Game Review: Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC

​Last year, I played through Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. It was amazing, the best JRPG that I've played in over a decade, with a cliffhanger ending that demanded an immediate resolution. And then I...didn’t start the second game until September of this year because I got sidetracked. You know how it goes. I wanted to play more Zelda games before Breath of the Wild came out, and then I was a little intimidated by the commitment than Trails SC would required, since I tend to only play one game at a time.

Seventy-seven hours later, my verdict is that I should have played this back in February and March instead of Wasteland 2. I could have moved on to Trails in the Sky the 3rd by now and finished up the first trilogy rather than spending my time shooting robots with assault rifles, the true post-apocalyptic überweapon. And in Trails SC I even got to shoot some robots with gattling guns, so it would have been the best of both worlds. Long as they were, those seventy-seven hours were an excellent use of my time.

Warning before I start: this review contains spoilers for Trails in the Sky FC. The games are so tightly connected it’s impossible for me to discuss the characters or plot in any real detail without them.

Not the secret final boss.

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Murder on the Orient Express

For once, not horror! Last night, schoolpsychnerd, mutantur, goodbyeomelas, fin.emery, and myself went out to see the new Murder on the Orient Express movie and then go out to dinner.

And I liked it, but it sounded like I was in the perfect position to like it as someone who doesn't often watch movies, hasn't read Murder on the Orient Express, and hasn't read most of Agatha Chrstie's other books (I read And Then There Were None when I was in high school). The others kept getting distracted by the actors they recognized, whereas I don't know what Kenneth Branagh looks like and so I didn't realized that he was the one playing Poirot until the discussion after the movie. I didn't know that the action scene, and the scene where Poirot harangues the various passengers of the train, weren't in the book. I didn't notice the changed nationalities of the passengers. These were all things that bothered my movie-watching companions.

There were two flaws I did notice, though. The first is that the titular Orient Express was far too short--only four cars and the engine, which made discussion of any carriage class other than first or the mention of the "Calais carriage" rather odd. The second is that there were a huge number of characters and simply not enough time to focus on any of them. The ballet-dancing count with the sudden rages is one of the most interesting characters, and he barely had any lines and only really appeared in two scenes. The car dealer barely had any lines at all.

Basically, though I did like it, watching the movie made me want to go read the book. I already put it for it at the library, so in a few weeks I'll have new opinions!