Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter took a Falcom programmer twice as long to beat as Sky FC, Kondo reveals

In a new interview with Japanese outlet Gamer, Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo revealed that it took a Falcom programmer twice as long as The Legend of Heroes: Trails In The Sky FC to fully complete Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter.

Before we go further, the original interview has links to a spoiler-filled interview about The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon so please be warned for spoilers for not only the upcoming Trails in the Sky remake, but also the latest main game in the series that is yet to be released in the West. The interview goes into a lot of details about Kondo's involvement in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter compared to the original release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC and much more.

We have included translations for the relevant portions about the game's length and how Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter adds more content than just covering The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC. Note that the interview excerpts below have been edited for clarity. 

Gamer: Thinking about it, Trails of the Sky FC was quite compact in volume, wasn't it?

Kondo: I feel like the play time for the original version would be a bit under 40 hours, but when we had a programmer meeting, the main programmer said that it took them 80 hours until they cleared Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. This included a considerable amount of exploration-related content across the map which could have been one of the reasons [for the longer runtime].

There are a lot of elements related to exploration [here] compared to the past entries. If you do all of that, properly listen to the voices during events, and  do the quests it'll take twice as long as the original. The time spent to watch the events may be a lot indeed here. In the past we would just scroll [the stories] based on the actually shown speed; that's one of the reasons the original was so snappy. I also began playing it (Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter) for supervision, but I couldn't really finish as it got extended to over a week.

Gamer: By the way, is there no issue to confirm that all the content covered in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is the same as The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC?

Kondo: We are basically covering Trails in the Sky FC while adding some more elements to the finer details. 

Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter launches worldwide on September 19 for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam).