There was a thing with Joshua’s headaches, the first one being when you meet the professor in the tower. I don’t have the exact wording, but he mentions the headaches always occured when the professor was nearby.
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Ooh, I completely forgot about this. Subtle.
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ヨシュアについて
Thinking about it some more, I think the part of the ending that felt a little off for me was less the cheesy big baddie reveal and more the Joshua backstory. As I said I knew that he was supposed to assassinate Cassius (fun fact: he’s one of the only S-rank bracers in the world!) and failed and was taken in by Cassius (S-rank).
What I did not expect is that he would have been a experienced assassin/murderer/terrorist by this point? Based on his description he was a child soldier who killed dozens of people, including innocent bystanders.
The trauma this would cause seems out of scope for something like Trails, and also has not been established in any meaningful way so far. Joshua seems to be fairly balanced and generally doing okay. He doesn’t exhibit any sort of behavioral troubles or instability. He adapted remarkably well to his new environment. Agathe for instance, who seems to have had a tough childhood although nothing even close to Joshua’s, appears to carry a lot more baggage in comparison. He’s distrustful, brash, aggressive and clearly compensating for something.
Joshua doesn’t show anything like that, except perhaps a few times when he showed some aggression when Estelle was in grave danger (like that scene with the artifact in Ruan’s mayor’s mansion) but even then it doesn’t seem particularly unwarranted or out of line.
Anyway I loaded SC on my Vita’s PSP emulator and managed to load my FC save, so I’m all set. SC uses 2 discs on the PSP (FC and 3rd only one) so it seems to be a big one!
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Oh hey now that this club’s done I can talk about my favorite part. The rest is still pretty good but the ending is cool.
the ending
It’s a pretty nice cliffhanger setup they leave you with. The cool stoic guy turns out to have been working for the evil organization the whole time. He is in love with Estelle, but now he has to go be evil. Joshua’s confession sold me on the romance more than Estelle’s feelings throughout the game. I remember when I first played it finding the incest a little weird, but not enough to make me put it down. But at the end I was immediately motivated to play the sequel and help Estelle get Joshua back.
Did not suspect the professor when I first played. This was despite having seen someone else play the end of SC earlier that year so I really should have recognized him. He really just seems harmless until he shows up to ruin Joshua’s day.
It’s been nice keeping up with the club even though I dropped off really early, I’ve enjoyed lurking and seeing what people thought about the game.
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Is that what’s happening? I thought he was basically going away because he was afraid that he would be manipulated into hurting Cassius (he’s S-rank, one of the few in the world!) and/or Estelle (her father his S-rank, btw).
At any rate I’m also hype for the sequel, now that everything seems set up I’m looking forward to see how all the pieces move.
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What you haven’t been accounting for is the impact of S-rank parenting.
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It’s what you’re thinking. I said evil but that’s a bit of a simplification. You get to see what he’s doing some in SC.
I think the upcoming games do a good job of balancing answering questions with leaving room for sequels without stringing the players along. This is one of the big cliffhangers in the series.
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The reason I was being a bit weird about the trigger warning stuff earlier is because there are later scenes where those trigger warnings are likely to be necessary to the people who need them.
There’s a lot of effed up stuff going on behind the scenes, and I’m not entirely sure how to make sure people have those warnings, but also not spoiling things, but also even people who aren’t triggered can find it very uncomfortable, so I should give a heads up, but also hide it in case people don’t want to know, but also not hide it to make sure people aren’t going in unawares.
Maybe I’m overthinking it 
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I think you’re fine to just make it clear there’s stuff you want to give a warning about for anyone who thinks they might want to be prepared, then hide the details. At least, I don’t think there’s a much better solution. But honestly my tolerance for that kind of stuff in art is essentially limitless so I’m not the best person to comment maybe 
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Yeah I have a fairly high tolerance for that stuff, I’m not worried about being traumatized, I’m worried about sloppy writing.
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Update on Steam SC with JP mod
Flashback of FC is in the English, with narrow typeface – and you guess, some face censorship (guess who).
VA mod
I failed to enabled voice acting mod while maintaining full JP experience. Anyway, I want to keep original avatars, rather than evo ones; and my self-excuse is that evo voice won’t match original artworks.
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It seems to be an annoying process, I’m happy that I decided to go with the PSP version directly…
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DLsite version should work fully JP by default. However, probably need locale simulator at some point. (So, isn’t guaranteed to work after all.)
I chose Steam because of refund policy, if mod doesn’t work. But I can’t know if it fully works until the unexpected happens (until it doesn’t 
). At least, I got a better resolution and aspect ratio.
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Couple issues that were in FC: the art Aqua Bleed crashed (stuck) the game, large kanji crashed (exit) the game. The latter can be fixed by turning high res fonts off, I don’t know a fix for the former.
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Well the thing is that if you decide to carry your save, you don’t have a lot of choices once you’ve picked your FC version.
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Right before the last scene, you can go talk to most the character. A couple of them have vaguely interesting stuff to say about the song Joshua’s plays on the harmonica.
And if you find クローゼ,
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SC has a home thread now.
