Funny that this game can be abbreviated as “Tits” cause I like it as much as tits (I am asexual)
Here's each party member's favorite From Software game:
Estelle: Dark Souls 2. (Nobody is perfect I guess.)
Olivert: Bloodborne. (Actually, this ins't his favorite, he just likes people to know he has a ps5.)
Kloe: Elden Ring. (She often says that Mountaintop of the giants is not that bad.)
Joshua: Kuon. (Dude is just edgy as hell.)
Agate: Sekiro Shadows die Twice. (He believes that Sword Saint Isshin Ashina is one of the best final bosses of all time, and you know what? He goddamn right.)
Tita: Armored Core: For Answer. (Honestly, I don't think I need to explain.)
Zin: King's Field. (And of course this old ass boomer often says that all games after demon's souls are garbage.)
Scherazard: None. (This bitch is too busy drinking all day to play video games)
Estelle: Dark Souls 2. (Nobody is perfect I guess.)
Olivert: Bloodborne. (Actually, this ins't his favorite, he just likes people to know he has a ps5.)
Kloe: Elden Ring. (She often says that Mountaintop of the giants is not that bad.)
Joshua: Kuon. (Dude is just edgy as hell.)
Agate: Sekiro Shadows die Twice. (He believes that Sword Saint Isshin Ashina is one of the best final bosses of all time, and you know what? He goddamn right.)
Tita: Armored Core: For Answer. (Honestly, I don't think I need to explain.)
Zin: King's Field. (And of course this old ass boomer often says that all games after demon's souls are garbage.)
Scherazard: None. (This bitch is too busy drinking all day to play video games)
I've seen Trails called both the "MCU of RPGs" and the "One Piece of RPGs" and whether you see both, one, or none of those comparisons as favorable is a good indicator of how much you're going to enjoy the series
Incredible.
Trails in the Sky brilliantly sets itself up for the grander story that is to come in the following game, the Second Chapter. Many elements of this game are masterfully crafted: music, characters, side quests, and many in universe aspects as to how the world functions.
The tools of engaging the player with the world did a lot to immerse me in the world. Countless days I've played where I couldn't put down the game due to how engaging and beautiful the game is. Despite a large portion of the game being optional; the Bracer Guild board postings and the occasional hidden quests that you seek out yourself, with absolute certainty I can say I participated in almost every side quest and a handful of hidden quests. The gratification of stumbling upon a hidden substory is unparalleled. Often times, the side quests, hidden and publicly known alike, offer so much knowledge into the world whether it relates to the history, different branches of society, or relationships between characters. Trails has an amazingly realized world that delves into some truly unique territory. Purchasable newspapers, books, and other various outlets for in world authored texts is truly something I heavily appreciate in the game.
Being a PSP game, it should come to no one's surprise that the soundtrack is fairly limited. Exploration of the world can only be so grand, combat has many hardware limits inflicted upon it, and NPC dialogue can only go so far. That being said, the game utilizes all of these aspects to their fullest.
The soundtrack is about an hour in length, yet throughout the +40 hour duration of the game it ceases to wear itself out. Not once was I able to find myself annoyed with the choice of music or even the existence of a track altogether. I absolutely adore when and how the developers chose to use certain tracks for cutscenes, locations, and events. Sound design is, simply put, superb, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Standard battle music, boss music, and any music played during specific fights always land. I can very easily recall moments where the game uses music to its advantage. The most notable and memorable being a scene in specific where a character snaps, eliciting a reaction from an opposing person, then eerily creeping back into their ominous foreboding song. Contextually, this scene is absolutely fucking loaded with emotion and intense story significance. Typing it this way to avoid spoilers absolutely does it zero justice, you have to witness it firsthand. Music in this game carries a LOT of emotional weight, the use of music to fit regardless of tone or setting is also shown in how music environmentally consistently matches the mood throughout the entire main story. For what it's worth, given the length of the game and the length of the soundtrack, I have an utmost level of appreciation for how expertly crafted the music and environments are built in tandem.
Exploration and visual flair is definitely one of the biggest aspects in my adoration with the game. Areas are beautifully crafted, with each space having such uniqueness to it. Each of the main explorable cities and their outskirts are all uniquely interesting and a blast to explore & learn about their history upon reaching them for the first time. Bracer Quests are equally one of my favorite mechanics for this reason. Should you not feel compelled to explore the lands of your own volition, Bracer Quests act as one of the supporting reasons to explore and familiarize yourself with your surroundings. The 1.3 GB file size for the original PSP release still absolutely blows my mind. I love the unique style in how the world is designed and how it presents itself, that early 2000s JRPG aura is super emphasized, and I'm here for it.
I don't want to delve into the specifics of the combat much to be honest. I enjoyed it for what it offered and that's about the most I can put into words about it, I'm willing to excuse its simplicity for it being the first game in the series. Though I can safely say I'm not the biggest fan of sepith farming, I do however like the payoff. It grants the complexity of crafting your “perfect” orbment loadout for your characters, adding just another layer of strategy to the base combat that I'm definitely a fan of.
Trails in the Sky brilliantly sets itself up for the grander story that is to come in the following game, the Second Chapter. Many elements of this game are masterfully crafted: music, characters, side quests, and many in universe aspects as to how the world functions.
The tools of engaging the player with the world did a lot to immerse me in the world. Countless days I've played where I couldn't put down the game due to how engaging and beautiful the game is. Despite a large portion of the game being optional; the Bracer Guild board postings and the occasional hidden quests that you seek out yourself, with absolute certainty I can say I participated in almost every side quest and a handful of hidden quests. The gratification of stumbling upon a hidden substory is unparalleled. Often times, the side quests, hidden and publicly known alike, offer so much knowledge into the world whether it relates to the history, different branches of society, or relationships between characters. Trails has an amazingly realized world that delves into some truly unique territory. Purchasable newspapers, books, and other various outlets for in world authored texts is truly something I heavily appreciate in the game.
Being a PSP game, it should come to no one's surprise that the soundtrack is fairly limited. Exploration of the world can only be so grand, combat has many hardware limits inflicted upon it, and NPC dialogue can only go so far. That being said, the game utilizes all of these aspects to their fullest.
The soundtrack is about an hour in length, yet throughout the +40 hour duration of the game it ceases to wear itself out. Not once was I able to find myself annoyed with the choice of music or even the existence of a track altogether. I absolutely adore when and how the developers chose to use certain tracks for cutscenes, locations, and events. Sound design is, simply put, superb, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Standard battle music, boss music, and any music played during specific fights always land. I can very easily recall moments where the game uses music to its advantage. The most notable and memorable being a scene in specific where a character snaps, eliciting a reaction from an opposing person, then eerily creeping back into their ominous foreboding song. Contextually, this scene is absolutely fucking loaded with emotion and intense story significance. Typing it this way to avoid spoilers absolutely does it zero justice, you have to witness it firsthand. Music in this game carries a LOT of emotional weight, the use of music to fit regardless of tone or setting is also shown in how music environmentally consistently matches the mood throughout the entire main story. For what it's worth, given the length of the game and the length of the soundtrack, I have an utmost level of appreciation for how expertly crafted the music and environments are built in tandem.
Exploration and visual flair is definitely one of the biggest aspects in my adoration with the game. Areas are beautifully crafted, with each space having such uniqueness to it. Each of the main explorable cities and their outskirts are all uniquely interesting and a blast to explore & learn about their history upon reaching them for the first time. Bracer Quests are equally one of my favorite mechanics for this reason. Should you not feel compelled to explore the lands of your own volition, Bracer Quests act as one of the supporting reasons to explore and familiarize yourself with your surroundings. The 1.3 GB file size for the original PSP release still absolutely blows my mind. I love the unique style in how the world is designed and how it presents itself, that early 2000s JRPG aura is super emphasized, and I'm here for it.
I don't want to delve into the specifics of the combat much to be honest. I enjoyed it for what it offered and that's about the most I can put into words about it, I'm willing to excuse its simplicity for it being the first game in the series. Though I can safely say I'm not the biggest fan of sepith farming, I do however like the payoff. It grants the complexity of crafting your “perfect” orbment loadout for your characters, adding just another layer of strategy to the base combat that I'm definitely a fan of.
For me, Sky FC is "the JRPG of all time" other than the final boss and literal last 10 minutes of the game. This is partially due to it being a "setup game," (of which I've played next to none, but have seen this often done in visual novels, and it's infinitely worse with an actual videogame due to gameplay losing tension) and as such is automatically an underwhelming part of the story. The combat system is probs my fav JRPG one from what I've played here and the 2 hours I played years back in Cold Steel I, especially later on when both you and enemies can cancel Arts (spell) casting before the attack is delivered, very strategic. The gameplay is fun, the worldbuilding is already good and this is just the first game in the series, true, and the music is good (though a popular JRPG having good music is a given), and it certainly has... soul, but it just felt like an okay experience most of the time for me. It was episodic for most of its story with okay characters and okay plot and okay pacing until it got better near the end. Although it's strange how the overwhelming majority of FC's thematic value is from that last part alone, and before that it feels more focused on worldbuilding and slice-of-life or something? The low points were Tita, Dorothy and Olivier (when he's a walking trope and/or stereotype) being annoying, as well as the stealth missions. I didn't care for the romance either.
I was feeling a little burnt out in the penultimate dungeon, too, which isn't a good sign when it's the first game in the 500+ hour series known for the "trust me bro, it gets peak" effect, with a coin toss on whether a specific player will like a particular game/arc. Additionally, it already feels bloated (it feels like I got 10 hours' worth of actual content out of my ~30 hour playthrough with how one-note some things, especially characters, were), so that's concerning.
In any case, the trailer for SC near the end looked very hype, so I'm excited to play that sometime this year.
I was feeling a little burnt out in the penultimate dungeon, too, which isn't a good sign when it's the first game in the 500+ hour series known for the "trust me bro, it gets peak" effect, with a coin toss on whether a specific player will like a particular game/arc. Additionally, it already feels bloated (it feels like I got 10 hours' worth of actual content out of my ~30 hour playthrough with how one-note some things, especially characters, were), so that's concerning.
In any case, the trailer for SC near the end looked very hype, so I'm excited to play that sometime this year.
The beginning of homophobia.
