Progression is slower than other survivor games, but they have increased the pace and added a mechanic with gear drops, which smooths out the curve and actually makes builds possible. All in all it’s one of the top survivor games i’ve played. I would place Vampire Survivors (because of the huge amount of content) and Halls of Torment (because i absolutely love the style) above it, but for me DRG:S is a solid 3rd place (and i’ve played quite a lot of bullet heavens)
I take there’s permanent unlocks/stat improvements/etc? Is gear permanent or per run? Surely the dwarves don’t enter the levels unprepared? :D
To me Vampire Survivors started to get a bit obtuse with some unlock requirements (have skills x, y, z, survive this certain level this long, be at this exact place, possibly with a character C, have the hand towel on second hook… etc). I’d assume DRG:S is a bit more straightforward?
Have you perhaps played Soulstone Survivors - it’s the one I’ve played the most, unlocked everything apart from some hidden/masked achivements? If you have, how does DRG compare?
Totally is. FFVII was a watershed moment for JRPGs on PSX. Same is true for Trails on PC.
It’s just that recognition in the West for FFVII was instant. Meanwhile, due to localization, it took more than a decade for Trails to get recognition.
Maybe this is a better comparison: if FFVII is The Beatles, then Trails is the Velvet Underground. Beatles sold massive copies immediately. VU took awhile, but now everyone knows they’re just as impactful as the Beatles.
That’s a bad analogy. I just asked 4 of my friends (25-65) if they knew who the Beatles were. Everyone said yes. Then I asked if they knew VU, everyone (including myself) had no clue who that was.
Oh boy I’m glad you said that because I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. I’m 40yo and I have no idea who the VU are, nor does comparing them to the Beatles make me excited to look them up.
The price is insane. No way I’m touching it until it’s about $50 cheaper. It doesn’t even have regional pricing for my country which makes it extra expensive by comparison.
A lot of it reads as lazy DLC meant to satisfy investors that want “value-adds” without taking a lot of development time. I’d imagine only obsessive fans (admittedly, there are many) would be considering them.
But the fact that it’s a remake of a 20 year old game doesn’t seem like it would affect the value. For reference, the old one was top down with prerendered chibi sprites. The new one is fully 3D with voice acting. It’s a pretty sizable change in appearance, even how the combat functions. $60 is probably normal, though it makes sense that for anyone unsure about it, either play the demo or just wait for it to go on sale.
The short answer is something people can play on a phone. Console ownership is not so prolific that you can assume people will have them, or that they will know how to use them properly. To that point the jackbox games are great for this
I saw this on Steam but the “1st Chapter” subtitle is a red flag. Is this a remake of a complete game or a partial release like the FFVII remakes?
Edit: Although the above concern has been addressed, this $60 game now has $75 worth of DLC just a day after release. I think this may be a patient gamer situation.
Previously, we offered free Key applications to replace game versions for existing players. However, as of this month, the number of supplementary Keys distributed has exceeded 30% of the total sales volume prior to this initiative—and we still receive numerous feedbacks from players stating they haven’t received their Keys, along with complaints about slow email response times.
This comparison really feels strained. FF7 was the PS1's biggest game, and by far. It was a revolution that shook the entire industry.
Trails is a cult classic that's beloved by a niche fanbase, and I'm happy to see this kind of game get a shot at wider recognition here, but its impact was in no way even remotely comparable to FF7.
Okay, but I’m not talking about commercial appeal. I’m talking about artistic achievement.
What Nihon Falcom accomplished with this game is unmatched. Trails in the Sky is, without question, the most expansive and intricate saga in JRPG history.
Because unlike other series that reset with each new title, Falcom committed to one continuous world. Every town, every political faction, every character connects across dozens of games.
The big thing about FF7 was that it came out during a critical transition period for the industry, and Squaresoft put the highest budget of any video game to date into making sure FF's jump to 3D graphics was as explosive as possible. The game was heavily marketed on its technical merits, boasting about how everything this game does could only be possible on PS1. It's full of setpiece moments that are literally just Squaresoft trying to show off their VFX budget (this is why summon cutscenes are so absurdly long). And it blew audiences away because no one had never seen anything like it before. FF7 was a revolution.
Trails certainly has good reason to be beloved by its niche fanbase, but by 2004, it really wasn't doing anything super unique compared to its contemporaries from the same time period. It's a polished game, but I can't describe it as anything more than an evolution.
Your only arguments for your statement in this thread are, that there are a lot of Trails games, and that the games are all connected. Comparing this to FF7 seems like a real stretch.
If these games are so important, how about some examples of how they influenced gaming and their impact, either to devs or gamers.
BTW I think the Trails series is garbage and has only one good game in it.
This isn’t about “a lot of games.” It’s about building something no other JRPG studio has ever pulled off—a single, continuous saga that’s been unfolding since Trails in the Sky in 2004.
No resets, no reboots, no discarded lore. Every event, faction, and character connects across a dozen titles. That kind of long-form narrative discipline doesn’t exist anywhere else in the genre.
And don’t minimize how hard that is. Most JRPG studios can barely keep one trilogy coherent. Falcom has been weaving one uninterrupted storyline for over twenty years—through console generations and shifting hardware.
Holding a narrative together across decades isn’t just impressive, it’s almost impossible. Doing this wasn’t just because of luck. It’s taken discipline, patience, and vision on a scale no other studio has matched.
Influence is easy to trace. XSEED’s Trails in the Sky localization raised the bar for how seriously Western publishers approach text-heavy JRPGs. At the time, bringing over a game with hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue was considered unworkable. They did it, and it set a precedent for the kind of effort fans now expect from localizations.