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Ok, I did NOT see that ending coming and I was NOT prepared.
They finally confess that they like each other and then Yoshua has to ruin it 
poor Estelle. He should know that she would go with him even if it puts her in danger, which is probably what Yoshua is thinking. I’m guessing he wants to go stop the mage. But she would still go with him. Yoshua バカ！She even told him his past wasn’t an issue for her
Now I do need to know how it continues with SC! Having hopes that they get to meet again one day 
I don’t dislike the ending though, it’s just hard on my feelings, haha. It would have been too easy otherwise.
Btw Yoshua’s past reminds me of someone from Final Fantasy Seven, I presume most of you know who: So, a manufactured war puppet, like Cloud. FF7 came out in 1997 and FC in 2004, so FF7 was definitely first. But it’s different in Trails, since Yoshua isn’t that affected by his trauma in his daily life. There’s room for more than one story of this type.
Thanks for the Trails history, I had heard a lot of this but forgot. Would be interesting to try these early Legend of Heroes games sometime, if only for the great spritework as you say.
Same, thanks for the club! 
Yes, the combat had its faults, but it wasn’t too bad honestly. It’s a pretty old game.
similar feelings here, and as I edited into an earlier post, I think this might be the Fellowship of the Ring in Lord of the Rings. You shouldn’t look at that part of the story in isolation, it’s part of a large whole. It feels like but the start of a journey, and it was already a lot of fun.
I was on fire a lot too thanks to the Vita version, but it wasn’t a big issue for me, curiously. The highest heal spell also heals status effects.
Haha, I have an Excel spreadsheet called “Games I Finished in Japanese”, and it’s #7 for me
#6 if I don’t count FF7 Remake which I played with dual subs somewhat lazily
- Grandia 2 (one of my nostalgia games)
- Final Fantasy 7 (first time I played this, it was very good)
- Final Fantasy 7 Remake (I love both versions of the story)
- Tokimeki Memorial (after the epic Tim Rogers review)
- Persona 4 (most words added to Anki out of any game: 582)
- Chrono Trigger
- Trails in the Sky FC (~557 new words in Anki)
By the way, you should try restarting the game from the save after the game for NG+, or at least re-watch the Evo intro FMV (the original intro FMV is different! I like both). A lot of things in there that only make sense after you experienced them, the fight with the red mask guy. You also see Tita shortly. And they even show a view of the last scene of the game, I’m pretty sure. But I don’t even remember having seen these scenes when starting the game, as you didn’t know who any of these people were, you couldn’t place these scenes.
I think this is when the power went out in Zaiss.
It’s also interesting re-watching the in-game scene where Yoshua wakes up in bed and gets mad at Cassius, now we know why.
125h here according to the game, though I also left it running while writing forum posts sometimes and so on.
Nice to know other people also took so long 
I understand the criticisms of the story being a bit tropey and villain-y, but I’m glad you’re also still looking forward to continuing it as Daisoujou said, I enjoyed it despite its faults.
Now, after a day or so of digesting the ending, gladly onwards to SC
I’ll also try the remake demo now, will be fun to see this in 3D
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Heh yeah I know that video, watched a bit of the beginning a while back but never went through the rest of it. Figured I’d play the game myself one day anyway. So I’m curious, what did you think of it? I read a lot of VNs but have little to not experience with proper dating sims, curious to see a few of the classics. People speak really highly of Amagami as well; I think that’s the one I’m most curious about right now.
Congrats on finishing! And you’ve been moving through so quickly recently.
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Hah, I had a lot to catch up to! Still a few weeks left to catch up to in SC but that will pale in comparison.
Tokimeki was interesting, I liked it. I only got one playthrough where I basically completely failed, but that was also fun, haha. The nice thing is that it has basically full voice acting (in the Playstation, not the SNES version), which was revolutionary at the time. I think some of its value is historical, but I still enjoyed it. I’ve heard Tokimeki Memorial 2 might be even better, they can even pronounce your name from the hiragana you input I think.
(similarly, I think Tim Rogers also said he heard Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is better than 1, but he still wanted to cover 1)
Btw if you don’t want your first playthrough to fail miserably, there’s a trick to the game mechanics that might be a slight mechanics/strategy spoiler, but the mechanic is also pretty silly imo (Tim Rogers talks about it too): even if you go for girl A, you should still meet other girls sometimes (and just be nice to them), because otherwise they hate you and throw bombs at you or something which somehow makes girl A dislike you too, haha. I tried to be loyal and got punished.
Amagami: Oh, I’ve watched part of a JP let’s play of it by Ukyochi, it was so much fun. Great artwork, really good voice acting, nice story and places to visit, interesting game mechanics. I definitely want to play that myself some day. I also read here on WK that there’s a JP let’s player/youtuber who loves this game to pieces, I forgot his name.
Btw since we’re talking about other games, I’m also interested in Flower, I really liked the artwork, can you recommend it? It seemed to have something mystical about it. Just an impression of course.
(maybe we should move this discussion to the video game thread or Japanese gaming thread, not sure)
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