@chronodekar That is indeed it. I got it for $4 CAD from a Fanatical bundle back in early January, so it might pop up again in a future bundle.
Hard agree with you for the visual style, though. It's not ugly, but after years of playing VNs that almost exclusively were anime-style, that art shift is jarring to me, too. Heck, even the story idea I have in my head that would fit a VN perfectly would probably also be done that way. Even that studio's other two VNs are in anime style, hah. I made that comparison earlier that for some reason it gave me a reminder of phone games, and the reason for that may be because phone games also trend that way, though they're a lot uglier.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (FC)
I've had this game in my backlog for a number of years, so I figured I may as well get to it. I've polished a few Falcom games off in the last two years, so what's one more. This one is straight up RPG fare, so it's a departure from the action and action RPGs I've been going through (Ys, Zwei!, and Tokyo Xanadu). Even if I like this well enough to play the series, it's not going to be all at once! I had to look up when the game was originally released in Japan, and wasn't at all surprised by the 2004 date.
Since it's a Falcom game, and having heard the reputation of this series, I have a guide on hand for this one. I don't want to miss anything in this game D: I am playing on Normal mode, for what it's worth, which is actually the easiest of 3 difficulty settings.
Anyways, I am enjoying it relatively so far. Obviously, given the mention above that it was first released in 2004, there's a lot of polish missing. Battles are turn-based, but with the added caveat that all allies and enemies are on a grid-based field. Depending on your range, you can hit multiple enemies with one special attack at once, buff several allies at once, or get out of range of a foe's attack. Turn order also is weighted by speed and what you did the previous turn (merely moving around prioritises your next turn, compared to if you actually attacked), so it's possible to move twice in a row. I've played enough games like this that it is easy to pick it up, just with its own little quirks.
Story hasn't really opened up much, and is still small in scale. I just finished getting to the quest where I have to retrieve something from the local mine. Estelle is...something. Dim-witted, genki girl, dense, ditzy, and any other number of descriptors. At least she's still better so far than Joshua, who has the standard aloof I-have-a-hidden-past-that-I'm-not-going-to-mention personality.
I'm playing the Steam version. The DirectX8 configuration was stuttering lots when I tried it, but the normal launcher has been A-OK for me. A couple of mundane graphical glitches have popped up, but that has been about it.
Also, I finished up after about 6 hours of playing today. About 5 hours 40 minutes in, I found out that the R2 button runs the game in turbospeed, about 3x speed? This means my character movement on the overworld moves a lot quicker, and fights and attack/magic animations move a lot quicker. I could have used that a lot earlier. Press F for respect.