@wes the side stories have me so damn hyped for Calvard holy f***

Yessir. They're all so good Not necessarily the Calvard ones, but the Osborne and Ash ones got me GOOD man

Also, the Gramheart and Grandmaster daydream was crazy. What are these fools cookin up

You hopping into Kuro 1 next then?

Already installed it and got the English patch

Probably gonna take a lot longer for me to go through as work is busy

That didn't take long Enjoy bro

going through act 2's rn. lapis and nadia already won me over

swin tho my boy, I'm afraid you will be bench warming first chance I get

Kuro no Kiseki

Just finished the prologue and I am in LOVE with this game. I love the new engine in this game, quite a bit of improvement visually but the real bump is the animation quality which is very noticeable. So much QoL too like going in/out of buildings no longer having loading screens and just being seamless.

New battle system makes perfect use of the new engine too, seeing the characters animated movement around the field is really nice, never thought I would get this excited about character movement not being stiff.

Also Orbment Lines quartz count from FC are back, they really brought back everything I love

I'm really liking Van as well; already clears Rean and Lloyd i'm afraid. I feel like I'm going to like Agnes a lot too.

“Release the Shard! Take The Grendel!. That small magical girl transformation scene with the Grendel track playing in the background was nice as f\*\*\*. The animation quality on this was insane, even Agnes' facial expression was animated really well in this scene. I just love everything in this game so far - really strong first impressions compared to Cold Steel

My god these clips are vicious. Might have to figure it out and get a PC or laptop I can just plug into my TV

At the reverie corridor for the second story relevant time

How tf you supposed to pick a team in here

Honestly seeing a clip of Kuro no Kiseki on Twitter is what got me into the series, playing the game right now is surreal

I ended up just picking my favourite characters for the Reverie Corridor, Renne never left the party

I like how the game encourages you to pick other characters by giving you rewards and s*** tho

I never did the Group Missions until the localized version came out (mainly because I didn't understand how they worked with the jank ass mission translation they had going on in the CLE release), and actually really enjoyed them. Was cool to see characters talk about some specific topic after you completed the mission. I know I took screenshots of a few of my favorites, but looks like these are the only ones I have lol.

@wes I cannot get over the fact that Van and Battler share the same VA, If Van had red hair they would look pretty similar too

My two fav MCs I never really noticed how similar they look until you said that

I hate making posts this long but I love Kuro no Kiseki so much, haven't loved a Trails game this much since the Sky arc (which I think is still my favourite - but Kuro may be tied with it depending on how it goes) its really restored the feeling

This game reminds me a lot of FC with how you meet party members in their respective cities: Kloe in Ruan/Jenis Royal Academy and now Aaron in Langport and I really f*** with this format over introducing multiple characters at once - Falcom does a really good job at developing characters by introducing them this way too

Coincidence or not but this game also has my favourite cast since the Sky arc, only been introduced to Agnes, Feri and Aaron but they are 3 for 3 right now - Aaron is my favourite but I love Feri and Agnes a lot too. Side cast has been really good too, I was so happy when Elaine temporarily joined the party shes cool as f\*\*\* and I love sword girls

I'm guessing Elaine isn't going to be a permanent party member in this game; the wait for Kuro 2 translation is going to be annoying as f\*\*\*

Act II Spoilers

This act goes so f\*\*\*ing hard, one of my favourites from the series. I love everything they did with introducing Aaron, he instantly joins the top ranks of favourite Trails character. Also hate to say it but Aaron facing his demons clears Rean facing his demons a hundred times - I love this little s\*\*\* he has so much personality

Anyways all this was to say that Aaron is cool as f*** I love him, Van too of course

I bought Trails in the Sky on PSP like ten years ago and never finished it lol. Soundtrack used to go crazy on OSU back then

I love the soundtrack in the Sky series, they have released like 10 games since then but the Sky series is still one of my favourites

@wes

used to pray for times like this

Just wait for Kuro 2

The track that plays in there slaps

How're you liking it so far?

Think I briefly mentioned this before but I think Falcom’s story writing will get sloppier with each game because for every game they feel the need to keep raising the stakes and when they do this they eventually have to rely on some deus ex machina plot device to keep the story moving forward

Kuro no Kiseki is sort of a restart so the stakes are no longer as high as they were in Hajimari where we needed the cast of every single game to resolve that whole conflict.

