Demo Play Thursday - The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon Story DEMO On PS4

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon Story Demo, from Nihon Falcom.

I've been told before that these The Legend of Heroes games have a slow long start to them. so in this playthrough of the Story Demo, i allowed myself more time than usual to check out more of the game that i've done with previous games from this series.

The game does look great on PS4 and mostly runs fine but i did notice some pop-in and there was a moment when my PS4 froze. it's possible there were some minor tech issues with it as i remember near the end moments when it looked like one of a character's eyes was not open. Other than that, the demo went smoothly. this is the most recently patched version of the demo.

For this being a "Story Demo" there was a lot of battles at the start. the battle system is mostly introduced to us smartly, but the fact we have to do mostly the same thing twice in the first hour or so means it got a little boring. the final tutorial boss fight was fun. After that we were introduced to what's been happening in the game world, mostly between the end of the previous entry and this. But what's odd is that in this video i never worked out what the game's actual story is about. i speculated what it could be. but for the most part, all we did was the battle tutorial and have a reunion.

You'll have to let me know in the comments how much further i had to go to get the game's story. i know this demo is from The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon Prologue but i am surprised that for a demo they didn't include anything to hint at or tell us what the game's story actually is. there is no trailer nor screenshots on the main menu. there's no hint as to how much further i would've had to go either.

It's difficult to recommend The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon as fans of the series know what they're getting themselves into and for those coming to the series for the first time there's a real chance they'll come away lacking the context to fully understand what's going on in the game.

Backlog Conquering - Anthem On PS4 - Part 8

Welcome to Backlog Conquering. This is a series were i play a game from my backlog that i may or may not have played before. the goal isn't necessarily to finish the game, the goal is to play it. that way, i can have an opinion about it.

Our new game is the PlayStation 4 version of Anthem. i have previously played around 5 hours of this game back in 2019, but i stopped playing once EA announced they weren't going to update the game. The main reason for picking up Anthem now is that the game servers are going to be turned off on January 12th 2026. I started recording these videos before the servers were taken down so from Part 5 onwards, these will go live on YouTube AFTER the servers have been shut down. You can't play Anthem anymore as the game doesn't have an off-line mode, it was online only.

Between Parts 7 and 8 i think i spent around 3 hours NOT doing story stuff because the game forced me to engage with the online multiplayer open world. so the start of this video are my attempts at completing the tasks required of me before i can enter tombs. but once i got that part done, i was back into the story and it got quite exciting by the end. i was lucky that i had help from some random players as there were some tough story moments in this video.

Check out previous parts:

Part 1 - https://youtu.be/A9yTrycU5gk

Part 2 - https://youtu.be/e8-wLS1CmN8

Part 3 - https://youtu.be/n-V3VDh_cJQ

Part 4 - https://youtu.be/kgWj3TeJWXg

Part 5 - https://youtu.be/ujvrBZeRZOI

Part 6 - https://youtu.be/OaOLQf336ZQ

Part 7 - https://youtu.be/ivTkSJ9nJGg

Stories on Tuesday - Underworld Office: Ghost Story - From Start to Finish

With my playthrough of Underworld Office: Ghost Story finished on iOS, i have put all 7 chapters of this story into video. this is a vertical video. i have included the credits.

Check out the previous Chapters of this story:

Chapter 1 - https://youtu.be/Gte27gt0KuQ

Chapter 2 - https://youtu.be/DTE_yWs9UHU

Chapter 3 - https://youtu.be/izLKYJgJtiQ

Chapter 4 - https://youtu.be/OF6IQKLat9E

Chapter 5 - https://youtu.be/rUVifyzOhpw

Chapter 6 - https://youtu.be/C_sUVnUVOoA

Chapter 7 - https://youtu.be/9QwoTfGi5to

iPhone Friday - Arknights: Endfield - Style And Good Combat Don't Make Up For A Dull Opening Story

For this week's iPhone Friday i tried Arknights: Endfield from Hypergryph and Mountain Contour on my iPhone 14 Pro.

I had seen many adverts for this game on various platforms, but i was always intending to try it out. But when something is seemingly being advertised so much i can't help but being a little weary why. 

Our immediate impression of Arknights: Endfield isn't great as the game starts downloading an update without warning, without permission, and then forces us to restart the app, which itself took longer than expected. i appreciate that the game gave us the option to chose which language the audio is in, but then it never said that it was going to download other stuff as well as that audio. so instead of the 786.06MB that Arknights: Endfield advertised it was going to download, it actually downloaded 17607.41MB (or 17.6GB) and it took about 25 minutes. Once that was finished, the game then had to install shaders which took an additional 3 minutes or so. 

So after 30 minutes we finally get to the game's home screen. It's an impressive looking screen, but it gets better when the game starts. the character select option looked cool but in terms of the game's story it also doesn't really make sense in hindsight. but once we go outside the tutorial begins and it's quite good. it introduces how to control the character step by step and for more complicated stuff the tutorial uses videos to show us how to do things. I also commented in the video that i thought the game's button placement was quite good, better than in Destiny: Rising, https://youtu.be/i4OljQxqzyg, because there was smart use of the same buttons and space for camera controls with my right hand.

Whilst the introduction to gameplay was good, in terms of story i have no idea what happened. i don't think it's ever explained in this video what we went through or even if it's normal. my issues with the game's story extend throughout this video and not just this opening tutorial segment. Our character is introduced as having amnesia and whilst we get a little bit of pity everyone is seemingly determined to talk to us and bombard us with information like we know what they're talking about. the game's story needs it's own tutorial to help give us context for it all. for example, key terms and names should be highlighted a different color and when touched we should be given a little bit of information to help us, the player, understand the context and story.

For me, from what i understand of it, i'm not enjoying the game's story. it's had nearly two hours to try and hook me and it's just not doing it. from what i understand of the story it seems like our character created or found a way to take advantage of a material what lets us create stuff, kinda like a replicator from Star Trek. we're at a planet and we're going to Terra Form it into something more suitable for mass production of stuff using this technology. But the local wildlife and seeming people already living there aren't too happy about this. it's possible i missed something, but i don't seem to remember any "why" being given. i don't know if we're a part of any Empire or not. i also don't remember any reason given for why we were away for ten years.

Thankfully, even though i'm not enjoying the story the gameplay is great. the combat is fluid and fast, maybe a little too fast for the camera controls so perhaps a tweak to the lock-on with a semi automated camera might help. the graphics are good and the video sequences look great. so the gameplay aspect of the game is fine, it's just the story aspect that i'm not getting into.

So that's why i've rated this game so-so. there's stuff to enjoy, but if you're like me there may not be enough to hook you. but it's probably worth checking out. just beware, it could take about 30 minutes after starting it to get to gameplay so maybe trying it on PC or console might be a better option.

Version 1.0.13 Played

Backlog Conquering - Anthem On #PS4 - Part 7

This was done with my backup recording on Mini Disc.

Welcome to Backlog Conquering. This is a series were i play a game from my backlog that i may or may not have played before. the goal isn't necessarily to finish the game, the goal is to play it. that way, i can have an opinion about it.

Our new game is the PlayStation 4 version of Anthem. i have previously played around 5 hours of this game back in 2019, but i stopped playing once EA announced they weren't going to update the game. The main reason for picking up Anthem now is that the game servers are going to be turned off on January 12th 2026. I started recording these videos before the servers were taken down so from Part 5 onwards, these will go live on YouTube AFTER the servers have been shut down. You can't play Anthem anymore as the game doesn't have an off-line mode, it was online only.

I started Part 7 with a side quest before moving back to the game's story and looking for tombs. what i didn't anticipate were the challenges that had to be done to unlock the tombs. i thought that it would've been related to story and things i've done in that but it seems that for at least two of the tombs i needed to have done things online or things in the game's world. so the rest of this video is my attempts at completing the needed challenges, but finding it quite difficult. So this will continue into Part 8.

Check out previous parts:

Part 1 - https://youtu.be/A9yTrycU5gk

Part 2 - https://youtu.be/e8-wLS1CmN8

Part 3 - https://youtu.be/n-V3VDh_cJQ

Part 4 - https://youtu.be/kgWj3TeJWXg

Part 5 - https://youtu.be/ujvrBZeRZOI

Part 6 - https://youtu.be/OaOLQf336ZQ

Stories on Tuesday - Underworld Office: Ghost Story - Chapter 7 - The Final Part

The current story i'm playing is Underworld Office: Ghost Story. i'm playing this on #iPhone14pro.

Now i've played it, i understand how it works. so each video from this one going forward will be it's own chapter in the game. i will continue to blur out the advert at the bottom of the screen. there are full screen adverts during my playthrough and i will edit them out. this will mean that occasionally the music will skip or go from on to off abruptly where i've made the edit.

Chapter 7 is the final chapter. the previous chapter teased that what was happening could only be delt with by other mortals and so it comes down to us to try and save the day ... or not. both choices exist.

Check out the previous Chapters of this story:

Chapter 1 - https://youtu.be/Gte27gt0KuQ

Chapter 2 - https://youtu.be/DTE_yWs9UHU

Chapter 3 - https://youtu.be/izLKYJgJtiQ

Chapter 4 - https://youtu.be/OF6IQKLat9E

Chapter 5 - https://youtu.be/rUVifyzOhpw

Chapter 6 - https://youtu.be/C_sUVnUVOoA

Cloud Monday - Final Fantasy VII: Remake - Part 1 - Early Access To Manual Saves Saved The Day!

This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing the PS4 version of Final Fantasy VII: Remake via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

This was one of the worst sessions of playing a game from the Cloud i've had in a very long time. off the top of my head, the last time it was this bad was when i checked out West of Dead, https://youtu.be/KltyL6NREyA. after 4 disconnections, i gave up for this Part 1 and hopefully Part 2 will be a better experience.

But that's not to say nothing was learned. with things this bad, i would say that Final Fantasy VII: Remake is still a good choice to stream from the cloud because players get access to manual saves after the first fight and the game itself seems to auto save fairly frequently. so even though there were 4 disconnections, i only lost progress after the first one because i hadn't unlocked manual saves by that point. every time the countdown began after that, i was able to manually save before time was up.