This review contains spoilers
Copy pasting a little gush i did when i finished this game (it's very messy and kind of embarrassing but whatever it was my real thoughts at the time lol). Check out my list for more concise thoughts on the series.
Okay so going into the game I had my expectations in line, based on the amount of times I'd heard from others that FC and SC should really be considered 1 game and no one should ever play FC on it's own. So I had it in my head it would be kinda like Great Ace Attorney in that regard, potentially slightly worse since at one point I'd heard someone was actually worried that a friend would quit the series after FC, kinda made me make up in my head that it was gonna be a bit of a slog.
For the first two chapters (inc prologue) I guess I got that experience that I was expecting, and I do think that they were overall the weakest chapters in the game in retrospect, but I understood that it was all in the nature of setting up a world and not throwing too many things at you at once, so it didn't bother me too much. As far as story and world building goes, they did a fine job.
My biggest issue with the game just ended up being the communication of battle systems in the game. Half of it is fine because they learn it, it is simple and you can only really learn it with experience, once you've figured it all out it's good. Half of the stuff isn't explained that well because it's just thrown into the book and sometimes I hadn't fully understood some things until halfway through the game (like what an s-break is and how it's related to an s-craft, how exactly quartz translate into arts). But once it's all figured out, the orbment system is really cool, it gives you a lot of freedom to really dig deep into how you want your team to be built, while also restricting it per party member in a way that matches their battle style and character within the game. Which is way cooler than just anyone being able to use anything.
Anyway no more bad stuff (cos really there wasn't any more). This game found a way to tackle three difficult things in one go and it kind of amazes me how well it's all executed. Those things being:
1. Setting up facets of the universe (continent?) that the series takes place in, orbment history, country relations, cassius' past
2. Building Estelle as a protagonist
3. All while making you really feel the same things that she does throughout the journey, making for a very engaging story
You start from zero in her hometown and you basically have the same knowledge as her when it comes to the point 1, facets of the universe. Well, she has some knowledge, but the game's writing does a fantastic job of re-explaining those things to her (you) without it feeling like an awkward almost 4th wall-y kinda thing. This journey around the country is so masterfully done. When you're done with it, you look at the map and go "wow, i really walked all that" and you believe it, because of how much time you spent in each region, the impact you made, the people you helped, the things you learned from those people. Things that it only makes perfect sense for people from that region to have tell you (Bose - hundred days war/conflicts with erebonia, Zeiss - orbment history, Grancel - a bunch of fucking stuff, etc).
Points 2 and 3 are both done at the same time thanks to the exponentially increasing stakes in the story, that never feels like too sharp an increase. Everything is perfect difficulty level for Estelle and Joshua to handle, just their enthusiasm and determination only barely making them trustworthy enough for the bracer guild to let them carry it out. And the best part of this is in Grancel, where they are assigned in charge of the final missions. She starts out as a country bumpkin and she remains that way, but learns so much through her experiences, and you really feel like you see every part of her development because of the structure of the game.
After Bose, in my opinion, the game just takes off. (Don't get me wrong the sky bandits were entertaining, and I can't wait to see more of them.) The school festival and play is adorable, you may not like how long that whole section is, but you have to admit that because of that, when they announce their giving the money to the orphanage it's just so heartwarming. It only makes it more cruel when they're harrassed and the money is stolen, then the whole thing is so intense when those sneaky spec ops guys get away, and i feel like that being one of the first times agate in your party, his fury is contagious and really makes you out to get those guys, it being the second time youve seen them sneaking around. Then the whole thing with the mayor and the boat chase it just keeps going and going, spectactular. That was the best time for them to introduce the royal guardsmen to you aswell, since Kloe is so well connected (great foreshadowing btw). This chapter also introduced the most under-appreciated character, butler phillip, my god he's a champ for dealing with all the duke's bullshit, and his voice actor does an amazing job.
getting into gush territory here i cba to keep up the structuring
Agate was awesome in Ruan, Tita was so adorable in Zeiss and then the relationship those 2 had was so good, I shed a tear when Agate took the bullet for her, and then she felt extremely bad and took care of him!! I really felt for everyone in that chapter, Russell was brilliant and saving him and seeing him deny richard and amalthea in front of them bceause he found their evil despicable was great, this + everything in zeiss, all the inventiones he made, that let you understand how much he really just cares for the people of the country and how he wants it to prosper. He's really a great man, and a great grandfather. The family dynamic is amazing there.
Zin is a chad, not much else to say, clearly just a big bloke that loves to help people, maybe he's got more of a story 👀 but obviously i dont know too much since he's not from Liberl. Same goes for Olivier, funny how they're two foreigners that are extremely different from one another, but they manage to get on very well haha.
It's also really cool how they had this "backup" group of bracers in grancel that they developed not too mcuh where they take away from the main cast, but enough to give you a slightly deeper look into the innergoings of the guild.
I also just have to say that when the royal guardsmen and the bracers took back the villa and the castle, it just felt amazing and it gave me goosebumps knowing that they'd had to hide, but were able to just go balls out, reappearing and showing their true strength.
My favourite song from the game has to be recapture. the entire journey around the kingdom, conspiracies becoming larger and larger, and this playing at the turning point where you begin to overthrow the overthrowers!
OH and not to mention the insane amount of effort put into npc dialogue
it's so unncessary
but so incredible
Okay so going into the game I had my expectations in line, based on the amount of times I'd heard from others that FC and SC should really be considered 1 game and no one should ever play FC on it's own. So I had it in my head it would be kinda like Great Ace Attorney in that regard, potentially slightly worse since at one point I'd heard someone was actually worried that a friend would quit the series after FC, kinda made me make up in my head that it was gonna be a bit of a slog.
For the first two chapters (inc prologue) I guess I got that experience that I was expecting, and I do think that they were overall the weakest chapters in the game in retrospect, but I understood that it was all in the nature of setting up a world and not throwing too many things at you at once, so it didn't bother me too much. As far as story and world building goes, they did a fine job.
My biggest issue with the game just ended up being the communication of battle systems in the game. Half of it is fine because they learn it, it is simple and you can only really learn it with experience, once you've figured it all out it's good. Half of the stuff isn't explained that well because it's just thrown into the book and sometimes I hadn't fully understood some things until halfway through the game (like what an s-break is and how it's related to an s-craft, how exactly quartz translate into arts). But once it's all figured out, the orbment system is really cool, it gives you a lot of freedom to really dig deep into how you want your team to be built, while also restricting it per party member in a way that matches their battle style and character within the game. Which is way cooler than just anyone being able to use anything.
Anyway no more bad stuff (cos really there wasn't any more). This game found a way to tackle three difficult things in one go and it kind of amazes me how well it's all executed. Those things being:
1. Setting up facets of the universe (continent?) that the series takes place in, orbment history, country relations, cassius' past
2. Building Estelle as a protagonist
3. All while making you really feel the same things that she does throughout the journey, making for a very engaging story
You start from zero in her hometown and you basically have the same knowledge as her when it comes to the point 1, facets of the universe. Well, she has some knowledge, but the game's writing does a fantastic job of re-explaining those things to her (you) without it feeling like an awkward almost 4th wall-y kinda thing. This journey around the country is so masterfully done. When you're done with it, you look at the map and go "wow, i really walked all that" and you believe it, because of how much time you spent in each region, the impact you made, the people you helped, the things you learned from those people. Things that it only makes perfect sense for people from that region to have tell you (Bose - hundred days war/conflicts with erebonia, Zeiss - orbment history, Grancel - a bunch of fucking stuff, etc).
Points 2 and 3 are both done at the same time thanks to the exponentially increasing stakes in the story, that never feels like too sharp an increase. Everything is perfect difficulty level for Estelle and Joshua to handle, just their enthusiasm and determination only barely making them trustworthy enough for the bracer guild to let them carry it out. And the best part of this is in Grancel, where they are assigned in charge of the final missions. She starts out as a country bumpkin and she remains that way, but learns so much through her experiences, and you really feel like you see every part of her development because of the structure of the game.
After Bose, in my opinion, the game just takes off. (Don't get me wrong the sky bandits were entertaining, and I can't wait to see more of them.) The school festival and play is adorable, you may not like how long that whole section is, but you have to admit that because of that, when they announce their giving the money to the orphanage it's just so heartwarming. It only makes it more cruel when they're harrassed and the money is stolen, then the whole thing is so intense when those sneaky spec ops guys get away, and i feel like that being one of the first times agate in your party, his fury is contagious and really makes you out to get those guys, it being the second time youve seen them sneaking around. Then the whole thing with the mayor and the boat chase it just keeps going and going, spectactular. That was the best time for them to introduce the royal guardsmen to you aswell, since Kloe is so well connected (great foreshadowing btw). This chapter also introduced the most under-appreciated character, butler phillip, my god he's a champ for dealing with all the duke's bullshit, and his voice actor does an amazing job.
getting into gush territory here i cba to keep up the structuring
Agate was awesome in Ruan, Tita was so adorable in Zeiss and then the relationship those 2 had was so good, I shed a tear when Agate took the bullet for her, and then she felt extremely bad and took care of him!! I really felt for everyone in that chapter, Russell was brilliant and saving him and seeing him deny richard and amalthea in front of them bceause he found their evil despicable was great, this + everything in zeiss, all the inventiones he made, that let you understand how much he really just cares for the people of the country and how he wants it to prosper. He's really a great man, and a great grandfather. The family dynamic is amazing there.
Zin is a chad, not much else to say, clearly just a big bloke that loves to help people, maybe he's got more of a story 👀 but obviously i dont know too much since he's not from Liberl. Same goes for Olivier, funny how they're two foreigners that are extremely different from one another, but they manage to get on very well haha.
It's also really cool how they had this "backup" group of bracers in grancel that they developed not too mcuh where they take away from the main cast, but enough to give you a slightly deeper look into the innergoings of the guild.
I also just have to say that when the royal guardsmen and the bracers took back the villa and the castle, it just felt amazing and it gave me goosebumps knowing that they'd had to hide, but were able to just go balls out, reappearing and showing their true strength.
My favourite song from the game has to be recapture. the entire journey around the kingdom, conspiracies becoming larger and larger, and this playing at the turning point where you begin to overthrow the overthrowers!
