The Legend of Heroes Trails from Zero 
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Trails from Zero v1.4.13 Patch NotesDec 9, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, today we are releasing a patch for Trails from Zero which improves how the game interacts with platform achievement APIs. This should prevent performance issues in some circumstances, specifically when a large number of achievements was already unlocked. Note that this issue surfaced due to changes in how Steam deals with repeated achievement API calls, and this change affects many of our prior releases in similar ways. We are committed to patching all affected releases, but this has taken some time, especially for cases where we need to re-build games for which we already archived various development resources. Cheers, Peter "Durante" Thoman, PH3Daybreak II Coming Early 2025Jul 5, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsAbout The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II + Wishlist today and stay tuned for updates leading up to the game's release! No longer threatened by the mafia organization Almata, the people of Calvard have returned to their peaceful lives. But one day, a shocking series of murders involving a mysterious crimson beast sets the wheels of fate in motion once again. Various factions spring into action – both those who abide by the law to uncover the truth and those looking to capitalize on any new developments wherever possible, no matter how sinister. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/35e0e427722e1b5d7bcefde9d66bef960cbd8cab.jpgWith chaos once again looming on the horizon, the spriggan Van Arkride receives an unexpected visitor, prompting his own investigation. Who is behind the murders, and what is their goal? The sands of time bring old and new faces together for this thrilling second installment in the Trails through Daybreak saga. STORY Year 1209 of the Septian Calendar. The threat posed by Almata has passed. Peace has finally returned to Calvard. And, for a time, that peace goes uninterrupted—until a CID special forces unit is slaughtered by an unknown assailant. With authorities working to contain the situation, criminal forces take the chance to make their own moves. Meanwhile, a spriggan by the name of Van Arkride begins his own investigation—after prompting from an unexpected visitor. Who could be responsible for this massacre? What was their objective? And how does it all relate to Agnès' search for the eighth Genesis? {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/a4b522ebb6694a5b91879220cce64ce6c8788967.jpgA crimson beast's roar. A chance meeting with a boy and girl, both embroiled in a mysterious search. These are the circumstances that lure Arkride Solutions down the trail of an inescapable fate. SYSTEM Battle System The game builds on the seamless transition between field battles and command battles introduced in the previous game with new mechanics that can be used in both: Cross Charge & EX Chains! Mastering the use of these two combo mechanics can provide you with overwhelming firepower to use against your opponents. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/79edba96a3a4637b00d9b8e3cb7595b120d4b04f.jpg - Cross Charge If you manage to Perfect Dodge an enemy's attack during a field battle, the Cross Charge icon will appear! Pushing the correct button while the icon is on-screen will swap in another party member, who will simultaneously execute a charge attack on your foe! As a bonus, the party member that you swap in will have enhanced attack power for a period of time. - EX Chains EX Chains can be activated by fulfilling specific conditions during command battles. Once these conditions have been met, using a craft or normal attack against a stunned enemy will automatically activate an EX Chain! This allows party members with SCLM activated to launch a simultaneous attack that will also impact nearby enemies, dealing massive damage. Choose Your Chapters {STEAM_CL...Daybreak upcoming English release & Launch Purchase OptionsJun 29, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsAbout The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak After the war, Calvard is enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity. However, the public grows uncertain as the number of immigrants increases and political reform runs rampant. Follow Van, a young man and local spriggan, on a unique request that will prove more than he bargained for. Will the nation fall into chaos? {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784472/086b05e629552d65f7ea4493e3cda1e463821aa9.jpgThe AT (Action Time) battle command has been completely revamped transitioning seamlessly from field battles to turn-based combat. The sixth-generation tactical orbment Xipha offers a revolutionary combat experience unique to this iteration of the Trails series! In addition, the Topic System allows players to gain an advantage in battle by using conversation topics as bargaining chips. These topics can be obtained by interacting with other characters throughout the city. The game also features the Alignment system, which allows players to change their character’s three unique attributes and influence characteristics such as their status, the forces they fight with (or against), and even how the plot unfolds. Dive into the dynamic adventure in "Trails through Daybreak!" Story The spriggan's life is but one of many professions that has emerged from the Calvard Republic. Be it playing detective, negotiator, or bounty hunter, Van Arkride takes on the kind of work that can't be taken to more legitimate sources. It could be something the police can't handle, work that's best left out of the public eye, or even a request from a criminal of organization in the underworld; so long as it pays and doesn't cross too far over the gray line, he'll accept near-any job that comes across his table. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784472/b83b31a331947224f3a2f7be0e5e719b5a9bd930.jpgThe year is 1208. A prim-and-proper young lady dressed in the uniform of an esteemed academy visits a dilapidated, multi-tenant building in a downtown district of Edith, the nation's capital. With a most dignified gaze, she looks upon the plague of the door before her. It reads: 'ARKRIDE Solutions Office: Complicated Matters Only.' Steeling herself, she knocks on the door three times. "First thing in the morning...?" a relaxed yet surprisingly young voice grumbles with a yawn. From the moment he opens the door to greet her, a new tale begins. Key Features The AT (Action Time) Battle system has been completely revamped, transitioning seamlessly from field battles to turn-based combat. The sixth-generation combat orbment, Xipha, offers a revolutionary combat experience unique to this iteration of the Trails series! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784472/40c3a01b9c834f87ff4b248ec3a97e8b021e411d.jpg In addition, the Topic System allows players to gain an advantage in battle by using conversation topics as bargaining chips. These topics can be obtained by interacting with other characters throughout the city. The game also features the Alignment system, which allows players to c...Trails from Zero v1.4.12 Patch NotesAug 28, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, it's been a while! A number of changes have accumulated since the last patch, although most of them are either non-critical or only only apply in very rare circumstances. Here's the full log: Optimize text rendering, particularly reducing frametime spikes when rendering new text at high FPS and with the fast text speed option enabled Allow the use of multiple controllers simultaneously Various Japanese text fixes Fix a legacy issue with a wrongly colored chest Several fixes to map collision geometry, either to make it impossible to get stuck or to prevent leaving bounds at specific FPS/turbo combinations Improved the handling of input rebinding reset Fix a minor potential memory leak related to the video player Fix rare potential soft-locks when closing shops Fix minor text issue in Crossbell Times issue 4 Improve the description of some game options Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu. Cheers, Peter "Durante" ThomanTrails from Zero v1.4.7 Patch NotesApr 18, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, in today's update there are a variety of smaller fixes and improvements: Fix potential reference leaks when switching resolution Fix mouse scrolling on minimap with respect to camera rotation Fix drawing intensity of percent progress in camp/records page Change initial window color to black Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu. Cheers, Peter "Durante" ThomanTrails from Zero v1.4.6 Patch NotesMar 28, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, in today's update there are a variety of smaller fixes and improvements: Fixed an issue where window content could be offset from the actual window position on startup. No longer confine the cursor while applying changed display settings, preventing a specific issue when reducing the resolution. Fixed various 3D map geometry issues. Improved the water effect on some maps. Tweaked the battle UI HP/EP/CP number placement. Back-ported some book text layout improvements from Azure. Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu. Cheers, Peter "Durante" ThomanTrails from Zero v1.4.5 Patch NotesMar 16, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, in today's update there are some further improvements to the auto text advance feature. Add a visual indicator when auto text advance is enabled. Add a bindable action to toggle auto text advance. (Defaults to "R" on the keyboard and "X" on the controller ) Tweak the minimum wait time for non-voiced text boxes. This brings the feature up to par with the release state of Trails to Azure. Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu. Cheers, Peter "Durante" ThomanTrails from Zero v1.4.4 Patch NotesJan 6, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, today we have another minor update to fix one specific issue: Fix the new water shader feature inadvertently affecting battle graphics in some specific circumstances (turning sprites black) Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu. Cheers, Peter "Durante" ThomanTrails from Zero v1.4.3 Patch NotesJan 5, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, version 1.4.3 is a minor update which primarily aims to resolve some issues with the recently introduced auto text advance feature. Improvements Improve auto-text wait time calculation Fix an issue where auto-text advances non-voiced messages despite set to voice-only Fix message log color handling in some circumstances Make prompt in shop menu to switch pages for large parties clickable Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu. Cheers, Peter "Durante" ThomanTrails from Zero v1.4.2 Patch NotesDec 27, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, version 1.4.2 brings with it several highly-requested features, a pretty nice rendering feature that wasn't really all that highly requested, an important bug fix, and many minor improvements and fixes. Let's start with the highlights. