Only thing I can think of is that it hides from your friends if you’ve played the game an extreme amount of time immediately after purchasing it, though if you exit the 10 day period with close to 240 hours in the game that’s gonna show that off anyways.
I’m a big fan of the series and would consider it to be my favorite JRPG series, not just for the story but because I enjoy the gameplay it offers as well.
It’s a fairly “cheap” series to try out and see if you’re into it. The entire series is a singular, continuous story, so the recommended place to start is Trails in the Sky First Chapter, which can be picked up fairly cheaply on Steam, especially during Steam sales. It’s not as long as future games in the series, and is fairly representative of the pacing and storytelling format that later games will follow (though it is considered one of the slowest-paced games in the series). Basically if you’re not a fan of Sky FC, you’re not likely to be a fan of the future games in the series either (especially given that the substantial improvements to gameplay over the series’ 20 year history likely won’t have much appeal to you).
There are also demos available for some of the newer games in the series (e.g. Trails of Cold Steel III), and while I would not recommend actually playing through those games out-of-order, they may serve as a quick/cheap way to see if the format of the games is right for you.
I will say that while the combat of the games is rarely very difficult, and the game provides difficulty modifiers to make it even easier if you’d like, that the combat system is still fairly fleshed out and quite good casually IMO, but if you’re really not into doing it even at easy difficulties, one option (PC exclusive) may be to download completed game saves and play through the games on New Game+ and completely trivialize the combat.
Even if the performance is only mediocre, the gameplay will hold up. The game uses a fresh new combat system that merges action combat with turn-based gameplay, the likes of which I haven’t really seen in any other game including past Trails entries, and it’s absolutely a great time.
For the original PS4 release, Falcom released a fairly comprehensive demo that allowed you to play through the entire first chapter of the game, and carry over your save to the full release. They’ve also done something similar with Ys X which released on Switch day 1, so hopefully the Switch version gets a similar demo for both the Japanese and Western releases so you can try-before-you-buy.
I’m interested to see how the game performs on Switch. I played the Japanese PS4 version which was rough at launch but improved with post-release patches. I expect there are going to be some necessary cutbacks (no 60FPS, lowered render resolution, reduced visual effects, the standard fare) but that shouldn’t impact the quality of the game experience at all, it’s a wonderful entry and a great starting point for newcomers in a long-running series that rarely ever has those great starting points.
I think this game definitely has the hardest shinespark “puzzles”, but the actual execution of shinespark is much easier than in previous games which balances it out. Super Metroid had items where figuring out what shinespark maneuver to do was easy, but actually executing it was difficult, while Zero Mission and Fusion had easier-to-pull-off shinesparks with harder puzzles.
With Dread, the challenge is almost entirely in figuring out what to do, once you know exactly where/when to shinespark the actual execution is very intuitive and feels amazing when you land a complex sequence of shinesparks/speed booster runs/wall jumps.
I have played the original, and will be playing the remaster, though not on Switch, I already own the Japanese version on Steam which will be patched with the localization upon release in the West.
It’s quite a fun, fast-paced game, as Falcom action RPGs tend to be. Being a PSP title originally, I think the game format works well for shorter, pick-up-and-play sessions, making it ideal on devices like the Switch and Steam Deck. No context or experience with the wider Trails series necessary, all connections to the mainline series are just simple references and the game has a standalone story (unless you’re deep in the rabbit hole of lore crack theories).
Being incredibly car-centric is probably our biggest issue in my opinion. If you’re expecting to be able to use public transit or even walk to basic necessities, and are looking to purchase a house, you’d likely be looking at areas outside of your price range, generally within highly urbanized city centers. Owning a car is very much the norm here, even within those urban environments.
The thing with R&D for a company like Nintendo is that they’re never finished. If they’ve really finalized the Switch 2 as you’ve said then R&D will have immediately started working on the next console, or at worst post-launch accessories.
Not to be too dismissive, but I agree that it should be taken with a grain of salt. I also would expect that somebody who’s supposedly a part of Nintendo R&D specifically will be more likely to be walking around with many attempts at proof-of-concept hardware ideas that aren’t (yet) intended to ship in a final product, and only an incredibly tiny portion of such ideas will ever make it far enough to even be in consideration for a new device.
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