OH and not to mention the insane amount of effort put into npc dialogue
it's so unncessary
but so incredible
A refreshing break from the god-slaying adventures of most JRPGS. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC really stands apart as a cozy and relaxing adventure. All aspects of the game work together to deliver a grounded and charming adventure that holds up almost 20 years after it's initial release.
Pros:
- A grounded, yet well paced story full of adventure
- Solid turn-based combat, enhanced by excellent battle systems
- A catchy and complementary soundtrack
- Awesome world-building and character development
- x6 TURBO mode on PC
Cons:
- Janky UI, difficult to navigate with little feedback
Overall:
The world of Trails in the Sky is always fun to explore, with a charm and coziness that really makes it standout. The standard turn-based combat is elevated by the supporting battle systems that allow for lots of customization and different strategies. The systems feel similar to Final Fantasy VIIs Materia. The art style remains timeless, but unfortunately the UI has aged quite poorly. After a few hours of gameplay you can navigate without too much pain, but it is a shame on an otherwise polished title. The delivery and pacing of the story are similar to a fantasy novel, but beautifully designed around letting the player explore at their own pace. The soundtrack is catchy, and really fits the theme of the game.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I started playing. It has a really different pace to most games, but sometimes its nice to step away from non-stop action and spectacle and enjoy a more grounded and cozy game. I had fun playing this first chapter, of the first arc, of the Legend of Heroes games. Similar to One Piece the initial length of the series put me off, but immediately I understood why it's so popular. Now I'm glad there is so much to catch up on!
Pros:
- A grounded, yet well paced story full of adventure
- Solid turn-based combat, enhanced by excellent battle systems
- A catchy and complementary soundtrack
- Awesome world-building and character development
- x6 TURBO mode on PC
Cons:
- Janky UI, difficult to navigate with little feedback
Overall:
The world of Trails in the Sky is always fun to explore, with a charm and coziness that really makes it standout. The standard turn-based combat is elevated by the supporting battle systems that allow for lots of customization and different strategies. The systems feel similar to Final Fantasy VIIs Materia. The art style remains timeless, but unfortunately the UI has aged quite poorly. After a few hours of gameplay you can navigate without too much pain, but it is a shame on an otherwise polished title. The delivery and pacing of the story are similar to a fantasy novel, but beautifully designed around letting the player explore at their own pace. The soundtrack is catchy, and really fits the theme of the game.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I started playing. It has a really different pace to most games, but sometimes its nice to step away from non-stop action and spectacle and enjoy a more grounded and cozy game. I had fun playing this first chapter, of the first arc, of the Legend of Heroes games. Similar to One Piece the initial length of the series put me off, but immediately I understood why it's so popular. Now I'm glad there is so much to catch up on!
FC is a slow burn that takes its time building its world by keeping the setting localized and the conflicts small-scale, giving the wonderful characters ample room to develop. The result is a game that feels incredibly cozy, with great music and that 2D-sprites-in-a-3D-world diorama style that's pretty uncommon but still great-looking.
For the first game that started this large story spanning multiple titles, I can't be more happier with this. It's been a long time since I finished an actual game for once so FC did a good job with not just getting me back into video games but also making me give JRPG's another shot.
It just felt like such an enjoyable game to play when I wasn't busy. Exploring Liberl with Joshua and Estelle felt way too fun. Talking to random NPC's was also a blast, always changing dialogue made them feel alive.
The companions and adventure-esque structure reminded me a lot of my other favourites and childhood shows growing up.
Gameplay was pretty good too, though I definitely say it lacked a few stuff which I know will be added in later series. It did feel kinda overwhelming at the beginning though but I got the hang of it pretty quickly afterwards.
THE MUSICCCCCCCC
The ending is probably the best part though outside of the worldbuilding and everything else. It just MAKES me wanna go play second chapter right now and I probably will.
It just felt like such an enjoyable game to play when I wasn't busy. Exploring Liberl with Joshua and Estelle felt way too fun. Talking to random NPC's was also a blast, always changing dialogue made them feel alive.
The companions and adventure-esque structure reminded me a lot of my other favourites and childhood shows growing up.
Gameplay was pretty good too, though I definitely say it lacked a few stuff which I know will be added in later series. It did feel kinda overwhelming at the beginning though but I got the hang of it pretty quickly afterwards.
THE MUSICCCCCCCC
The ending is probably the best part though outside of the worldbuilding and everything else. It just MAKES me wanna go play second chapter right now and I probably will.
combat is a bit... *pulls collar* but its really really great at building up a world and really focusing on it bit by bit, feels like i only just finished reading fellowship of the ring. it's extremely thorough. that's like the best word i can come up with for it. even just having the normal jrpg protagonist dynamic switched is interesting from the get-go.
joshua maid dress mmm
psst.. wanna hear a secret... it's really not as long as everyone makes it out to be
joshua maid dress mmm
psst.. wanna hear a secret... it's really not as long as everyone makes it out to be
One of my favorites games of all time, the whole Trails in the Sky trilogy up to the Crossbell duology are genuinely my favorite JRPGs of all time. While not necessary, the experience is even better with the japanese voices mod.
Estelle is Bestelle.
Estelle is Bestelle.
it would be a better game if they let Estelle say slurs
trails in the sky! trails in the sky! a fun, kingdom-sprawling, feet-on-the-ground explorative and npc dialogue/story-focused jrpg with a nice light romance plot, and plenty of problematic 2000s jrpg tropes (oh well)
For better or worse, I've played (Though not completed) all the trails games, and Sky 1 is still the best.
What I like the most about trails in the sky is its slow pacing - the way you get to know each town, read the newspapers, setting up many of the emotional plot beats for Sky 2. Joshua and Estelle are journeying on foot to get better acquainted with their little country of Liberl, and it really makes sense and feels good to walk from place to place, no fast travel or flying around.
If you like more lighthearted JRPGs I'd check Trails in the Sky out. (If the first hour doesn't hook you I'd drop the entire series)
For better or worse, I've played (Though not completed) all the trails games, and Sky 1 is still the best.
What I like the most about trails in the sky is its slow pacing - the way you get to know each town, read the newspapers, setting up many of the emotional plot beats for Sky 2. Joshua and Estelle are journeying on foot to get better acquainted with their little country of Liberl, and it really makes sense and feels good to walk from place to place, no fast travel or flying around.
If you like more lighthearted JRPGs I'd check Trails in the Sky out. (If the first hour doesn't hook you I'd drop the entire series)
OLIVIER BROS UNITE!!!!!!!!!!
T.I.T.S.
You know, I wasn't originally going to get into this series so soon with me having several games I wanted to get into beforehand, but I had this sudden craving for an adventure story and just couldn't help myself. I have heard massive amounts of praise about this game and franchise, and then one day I was just convinced to give this game a try. This as I look back on it after finishing this game for a little over a week now, may have been one of the best and worst decisions I have made in a long time. Best because I got to experience one of the most comfiest adventures I've had the pleasure to witness. On the other hand, worst because well I started this game during a time when I was supposed to be studying for my Finals that were coming up, but I instead decided to spend a little over 50 hours of my time on this game.
When you think of games that fall under the title the quintessential adventure video game, you may think of games such as: Final Fantasy X, Shadow of the Colossus, Death Stranding, or maybe just any Zelda game.
Well, what if I told you this game, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC, rivals those aforementioned.
It has everything you could ask for in a JRPG with minimal flaws that is left to be desired. I mean this from the story, world-building, OSTs, gameplay, characters, and most especially the dialogue.
The attention to detail and love that is poured into this game is astounding. The amount of text in here is mind-boggling. NPC dialogue refreshes after EVERY story event and treasure chests have a pun or just a line of dialogue after you open it.
The world-building is one of the game's strong suits without a doubt. Since this game is what I would like to call an "intro game", due to it being not only the first Trails game, but also it being the introduction to a world that is now at about 11 games long with Kuro no Kiseki II: Crimson Sin getting its English translation relatively soon and the recent announcement of the 13th game, Kai no Kiseki - Farewell, O Zemuria.
Each chapter you travel to each region of the country of Liberl, and you're introduced to the cast as you progress effortlessly. It's impressive at how effortlessly brilliant this game can be.
The character interactions are also one of my favorite aspects of this game as each character has their quirks and how their personality changes towards one another. This aspect gives the game its unique charm and just makes the game feel more vibrant and alive.
Every game has a hooking point and it may be different for everyone, but I believe during Chapter 2 or 3 of this game was where I was like, "Yeah it's over I'm invested now." Especially whenever you fight a certain someone and THIS SOUNDTRACK STARTS PLAYING I was for sure invested until the end credits.
The length may be something that catches your eye because this franchise has a trend of having its games go easily up to 50+ hours. Luckily those hours fly by playing this game, however.
If you want a comfy adventure to experience or just to start on a legendary franchise such as this, I cannot recommend it enough. Trails in the Sky is a worthy investment.
When you think of games that fall under the title the quintessential adventure video game, you may think of games such as: Final Fantasy X, Shadow of the Colossus, Death Stranding, or maybe just any Zelda game.
Well, what if I told you this game, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC, rivals those aforementioned.
It has everything you could ask for in a JRPG with minimal flaws that is left to be desired. I mean this from the story, world-building, OSTs, gameplay, characters, and most especially the dialogue.
The attention to detail and love that is poured into this game is astounding. The amount of text in here is mind-boggling. NPC dialogue refreshes after EVERY story event and treasure chests have a pun or just a line of dialogue after you open it.
The world-building is one of the game's strong suits without a doubt. Since this game is what I would like to call an "intro game", due to it being not only the first Trails game, but also it being the introduction to a world that is now at about 11 games long with Kuro no Kiseki II: Crimson Sin getting its English translation relatively soon and the recent announcement of the 13th game, Kai no Kiseki - Farewell, O Zemuria.
Each chapter you travel to each region of the country of Liberl, and you're introduced to the cast as you progress effortlessly. It's impressive at how effortlessly brilliant this game can be.
The character interactions are also one of my favorite aspects of this game as each character has their quirks and how their personality changes towards one another. This aspect gives the game its unique charm and just makes the game feel more vibrant and alive.
Every game has a hooking point and it may be different for everyone, but I believe during Chapter 2 or 3 of this game was where I was like, "Yeah it's over I'm invested now." Especially whenever you fight a certain someone and THIS SOUNDTRACK STARTS PLAYING I was for sure invested until the end credits.
