More Legend of Heroes coming to PC

Playing ToCS: Trails of Cold Steel on the PS Vita. About 15 hours in and I am enjoying it a lot! I like the "school" setting since I always enjoyed fantasy books where hero(s) goes "school" for training and all the politics, friendships, rivalries etc which goes along with it. For example I am talking about Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind or Antony Ryan's Bloodsong etc.

The reason why I like the “school”/”academy” setting is that it automatically makes the world big, mysteries and you a small fish in the grand scheme of things since you are someone who is dealing with school life. In many recent RPG’s I have played, I know from the start that I am the big hero who is going to save the world! So it’s kind of refreshing to go from saving the world to studying at the school!

Also they are cleverly building up the outside world as well. There is no information dump as such (unless you go the library and read books). You get information about what the world while talking to your classmates and trying to figure them out. You are mostly interested in the local school stuff but vignettes about the world is revealed while doing this.

Some people may have issues with this but this is anime so you get the usual anime tropes as well but they are not over the top and I kind of enjoying these tropes so far!

After playing lot of action games lately, its refreshing to go and play a turn based game. They have multiple different system which works together and its seems very tactical. I have not figured out the whole thing yet but it seems to have lot of depth.

On aside note, I am pretty impressed with the vita. Its slightly bigger than the iPhone Plus and graphics seems pretty good. Most of my gaming is done while travelling to and from work on the train so its nice little handle for that!
 
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Glad you're liking it. Yes, the school setting is great, sort of makes it a Persona hybrid in that aspect.
 
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I'm finishing Trails in the Sky: the 3rd. If anyone's interested, it's awesome. I never expected to like its storytelling better than FC\SC, it was a pleasant surprise. The structure of the game is very different from its predecessors. It's a game that explains and fills in, as well as sets the scene for events that happen in next arcs.

A word of warning: keep in mind that unless you've played both previous games you will not understand a thing. I've never seen another game based entirely on knowing the contents of previous ones.

Playable characters include the cast of previous games, as well as notable NPCs from FC\SC like:
Colonel Richard, Julia Shwarz, Muller Vander, and even a little ex-enforcer Renne :)

Waiting for the incoming PC release of Trails of Cold Steel!
 
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Wccftech agrees with you:
http://wccftech.com/review/legend-heroes-trails-sky-3rd/

Pros

- Excellent story which ties up loose ends from SC while setting events up for future games
- Memorable characters
- Superb localization
- Simple yet engaging turn based battle system
- Outstanding soundtrack


Cons
- Outdated looks
- Dungeon crawler game flow may put off some
- Not a good starting point for newcomers

9.5/10

While I was disappointed with Tits2 I'll buy it, just not yet - my backlog got filled with too many titles I need to finally get hands on.
 
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An update on ToCS.
The game will get released in about two weeks on Steam, GOG and HumbleBundle. On August 2nd to be precise. Can't wait.

Additionally I'm adding something I didn't know before:
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-l...st-2nd-will-be-properly-optimized-for-the-pc/

What’s also interesting here is that XSEED Games recruited Peter “Durante” Thoman to help optimize the game for the PC. As such, we can all except the PC version of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel to run properly.

In fact, thanks to Durante, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has transitioned from OpenGL to DirectX 11, bringing massive performance improvements.

tumblr_inline_otcm6a9JWa1siwbnr_500.png

I have no doubts the game performance will be without hiccups. Here's hope Durante also pointed them to possible controls atrocities that usually appear in ports. If someone is interested in more details of this process, Durante spared no words on his blog:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/538680/discussions/0/1458455461475072896/
Here's an excerpt on slow loading times, I find it very interesting, others might not care:
the initial issue that I was consulted on were in fact loading times. In the PC version of the game at that point, even on a fast machine, loading would routinely take upwards of 20 seconds. And these were not some infrequent large loads, but rather loading which occurred e.g. every single time a battle started and ended. Additionally, significant loading stutters were present frequently throughout the game.

This was of course not an acceptable state of affairs. After a lengthy analysis, I figured out that the primary reason for both the stutters and the loading was that the game’s engine used Nvidia Cg (a - by now - very outdated and unsupported high-level shading language toolkit) to compile and load shaders at runtime. By caching and reusing shader compilation results, I was able to reduce loading times (after the initial load) to ~2-3 seconds, and also eliminate most stutter after a startup phase.

Note that the graph only shows gain in this specific code, GL used for console just can't do the same thing efficiently on different hardware/OS combo, the graph doesn't mean DX is generally superior!

-

And sorry, I just can't not to paste the gif from comments there:
310.gif
 
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