“Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned…” – William Congreve

I’ve played a lot of RPGs in my life and I have never been so glad to put a game behind me as I was when the credits finally rolled on Snails in the Sky. The credits rolled, but the game didn’t exactly end. Joshua remembered his past and went dashing off for revenge and Estelle is going to spend the next game looking for him. And Falcom actually expects me to spend money on that. **** THAT. If I never see those two again it will be too soon!

Like I said before, it’s not that Trails in the Sky is bad, it’s just that it drags a 10 hour story out to 40 hours by means of extreme padding, pointless scenes, pointless side plots, pointless characters, pointless walking, pointless quests and pointless battles. The end result left me mentally chafed in ways I didn’t even know were possible.

And speaking of repetition, does anyone remember the scene in I, Claudius where Augustus roars, “IS THERE ANYONE IN ROME WHO HAS NOT SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTER?!” I felt the same way after scene upon scene of character upon character going on and on about how wonderful Cassius Bright was. “IS THERE ANYONE IN LIBERL WHO IS NOT IN LOVE WITH MY FATHER?!” In fact, several characters (most notably Zane and Agate) are only in the game because “Cassius asked me to help.” It’s a wonder any of them can talk with their mouths so full of Cassius Bright’s <bleep>.

And then that blasted Cassius had the nerve to show up right when I was putting the finishing touches on the final boss. Blasted scene-stealer. Glory hound. It wasn’t enough for you to ruin the game, now you’ve got to take the final boss as well? I hate you. WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS TROUBLESOME DAD?!

Of course, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Falcom’s dilemma. They have a previous trilogy which presumably made them a lot of money. So even if they barely have a story, they still have to stretch it out to fill three full-sized games. I’m not one of those people who complain if a game is too short, but it’s common in the fandom so I know where’s they’re coming from. But seriously, they could still have condensed Trails in the Sky into a 10 hour storyline, added 10 hours hours worth of fights, sidequests and silly plotlines and ended up with a classic. 40 hours of nothing is way too much.

One more thing: I really must register my dissatisfaction with how boring the kingdom of Liberl was. Apart from a few cliffs, all the terrain was basically the same. The architecture was the same, the people dressed the same, talked the same, acted the same, etc. Even Britain, the king of the boring nations, has a lot of different locations and accents and cultural practices. This is fiction. Don’t make me keep walking though woods and manicured lawns for 40 hours when you could throw in a couple of deserts and icy wastes and ruined jungles. Lie to me!

Luckily, all bad things must come to an end. As a final act of mercy, I will now proceed to spoil the story: everything was a plot by Colonel Richards of the Intelligence Division to take over the country so he could get at the artifact hidden under Grancel Castle. Only it wasn’t really him, it was the really bad guys, who planted ideas in his head. No one in the game is bad, it’s always “The really bad guys made me do it. I have amnesia!” (BUULLSHIITTT) Oh, and Professor Alba is one of the really bad guys. And Joshua used to be an assassin who got taken in by Cassius Bright after Joshua failed to assassinate CB. Did I miss anything? See, that wasn’t anything that couldn’t be cleared up in 10 hours, was it?

Moving on, I usually like to put a little space between games of the same series, but I really want to play Persona 2: Innocent Sin now, so I’m not going to wait any longer. UnchainBlades Rexx has been out for a while, but the reviews are quite horrible. I’m going to go into it with extremely low expectations and maybe I’ll be able to salvage something from that. I also want to finish the second story of Blue Roses to see how things end, but that’s the lowest thing on my priority list right now. And finally Will O’ Wisp has shown me that otome game visual novels don’t necessarily have to suck, so I’m thinking of trying another one of those in the near future. It’s going to be a busy rest-of-2011.

Or, more accurately, The Legend of Heroes: Snails in the Sky. I’ve been playing this game for ages. Barely anything has happened and the game drags on like you wouldn’t believe. Won’t it ever end?

Incidentally this is why I like to write posts at various stages of the playing process. If I’d written this post at the 5 or even 10-hour mark, I would have raved about the sense of adventure and the fine soundtrack and bright palette and so on and so forth. Now it’s just like “Please Lord, let it be over soon.”

Trails in the Sky is one of the best turn-based RPGs the PSP has turned out so far, which really isn’t saying much because the PSP’s selection of RPGs is worse than I’d expected when I bought one. The barely-moving story is fairly interesting (when anything happens) and the characters are interesting enough when the game isn’t hammering their characteristics in repeatedly. Joshua is secretive, Joshua is secretive, Estelle is naive, Estelle is naive, Olivier talks too much, Olivier talks too much. OKAY OKAY, WE GET IT! It’s a pretty decent offering, all things considered.

It’s just, too much of a good thing, you know? The best RPGs I’ve played made me wish they’d never end, but those are precisely the ones that quit while they were ahead. Just ask Chrono Trigger. It had a simple story to tell, it told it sharpish and then it buggered off. I hear T.I.T.S. is the first of a trilogy, but even the first game in the Xenosaga trilogy had the decency to cap off at around 20 hours. You want to leave the player begging for more, not throwing up by the door.

Well, at least Trails in the Sky is somewhat improved over the previous two Legend of Heroes offerings I tried. The soundtrack is pretty good, if a bit generic (though I’m positive I’ve heard that main theme before) and the battles are slightly more interesting because they rip-off Grandia‘s system without, alas, also copying the dynamism that made Grandia’s battles so epic. So the end result is just a turn-based battle system where the characters go running around the screen…but in turns.

It looks good on paper, but in practice every character having to run a marathon just to strike an enemy makes the battles clunky and slow like you wouldn’t believe. And either you don’t hit very hard or the enemies have a ton of HP, because even simple random battles take a long time to finish. On top of all that, the EXP gains are pathetic, even for beating bosses. I beat Lt. Lorence in the castle and got 80 EXP. 8-0. Even the random chest monsters in the next dungeon gave more experience than that!

I’ve been convinced I’m almost done for the past 5 hours, but it’s still going on. After a long, tedious tournament and the most annoying stealth mission in history, I now have at least one more stage to get through before I can finally put this game behind me. Things move so slowly that all this will probably take another 10 hours. I’m so tired. I get even more tired when I look back on all the unnecessary things I had to do to progress the game: killing farm pests, taking part in a school play (that was spectacularly stupid), fixing a hot spring, the aforementioned tournament… And that’s not counting all the technically-optional-but-then-you-won’t-get-any-money sidequests you have to fulfill as part of being a junior bracer. Half the events are unnecessary, as are half the characters. Only a few things have happened in all that time: the Special Ops are evil, Daddy’s missing and there’s a black orbment out there with special powers. They could have told this story in 10 hours, maybe less.

*sigh* Sunken costs and all that. I’ll just finish it. See you later…