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/a92af3539da9306ed495593c6c7c09480ea3b5a0.gif Major New Features Water rendering update: water now optionally uses a pixel shader which distorts the reflections/refractions. We tuned this for most bodies of water in the game and it looks pretty neat. Added an "Auto Text Advance" feature. Note that there are a few events in-game where this will not apply since they require manual advance. Check and trigger achievements on loading saves. This means that if you e.g. import a save from a playthrough of a different version of the game, applicable achievements will now trigger. (Note: this mostly applies to collection-type achievements) Major Bug Fixes Resolved an issue which could cause portraits not to be displayed in very specific circumstances. If you are curious about what happened there, here is an explanation by Alex: Like many games, Trails from Zero uses a texture manager, a dedicated component that is in charge of loading, retaining, and releasing textures. The texture manager maintains a fixed number of slots, where each loaded texture occupies one slot. Slots can be reused once a texture has been released (i.e. is no longer needed). Textures are referred to by their slot index (ranging from 0 to number of slots - 1). However, a special value of -1 is used to indicate the absence of a texture. While -1 is handled correctly by the game, the message box logic suffered an off-by-one error, where slot index 0 triggered an immediate release of the corresponding texture. This unintended release caused the portrait to be missing. The game loads a handful of system textures at launch, which end up in texture slots 0 and a few subsequent ones. Originally, on other platforms, these system textures are only released when quitting the game; slot 0 can never be used for a portrait texture as it is already occupied. However, in the PC and Nintendo Switch version, these initial system textures are occasionally reloaded (released + loaded), for example when docking the Nintendo Switch or changing the text language. This reload can free up texture slot 0, which can then (potentially and rather randomly) be used to hold a portrait texture, in which case the off-by-one bug described above triggers. Implement a number of English localization fixes. Additional Changes and Fixes Improve font rendering performance by avoiding unneeded copies and temporary textures. This might be noticeable on slower systems when a lot of text is displayed. Map geometry fixes on many maps, and some map collision fixes. Some of these are specific to ultra-wide monitors, but others are visible in 16:9 as well. Show correct button prompt in detective notebook for "Details". Add mouse support for the casino exchang...The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero Extras Bundle offer EXTENDED!Oct 17, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsThe Trails from Zero "Extras Bundle" offer is extended until the end of October! This bundle includes the "SSS Classified Files" Digital Art Book and the "Anthems of Crossbell" Digital Soundtrack for absolutely FREE! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/32623015/55e818ff6ab65f7f8e27300802fb54579cc8e99e.png Additionally, for those of you who already bought the game between October 4 and October 17, 2022, you will also receive the bundle! Please note, for those who bought the game on Steam during this period, please visit the Trails from Zero Steam page to claim the bundle. On top of the offer being extended, all of our Falcom titles are on sale as part of our NISA Publisher Sale! The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III - 60% off The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV - 40% off Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - 30% off Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA - 70% off We'll be posting more exciting announcements all week long on our Falcom Events Website, so keep your eyes peeled 👀Version 1.3.7 Hotfix NotesOct 12, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, we just released a small hotfix for Trails from Zero which fixes a regression introduced in patch 1.3.7 that could lead to graphical issues (i.e. missing sprites) on some configurations in some situations. Sorry about that, and we hope you continue to enjoy Trails from Zero! - Peter “Durante” Thoman, PH3Trails from Zero v1.3.7 Patch NotesOct 7, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, Thanks for all the great feedback on Trails from Zero! We've implemented some of the requested features and fixed a few issues in this update, see below for details. Changes and Improvements Added a new audio setting to disable message beeps Added a new setting to disable rich presence Play voice lines in the message log when selected even if the "Other Voices" option is set to OFF Bug Fixes Fixed a potential crash when returning to the title menu Fixed an issue where movie sound effects were still played after skipping a movie Draw the BGM Info overlay in some additional situations where it was hidden before Various localization and map fixes We've also added an experimental "fast text speed" option: to use it, set "fastTextSpeed" to "true" in the category in "%localappdata%\Falcom\Zero\settings.toml". This is not intended for general use. We have received some reports of sporadic crashes specifically on older Intel integrated graphics hardware. So far, we have been unable to determine any specific issue with the game causing these, and in several cases the problem was resolved by updating graphics drivers. So, if you are affected by this problem, please try updating your drivers. Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu. Cheers, Peter "Durante" ThomanPC Version Overview (Part 3 - Final)Sep 27, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone, and welcome to the final post in this series on the upcoming Trails from Zero release! In case you are just joining us, there were two prior parts: in the first part of the series, I talked about a slew of general and PC-specific improvements we made to the game, including support for arbitrary resolution, framerate and aspect ratios, the message log, and full mouse support both for gameplay and in menus. The second part was all about how we selected, generated and sometimes recreated the highest quality assets for map textures, character sprites, and the UI. Originally, I planned for this final installment to deal primarily with platform features, a bit about optimization, and perhaps also some information on the more obscure almost antique bugs we fixed for our release of the game. However, after the first post, we were contacted by many people who pointed out various features of some specific previous releases which, despite our best efforts, we didn't yet include. Luckily, we managed to get not just one but two surprise features in since then -- the most highly requested one by far, and another one which most people might not even be aware of. So without further ado, let's get started with those two surprises! Music Information UI {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/818c715db154ecea51a3ff7b3719f38996851c22.png The single most requested feature - of those that we had not already included - was a background music track information popup as seen in the Geofront fan patch for the game. I'm happy to report that we managed to implement this without too much hassle. As you can see above, it is of course entirely optional. With that option enabled, every time a new music track starts playing a UI popup will show the track name, and, if available, the OST disk and track number it can be found on: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/8ef03fa12c446948882c8577fcced9cff3dd9e51.jpg Dynamic Character Shadows {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/cab8de8eb39b897d76f9b01c064a4ba04e0ab314.png This is a much more obscure feature request, which reached us after the first post in this series went live. When we first received it we were surprised - none of us were aware that this existed - and not quite sure if we could actually implement within the resource constraints we have. Some background: the Japanese-only Vita "Evolution" version of the game features dynamic character sprite shadows in some scenes. These do not exist in any other version of the game, and we had access to neither the source nor assets used in this particular version. As such, for this particular feature, the problem is not just coding the shadows, but actually placing lights on all maps where they make sense. Luckily, we were able to create some in-game UI for light placement which allowed our beta testers to contribute to getting all the light locations just right. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/0842525288d9eee9e90ae892a0a5bcb648967a22.png We now have dynamic shadows from light sources in dungeons, and on ...Trails from Zero is the perfect entry point for Falcom's sprawling JRPG seriesSep 26, 2022 - PC GamerTrails from Zero begins near the end, plunging players straight into a thrilling in media res segment without any warning or explanation. The main cast's all here: the only problem is nobody playing will know who these people are, where they are, or what they're supposed to be doing... Read more.Trails from Zero - PC Version Overview (Part 2)Aug 6, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone! As I mentioned in the first part of the series — be sure to check it out if you haven't done so yet — I originally intended for this to be the usual one-off behind the scenes blog post I do for our releases, but the sheer amount of changes and improvements in Zero made that infeasible, So here is the second part in the series, this time focusing on game assets, and more specifically on sprites, UI textures, map textures, and even the maps themselves. In the first post I noted that to fully understand this version, it's helpful to know the history of Trails from Zero's releases. You can find the same summary of this history here again as a refresher: The game was originally released for PSP by Falcom, with a Chinese PC release licensed to the company Joyoland following soon after. This release was eventually used as the basis for a fan translation by the "Geofront" team. Independently, Falcom much later on developed a Playstation 4 version of the game known as "Kai", which serves as the basis for our version. That version did not include everything that was in the Joyoland version, or that was eventually added by the Geofront modders, so it fell to us to adopt or sometimes recreate these contents. I'll refer to all of these versions as "PSP", "Joyoland", "Geofront" and "Kai" respectively. Character Sprites The Crossbell games are the final series by Falcom to use the 2D-sprites-on-3D-maps look which was a hallmark of the Trails in the Sky series, and is also featured in some beloved Ys titles. Since they make up such a significant part of the overall presentation, the quality of the sprites is a fundamental aspect of the look of the game, and we wanted to make sure that we go for the best possible option here. The sprites for PSP were by necessity rather low resolution, and the Kai version uses upsampled variants of these lower-resolution sprites. Joyoland and by extension the Geofront release have higher-resolution versions, but these are limited to an 8 bit color palette and therefore frequently show some dithering artifacts. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/a4d70d4042b505c618b37195a9e4fb4f2a629899.png For our release, we chose to start from the higher-resolution Joyoland sprites, and de-dither them using a neural network trained for this purpose. Special thanks to our beta tester UltraSun for investigating this! The results are clean, high-resolution sprites with full colors and no dithering artifacts, as you can see in the comparison above. These sprites are shown at 200% size (400% for PSP), which makes both the dithering artifacts in the Joyoland version as well as the relative loss of detail and some small distortions in the upsampled version quite visible. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/29db5fdcdcd160bc1609280be924a06e1a0d349d.png One thing you might also have spotted is that the color saturation and brightness is slightly different between the Joyoland (and thus our) version and the PSP version (and thus its Kai upscale). This would ...The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is going hard on features for the PC portJun 18, 2022 - PC GamerThe upcoming port of The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero looks to be going out of its way to accommodate the broad range of PC hardware fans are using. To be frank, it's not really the kind of game anyone expects to have a robust port, but the developers are working pretty hard at it. Harder, in fact, than anyone might expect... Read more.Trails from Zero - PC Version Overview (Part 1)Jun 17, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone! The release date for Trails from Zero is inching closer, and we want to share more about the development of this new version of the game. I initially just intended for this to be a one-off post like we did for a few other releases, but there's more to cover here than there ever was before so instead this will be a multi-part affair. In this first part, I'll primarily talk about new in-game features, while future parts will focus on the improvement to in-game assets, bug-fixes, some platform support information, and maybe even more minor features I can't get to today. Background For both this look at features and future discussions of assets, it helps to have some background knowledge of the release history of Trails from Zero. The game was originally released for PSP by Falcom, with a Chinese PC release licensed to the company Joyoland following soon after. This release was eventually used as the basis for a fan translation by the "Geofront" team. Independently, Falcom much later on developed a Playstation 4 version of the game known as "Kai", which serves as the basis for our version. That version did not include everything that was in the Joyoland version, or that was eventually added by the Geofront modders, so it fell to us to adopt or sometimes recreate these contents. I'll refer to all of these versions as "PSP", "Joyoland", "Geofront" and "Kai" respectively. The short of it is that the most recent Falcom version - PS4 Kai - is the source for this port. Aspect Ratios, UI and Mouse Support One of the more significant challenges when porting a game from console to PC is dealing with aspect ratios, especially in older games with lots of hand-crafted UI. In a similar vein, fully supporting mouse input in such games frequently requires a lot of work on individual menu screens and UI elements. I'm happy to report that we were able to tackle this challenge in full for Trails from Zero. Aspect Ratios {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/6faaa634c31bf0f652b9f99d38b69081b0d915cb.jpg In games with a fixed camera perspective such as Trails from Zero, supporting ultrawide aspect ratios can be particularly difficult. Often, the original game optimizes level assets by not including anything which can't be seen by the original (16:9) camera. In our previous release of The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails, we tackled this issue by trying to constrain the camera, per-level, to areas that are visible. For Trails from Zero, we re-implemented this approach -- as you can see above -- but also managed to go one step further in many situations. We created some tooling to extract and edit the original level geometry, and one of our wonderful QA testers was able to fix many smaller geometry issues in maps with this tool. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40784458/53e5d58f301de2157544c28455b8a1a9038033c0.png Aspect Ratio and UI This takes care of the 3D rendered aspect of aspect ratio support, but still leaves open the question of UI. Here, we opted to keep a letter- or pilla...The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero - Neues JRPG erscheint Ende SeptemberMar 4, 2022 - pressakey.comErlebe eine reichhaltige und erfrischende Spielwelt, in der es von Geheimnissen und Abenteuern nur so wimmelt. » Komplette News auf pressakey.com lesen » The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero auf pressakey.com Fan translations become official for the lost Trails RPGsJun 25, 2021 - PCGamesNIf you love RPG games and haven't played Nihon Falcom's Trails series, you're missing out - but then, the English-speaking world has been missing pieces of the series for years. A group of fan translators known as the Geofront have worked to unofficially bring The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure to Western audiences, and now that work is becoming official. Trails from Zero is due to launch in autumn 2022, while Trails to Azure will land in 2023, both published by NIS America. Both games will hit PC via Steam, Epic, and GOG, with versions for Switch and PlayStation 4 as well. The Geofront's translation text will serve as the basis for the official localisation, and NIS is making use of the English titles and logos the fan translation team put together. "Leading the Geofront's Trails to Azure was a dream come true, but seeing this partnership come to fruition is something unfathomable," Trails to Azure project lead Scott says in a blog post. "I cried tears of joy the day I read NIS America's proposal to us. I was overwhelmed at the thought of my name being immortalized in my favorite game of all time... forever." 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