The length may be something that catches your eye because this franchise has a trend of having its games go easily up to 50+ hours. Luckily those hours fly by playing this game, however.
If you want a comfy adventure to experience or just to start on a legendary franchise such as this, I cannot recommend it enough. Trails in the Sky is a worthy investment.
Ret's Go!
This review contains spoilers
This is going to be a bit of a rant, maybe more than FC deserves. It's difficult for me to do otherwise though, considering the cultural recognition Trails in the Sky now has in its diehard Falcom community. Really it's just unavoidable now, as any conversation I could have about Trails in the Sky will inadvertently be tied back to the reverent fanbase. I don't think that's what the general public who play this game will experience, but when you're about as online as I am, it won't come as a surprise that a lot of what I COULD'VE talked about when it came to this game was quickly dismissed.
I don't hold that against the people who love this series, but it was very interesting to me when I came out the end of this game quite positive after the first runthrough. Specifically that any and all talk I could make about the specifics of this game were weirdly shouted down as "this game is just setup for the entire series and it should not be judged without that retrospection in mind." So you know what, I kept my mouth shut. It's not a terrible enough point to consider, even though I thought then as I do now that it's certainly a weak excuse. So I kept going, I went ahead and immersed myself in a fat load of Trails discourse and ended up surrounded by it, being spoiled on several things before I even thought to finally pick up SC. I may not be an expert on Trails in the Sky at this point, but I do feel a lot more informed about the series and FC's place in it as a whole. And it is sorely not the conclusion I think those people really hoped I would come to.
FC is not just a setup of Trails in the Sky's series narrative that leads to interesting payoff, it is a setup of Trails in the Sky's criminal flaws and trends. It's literally a walking simulacra of what the series stands for in its biggest moments, from its biggest positives to its awful issues. I'll start on what I still reminisce fondly, which is FC's sense of character. After a pretty dogshit poorly paced intro, there's more moments than I can effectively count where the cast of FC ends up bouncing in my head with their sense of heart and strong humanization. Dialogue is very reflective and strongly well written for each of their characters, and it all contributes to comfy vibes that define the midgame, which I'd say is where FC certainly peaks. Worldbuilding is no slouch to get you into the setting either, with a pretty grounded dialogue and well setup stakes for adventure that feel refreshing. The story keeps that idea in mind, which makes the endgame feel rather deserved even when the stakes are still pretty fate of the nation-heavy.
The story, however, is also when the cracks really start to show. FC is really quick to show its hand that a lot of the characters it puts at you are effectively tools, motivations that are nice setting dressing but completely thrown out when it's suitable. To make it clearer what I'm talking about, FC establishes a villain who is fighting for a past idea of his nation in absence of someone he respected. They then literally, and I cannot stress this enough, throw this out that his motivations and his choices were brainwashed by some other guy we don't fucking know at all from the get go. Even if I were to pretend that didn't happen, FC really does not explore this theme much if at all, or this backstory to an even genuinely sympathetic level.
This is the clinching issue with Trails stories, the setup politics that points at interesting themes are wallpaper, torn asunder right in front of you at every turn you could get. The villain I quote here is really not the first time that the inner themes of a nation you visit are hamstrung for a big bad that is neither emblematic of the themes to be a good metaphor or interesting in their own right. There's even more stuff I can get ranting about, but talking about the ramifications of moral motivations and how quickly they are side-stepped was already a poor errand for me to rag on when this game pushes that incest is fine, actually.
The combat is about as disappointing, but has more to do with the base mechanics that Trails seems to care about rather than its potential. Early-midgame is a bit interesting initially, where the grid-like structure and the meter management of arts ends up forcing you to take encounters by the skin of the teeth while you're trying to figure out your strategy. Immediately after this, it falls apart as you begin to realize that Trails could not give less of a shit about the action economy it makes, never going beyond "lose a turn" or "gain a turn" in terms of time. Positioning, while sometimes tested with genuinely solid superbosses, also ends up turning into dominant strategies of doing the same thing ad nauseum. I highlight the endgame for this especially, where p much all enemy fights are weakly put a massive fucking AOE to encapsulate as much as you can, and then repeat. Were it not for the customization and good user experience for figuring out the combat systems on your own with solid feedback, I would say this combat is average.
And I'd like to say that my issues here are FC-only still, I really would. I really would like to believe the narrative that keeps getting wrapped in front of me that this is at worst just a middling setup that then gets into the real kino shit that is the series and fixes all of this crap. But no, it's not. Trails does get better at its strengths from here as it goes on. The character writing continues to be good, and gets great and even excellent often. The vibes do get stronger, especially in terms of the soundtrack that gets outright legendary. But the poor foundation in story, general thematic writing, and combat is what you see here on full display. It's so vastly the embodiment of Trails that it's stunning how much talk about the series now feels like gaslighting to me.
Trails in the Sky FC is not a good game, and though I still lean positively on it, I would not recommend it to most. Worth a try at least, if you can get past the awful pacing in the first arc or two and end up enjoying yourself a ton then you absolutely will love the rest of the series. Is it worth trudging through if you don't enjoy it superbly to get to the rest of the series? I'm still not really sure about that.
I don't hold that against the people who love this series, but it was very interesting to me when I came out the end of this game quite positive after the first runthrough. Specifically that any and all talk I could make about the specifics of this game were weirdly shouted down as "this game is just setup for the entire series and it should not be judged without that retrospection in mind." So you know what, I kept my mouth shut. It's not a terrible enough point to consider, even though I thought then as I do now that it's certainly a weak excuse. So I kept going, I went ahead and immersed myself in a fat load of Trails discourse and ended up surrounded by it, being spoiled on several things before I even thought to finally pick up SC. I may not be an expert on Trails in the Sky at this point, but I do feel a lot more informed about the series and FC's place in it as a whole. And it is sorely not the conclusion I think those people really hoped I would come to.
FC is not just a setup of Trails in the Sky's series narrative that leads to interesting payoff, it is a setup of Trails in the Sky's criminal flaws and trends. It's literally a walking simulacra of what the series stands for in its biggest moments, from its biggest positives to its awful issues. I'll start on what I still reminisce fondly, which is FC's sense of character. After a pretty dogshit poorly paced intro, there's more moments than I can effectively count where the cast of FC ends up bouncing in my head with their sense of heart and strong humanization. Dialogue is very reflective and strongly well written for each of their characters, and it all contributes to comfy vibes that define the midgame, which I'd say is where FC certainly peaks. Worldbuilding is no slouch to get you into the setting either, with a pretty grounded dialogue and well setup stakes for adventure that feel refreshing. The story keeps that idea in mind, which makes the endgame feel rather deserved even when the stakes are still pretty fate of the nation-heavy.
The story, however, is also when the cracks really start to show. FC is really quick to show its hand that a lot of the characters it puts at you are effectively tools, motivations that are nice setting dressing but completely thrown out when it's suitable. To make it clearer what I'm talking about, FC establishes a villain who is fighting for a past idea of his nation in absence of someone he respected. They then literally, and I cannot stress this enough, throw this out that his motivations and his choices were brainwashed by some other guy we don't fucking know at all from the get go. Even if I were to pretend that didn't happen, FC really does not explore this theme much if at all, or this backstory to an even genuinely sympathetic level.
This is the clinching issue with Trails stories, the setup politics that points at interesting themes are wallpaper, torn asunder right in front of you at every turn you could get. The villain I quote here is really not the first time that the inner themes of a nation you visit are hamstrung for a big bad that is neither emblematic of the themes to be a good metaphor or interesting in their own right. There's even more stuff I can get ranting about, but talking about the ramifications of moral motivations and how quickly they are side-stepped was already a poor errand for me to rag on when this game pushes that incest is fine, actually.
The combat is about as disappointing, but has more to do with the base mechanics that Trails seems to care about rather than its potential. Early-midgame is a bit interesting initially, where the grid-like structure and the meter management of arts ends up forcing you to take encounters by the skin of the teeth while you're trying to figure out your strategy. Immediately after this, it falls apart as you begin to realize that Trails could not give less of a shit about the action economy it makes, never going beyond "lose a turn" or "gain a turn" in terms of time. Positioning, while sometimes tested with genuinely solid superbosses, also ends up turning into dominant strategies of doing the same thing ad nauseum. I highlight the endgame for this especially, where p much all enemy fights are weakly put a massive fucking AOE to encapsulate as much as you can, and then repeat. Were it not for the customization and good user experience for figuring out the combat systems on your own with solid feedback, I would say this combat is average.
And I'd like to say that my issues here are FC-only still, I really would. I really would like to believe the narrative that keeps getting wrapped in front of me that this is at worst just a middling setup that then gets into the real kino shit that is the series and fixes all of this crap. But no, it's not. Trails does get better at its strengths from here as it goes on. The character writing continues to be good, and gets great and even excellent often. The vibes do get stronger, especially in terms of the soundtrack that gets outright legendary. But the poor foundation in story, general thematic writing, and combat is what you see here on full display. It's so vastly the embodiment of Trails that it's stunning how much talk about the series now feels like gaslighting to me.
Trails in the Sky FC is not a good game, and though I still lean positively on it, I would not recommend it to most. Worth a try at least, if you can get past the awful pacing in the first arc or two and end up enjoying yourself a ton then you absolutely will love the rest of the series. Is it worth trudging through if you don't enjoy it superbly to get to the rest of the series? I'm still not really sure about that.
Didn't know a whole lot about this game going in, but it seemed interesting enough and the one song I'd heard from this game was really good so I thought I might as well give it a try.
This games combat is addictive, and the orbment system takes inspiration from FF7's materia system, but uses it in a better way. I feel this game will be a lot lighter in plot than the others, it is more about the journey and getting to know the characters and setting up the future plot points than anything else.
It's definitely got some filler too. But having said that, the characters are strong, the music is great and I don't think I've ever had expectations flipped completely by a games ending before in my life. Thoroughly enjoyable, and while not a 5/5 due to flaws in how chapters drag on and how there is a bit of filler, I can easily say that it is a brilliant game and I'm excited to play the rest of the series.
