Game:

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

Category:

Vlog

Duration: 3:02:33

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1

Originally recorded: May 23, 2022
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Okay, this title's a bit of a stretch, but when I saw a specific idiom on The Free Dictionary, I knew it would be the absolute perfect title to use for this session with just a minor tweak, preferably one that rhymed with the offending word that clearly needed to be changed. Fortunately, that ended up being an easy enough fix. I always have trouble coming up with episode titles in the first place -- to the extent where I usually would just ask for help from other people who watched the livestream in question -- but for Back the Log Off!, I'm completely alone. At best, all I can do is ask others if a title makes sense. Hopefully, that'll allow me to improve my titling skills in the long run.

As expected, I managed to wrap up that Martial Arts tournament this time around. Granted, it felt like most of the story progression was frontloaded into that segment. I *was* surprised by the way things went down though: I was honestly expecting the Grancel Bracers to get absolutely destroyed by the Special Ops team, to add to the drama by forcing us to avenge our fallen comrades. Considering the fact the first round was a rematch against the Ravens, I was expecting them to just recycle the Capua family battle for round 2. In the end, I guess it was a much smarter move to go the way they did. I got to fight new characters in the second round and the Capua family has clearly cemented their relevance in the remainder of the trilogy with the clear beginning of a redemption arc of some kind later on. Honestly, that works out pretty well for me -- I liked them well enough for the role they played back in Chapter 1. Of course, it was easy enough to guess that I wouldn't be fighting anyone other than the Special Ops team for the finals, though.

From there, it was onto the big dinner party at Grancel Castle and holy crap, I just kept on triggering story sequences at that point. I honestly intended to wrap up a little early, but every time I thought I had made it to a safe point where I could just save the game, I ran into another one which just ate up more and more time. It's not necessarily a problem, I didn't run that much later, but it just started getting ridiculous. It reminded me of that common criticism I've seen lobbed at the Sky games: that they're merely visual novels with brief moments of JRPG gameplay thrown in to spice things up.

I'm still not sure if I'll be able to finish this game in 16 sessions, but I'll at least try to make it that way. My schedule's going to be somewhat upended this week, but I still intend to do at least two recordings this week. I guess I'll be finding out next time whether or not finishing "on schedule" is still feasible. Most of the chapters so far took roughly 3 sessions for me to finish and while I'm expecting the last one to take longer than usual, whether that'll be just need one or two extra or significantly more... remains to be seen.

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