There’s one segment of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth’s many ending scenes that has stuck with me, months after finishing the game. The scene takes place in an alternate reality Midgar, where the lifestream has dried up and the planet has died. Here, Cloud has just awakened from a coma, and has gone on an impromptu date with Aerith in the Sector 5 slums, hoping to have a nice time in the last days of the crumbling world.
Unfortunately, Cloud and Aerith’s date turns out to be a pretty bad one. First, Cloud tries to buy Aerith a piece of jewelry, but whichever one he picks turns out to not be for sale. Later, Cloud and Aerith encounter a street vendor who offers them a host of candies to choose from, but no matter which of the colorfully packaged treats they select, the vendor guilts them into trying her own experimental homemade candies instead. The candies aren’t very good. Finally, Cloud and Aerith encounter a street photographer who is taking photographs of couples on the street. Unfortunately, he has only one shot remaining on his last roll of film, and decides to take another couple’s picture instead.
This scene really resonated with me because, as Sinatra sang, “that’s life”. And the resignation here underscores a lot of life’s disappointments that we all experience day to day, even when things we are supposed to enjoy end up not being very fun. But also, I feel like this scene might aptly describe Square Enix Creative Business Unit I’s feelings about their own work: in Rebirth, they’ve prepared a buffet of options for fans, but not matter how many of their wares they unpack and place on the table, their own game must be a singular experience that will likely not meet everyone’s, or even anyone’s, lofty expectations. They’ve offered their absolute best work, and now it’s up to the players to have a positive experience for themselves by not letting the negatives define their experience. “That’s life!”
For several years, I’ve been telling myself that I’d get around to playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. As a JRPG-lover like myself, the Trails series has been an embarrassing blindspot that I’ve meant to rectify time and time again. But, opportunities would come and go, and I would just keep finding excuses to not start the game.
When I finally secured a Steam Deck pre-order back in mid-2022, I told myself “now’s the time”. Trails in the Sky would be the first game I played on my new console. Tragically, though, Trails in the Sky has a status of “incompatible” on the Steam store’s compatibility page. I did some research, and I found pages of comments on Steam, reddit, and even from the developer themselves reassuring me that, with one minor caveat (an anime cutscene intro does not work), the game was perfectly playable on Steam Deck.
For some reason, I did not start the game.
I gave into the hype and played Tunic instead. Then I played Unsighted. Then I dicked around with American Truck Simulator and Final Fantasy XIV. Then I played Pentiment. Then I broke up with my Steam Deck (I’ll explain that in a minute) and went back to playing my Switch, apparently for a whopping 347 hours in 2023. It was starting to look like I would never find a reason for the Falcom RPG to be elevated to my “now playing status”.
You can’t play The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky on Switch, but if you could, maybe I’d have gotten around to it sooner. People make fun of the Switch in 2023, but it’s still a perfectly good console that runs most games I’d like to play to an acceptable standard. When the Steam Deck came out, a lot of people talked about it like it was a “Switch-killer”, and I certainly thought my Switch would be decommissioned after my first few sessions with the sexier Valve device, but the Steam Deck (still) has two main drawbacks, at least as far as I’m concerned:
It’s Heavy as Shit
The Official Dock Sucks
As it happens, I’d wanted to use the Steam Deck as both a portable and a living room device at one point, but I just kept running into problems. The biggest one of these was that the Dock just seemed to hate my TV. Its display would shutter and blink constantly, and sometimes it would not display at all.
I worked the problem for an hour or so, but eventually, I gave up after a rare “gaming date night” with my wife turned into a night of her sipping wine on the couch, scrolling her phone and watching me as a sat on the floor troubleshooting. Instead, we decided to play a game on the Switch, because the Switch just works. Our evening was salvaged, and my Steam Deck was ushered off to an empty drawer where its battery gracelessly drained completely over the next 9 days.
No harm, no foul. I had a great year playing my JRPGs on my Switch. I sunk about 80 hours into Octopath Traveller II, many of those hours in the console’s portable mode whilst on a train or in the work cafeteria, but also via longer sessions docked to the TV (and sound system) on weekend nights (the Octopath Traveller 2 audio and soundtrack is glorious, by the way, especially hearing it come through a real set of speakers). I played Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, DragonQuest, and Phantasy Star much the same way. Then I played Super Mario RPG (2023) and fell into a hole. It was such a special experience for me that I wanted my next game to be something that could be just a special. I thought again about Trails in the Sky, a game beloved by many, just sitting installed on my Steam Deck for over a year now. I thought “now’s the time”.