This games combat is addictive, and the orbment system takes inspiration from FF7's materia system, but uses it in a better way. I feel this game will be a lot lighter in plot than the others, it is more about the journey and getting to know the characters and setting up the future plot points than anything else.
It's definitely got some filler too. But having said that, the characters are strong, the music is great and I don't think I've ever had expectations flipped completely by a games ending before in my life. Thoroughly enjoyable, and while not a 5/5 due to flaws in how chapters drag on and how there is a bit of filler, I can easily say that it is a brilliant game and I'm excited to play the rest of the series.
Zin carries. Whether you like him or don't like him, there's nothing you can do about it because he's number one.
Otherwise I have to say it's an epic adventure for the ages and fun to finish in the leadup to Drake's upcoming album "For All the Dogs" releasing October 6th. I will be thinking about this game quite a fair bit while I listen to his new music.
Otherwise I have to say it's an epic adventure for the ages and fun to finish in the leadup to Drake's upcoming album "For All the Dogs" releasing October 6th. I will be thinking about this game quite a fair bit while I listen to his new music.
Edit: if you’re finding this in 2023 or later, I played the second fucking game.
The gameplay here is immaculate. Pure JRPG goodness, if a little on the easy side. No wasted mechanics, winning is fun, losing is fun, random encounters and boss fights are all fun. The money/equipment economy feels balanced all the way through, which is incredibly rare for this sort of thing. There’s no minigame chaff except for one unbelievably bad stealth section. Normally immaculate gameplay should guarantee a three-star review, but this clearly /wants/ to be a story-focused game above all else, so I have to underweight the fighty stuff.
I can see where people get confused and think this is a good game, story-wise, because it has the structure of a much better game. There’s a lot of sort of baseline stuff that suggests a lot of care went into designing this as a game that could tell a complex story through lots of different kinds of scenes. PCs swap in and out as the story demands so it’s not stuck to the “adventuring party” format; there’s a certain deftness to the blocking with the little sprites that gives a lot of flexibility to the talky bits; and it’s /very/ talky—these games are famous problems for localizers, I guess, because every little JRPG-type man-on-the-street interaction is a novel and changes contextually every time a character so much as sneezes. It’s all suggestive of a game that’s very patient, that does a lot of “worldbuilding” and character work, and is setting up something more complex than the normal get-the-boys-together-and-fight-God JRPG plot.
But it’s not! The story and the character work are, in practice, /incredibly/ bad here—pretty bad even by video game standards. A comment you’ll see about this game is that it’s unfortunately a bit boring because it’s doing all this patient worldbuilding and setup work rather than getting to the story; this is false. In fact, at the end of the game the kingdom has been taken over by sinister conspirators whose palace coup is actually a front for an apocalypse plot involving retrieving an ancient doomsday weapon from a secret prelapsarian robot palace beneath the castle. This is actually where most JRPGs end up after forty hours. What seems to be giving players the impression that this is not in fact happening—that the two main characters are still walking around meeting different Mayors and battling small-time Sky Bandits at the end of the game, as in the beginning—is A) this sort of ambience of “slow-burn” that the game projects and B) the fact that all of this is so completely dramatically inert.
I’ve never felt an RPG journey from “let’s go to the sewers for some training!” to “the A U R E O L E has been unleashed, and the R I N G G U A R D I AN has awakened” to be so free of conflict. These characters never really struggle. The story structure revolves more around them being /delayed/ then thwarted—there’s never really a point where they don’t know what they’re going to do next. They are constantly encountering and re-encountering incredibly helpful, friendly people who have the exact information they need. The next step in the quest is often, “let’s go to the bar to talk to X about this,” or, “Y wants to meet in the morning, so let’s go back to the hotel.” Characters do a lot of checking in on each other and relaying information, sometimes along roads full of monsters, and then eventually they find where the bad guy is and go proactively to bring them to justice.
All of this would work out fine if the scenes of characters hanging around hotels were psychologically insightful, or compellingly naturalistic, or funny, or sexy, or anything like that. Other reviews of this game on this website will suggest that this is so—a lot of “plot: 6/10; CHARACTERS: 10/10.” Anyone who thinks this desperately needs to watch an R rated movie. All of the writing here (and it’s not just the localization, which seems high-quality) is… I would define it as “sub-anime.” The “jokes” are terrible and often homophobic. Everyone’s primary character trait is how happy they are to see each other, plus maybe some plot-inert “flaw” (Schera drinks too much, but in a cool high-functioning way; Olivier is bisexual, which grosses the other characters out, but they heroically put up with it; Agate has a gruff exterior, which everyone immediately sees through to his heart of gold). There’s not a single joke that lands.
There is one main dramatic thread about which the game musters up a bit more genuine passion, and it fucking sucks: the main characters are a sixteen-year-old brother and sister by adoption, and they’re starting to develop feelings for each other. Watching this warmed-over Pornhub scenario play out completely mechanically, without an affection mechanic to jimmy or even a nominal love triangle to form an opinion on, is like a forty-hour-long sleep paralysis nightmare, in which you know exactly what’s going to happen but are powerless to prevent it. Imagine my horror when a character casually mentions that a nearby town is famous for its hot springs…
There are two other major dramatic threads: the first involves the characters’ father, who disappears in the beginning of the game. This should at least give you something to worry about, except that the game, terrified of stressing you out, keeps having characters insist that your dad is fine, or even that they just talked to him last week. He does in fact reappear at the end, completely unharmed, to tell you how proud of you he is. The other thing is Joshua’s mysterious past, which is way too vague to be of any interest, and then sort of comes out in a sputter at the end of the game. I was told that the game ends on a cliffhanger, by the way, which is such a generous definition of “cliffhanger;” a minor character reveals himself to have been evil all along, announces that everything that happened in the game was according to his plan, and then walks off with a vague promise to continue doing bad-guy stuff in the future. No cliff, no hang.
What the game is counting on is propinquity, the great ally of the game developer. If you spend enough time with these people, watching them hang out, alternately imagining that you “are” them or that they’re your friends, eventually you’ll fall in love. Clearly this has worked on a lot of gamers, and if the game were any better (say, as good as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, another game I would not describe as well-written) it might have worked on me. As it stands, I kind of like Kloe, the schoolgirl (I know, I know) character who turns out to be the secret princess and fights with a rapier and a trained falcon named Sieg. Sieg is cool, and Kloe kind of seems most convincingly like she would be friends with the protagonists. Her bit of the game includes a fascinating interlude where the protagonists are assigned (the gimmick is that you belong to “the Bracer Guild,” which is a sort of multinational benevolent fantasy Pinkertons) to attend a high school (?) to help out with a school play (??) in drag (ah, okay). I’m not sure I was ever more interested in the story than during this bit, which promises all the parapedophilic low-level sexual intrigue one expects from a different sort of game. (This is one of /two/ sequences in the game where Joshua has to crossdress, by the way; the other one involves a maid uniform, for purposes of sneaking into a palace. This all just makes me nostalgic for the edgier, more complex queerphobia of Final Fantasy VII’s crossdressing gag.) But it all fizzles out into the same chumminess as the rest of the game; all the schoolgirls agree that the siblings are made for each other and you walk around after the play meeting an array of Mayors, each of whom congratulates you on your stunning efforts.
Apropos of the secret princess, a note on the politics of this game: it’s completely unreflectively pro-royalist. The Queen of the Liberl Kingdom (yes, “the Liberl Kingdom”) is a wonderful old lady, and her granddaughter, Kloe, is a wonderful young lady. But there’s another heir, through the distaff, the queen’s nephew the Duke, who is a shitty, pampered, self-obsessed aristocrat. Kloe and the Duke have a coequal (not “contested,” just “equal,” like no one has gotten around to reading the line of succession yet, the Queen being only sixty) claim to the throne, and nasty bad actors in the military, in service to foreign interests, lock the queen in her room and abduct the princess and announce that the Duke has been made heir. Vile treason! Luckily the Benevolent Fantasy Pinkertons are here to set things to right. Now, I’m not a whiner about this stuff, and I’ll accept a benevolent princess and kindly queen, but this isn’t Zelda: it’s supposed to be a complex palace intrigue story! Maybe it should think about this stuff for even a second!
Anyway, I haven’t ruled out playing the second one eventually, because I’m a mark, and it’s supposed to be better, and the gameplay really is fun. But I’m very glad that I have regular exposure to way, way better art than this. If this is your idea of “plot pretty good, characters excellent,” I consider you a victim. Of what, I’m not sure exactly. This game, much like every villain I sliced my way through in the course of playing it,, is only the innocent pawn of something much larger and more sinister, but that I can’t spend too much time thinking about, because it’s boring and I have better things to do.
The gameplay here is immaculate. Pure JRPG goodness, if a little on the easy side. No wasted mechanics, winning is fun, losing is fun, random encounters and boss fights are all fun. The money/equipment economy feels balanced all the way through, which is incredibly rare for this sort of thing. There’s no minigame chaff except for one unbelievably bad stealth section. Normally immaculate gameplay should guarantee a three-star review, but this clearly /wants/ to be a story-focused game above all else, so I have to underweight the fighty stuff.
I can see where people get confused and think this is a good game, story-wise, because it has the structure of a much better game. There’s a lot of sort of baseline stuff that suggests a lot of care went into designing this as a game that could tell a complex story through lots of different kinds of scenes. PCs swap in and out as the story demands so it’s not stuck to the “adventuring party” format; there’s a certain deftness to the blocking with the little sprites that gives a lot of flexibility to the talky bits; and it’s /very/ talky—these games are famous problems for localizers, I guess, because every little JRPG-type man-on-the-street interaction is a novel and changes contextually every time a character so much as sneezes. It’s all suggestive of a game that’s very patient, that does a lot of “worldbuilding” and character work, and is setting up something more complex than the normal get-the-boys-together-and-fight-God JRPG plot.
But it’s not! The story and the character work are, in practice, /incredibly/ bad here—pretty bad even by video game standards. A comment you’ll see about this game is that it’s unfortunately a bit boring because it’s doing all this patient worldbuilding and setup work rather than getting to the story; this is false. In fact, at the end of the game the kingdom has been taken over by sinister conspirators whose palace coup is actually a front for an apocalypse plot involving retrieving an ancient doomsday weapon from a secret prelapsarian robot palace beneath the castle. This is actually where most JRPGs end up after forty hours. What seems to be giving players the impression that this is not in fact happening—that the two main characters are still walking around meeting different Mayors and battling small-time Sky Bandits at the end of the game, as in the beginning—is A) this sort of ambience of “slow-burn” that the game projects and B) the fact that all of this is so completely dramatically inert.
