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Sora no Kiseki; Please tolerate my ramblings :)
Topic Started: Mar 19 2009, 03:20 AM (381 Views)
Kimimi
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Teikokukagekidan: Hanagumi official tea maker :)
I really love Sora no Kiseki, but even though it's a Falcom series it's still relatively unknown outside its home country. I wrote this to try and explain a bit about the series, as well as hopefully get across some of what makes it so brilliant.

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Think Falcom, you think of Ys. It’s hard not to, the series is well known for its amazing soundtracks and fast paced action. It’s far from the only series Falcom have made, although it is the most accessible to Western fans. By far their most recent success is the Sora no Kiseki trilogy, the latest RPGs in their “Eiyuu Densetsu (Legend of Heroes)” line of more traditional, story heavy, RPGs. Before you run off let me briefly explain something – the PSP “Legend of Heroes” games inflicted upon America are a mess of badly edited, poorly translated dialogue and a naff Lunar-ish battle system that was nothing like the original. Falcom didn’t go anywhere near them, they just licensed out the name to Bandai Namco. The reason I’ve bothered to mention this is because I don’t want anyone’s experiences with those games to colour their view of Sore no Kiseki before we start.

Music is also a departure from the fast paced guitar-laden tracks of Ys – it’s more melodic and instrumental, with several tracks such as “Silver Will, Golden Wings”, “Whereabouts of the Stars”, and title track “Sora no Kiseki” often remixed as everything from a heart-pumping boss fights to slower, more thoughtful tunes.

Field Screenshots

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The original game, Sora no Kiseki FC (First Chapter) was released on the PC in Japan late 2004, with SC (Second Chapter) released late 2006 and the final chapter (“The Third”) out in 2007. This trilogy has a somewhat unique and demanding expectation of its players – the story expects players to play them all in order, and it makes no concessions for anyone trying to dive into SC without playing the first game through to completion first, and there’s no Xenosaga-style database to use for reference. There’s barely a break in the plot – the second game begins the morning after the night FC ended; same place, same characters, carrying on like before. This does have its benefits – your save data can naturally be carried over, and any NPCs you were helpful to in the past game will comment on your actions which is a nice touch. From a plot point of view it forces them to deal with that recurring plot puzzle – what happens to the characters after the credits roll. Far more than just “Hey gang, let’s have more adventures!” they take the bull by the horns and show how these people have been shaped by their experiences and how they have moved on.

Conversation Screenshots

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In addition to the excellent job they did creating the characters Falcom went a step further and made sure the world they inhabited was a place, and not merely a collection of areas arranged for conveniences sake. Take Rolent for example; this town is the first one you encounter and close to the home of the main cast members. You can learn if you wish that Rolent has two main industries – agriculture and septium mineral mining. Does that make any difference to the gameplay? No, none at all. What it does do is show the level of care and detail that went into creating the world as a whole, instead of creating a plot and fashioning bits and pieces around it. In terms of scale it’s “Suikoden sized” – the series is set entirely within the Liberl kingdom, although you are made aware of the surrounding areas and fed some small details about them. The next game in the series, Eiyuu Densetsu 7, is apparently going to be set within the neighbouring Ebronian Empire, so I guess Falcom aren’t done with the setting just yet.

Let’s get onto something we can all enjoy – beating up the local wildlife! The battle system is at heart a turn based one, with turn order displayed at all times in a manner similar to Evolution/Final Fantasy X/Xenosaga. You can manipulate the turn order through haste spells, stunning the enemy and so on, and of course the enemy can do this to you as well. Spells take time to cast too, and this must be taken into consideration – it’s possible for enemies to simply move out of the way of offensive spells if they have the time, and if you’re trying to cast a group healing spell you have to make sure everyone stays within the area of effect. Party movement is decided by the player (although enemy hits can knock you back) making these choices more tactical.

Battle screenshots

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Magic is handled through what I can only describe as a materia-like system. They expanded upon it in several ways however – “quartz” (materia, for descriptive shorthands sake) isn’t placed into equipment, but onto an item called an Orbment. This has a fixed number of slots and each character has a different layout that cannot be altered; in addition to this some slots can only contain certain kinds of quartz, forcing you to play to each characters natural strength and preventing any kind of perfect setup. The order you place them in also effects the spells you gain from them too – it’s possible to equip the same character with the same quartz, but result in a different spell set at the end of it. Messing around with this Orbal system is very easy and you see the results instantly, so experimentation is straightforward enough.

Orbment/Status Screenshots

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As I mentioned at the beginning, the Legend of Heroes series is known for being story heavy and Sora no Kiseki certainly doesn’t disappoint. The main cast are a varied bunch, backed up by a strong group of supporting characters and adversaries. They’re multifaceted too, never settling into an easy stereotype. Olivier is a great example of this – he’s very much the joker of the group, getting drunk, creating rubbish songs on his lute and flirting with the girls. Then, there’s comes a time where your party are trapped within their own individual perfect dream worlds (you only ever get to see this from Estelle’s point of view). When asked what he dreamt of, Olivier simply says he dreamed he was with his elder brother when they were younger, and he never speaks of it again.
There’s plenty of time for the big events too – an ancient city is discovered, a dragon lands in the middle of a shopping district and an invasion is narrowly avoided, but the plot never loses sight of the people that are forced to live through these decisions and never takes the easy road of painting the opposition as pantomime-level evil.

