In the wake of the Western release of Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel for PC, XSEED games, the English localizers and publishers of the Trails series, have announced several updates to the previous PC releases of Trails in the Sky to more closely align the games with Trails of Cold Steel.
Trails of Cold Steel introduces some new mechanics into the Trails games. One of the major ones is the introduction of Turbo Mode, which functions like it sounds. By pressing a button you can speed up game time and skip most battle animations, making dungeon grinding easier than ever (Looking at you, towers in Sky SC). Field and battle speed can also be customized individually, rather than just flipping a switch to a generic Turbo Mode setting. According to a recent Trails in the Sky localization blog posted, Turbo Mode is now in beta testing for all three Sky games on Steam. A word of caution, there are still a few minor bugs and animations are not yet skippable, but once these are smoothed out the new version will be released to other storefronts including Gog after beta testing is finished on Steam.
The other major update released is the news that Trails in the Sky using DirectX9 is also available for beta testing on Steam. Originally released exclusively for DirectX8, some older graphics cards have stopped supporting DX8 technology, notably some older NVIDIA rigs. While DX9 isn’t fully polished either, when starting the games on Steam it now pops up as an option for those brave enough to have a go.
Other updates include the addition of a Monster Guide button, tweaks to improve engine performance and fixing New Game+ bugs in Trails in the Sky the Third.
What part of Trails are you looking forward to powering through on Turbo Mode? Looking forward to playing on a setup using NVIDIA Optimus? Are there other features from Trails of Cold Steel that you’d like to see implemented in the older games? Let us know in the comments below!