I’ve never felt an RPG journey from “let’s go to the sewers for some training!” to “the A U R E O L E has been unleashed, and the R I N G G U A R D I AN has awakened” to be so free of conflict. These characters never really struggle. The story structure revolves more around them being /delayed/ then thwarted—there’s never really a point where they don’t know what they’re going to do next. They are constantly encountering and re-encountering incredibly helpful, friendly people who have the exact information they need. The next step in the quest is often, “let’s go to the bar to talk to X about this,” or, “Y wants to meet in the morning, so let’s go back to the hotel.” Characters do a lot of checking in on each other and relaying information, sometimes along roads full of monsters, and then eventually they find where the bad guy is and go proactively to bring them to justice.
All of this would work out fine if the scenes of characters hanging around hotels were psychologically insightful, or compellingly naturalistic, or funny, or sexy, or anything like that. Other reviews of this game on this website will suggest that this is so—a lot of “plot: 6/10; CHARACTERS: 10/10.” Anyone who thinks this desperately needs to watch an R rated movie. All of the writing here (and it’s not just the localization, which seems high-quality) is… I would define it as “sub-anime.” The “jokes” are terrible and often homophobic. Everyone’s primary character trait is how happy they are to see each other, plus maybe some plot-inert “flaw” (Schera drinks too much, but in a cool high-functioning way; Olivier is bisexual, which grosses the other characters out, but they heroically put up with it; Agate has a gruff exterior, which everyone immediately sees through to his heart of gold). There’s not a single joke that lands.
There is one main dramatic thread about which the game musters up a bit more genuine passion, and it fucking sucks: the main characters are a sixteen-year-old brother and sister by adoption, and they’re starting to develop feelings for each other. Watching this warmed-over Pornhub scenario play out completely mechanically, without an affection mechanic to jimmy or even a nominal love triangle to form an opinion on, is like a forty-hour-long sleep paralysis nightmare, in which you know exactly what’s going to happen but are powerless to prevent it. Imagine my horror when a character casually mentions that a nearby town is famous for its hot springs…
There are two other major dramatic threads: the first involves the characters’ father, who disappears in the beginning of the game. This should at least give you something to worry about, except that the game, terrified of stressing you out, keeps having characters insist that your dad is fine, or even that they just talked to him last week. He does in fact reappear at the end, completely unharmed, to tell you how proud of you he is. The other thing is Joshua’s mysterious past, which is way too vague to be of any interest, and then sort of comes out in a sputter at the end of the game. I was told that the game ends on a cliffhanger, by the way, which is such a generous definition of “cliffhanger;” a minor character reveals himself to have been evil all along, announces that everything that happened in the game was according to his plan, and then walks off with a vague promise to continue doing bad-guy stuff in the future. No cliff, no hang.
What the game is counting on is propinquity, the great ally of the game developer. If you spend enough time with these people, watching them hang out, alternately imagining that you “are” them or that they’re your friends, eventually you’ll fall in love. Clearly this has worked on a lot of gamers, and if the game were any better (say, as good as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, another game I would not describe as well-written) it might have worked on me. As it stands, I kind of like Kloe, the schoolgirl (I know, I know) character who turns out to be the secret princess and fights with a rapier and a trained falcon named Sieg. Sieg is cool, and Kloe kind of seems most convincingly like she would be friends with the protagonists. Her bit of the game includes a fascinating interlude where the protagonists are assigned (the gimmick is that you belong to “the Bracer Guild,” which is a sort of multinational benevolent fantasy Pinkertons) to attend a high school (?) to help out with a school play (??) in drag (ah, okay). I’m not sure I was ever more interested in the story than during this bit, which promises all the parapedophilic low-level sexual intrigue one expects from a different sort of game. (This is one of /two/ sequences in the game where Joshua has to crossdress, by the way; the other one involves a maid uniform, for purposes of sneaking into a palace. This all just makes me nostalgic for the edgier, more complex queerphobia of Final Fantasy VII’s crossdressing gag.) But it all fizzles out into the same chumminess as the rest of the game; all the schoolgirls agree that the siblings are made for each other and you walk around after the play meeting an array of Mayors, each of whom congratulates you on your stunning efforts.
Apropos of the secret princess, a note on the politics of this game: it’s completely unreflectively pro-royalist. The Queen of the Liberl Kingdom (yes, “the Liberl Kingdom”) is a wonderful old lady, and her granddaughter, Kloe, is a wonderful young lady. But there’s another heir, through the distaff, the queen’s nephew the Duke, who is a shitty, pampered, self-obsessed aristocrat. Kloe and the Duke have a coequal (not “contested,” just “equal,” like no one has gotten around to reading the line of succession yet, the Queen being only sixty) claim to the throne, and nasty bad actors in the military, in service to foreign interests, lock the queen in her room and abduct the princess and announce that the Duke has been made heir. Vile treason! Luckily the Benevolent Fantasy Pinkertons are here to set things to right. Now, I’m not a whiner about this stuff, and I’ll accept a benevolent princess and kindly queen, but this isn’t Zelda: it’s supposed to be a complex palace intrigue story! Maybe it should think about this stuff for even a second!
Anyway, I haven’t ruled out playing the second one eventually, because I’m a mark, and it’s supposed to be better, and the gameplay really is fun. But I’m very glad that I have regular exposure to way, way better art than this. If this is your idea of “plot pretty good, characters excellent,” I consider you a victim. Of what, I’m not sure exactly. This game, much like every villain I sliced my way through in the course of playing it,, is only the innocent pawn of something much larger and more sinister, but that I can’t spend too much time thinking about, because it’s boring and I have better things to do.
You can really tell this game was made in 2004; the graphics aren't the finest, menuing is often a pain, and you'll be constantly holding down the turbo button if you don't want every engagement to take a century due to the animation lengths. That said, the world building and characterization is fantastic, and the soundtrack is quite understated yet exceptional. If you can get through the somewhat sluggish beginning, you'll be fairly pleased with what's to come. Not my favorite game in the Legend of Heroes series, and I definitely had my gripes with plenty of aspects (stealth missions...), but I ended up liking this a lot more than I had originally expected.
Trails in the Sky is an underrated JRPG that needs to be hailed and recognized for its outstanding story and compelling characters. One of the game's strongest substances is the relationship between Estelle and Joshua. It's uncommon to witness such strong rapport between two mostly alone characters in a genre that favors ensemble casts with several characters. Their interactions are authentic and realistic, allowing you to feel their affection grow deeper as the game continues. The writers behind this game clearly put a lot of work into crafting the detailed dialogue and it shows.
In a genre dominated by male heroes, Estelle is a breath of fresh air. She embarks on her journey as an impressionable young woman with little life experience, but as she crosses the nation and interacts with new people, she learns priceless lessons about accountability, selflessness, and the value of family. She doesn't hesitate to face challenging circumstances, and many around her are motivated by her bravery. Her bond with Joshua is undoubtedly at the heart of the plot, and it's a joy to watch them interact with each other. Her progress and evolution throughout the game make her adventure all the more enjoyable, and she's certainly become my new favorite protagonist in a videogame.
The music score is also worth addressing in greater detail. The OST was composed by Falcom Sound Team jdk and is a testament to their widely praised brilliance. The music is eclectic and covers a wide range of tones and themes, from energetic fight tracks to somber piano compositions. Each track fits wonderfully in its own scene, and they're all memorable in their own way. The game's opening theme, "Sora no Kiseki," is very catchy and sets the tone for the game, and Factory City Zeiss is one of the most vibe-filled bops I've heard in a JRPG.
The combat system in the game is turn-based, similar to that of most classic JRPGs. While it isn't extremely unique it is serviceable and takes some strategic thought. You can customize your party members' abilities and equipment, and there are a range of foes with varying strengths and weaknesses. However, it can feel repetitive at times, especially since most battles boil down to using the same tactics over and over again.
While the graphics may not be up to modern standards, it's crucial to remember that this is a 2004 game. So, while it is a flaw, it is not surprising, and the game's aesthetic more than compensates. It's also worth noting that, despite the presentation being filled with chibi models, the actual dialogue box artwork for each character is so visually appealing that it's heartbreaking to see the Evolution version of the game replace these images. They have an incredible appeal that should have been preserved.
Despite the previous points, the most significant flaw is the story's unbelievably sluggish pacing. And this is not stated lightly. Over half of the game is mainly focused on introducing the world and its characters, and it honestly can feel like nothing is really happening. I found myself often asking "Where's the plot?" several times, or "when does it get juicy" all the way to the end of Chapter 2. Despite these criticisms, the pacing is justifiable, as the immersion in this game's world and its characters is essential for later context near the end of the game's story. The narrative is captivating and dramatic once it gets to the point and it does not slow down at all. The story addresses challenging topics like political corruption and familial ties, and it tackles these topics with maturity and complexity. The finale is satisfying and enthralling, and allows the perfect amount of room for the second chapter to follow. If you stay around for the entire journey, which I almost didn't, it's a good payoff.
Trails in the Sky is an absolute must-play for JRPG enthusiasts. Its strong characters, outstanding musical score, and incredibly relevant themes more than compensate for its weaknesses such as the rough pacing and hardly serviceable combat. It's an excellent introduction to the Trails series. Just tackle the slow start with patience and you'll be rewarded with a fascinating trip filled with some of the most diverse and colorful characters and world-building you'll ever see.
In a genre dominated by male heroes, Estelle is a breath of fresh air. She embarks on her journey as an impressionable young woman with little life experience, but as she crosses the nation and interacts with new people, she learns priceless lessons about accountability, selflessness, and the value of family. She doesn't hesitate to face challenging circumstances, and many around her are motivated by her bravery. Her bond with Joshua is undoubtedly at the heart of the plot, and it's a joy to watch them interact with each other. Her progress and evolution throughout the game make her adventure all the more enjoyable, and she's certainly become my new favorite protagonist in a videogame.