“The Third” offers something quite different, focussing on the cast to the exclusion of almost everything else, by creating a plot that forces them into an illusory world with nobody else to interact with. It sounds rather limiting, but it works quite well as they encounter fragmented parts of familiar places and people within them. It feels a bit strange after the first two, but as you go through it all clicks into place, even if I couldn’t quite get it to shake that “fan service” feel.

Oh dammit! All this, and I’ve not even mentioned the Bracers Guild! The guild is integral to both the plot and the gameplay. Every town has a guild offering sidequests in exchange for money and items, and completing enough of them will boost your Bracer rank. It’s not necessary by any means, but failure to do so will result in some characters berating your lack of effort or offer up humiliating put downs when you boast of your unimpressive position within the guild. The game offers up a nice reproduction of you Bracers journal – notes are jotted down in it as you gather information on quests and it also contains a thorough guide on the Orbment system as well as logs of enemies defeated and similar data.

Bracers Guild/Guild Notice Board

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So, the downside to all this? The games are only available in Japanese, traditional Chinese, and Korean.; and there are currently no English language translations available. GameFAQs has guides for the first two games that will certainly get you through from start to finish, but plot details are thin on the ground and only cover the basics. There is some hope however – a program called “Anime Game Text Hooker” is capable of extracting the dialogue from the game in real time and there are various setups that can run this automatically through a machine translator or onto a blank Firefox page for use with Rikaichan, a great plugin that translates specific words on mouseover.

Fishing Minigame

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This little trilogy of RPGs is easily one of Japans best kept secrets, and certainly more deserving of a wider audience. The sad fact is though that they are expensive to buy (even Falcoms excellent PSP ports don’t come cheap) and with the dialogue untranslated a lot of people who do bother will still miss out on what makes these games so amazing.
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This game looks really cute. The sprites kinda remind me of Crystal Chronicles. Do you have to have played any previous games by Falcom to really get the story behind this or is it a stand alone series?

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Kimimi
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Teikokukagekidan: Hanagumi official tea maker :)
It's completely self contained - the world and everything in it isn't linked to any other series so you don't need to have played anything else first.
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Darkstalker
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~ The QUEEN ~
Since it's a miniseries, I was wondering about the scale; specifically, the number of characters. Are there a humongous amount or is it more or less focused with a really small group of people?

The reason I ask is that there're not too many sequential series I can think of that actually uses the previous characters strongly so I'm not too sure how it'd turn out. Like, say, Suikoden has recurring characters but most of them don't continue to play an important role in subsequent games, etc.
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Kimimi
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Teikokukagekidan: Hanagumi official tea maker :)
The first game uses the eight characters, SC adds one new one (Graham, who becomes the main in The Third) and one temporary one. IIRC The final game in its role as fan-fulfillment doubles it - it includes all those from FC and SC, as well as all the cool secondary characters who spent a lot of time with the team but you didn't get to put in your party.

I can't recall the exact number at the moment, and the manual's upstairs. I'll count if you want a specific figure.
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Kimimi
Mar 19 2009, 10:55 AM
It's completely self contained - the world and everything in it isn't linked to any other series so you don't need to have played anything else first.

It sounds really cool. I really like what you mentioned about developing the towns as actual places. Too many RPG worlds lack that. It's minor details like that which breathe real life into a game.
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Kimimi
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Teikokukagekidan: Hanagumi official tea maker :)
It's well worth a look if nothing else, but I do recommend reading up as much as possible on the plot because that's where all the real joy lies.
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Kimimi
Mar 19 2009, 01:13 PM
It's well worth a look if nothing else, but I do recommend reading up as much as possible on the plot because that's where all the real joy lies.

Yeah, it would be great if it had an actual translation though.

Curse my hatred of the Japanese language. Curse it I say.
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Kimimi
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Teikokukagekidan: Hanagumi official tea maker :)
There is a translation project going on, but it's such a mammoth task that it isn't really progressing. The other thing is with games like Ys everyone can have a go and have a good time, then they'll go ask for a translation. With Sora no Kiseki it's hard to see what you're missing without knowing the dialogue anyway, so these people don't get anywhere near the same kind of support even though their task is far harder.
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It's a shame really, because there are hundreds of games of quality exclusive to other countries that we will never get translated for whatever reason. Hell, an example could be made with Mother 3. It had been out forever and Nintendo refused to bring that over so it needed to be fan translated.

I'll definitely look into this game at some point. The amount of work you put into this review tells me it must be good.
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Kimimi
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Teikokukagekidan: Hanagumi official tea maker :)
Thanks a lot! If you need help with anything, just let me know. I'll be happy to offer up some pointers and gameplay explanations if you need them.
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Kimimi
Mar 19 2009, 01:47 PM
Thanks a lot! If you need help with anything, just let me know. I'll be happy to offer up some pointers and gameplay explanations if you need them.

I'll be sure to ask if I need anything. :3
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