Despite its innocuous visual style and straightforward combat, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC is a pretty sizable adventure. The main story alone takes 40 hours to complete, and that’s without any side content. However, it seems that Falcom is outdoing even completionist runs by a significant margin with the remake, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter.
Speaking to The Gamer (translation via Automaton-Media), studio CEO Toshihiro Kondo revealed that the team’s main programmer completed it in about 80 hours. The reason for the nearly-doubled playtime is “more map exploration” and the additional voice acting.
“There’s more map exploration compared to previous games, and we found that if you explore those areas, listen to the voiced lines, and complete all the quests, it takes twice as long as the original. Maybe it’s also because you spend more time watching the events. Back in the day, we really did tend to scroll through text at the speed it appeared, and that gave the original a kind of snappy feel in its own way.”
While there are a few story additions, more voice lines are available, especially between Estelle and Joshua, since a large part of the story focuses on them alone. “For example, in scenes where the two travel together and cross checkpoints, we’ve added quite a lot of detailed dialogue, increasing the total number of lines. There’s also some casual dialogue during battle, which is more detailed than in previous games.” The result is the largest number of voice lines in the series yet.
Falcom has also included instant fast travel and “high-speed movement” to make traversing the world much quicker, not unlike in the improved versions of the original. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter launches on September 19th for PS5, PC and Nintendo Switch. Check out the opening cutscene, remade in glorious 3D, here.