The music score is also worth addressing in greater detail. The OST was composed by Falcom Sound Team jdk and is a testament to their widely praised brilliance. The music is eclectic and covers a wide range of tones and themes, from energetic fight tracks to somber piano compositions. Each track fits wonderfully in its own scene, and they're all memorable in their own way. The game's opening theme, "Sora no Kiseki," is very catchy and sets the tone for the game, and Factory City Zeiss is one of the most vibe-filled bops I've heard in a JRPG.
The combat system in the game is turn-based, similar to that of most classic JRPGs. While it isn't extremely unique it is serviceable and takes some strategic thought. You can customize your party members' abilities and equipment, and there are a range of foes with varying strengths and weaknesses. However, it can feel repetitive at times, especially since most battles boil down to using the same tactics over and over again.
While the graphics may not be up to modern standards, it's crucial to remember that this is a 2004 game. So, while it is a flaw, it is not surprising, and the game's aesthetic more than compensates. It's also worth noting that, despite the presentation being filled with chibi models, the actual dialogue box artwork for each character is so visually appealing that it's heartbreaking to see the Evolution version of the game replace these images. They have an incredible appeal that should have been preserved.
Despite the previous points, the most significant flaw is the story's unbelievably sluggish pacing. And this is not stated lightly. Over half of the game is mainly focused on introducing the world and its characters, and it honestly can feel like nothing is really happening. I found myself often asking "Where's the plot?" several times, or "when does it get juicy" all the way to the end of Chapter 2. Despite these criticisms, the pacing is justifiable, as the immersion in this game's world and its characters is essential for later context near the end of the game's story. The narrative is captivating and dramatic once it gets to the point and it does not slow down at all. The story addresses challenging topics like political corruption and familial ties, and it tackles these topics with maturity and complexity. The finale is satisfying and enthralling, and allows the perfect amount of room for the second chapter to follow. If you stay around for the entire journey, which I almost didn't, it's a good payoff.
Trails in the Sky is an absolute must-play for JRPG enthusiasts. Its strong characters, outstanding musical score, and incredibly relevant themes more than compensate for its weaknesses such as the rough pacing and hardly serviceable combat. It's an excellent introduction to the Trails series. Just tackle the slow start with patience and you'll be rewarded with a fascinating trip filled with some of the most diverse and colorful characters and world-building you'll ever see.
it took a while for me to finish this one because of its slow start but definitely a great prologue to the series. My favorite part about the game was definitely the characters (shoutout agoat) but I really liked the soundtrack, combat, worldbuilding etc as well. I'm so locked in now, can't wait to dive into the rest of the series!
Eiyuu no densetsu IV : Sora no Kiseki, or just The legend of Heroes : Trails in the sky in west is the first game of the "Kiseki" franchise even if it's technically the 6th one of a long series of spinoff in the Dragon Slayer series. Like the games prior in that spinoff series it embrace the label of "Story-RPG", so basically games focusing first on the story and then the RPG elements. As the first game of this series that Falcom launched way back in 2004, it have the mission to introduce the player to the universe, the terms, the characters, the systems etc and try to hook them into the series, first Second Chapter the sequel and the all the other games that expand the universe even more, planned or not from the beginning.
Did Sora no Kiseki succesfully completed this mission ? I think the answer is yes and surely without problems. Between the OST, the envrionement, the diversity of all characters, the charming art style, the slow story but surprising having an enough good pacing to hook the player from the start. Sora no Kiseki did succesfully all those points. Also in West we were lucky to have the excellent translators and Localizators from Xseed giving us probably one of the best translation in the industry, well in PC rerelease, we don't talk about the first translation on PSP.
Personally Sora no Kiseki is one of my favorite game in the series, I probably love everything about it, from the characters to the exploration of grancel sewers. I think this game is a masterpiece in terms on an introduction of an universe and sadly outside of Zero no Kiseki Falcom wasn't able to reproduce something on this scale for me, maybe Kuro no Kiseki in the future, but we will see at that moment.
Did Sora no Kiseki succesfully completed this mission ? I think the answer is yes and surely without problems. Between the OST, the envrionement, the diversity of all characters, the charming art style, the slow story but surprising having an enough good pacing to hook the player from the start. Sora no Kiseki did succesfully all those points. Also in West we were lucky to have the excellent translators and Localizators from Xseed giving us probably one of the best translation in the industry, well in PC rerelease, we don't talk about the first translation on PSP.
Personally Sora no Kiseki is one of my favorite game in the series, I probably love everything about it, from the characters to the exploration of grancel sewers. I think this game is a masterpiece in terms on an introduction of an universe and sadly outside of Zero no Kiseki Falcom wasn't able to reproduce something on this scale for me, maybe Kuro no Kiseki in the future, but we will see at that moment.
I really enjoyed this game, but it definitely won't be for everyone. Even as a JRPG fan, I felt like this game's pacing was a little slow at times, but it is worth it for the ending. Was a bit skeptical about this series at first, but now that I've finished this game I cannot wait to start the others.
The One Piece of JRPGs
Extremely charming game with a great cast, great story, good gameplay and a fully realized world that isn't a complete masterpiece due to some gripes with areas that blend together and some of the gameplay being a bit flat near the end.
Will eventually get to SC. But my biggest takeaway is that Olivier is absolutely my goat.
Will eventually get to SC. But my biggest takeaway is that Olivier is absolutely my goat.
So a quick preface before I go into any thoughts; First of all, I'm not the best at writing shit I gotta be honest. I'm much more of a rambler so please don't expect any sane cohesion from this or any review of the other games in the series. Secondly, I'm going to be rating these games on the merits of themselves and how they differ from past games, I won't be taking into account future reveals to bump up nor put them down in any way but I will take into account how well they pick up threads or improve upon previous entries.
Feel free to let me know if you feel I missed anything!
My relationship with FC is a kinda strange one. You see, I have this friend who fucking adores this series. You'd be hard pressed to find somebody who has trails living in their head rent free more than this guy to the extent he was given a £100 bet to shut up about it for half a year. However this guy talks about this game being incredibly boring and bad but that "It's okay because it's setup for the future games in the series!" So when I picked this game up for the first time something like 3 years ago I dropped it right after the prologue which was very slow and pretty uninteresting. But recently I was bored and had nothing to do so I picked it back up again and decided I was going to get through it.
Honestly, I'm pretty soft on this game. Although I can't place very many areas I can call it great or even really good I think those low expectations really helped me get past its shortcomings and enjoy what it does have. This series is old and you honestly wouldn't be able to tell with how creative some of its systems are. The game looks great even today, The spritework has aged really nicely with those little chibi pseudo-3d clay model sprites and nothing looks really out of place. There's a few issues with a widescreen display where in cutscenes the corners will be either low quality or just a black void and the cutscenes have animations which are about 50% too slow to really be engaging but those are really the only complaints I can give to the visuals. The 90s to early 2000s anime style portraits look great and I prefer quite a few of them to the newer game's art. The soundtrack is a joy to listen to and I'll never get tired of the battle theme.
The gameplay can be pretty lackluster unfortunately, it's a shame because the systems in play with some tweaking that just wasn't in place in time for this game could have been really great. The grid based battle system has so many opportunity for interesting fight mechanics that this game unfortunately doesn't take advantage of at all outside of "how many enemies can you hit with an AoE." There could have been interesting movement based mechanics but with moving taking up your turn all on its own it's practically never worth doing even in situations where an enemy is targetting where you're standing.
Quartz however is great, even this early on it's an amazing system. Very similar to Final Fantasy 7's materia you can slot quartz into your characters to provide them with stats and abilities. and although it's nowhere near as in depth as later games it's still a fun system to play with. It's not the most well explained system outside of the very basics and it can be tough to get a handle of good setups on your first time playing with it but there's a lot of freedom in how you set up your characters with quartz in lieu of any really interesting gear otherwise... or at least it would be.
Unfortunately this game in particular is horrendously balanced. There is a very clear winning strategy that comes to light very early and nothing else is really worth using the entire game which is a big shame. it really feels like every game going forward that I've played thus far has been trying to solve this problem little by little and not exactly hitting the mark, at least not in the Sky trilogy. Physical damage is outright worthless in this entry and any arts not called Aerial, Aero Storm or White Gehenna are barely worth a second look outside of utility and support arts. It really is a shame because there's a lot of room for personalization and experimentation even this early with the quartz system but it really tends to boil down to just making sure you have your wind, your have your mind quartz and you have your action and cast quartz and everybody spams their biggest AoE. Thankfully this problem does get mitigated as we go on.
When it comes to the story let me get this out of the way. Yeah, there's no grand sweeping narrative here yet. Yes it sets up a lot of the things going forward that will become important without directly involving them much if at all. But honestly I disagree with the notion that this game "Doesn't have a story."
I personally enjoyed Estelle and Joshua's journey to become senior Bracers. Was it an amazing epic narrative? No of course not. But we do watch these characters grow into their roles that they'll take moving forward and to act like there's no narrative at all in this game is just a lie. From searching for your missing father and the hijacked airship and the mystery that starts witth the capua family's contacts with masked soldiers to finding them assisting the mayor of ruan's plan, to discovering the gospel and the kidnapping of professor russel and finally the coup d'état and the first seal of the aureole there is a plotline through this game that I personally found interesting enough to want to keep going and see what was really happening. Maybe it's an issue of Trails superfans looking back on all these callbacks and plot threads that connect through the series and thinking "yeah none of that really mattered though" and forgetting that, at this point of the series this stuff does matter. This is your first interaction with all these things going on behind the scenes and your first interaction with, what you'll eventually come to learn is the first stage of ouroboros's plan.
With characters I honestly wish I had more good to say, the format of this game has you journeying with a revolving door of characters who will become much more important as the series progresses but at this point outside of Estelle and Joshua many of them don't get enough time or effort put into them which is sad because I came to like a lot of them in future games but here there's just nothing to like about a lot of them.
Estelle is our protagonist, she's a headstrong act first questions later tomboy who wants all the adventure of a Bracer with none of the thinking. I really like Estelle even here. She's dumb as bricks most of the time, especially in english. But she's fun and enjoyable and a great PoV character especially as an introduction to this heavily bracer focused narrative. Her father is Cassius Bright, widely considered the best bracer in the entire continent and one of if not the strongest fighter and best strategic minds out there. She feels like she has a lot to live up to and strives to become as good as, then surpass her father. Her relationship with Joshua is sweet and pretty believable most of the time but I really feel that, despite how you feel about their romance, they go at it far too quickly and that kinda bothers me in this game. Along with the weird switch they pull about halfway through which I'll talk about in Joshua's section so I don't give it all to Estelle.