Falcom also helped legitimize PC as a JRPG platform in the West—back when most people dismissed the genre as “console only.”
And if you look at modern RPGs built around serialized storytelling and grounded politics—Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, even the way Persona 5 structures its arcs—you can see Falcom’s fingerprints everywhere.
Critics agree. RPG Site flat out said this about the remake of Trails in the Sky FC:
If you’re here strictly for the magical number, here it is: Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter remake is a 10/10. What’s more, it’s the easiest 10/10 I’ve ever given.”
And the numbers back it up. Trails in the Sky sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 93% approval rating from thousands of reviews. Recent reviews are even better—96% positive.
Rather than burning energy on outrage, put that time into actually playing more games. You’ll get more out of them—and you’re better than just dismissing something this significant.
I believe you’re vastly overstating the importance of this game and franchise. As I said, I think it’s a terrible series of games (and I’ve played them up to CS3), so there’s absolutely some bias here.
Also, what do other people’s reviews have anything to do with how impactful or important something is to the medium? Does this mean that the Hentai game Mirror with ~96% positive, 85k+ reviews on Steam is even more significant than Trails?
And if you look at modern RPGs built around serialized storytelling and grounded politics—Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, even the way Persona 5 structures its arcs—you can see Falcom’s fingerprints everywhere.
Please show me where those fingerprints are, because I don’t see them.
Ok well, then that’s definitely not like Final Fantasy 7.
Final Fantasy games are in their own contained universe.
Clearly the potboilers on your team don’t know what they’re talking about and are just saying bullshit to drum up hype so they can make money.
Rather than burning energy on outrage, put that time into actually playing more games. You’ll get more out of them
Fuck off with that nonsense. You’re here to sell a product and take people’s hard-earned money. They shouldn’t lower their standards to satisfy your ego and make you more money.
You should work harder because I guarantee your team didn’t put as much effort into this as went into FF7.
I’d even say the interconnectedness is often more of a handicap.
There’s one character in Sky whose arc is postponed into Azure. It…doesn’t fit with that larger narrative. Then, the biggest criticism of some of those later games is how there’s too many characters around. Most were enjoyed when first introduced, but then there’s way too many. In a lot of ways it suffers the same ways later Marvel movies do; banking on audience members shouting “I know what that is!!”
Supposedly some more recent games refocus on smaller groups but are still very much about “building a larger narrative”. I can’t claim I’ve played all of them to get a larger opinion, but Kingdom Hearts did a lot of that, and we saw its failed payoff in Kingdom Hearts 3 (actually something like KH8). I still enjoy the first two games in the series - the duology this one is remaking - but I’m pretty sick of the obsession with lore.
A video I watched even discussed how early Star Trek movies had blatant plotholes with earlier establishment, but that was fine because it was better to focus on the narrative the director wanted.
There might be some fringe impacts Trails has had on the industry here and there, but the only big influence it has had is on Honkai: Star Rail’s combat system. And at this point, HSR is so much larger than the Trails series as a whole that it’s going to look like Meucci’s contribution to telephone technology when all is said and done. Expedition 33 already took some of its UI design from HSR.
Even the impact of Trails’s hybrid action/turn-based system is debatable because Trails through Daybreak was in development at the same time as Metaphor: ReFantazio, which uses the same system. Ultimately, the series serves a very specific, small niche within a niche, and it’s never going to be a major trailblazer for the same reason much of Baldur’s Gate 3’s story design won’t be: that kind of narrative structure is not an efficient way to make money. You have to be an auteur or a major risk taker to do software engineering that way.
Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII’s impacts on the entire industry, let alone the genre, are too numerous to list. The two series are not remotely comparable. OP’s neck-deep in atomistic fallacy here.
Not sure I want that after the reviews, which is a shame because a good fantasy city builder is something I’d pay for. But I wouldn’t want to invest time in an unfinished game that’s turning to a mobile idle thing model.
But I am a bit curious about how they are doing this. I don’t think Steam allows different pricing from the wishlist, do they?
Did they just hide the free base game purchase leaving only paid options on the store page? It’s looking like that, technically you can’t buy “Leviathan’s fantasy” alone from the store, only paid bundles (with the new version? and weirdly, this makes Leviathan’s fantasy cost money inside that bundle making it more expensive? so confusing).
Recently, we have been in continuous communication with Steam Support regarding the duration of our game's free promotion. The support team has also walked us through the potential drawbacks, advantages, and disadvantages of the free offering. Additionally, they assisted us in enabling the free access permission this past Monday morning; however, this free version remains hidden—as we still need to confirm the official launch time, it is currently not visible on the store page.
[...]
It seems even the Steam team was unaware that, with the hidden free version active and the paid version not yet fully removed, users could still claim the free version directly via their Steam Wishlist. I only discovered this issue today myself. Immediately after learning about it, I sent a follow-up email to Steam Support to inform them of this situation and requested that they process refunds for players who purchased the game recently (after the unintended free access became available).
To clarify: The original purpose of our free promotion is to ensure that players who have already purchased the game can continue to access the game’s ongoing updates. There are no hidden agendas or "conspiracy" behind this decision. We simply hope new players can enjoy the game, and existing players can benefit from sustained support.
I’d recommend checking out the Far Cry games, from Far Cry 2 onwards.
Also, while not necessarily exactly the thing you’re looking for, the Sniper Ghost Warrior series offers a lot of good stuff. especially SGW3 and later are really fun and have pretty decent gunplay and the games can be played pretty nicely without focusing on the sniper aspect.
And if you feel like doing even more snipering, Sniper Elite gives you some NICE slow-mo X-ray closeups of your bullets destroying your enemies, but the gunplay besides Snipers isn’t that fun.
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