especially in regards to MMOs.

> an Elder Scrolls game the size of actual Britain!