In gameplay she's anarts caster all around jack of all trades character. Unfortunately with this game's balancing it doesn't really work out that way. the slightest drop in strength against an enemy's defense means you're gonna be doing no damage at all with basic attacks or crafts and her crafts in this game are lackluster at best.
Joshua is Estelle's adoptive brother, brought in by Cassius years before the start of the game. He's a kind boy who tends to push back his own feelings to not worry those around him. He grew up with Estelle and the two are incredibly close and even as early as the prologue it's clear that he has romantic feelings for her which Estelle is blind to. Which is incredibly frustrating when halfway through the game they completely drop his feelings and now it's Estelle hiding romantic feelings from Joshua and his are never even brought up again until the very end of the game. I don't know it's really strange that the second Estelle thinks that maybe she likes him that now all mention of Joshua liking Estelle is completely gone. It's not like it was just one or two mentions before either, it would constantly bring up Estelle not noticing Joshua's feelings and the implications that there's somebody he likes and Estelle teasing him about maybe liking somebody else and Joshua's insistence that there's somebody else.
And in true ramble fashion I'm completely dropping my gameplay discussion per character here because there's too many characters and the jokes I wanted to put in are no longer worth it with the length this review is getting so I'm gonna talk about the last 2 party members in the story that are interesting enough to warrant it and then move on.
And I'm also just gonna group these together, it kind of fits anyway considering who they are.
Olivier and Kloe are probably the only other party members to really get any development and character to them.
Olivier is a traveller from the neighboring empire of Erebonia with which Liberl was in a war with in the past. Pretty early on it's shown that there's clearly more to him going on than he lets on but as displayed to the main party he's an easygoing over the top wandering bard with a playboy streak. Olivier is fucking hilarious. Especially with the evolution voice acting mod every single moment Olivier is on screen is an absolute joy to watch. Trails in the Sky without him would not be even close to as fun and I really mean that I fucking love this gremlin of a man. Easily my favourite character outside of the main 2.
Kloe meanwhile is pretty much on the complete opposite side of the coin. She's secretly the princess of the kingdom and she's very polite and reserved. She probably gets the most character growth in this game of any character outside of our protagonists and although it's a completely different vibe to Olivier I really enjoy the time you get to spend with her as well. It's cute and comfy and you really do get a feeling that she and Estelle become really close friends through their time together.
Ultimately FC is a game that I enjoyed but it could have been much better than it ended up being. A lot of its systems sadly fall too short and a majority of its characters don't get the time they need. It's a fine introduction to the series and there's a lot to like but I wouldn't by any means call it a great game. There's nothing incredibly wrong with it but there's nothing amazing either, it's just barely above being a completely mid experience.
Feel free to let me know if you feel I missed anything!
My relationship with FC is a kinda strange one. You see, I have this friend who fucking adores this series. You'd be hard pressed to find somebody who has trails living in their head rent free more than this guy to the extent he was given a £100 bet to shut up about it for half a year. However this guy talks about this game being incredibly boring and bad but that "It's okay because it's setup for the future games in the series!" So when I picked this game up for the first time something like 3 years ago I dropped it right after the prologue which was very slow and pretty uninteresting. But recently I was bored and had nothing to do so I picked it back up again and decided I was going to get through it.
Honestly, I'm pretty soft on this game. Although I can't place very many areas I can call it great or even really good I think those low expectations really helped me get past its shortcomings and enjoy what it does have. This series is old and you honestly wouldn't be able to tell with how creative some of its systems are. The game looks great even today, The spritework has aged really nicely with those little chibi pseudo-3d clay model sprites and nothing looks really out of place. There's a few issues with a widescreen display where in cutscenes the corners will be either low quality or just a black void and the cutscenes have animations which are about 50% too slow to really be engaging but those are really the only complaints I can give to the visuals. The 90s to early 2000s anime style portraits look great and I prefer quite a few of them to the newer game's art. The soundtrack is a joy to listen to and I'll never get tired of the battle theme.
The gameplay can be pretty lackluster unfortunately, it's a shame because the systems in play with some tweaking that just wasn't in place in time for this game could have been really great. The grid based battle system has so many opportunity for interesting fight mechanics that this game unfortunately doesn't take advantage of at all outside of "how many enemies can you hit with an AoE." There could have been interesting movement based mechanics but with moving taking up your turn all on its own it's practically never worth doing even in situations where an enemy is targetting where you're standing.
Quartz however is great, even this early on it's an amazing system. Very similar to Final Fantasy 7's materia you can slot quartz into your characters to provide them with stats and abilities. and although it's nowhere near as in depth as later games it's still a fun system to play with. It's not the most well explained system outside of the very basics and it can be tough to get a handle of good setups on your first time playing with it but there's a lot of freedom in how you set up your characters with quartz in lieu of any really interesting gear otherwise... or at least it would be.
Unfortunately this game in particular is horrendously balanced. There is a very clear winning strategy that comes to light very early and nothing else is really worth using the entire game which is a big shame. it really feels like every game going forward that I've played thus far has been trying to solve this problem little by little and not exactly hitting the mark, at least not in the Sky trilogy. Physical damage is outright worthless in this entry and any arts not called Aerial, Aero Storm or White Gehenna are barely worth a second look outside of utility and support arts. It really is a shame because there's a lot of room for personalization and experimentation even this early with the quartz system but it really tends to boil down to just making sure you have your wind, your have your mind quartz and you have your action and cast quartz and everybody spams their biggest AoE. Thankfully this problem does get mitigated as we go on.
When it comes to the story let me get this out of the way. Yeah, there's no grand sweeping narrative here yet. Yes it sets up a lot of the things going forward that will become important without directly involving them much if at all. But honestly I disagree with the notion that this game "Doesn't have a story."
I personally enjoyed Estelle and Joshua's journey to become senior Bracers. Was it an amazing epic narrative? No of course not. But we do watch these characters grow into their roles that they'll take moving forward and to act like there's no narrative at all in this game is just a lie. From searching for your missing father and the hijacked airship and the mystery that starts witth the capua family's contacts with masked soldiers to finding them assisting the mayor of ruan's plan, to discovering the gospel and the kidnapping of professor russel and finally the coup d'état and the first seal of the aureole there is a plotline through this game that I personally found interesting enough to want to keep going and see what was really happening. Maybe it's an issue of Trails superfans looking back on all these callbacks and plot threads that connect through the series and thinking "yeah none of that really mattered though" and forgetting that, at this point of the series this stuff does matter. This is your first interaction with all these things going on behind the scenes and your first interaction with, what you'll eventually come to learn is the first stage of ouroboros's plan.
With characters I honestly wish I had more good to say, the format of this game has you journeying with a revolving door of characters who will become much more important as the series progresses but at this point outside of Estelle and Joshua many of them don't get enough time or effort put into them which is sad because I came to like a lot of them in future games but here there's just nothing to like about a lot of them.
Estelle is our protagonist, she's a headstrong act first questions later tomboy who wants all the adventure of a Bracer with none of the thinking. I really like Estelle even here. She's dumb as bricks most of the time, especially in english. But she's fun and enjoyable and a great PoV character especially as an introduction to this heavily bracer focused narrative. Her father is Cassius Bright, widely considered the best bracer in the entire continent and one of if not the strongest fighter and best strategic minds out there. She feels like she has a lot to live up to and strives to become as good as, then surpass her father. Her relationship with Joshua is sweet and pretty believable most of the time but I really feel that, despite how you feel about their romance, they go at it far too quickly and that kinda bothers me in this game. Along with the weird switch they pull about halfway through which I'll talk about in Joshua's section so I don't give it all to Estelle.
In gameplay she's an
Joshua is Estelle's adoptive brother, brought in by Cassius years before the start of the game. He's a kind boy who tends to push back his own feelings to not worry those around him. He grew up with Estelle and the two are incredibly close and even as early as the prologue it's clear that he has romantic feelings for her which Estelle is blind to. Which is incredibly frustrating when halfway through the game they completely drop his feelings and now it's Estelle hiding romantic feelings from Joshua and his are never even brought up again until the very end of the game. I don't know it's really strange that the second Estelle thinks that maybe she likes him that now all mention of Joshua liking Estelle is completely gone. It's not like it was just one or two mentions before either, it would constantly bring up Estelle not noticing Joshua's feelings and the implications that there's somebody he likes and Estelle teasing him about maybe liking somebody else and Joshua's insistence that there's somebody else.
And in true ramble fashion I'm completely dropping my gameplay discussion per character here because there's too many characters and the jokes I wanted to put in are no longer worth it with the length this review is getting so I'm gonna talk about the last 2 party members in the story that are interesting enough to warrant it and then move on.
And I'm also just gonna group these together, it kind of fits anyway considering who they are.
Olivier and Kloe are probably the only other party members to really get any development and character to them.
Olivier is a traveller from the neighboring empire of Erebonia with which Liberl was in a war with in the past. Pretty early on it's shown that there's clearly more to him going on than he lets on but as displayed to the main party he's an easygoing over the top wandering bard with a playboy streak. Olivier is fucking hilarious. Especially with the evolution voice acting mod every single moment Olivier is on screen is an absolute joy to watch. Trails in the Sky without him would not be even close to as fun and I really mean that I fucking love this gremlin of a man. Easily my favourite character outside of the main 2.
Kloe meanwhile is pretty much on the complete opposite side of the coin. She's secretly the princess of the kingdom and she's very polite and reserved. She probably gets the most character growth in this game of any character outside of our protagonists and although it's a completely different vibe to Olivier I really enjoy the time you get to spend with her as well. It's cute and comfy and you really do get a feeling that she and Estelle become really close friends through their time together.
Ultimately FC is a game that I enjoyed but it could have been much better than it ended up being. A lot of its systems sadly fall too short and a majority of its characters don't get the time they need. It's a fine introduction to the series and there's a lot to like but I wouldn't by any means call it a great game. There's nothing incredibly wrong with it but there's nothing amazing either, it's just barely above being a completely mid experience.