The 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.
First published in 2010 for the PlayStation Portable, The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is part of the Trails sub-series to the long-running The Legend of Heroes JRPG series. They’re consistent hits in Japan but more of a niche series in the US—especially on PC.
In a thorough post (opens in new tab) on Steam, PH3 chief technology officer Peter Thoman dives into a pile of upgrades made for this new port. This includes figuring out how to support ultrawide aspect ratios and traditional 4:3 on a fixed perspective, including the scalable UI. There’s also mouse support for the entire game: “In fact, the entire game could feasibly and rather comfortably be played using only the mouse! Even the mini-games are fully supported,” says Thoman.
Additional improvements are things like better draw distance, support for variable framerates up to 144 FPS, and anti-aliasing up to MSAA 8x. It’s above and beyond what you expect for a PC port, frankly—I’d say it’s what we should expect, but I fear I’d set an unrealistic expectation for everyone else porting in the future.
There are also upgrades to the game itself, like a message log similar to modern Trails games, better rendering and graphics, optimization, and platform features. Thoman promises to lay those out in future posts.
You can find The Legend of heroes: Trails from Zero on Steam (opens in new tab), where it’s scheduled to release on September 27, 2022.
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