Despite the stakes having reset though, Kiseki is still an overarching story which is one of my favourite things about this series but depending on how Falcom utilises this and relies on previous entries to tell a story could result in a either positive or negative outcome.

In Zero, Falcom handled this extremely well with the conclusion of Renne joining the Bright family, I wouldn’t say their inclusion distracted from the narrative of the game as their screen time was pretty minimal but it still left a pretty big impact on these characters that could potentially return in future games; overall the way they utilised the previous entry actually enhanced the narrative

In Kuro no Kiseki, we have a whole chapter dedicated to the Rixia/Ilya brain washing mask plot point - its an exact copy paste of what they did in the entry before this. It was probably one of the worst plot points in Hajimari (though I love how much Rixias character benefited from this whole plot point) and Kuro no Kiseki doesn’t make this any better; I would argue its worse here because the way they shamelessly reused this is kinda insulting.

Falcom also still struggles to make interesting villains, Almata is just Oroboros with a different name - as usual they show up, perform some experiment and leave. Melchior is especially lame

With everything just said you would think that I hate this game but despite the flaws I just listed I love this game a lot.

Every character in this just has too much personality for me to dislike the game. There is an absurd amount of banter and party interactions between the main cast and I love how the cast is introduced naturally over the story of the game instead of all at once. Even the side cast is pretty good (with the exception of the antagonists)

Whats even more crazy is that I don’t dislike a single party member and every single one of them is viable in combat.

Now the combat is obviously a step down from Hajimari where it had what I would say the most fun turn based combat out of all the Kiseki games just because of how much customisation options you had but I do like the introduction of the field combat, granted its very shallow but I found that stunning enemies and then activating shard speeds up regular enemy encounters by so much since you start battles with a quite a lot of CP generated from field combat, even in Nightmare fights usually end before enemies get their turn

I really like how orbment lines work similar to Sky in this too. Some characters have fixed elemental slots on certain lines which makes it easier for them to obtain certain traits which means that stats aren’t exactly everything. I noticed that Judith had easier access to a certain Drive skill which made her do more damage than Agnes in certain conditions despite having a lower ATS due to her having another follow up attack after casting, I really love things like that. Boost is a really cool concept too. Really excited to see how other Kuro games take this further cause we have a really cool foundation here.

Also gotta gush about the new engine again because I love how seamless travelling through cities are now. Basel has gotta be one of the coolest cities in Kiseki because of its layout that I don’t think would have been possible in Cold Steel. The animations in combat are also just beautiful; There was a fight with Olympia in Chapter 4 and seeing her S-Craft was just gorgeous (I feel like she is going to become a party member in later entries)

Only downside of this new engine though is the absurd amount of loading screens.

Also despite what I said before about the story there are a lot of really good moments in this game when its focusing on the characters rather than the plot, and this game being the start of a new arc means it focuses on the former a lot more.

Side quests are also really good here and when I think about it, side quests are an underrated part of Kiseki cause the writing in a lot of them are actually pretty entertaining - especially since party members actually participate in the side quests unlike another AAA game I played this year

Kind of hard to rank this game because because despite despite its shortcomings there is too much I like about this game, the 2D games are always going to be my favourites but this game restored a lot of the feeling I had from playing those games.

Going to be a strange feeling not having another Kiseki game to play after this one with having to wait for full Kuro 2 fan translations

In! Plan on starting my Trails In The Skiny

@redtruth I think the Kuro 2 translation is just about done at this point. Thought it was edited MTL/ChatGPT, but I'm pretty sure they've just been manually editing it as well.

Oh wow just checked and they have everything done except the finale, not done with Kuro 1 yet but I think the way imma approach Kuro 2 is to play until the chapters without NPC translation since I like reading those. Wasn't expecting them to actually finish translating this anytime soon

No lying. Don't blame you for waiting for the NPCs to be finished up. I had the MTL translation for the NPCs, and I got some pretty hilarious results

Finally finished Kuro no Kiseki. Nice to see that Kuro no Kiseki 2 translation is pretty much done but for now I think its time I finally catch up on the Yakuza series as well

Nice man

This s*** was so raw. Diabolic Howl into Unmitigated Evil