With great trepidation, I plugged my comatose Steam Deck into its Official Steam Deck Charger, and prepared myself for my next great video game experience. Later that night, I made myself a cup of chamomile tea, and sat down on the couch with the Deck. It was time to finally play The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.
I played it for an hour or two, and then put the game down. It felt slow, with lots of inconsequential writing. Over the next several nights, I kept going, knowing that many good RPGs take time to get going, and armed with the knowledge that many before me had made it through this common complaint regarding this particular game and its subsequent entries. Around 8 hours in, the magic of the game was starting to work on me. I was starting to care about the characters, and the world around them. I was becoming invested in what would happen next.
Unfortunately, after a week of daily Steam Deck sessions, my wrists were also starting to strain under the device’s immense weight.
I tried propping the Deck up with a lap pillow, but it only worked so well. It was then that I knew that, if I wanted to keep playing The Legend of Heroes, I’d have to once again see if I could get the Dock to work.
Long story short, my Steam Deck dock wasn’t outputting to a display that my TV liked, so once I manually changed the display to something I knew my TV could handle, it was relatively smooth sailing. Pretty weird that I had to do that, and I wish I’d have thought of it back months ago as my date gaming night was slowly melting away, but whatever. No harm, no foul.
Now, life is good. I’m relaxing on the coach on a Friday night, playing The Legend of Heroes on a 55″ flatscreen, and I’m finally getting some good use out of my 8bitdo Pro 2. I’ve got a lot of Trails left to play – more than enough to get me through the holidays, and then some – but truly, now that I’ve figured out this docking situation, the “sky” is the limit. I’m living the dream, something close to the exact ideal circumstances that any gamer with a real affection and interest in old video games hopes to find themselves in one day.
Next up, maybe I’ll figure out how to get that emulator audio to stop crackling.
Since my teens, I’ve considered myself a JRPG fan more than anything. Now, I’m finally going back to see what stuff my favorite video game genre is really made of.
The earliest Final Fantasy game I’ve ever played was IV, and that was the version of it that appeared in the Playstation “Final Fantasy Chronicles” collection. While I’d bought that collection primarily for Chrono Trigger (my older, wiser cousin had sworn it was the best thing ever), I’d always known that I wanted to eventually go back and play the older Final Fantasy games. Having played titles such as VII and X to completion, I already knew that I was a “fan” of the Final Fantasy series. It would just be a matter of catch-up.
Growing up, I never had Nintendo consoles. My parents were staunchly anti-video game, until finally one Christmas they surprised my brother and I with a Playstation. But even as I tore through games like Final Fantasy VII, Star Ocean II, Xenogears, and several others, the voices calling from the genre’s heyday on the SNES and Genesis rang loud. Rather than seek out an older console that I never had the chance to play, I turned to ports – Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger in the Final Fantasy “Chronicles” Collection, Final Fantasy V and VI in the “Anthology” counterpart, and Final Fantasies I and II in the “Origins” bundle.
Unfortunately, other than Final Fantasy IV, which I loved (anachronistic PS disc loading times and all), I never got around to playing many of these games, though I purchased them all. I blame the release of the PS2, which would soon find its way into my bedroom, bringing titles like Xenosaga, Star Ocean 3, Final Fantasy X, Wild Arms 3, and many others with it. And then, forget about RPGs, there were also games like Snake Eater to be played.
Time marched on, and when my PS2 was eventually softly laid out to pasture for the new Xbox 360 which accompanied me on my way to college, little did I know at the time that the JRPG had already sang its swan song, replaced by massive western RPGs like Fallout, Skyrim, and Mass Effect. Sure, I’d hit on a few of the better Japanese entries – like Persona – in my adult life, and I’d play the new (and befuddling) Final Fantasy installments, but it no longer felt the same. The JRPG just felt kind of like an obsolete piece of tech that was no longer worth using.
But over the last few years, things have started to change. Dragon Quest XI was released, and was an absolute delight. Square Enix’s smaller studios also delivered exciting new games in the old style, like Octopath Traveler II, as well as a decent new entry in the Star Ocean series. Suddenly, the JRPG has felt very interesting to me again.
I’ve remembered how much I like the JRPG, and I don’t want to forget about it ever again. So, over the next several years(???), I’ll be making a result to play some of these games that I’d never gotten around to, including some of the genre’s earliest entries. It’s no small project, but I plan on taking my time with it. There is a lot of stuff of game there, and no need to rush into all of it at once.
The Tingle Review 