Game:

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (2004)

Category:

Vlog

Duration: 2:34:44

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0

Originally recorded: April 7, 2022
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Hello all, and welcome to a new series I decided to cook up on a whim. Back the Log Off! deviates from my usual trend of livestreams... in the sense that it isn't a livestream at all! That's really the major difference: instead of streaming games live for an audience, I plan to handle the playthroughs entirely via local recordings.

Originally, I came up with the concept as a way to effectively offer a compromise to my streaming audience. There were a few games that were effectively trapped in limbo on my end: games that were requested for streams at one point, but just didn't seem to make any headway when it came to actually being nominated for legitimate streams. Recording my playthroughs of the games in question felt like a perfect compromise for that very reason. That way, I could knock the games in question off my backlog without effectively stealing footage of my gameplay away from the people who requested they be played in the first place. Win/win, right?

Except there was one fatal flaw to this very idea. There were two games in particular I wanted to use as prospective pilots for these series. And in the process of devising exactly how to approach it -- seriously, it took me way more time (and outside input) than I'd like to admit to even come up with the name "Back the Log Off" -- both games would essentially be scooped up for streams. The first was Ori and the Blind Forest, which ended up being a bonus game last year, while the other was Platinum Games' Vanquish, which I recently just finished streaming as a part of my main line-up for 2022. Now granted, this didn't exactly smother the concept of the crib. But determining where to begin did become a lot more difficult...

That is, until an off-hand conversation gave me the perfect idea.

You see, I'd originally planned on finally biting the bullet and playing the entire Trails in the Sky trilogy this year, starting from scratch and essentially ignoring what little progress I made in the first game during an aborted run I last played roughly five years ago. I hadn't even finished the first chapter, so it wasn't exactly a big loss. But one of the members of my core online friend group -- whom I affectionately refer to as "my imaginary friends", as a bit of an inside joke -- asked me whether or not I'd consider streaming the first Sky game. Now, the person in question has made some of my favorite requests in recent history: he's the reason I got to stream the Commander Keen hexalogy last year and the Jazz Jackrabbit games this time around. And frankly, while I shot down his initial pitch because, let's face it, even the earliest Trails in the Sky game is a freaking behemoth in terms of quality... it did inspire me to offer recordings of all three games as a consolation prize: an offer he considered all too generous.

And so, here we are. Admittedly, covering the backstory in this write-up felt like the best idea... simply because the sheer amount of exposition and dialogue in this section of the playthrough prevents me from doing any real running commentary. Hopefully, there will be some long, uninterrupted dungeon sections next time... which should allow me to work on my solo commentary chops in the actual recording and impart some actual trivia in this section.

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