Sora no Kiseki

Mar 19, 2009 at 9:19 AM
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I really love Sora no Kiseki, but even though it's a Falcom series it's still relatively unknown outside its home country. I wrote this to try and explain a bit about the series, as well as hopefully get across some of what makes it so brilliant.

Think Falcom, you think of Ys. It’s hard not to, the series is well known for its amazing soundtracks and fast paced action. It’s far from the only series Falcom have made, although it is the most accessible to Western fans. By far their most recent success is the Sora no Kiseki trilogy, the latest RPGs in their “Eiyuu Densetsu (Legend of Heroes)” line of more traditional, story heavy, RPGs. Before you run off let me briefly explain something – the PSP “Legend of Heroes” games inflicted upon America are a mess of badly edited, poorly translated dialogue and a naff Lunar-ish battle system that was nothing like the original. Falcom didn’t go anywhere near them, they just licensed out the name to Bandai Namco. The reason I’ve bothered to mention this is because I don’t want anyone’s experiences with those games to colour their view of Sore no Kiseki before we start.

Music is also a departure from the fast paced guitar-laden tracks of Ys – it’s more melodic and instrumental, with several tracks such as “Silver Will, Golden Wings”, “Whereabouts of the Stars”, and title track “Sora no Kiseki” often remixed as everything from a heart-pumping boss fights to slower, more thoughtful tunes.

Field Screenshots


The original game, Sora no Kiseki FC (First Chapter) was released on the PC in Japan late 2004, with SC (Second Chapter) released late 2006 and the final chapter (“The Third”) out in 2007. This trilogy has a somewhat unique and demanding expectation of its players – the story expects players to play them all in order, and it makes no concessions for anyone trying to dive into SC without playing the first game through to completion first, and there’s no Xenosaga-style database to use for reference. There’s barely a break in the plot – the second game begins the morning after the night FC ended; same place, same characters, carrying on like before. This does have its benefits – your save data can naturally be carried over, and any NPCs you were helpful to in the past game will comment on your actions which is a nice touch. From a plot point of view it forces them to deal with that recurring plot puzzle – what happens to the characters after the credits roll. Far more than just “Hey gang, let’s have more adventures!” they take the bull by the horns and show how these people have been shaped by their experiences and how they have moved on.

Conversation Screenshots


In addition to the excellent job they did creating the characters Falcom went a step further and made sure the world they inhabited was a place, and not merely a collection of areas arranged for conveniences sake. Take Rolent for example; this town is the first one you encounter and close to the home of the main cast members. You can learn if you wish that Rolent has two main industries – agriculture and septium mineral mining. Does that make any difference to the gameplay? No, none at all. What it does do is show the level of care and detail that went into creating the world as a whole, instead of creating a plot and fashioning bits and pieces around it. In terms of scale it’s “Suikoden sized” – the series is set entirely within the Liberl kingdom, although you are made aware of the surrounding areas and fed some small details about them. The next game in the series, Eiyuu Densetsu 7, is apparently going to be set within the neighbouring Ebronian Empire, so I guess Falcom aren’t done with the setting just yet.

Let’s get onto something we can all enjoy – beating up the local wildlife! The battle system is at heart a turn based one, with turn order displayed at all times in a manner similar to Evolution/Final Fantasy X/Xenosaga. You can manipulate the turn order through haste spells, stunning the enemy and so on, and of course the enemy can do this to you as well. Spells take time to cast too, and this must be taken into consideration – it’s possible for enemies to simply move out of the way of offensive spells if they have the time, and if you’re trying to cast a group healing spell you have to make sure everyone stays within the area of effect. Party movement is decided by the player (although enemy hits can knock you back) making these choices more tactical.

Battle screenshots



Magic is handled through what I can only describe as a materia-like system. They expanded upon it in several ways however – “quartz” (materia, for descriptive shorthands sake) isn’t placed into equipment, but onto an item called an Orbment. This has a fixed number of slots and each character has a different layout that cannot be altered; in addition to this some slots can only contain certain kinds of quartz, forcing you to play to each characters natural strength and preventing any kind of perfect setup. The order you place them in also effects the spells you gain from them too – it’s possible to equip the same character with the same quartz, but result in a different spell set at the end of it. Messing around with this Orbal system is very easy and you see the results instantly, so experimentation is straightforward enough.

Orbment/Status Screenshots


As I mentioned at the beginning, the Legend of Heroes series is known for being story heavy and Sora no Kiseki certainly doesn’t disappoint. The main cast are a varied bunch, backed up by a strong group of supporting characters and adversaries. They’re multifaceted too, never settling into an easy stereotype. Olivier is a great example of this – he’s very much the joker of the group, getting drunk, creating rubbish songs on his lute and flirting with the girls. Then, there’s comes a time where your party are trapped within their own individual perfect dream worlds (you only ever get to see this from Estelle’s point of view). When asked what he dreamt of, Olivier simply says he dreamed he was with his elder brother when they were younger, and he never speaks of it again.
There’s plenty of time for the big events too – an ancient city is discovered, a dragon lands in the middle of a shopping district and an invasion is narrowly avoided, but the plot never loses sight of the people that are forced to live through these decisions and never takes the easy road of painting the opposition as pantomime-level evil.

