What’s going on with The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon in Australia?
No seriously, do you know?
You may have noticed one game missing from the Nintendo eShop here in Australia this week, and that game is The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon (it’s also missing from the PlayStation Store).
We’ve been following this one for a couple of weeks now. A few weeks ago, the game was rated and Refused Classification, and shortly after that it was removed from both the Nintendo eShop and the PlayStation Store — which, if it was effectively banned, makes sense.
To be clear though, the classification applied to the demo of the game. That said, the same classification would generally be expected to apply to the full release anyway.
At that point, we contacted the local distributor for the series, but as this is a digital-only release, they’re not involved. We also reached out to NIS America, but didn’t receive a response. While those emails were going out, the classification was updated to R18+, so we assumed the situation had been resolved and the game would still release.
Not long after, the classification disappeared entirely, and we were back to not knowing what was going on.
According to a letter from the Australian Government sent to a Reddit user, the game’s rating was reviewed by the Classification Board and changed to R18+ on January 8. However, it wasn’t until today, January 15, that the rating reappeared on the Classification website.
It’s now the game’s proposed release date, and the game has indeed launched — on Steam in Australia. Steam and Valve generally don’t enforce Australian classification requirements unless someone raises an issue, making it more of an “ask for forgiveness rather than permission” situation.
As of writing, the game is still missing from the Nintendo eShop, and the PlayStation Store listing remains removed. The game’s data does exist on the Australian eShop backend, but no pricing has been assigned.
So what does this mean for The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon on Nintendo Switch (or PlayStation) in Australia?
Someone tell us.
