For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter from Nihon Falcom and GungHo Online Entertainment.
This is one of the longest videos in the Demo Play Thursday series, if not the longest, and i'm not surprised because all of the "The Legend of Heroes" game demos have been long, but unlike them this time i kept playing because i knew from experience that i should. this video only covers the opening story, a time skip, and the first quest of the game.
The demo starts with a screen that lets you buy the game, something that not all demos do. the option menu is quite extensive and has some nice customisations that typically come to early 2000 games remade in the modern day like speed up settings. the next 9 minutes is an opening set in the game's past before having an intro to the modern day setting of the game.
the story we start with is both main characters needing to head into town as today is their final test. their goal, to become a junior bracer. our characters and the world look great on the original Switch, and a launch model too. there was some pop in where shadows appeared before the grass that sat on top, but other than that everything looked and controlled great and it didn't feel like i was playing a lesser version of the game.
by about 40 minutes into the demo, it really started to feel slow. i had turned on auto messages, but they were slow. there was nothing in the options to increase the speed of the text bubbles. the default in this demo just happens to be really slow. i had set the difficult to easy as i wanted to sit back and enjoy the story, but i was starting to get frustrated by how slow things were starting to feel and the auto messages was a key part of this.
it would take about 40 minutes to start our final training quest and get all the back story of the world. having so much information available is useful as i've never played the original on PSP. but it was a lot to take in in such a short period of time. when it came to combat, the game had some nice pictures showing how to do it. as i've played previous The Legend of Heroes games i was also able to bring some of that past experience. what's nice about the combat is that if you're facing a low level enemy you can quicky dispatch them. but if there are many of them or something stronger, you can do a quick hit and then engage them in turn based combat.
it took a little under 20 minutes to complete this final training quest and i ended this video once we became junior bracers. unfortunately, i don't know how much longer this demo was. there was no information on the game's eShop page and the game itself gave no information as to how long and what was in this demo. another issue with this demo is how out of date it is to the game. the developers have done a final job continuously updating the game since it came out, but this demo hasn't been updated. i don't know how different this demo is, or how improved the game is, from what i played in this video.
