Recent reviews by Val the Moofia Boss

It is overall fine.

I wasn't a fan of how modern Calvard looks. Most of the locales are boring. There are only two highways you can walk on. Doesn't feel like a realized fantasy world like Trails in the Sky or Trails of Cold Steel.

The combat was serviceable. Game was too easy even on nightmare difficulty. Except for the true final boss' second phase, I never really had to buckle down and try to optimize my builds. The new boost gauge incentivizes weird gameplay of stacking your characters closely together and hoping that as many of them get hit by enemy AoE attacks as possible so you can fill the gauge and boost/buff up your characters more often.

The main cast was pleasant but not captivating like the Sky and old Class VII characters. Everyone except Bergard felt derivative of older characters. The secondary characters were a lot more interesting.

The game suffers from severe pacing problems. It is 110 hours long (the longest first game yet) but nothing exciting happens until chapter 5, which was 70 hours into the game. Everything before chapter 5 felt like filler where I wasn't making any progress towards defeating the bad guys. There are also too many NPCs and their dialogue updates too often, which makes talking to everyone a chore. Chapters 2 and 3 and the final chapter really dragged on. Chapter 5 was pretty enjoyable, though. The writing is sloppier than previous Trails games but overall still enjoyable enough.

Music was okay but not as memorable as prior Trails OSTs.

Visual presentation is nicer than prior games.

PC port: overall great, except that I got stutters during some S-craft animations (namely Van's, Feri's, and Aarons, and maybe a few other's I'm forgetting) when v-sync was turned on, even with graphical settings set to default. I have a Nvidia 3070 Ti. With v-sync turned off I get no stutters but I did get screentearing. I do not have a Nvidia g-sync compatible monitor so no idea if that could have fixed the problem. Kuro got a patch yesterday so this might still get fixed. Given how fast the the S-craft animations are, the stutters are a little disappointing, but it's not a dealbreaker.

I would not recommend playing the game on hard like I did. There were 4 or 5 boss battles I got walled on for hours, retrying over and over, because there was nothing else I could do. The vast majority of EXP comes from boss fights, and if a character is dead when a battle ends (as was often the case), they don't get any EXP. Level grinding is very tedious and only gives you a marginal increase in performance. Some of the battles come down to just getting lucky with the boss not spamming one shot attacks repeatedly. My clear save says 57 hours, but Steam says I have 67 hours. That was 10 hours spent walled on boss fights. If for some crazy reason, you do play on hard, invest all of your points into HP, defense, and spirit.

Game is fine. It's the most traditional turn based JRPG ever. Aside from the action ring, there is nothing to write home about it gameplay wise. Could use a few QoL improvements, like being able to skip battle animations or being able to give up during battle, but it was remarkably bug free for a VN's studio's first time releasing a JRPG.

The story is fine, but it isn't quite what I wanted out of a prequel. It doesn't show how Vurai's beef with Oshtor got started, or how Ougi came into Oshtor's service. The story was interesting at first with Oshtor visiting a hidden country to the West, but then the story goes back to Yamato, a place we've already spent 100 hours and 2 visual novels in. Big stuff happens in Yamato, creating continuity problems that can't be reconciled with the VN duology in which Yamato has been an uneventful period. The story is unresolved, which might be resolved in a sequel, but again this depends on there being a sequel, which we might not see for a few years.

Game itself is decent but the PC port is not just embarrassingly lackluster; it's broken. As of 7/28/2022 it now crashes on startup and I'm not alone in this. EDIT: there is a workaround that can work, but for other people it doesn't work, see here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/552700/discussions/0/3421061982941966857/

The game itself is good. The PC port however, is embarrassingly lacking options. Minimal functionality. Hardly any options. I only had one crash.

Good game. I started getting the hang of the gameplay about half way through. The story was pretty interesting, going to check out the sequel to find out what happens next.

Overall good. It was disappointing that my stats and inventory from the prior game didn't really carry over. Also, in the prior game it was leaning towards you being able to pick a girl, but here you get railroaded towards one particular girl. It's not bad (has some good story stuff) but it's unexpected. Looking forward to the next game.

Overall good. Takes a couple hours for the story to get going but once it does it's pretty interesting. It's short (20 hours long) which is a plus IMO, relatively little fluff/filler compared to your typical VN. Combat was mechanically fun, though a little overtuned (started on captain, had to take it down to ensign half way through the game, and then I should have taken it down to casual near the end).

The game itself is very good. Recommended.

This PC port is lackluster. The 3D segments are resolution locked to 720p, and there is screentearing on AMD cards. The 3D segments only comprise about 10-20% of the game and you get used to the screentearing, but it says a lot when you would get better performance from playing the game on emulator over this port.

To reemphasize: I recommend getting this game. Worth the money. Just disappointed by the port.

The game itself is very good. Recommended.

This PC port is lackluster. The 3D segments are resolution locked to 720p, and there is screentearing on AMD cards. The 3D segments only comprise about 10-20% of the game and you get used to the screentearing, but it says a lot when you would get better performance from playing the game on emulator over this port.

To reemphasize: I recommend getting this game. Worth the money. Just disappointed by the port.

The game itself is very good. Recommended.

This PC port is lackluster. The 3D segments are resolution locked to 720p, and there is screentearing on AMD cards. The 3D segments only comprise about 10-20% of the game and you get used to the screentearing, but it says a lot when you would get better performance from playing the game on emulator over this port.

To reemphasize: I recommend getting this game. Worth the money. Just disappointed by the port.