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.
4 Likes
Ooh, I completely forgot about this. Subtle.
4 Likes
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!
5 Likes
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.
6 Likes
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.
4 Likes
What you haven’t been accounting for is the impact of S-rank parenting.
5 Likes
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.
4 Likes
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 
6 Likes
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
3 Likes
Yeah I have a fairly high tolerance for that stuff, I’m not worried about being traumatized, I’m worried about sloppy writing.
3 Likes
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.
2 Likes
It seems to be an annoying process, I’m happy that I decided to go with the PSP version directly…
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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.
2 Likes