“The Third” offers something quite different, focussing on the cast to the exclusion of almost everything else, by creating a plot that forces them into an illusory world with nobody else to interact with. It sounds rather limiting, but it works quite well as they encounter fragmented parts of familiar places and people within them. It feels a bit strange after the first two, but as you go through it all clicks into place, even if I couldn’t quite get it to shake that “fan service” feel.

Oh dammit! All this, and I’ve not even mentioned the Bracers Guild! The guild is integral to both the plot and the gameplay. Every town has a guild offering sidequests in exchange for money and items, and completing enough of them will boost your Bracer rank. It’s not necessary by any means, but failure to do so will result in some characters berating your lack of effort or offer up humiliating put downs when you boast of your unimpressive position within the guild. The game offers up a nice reproduction of you Bracers journal – notes are jotted down in it as you gather information on quests and it also contains a thorough guide on the Orbment system as well as logs of enemies defeated and similar data.

Bracers Guild/Guild Notice Board


So, the downside to all this? The games are only available in Japanese, traditional Chinese, and Korean.; and there are currently no English language translations available. GameFAQs has guides for the first two games that will certainly get you through from start to finish, but plot details are thin on the ground and only cover the basics. There is some hope however – a program called “Anime Game Text Hooker” is capable of extracting the dialogue from the game in real time and there are various setups that can run this automatically through a machine translator or onto a blank Firefox page for use with Rikaichan, a great plugin that translates specific words on mouseover.

Fishing Minigame


This little trilogy of RPGs is easily one of Japans best kept secrets, and certainly more deserving of a wider audience. The sad fact is though that they are expensive to buy (even Falcoms excellent PSP ports don’t come cheap) and with the dialogue untranslated a lot of people who do bother will still miss out on what makes these games so amazing.
 
Mar 19, 2009 at 11:30 PM
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You just got me to download a game.
 
Mar 20, 2009 at 12:18 AM
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Very nice game. I've played it before, but haven't gotten around to playing it again in quite some time.
 
Mar 20, 2009 at 12:28 AM
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It reminds me of Ragnarok. But better because it's different. (Could change when the DS RO comes out, but maybe not.)
 
Mar 27, 2009 at 3:26 PM
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That's an excellent article written for the games. I'm still waiting on my Sora no Kiseki trilogy boxset to arrive from Japan.

And Fire1052, it's cool if you want to download games on your own, as that is your choice, but let's not encourage others to do do the same in a public forum venue. The creator of this thread and I both are huge Falcom fans that enjoy supporting the company. We tend to frown on piracy of their games. I mean it's cool with me, if you want to try download it to try it out to see if you like it, but if you really get into it or any other badass Falcom titles, I'd highly encourage purchasing the real thing one day. : )

-Thomas
 
Mar 30, 2009 at 8:33 AM
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Fire1052;49353 said:
You just got me to download a game.
That isn't exactly something to be proud of.

Kimimi;49094 said:
even Falcoms excellent PSP ports
:eek:

I wish it was in English. :(
 
Apr 2, 2009 at 8:40 PM
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Well there is an English translation project being worked on by many people, but there is so much dialogue in these games that would have to be translated that most companies and even some fan translation groups see it as not being a viable project to take on.

-Thomas
 
Apr 3, 2009 at 1:45 PM
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While there are no playable demos (apparently the PSP versions did, but I can't find them) if you go through this official portal site you can download movies, wallpapers, music tracks and have a bit of a look around.
 
Aug 2, 2009 at 8:14 PM
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lol Sky of Miracles.
 
Sep 2, 2009 at 2:15 PM
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Hi,
I like the story of the game Sora no Kiseki. You have given nice screen shots for this game. They really attracts me to purchase this lovely game. Music is also good in this game. Thanks for sharing the information.
 
Sep 23, 2009 at 7:57 AM
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I really love the world outlook of Sora no Kiseki. Everyone fights for

their dreams and their ideals. I purchased the game and played it last

year, and I have got around to playing it again.


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Oct 5, 2009 at 7:34 AM
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The sixth entry (and second of two split chapters of this game) in the Legend of Heroes series, a long-running RPG franchise started by Falcom in its founding days and later continued with remakes and all-new games for PSP and PC systems.

Blazers are gallant warriors that consider the well being of others and the safety of the land as their priority, and work hard to defeat monsters and criminals. Estel is an aspiring Blazer who lives near the city of Rolento in Rebel Kingdom. Together with her friend Yoshua, Estel continues to train herself in the arts of Blazers. The story begins when Estel’s father receives a strange letter, starting a chain of events. The Legend of Heroes VI gives players an assortment of gameplay with its Blazer quest system, cooking system, opal arts system and many other features. With highlights like the AT bar and the AT bonus, battles in The Legend of Heroes give players that further tactical edge.
 
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