[SPOILER-FREE] Official Zero no Kiseki + Ao no Kiseki Discussion Thread

OneTrueEmiya said:
I'm at the prologue, and I'm supposed to be meeting someone at the police HQ for my first mission. As per Kiseki tradition though, I'm ignoring the main story and running around town instead.

First impressions:

-Estelle > Lloyd
-Lloyd is still interesting though, he's calm and calculating, which is always great to have
-Crossbell is awesome
-Reference to SC in the first five minutes of the game: this gunna be gud
-Randy: probs gonna be the Olivier of this game (though he probably can't out-badass Olivier after he went and challenged Osborne...)
-Ellie: waifu material
-New battle system of having to hit the monsters before battling is reminiscent of old JRPGs, but after FC and SC it took some time getting used to it
-That Black Moon shop thing looks suspicious af.
-Bracers are probably going to be a royal pain this time. Can't blame them though, considering Estelle is at Lv140s and I'm at Lv5...

hoopla123 said:


I agree Estelle > Lloyd. I mean she is daughter of the sun after all. She steals the spotlight in Zero despite the fact that she isn't even the MC LOL.

And yeah, Crossbell is quite a change from Liberl. Way more modern and even have cars/cell phone, not to mention computers!!

Also in terms of pure badassery, Randy > Olivier. Olivier is a hunk but in terms of badassery, Randy is literally in a whole different dimension.

And I agree, Tio is a cutie but Ellie is the best waifu.

hack5 said:




I think Estelle is the biggest Mary sue in the franchise people treat her like a goddess she says naive cliche stuff and is kind of stupid to a fault and every time in the game the characters and npc's praises her as if shes the best thing since slice bread thats our Estelle i want to vomit whenever one of the characters say that cringey line but i don't hate her she is just not in my top ten characters if you know what i mean

Trails in the Sky is just as much a wish-fulfillment powerfantasy as Cold Steel. You play as a 16 year old girl who is entrusted with a cool job as hero for hire/cop/bounty hunter/monster slayer without all of the paperwork and insurance fees that would come with such a job. She gets to wander around the world on a fantastical journey, leading a band of warriors who have far more experience than her, solving other people's problems and imposing her world view on everyone she comes into contact with, fights a world-spanning evil organization and defeats their most powerful agents, and returns home hailed as the hero of the country. Her dad is an almighty superman and she gets with the cool boy.

Valyrian1124 said:
Finished the dulogy. My thoughts as I played the game are here. I thought that I'd wait to see if my thoughts on the duology had changed after I finished Ao (recency bias and all), but I feel the same way now as I did while playing the games.

TL;DR: it's great, but not the masterpiece the fandom makes it out to be. It fixes many of the issues I had with 'Sky's story and characters while also creating a lot of new problems that hold it back. I think people are willfully ignoring it's flaws and hiding behind the Crossbell duology so as to justify their dislike of the Cold Steel games, as relatively few people have managed to played them yet and thus cannot point out the contradictions in their claims.

That said, I'd strongly encourage anyone interested in the Crossbell games to play them, as I think that they are absolutely worth the time and effort. If you're interested in specifically Zero no Kiseki (as opposed to the series as a whole), you don't need to have played the previous games to enjoy Zero either. Hop right in.





I'd have to agree. While I didn't dislike Estelle, I was never invested in the character, nor convinced of her feats during the 'Sky story. She feels like a character with a lot of flash (ditzy, book dumb, explosive, bubbly) and little substance. I suppose her character arc is... becoming less prone to calling people idiots at the first provocation? (I'd also have to say that Lloyd also somewhat suffers from having a virtually non-existent character arc as well). As for her feats, they're rather incredible in retrospect. You can count the number of battles that she "loses" in the 'Sky trilogy on one hand, and she goes on to defeat a high number of warriors that the later games hype up to be "actually some of the strongest people alive", which makes the idea that she overcame anything significant rather laughable. Her remarkable victories are obfuscated by the fact that she finds herself leading a band of highly experienced fighters against said strong opponents, but that just raises even more questions. If your were to take the criticisms that the people of r/JRPG and r/Falcom tend to levy at Cold Steel and apply them to Estelle, you'd get this:



Let's not trick ourselves into thinking that we don't play games for escapism, but I find the notion that the writing some how took a nose dive to start pandering to people (as if that was a bad thing) with the Cold Steel games to be rather pretentious.