One of the most stunning games ever made. If you are here considering whether to jump in (this game begins a ten-games-and-counting series), I only envy you. What a journey you're about to set out on.

Even if it's bound to be overshadowed by its successor, this game's gambit to drag JRPG mechanics and storylines wayyyy down to earth is so wildly successful you can forget how daring it is. Two teenagers head out on a hike around their tiny mountainous kingdom to look for their dad, who everyone agrees is probably fine. Your most significant obstacles (and, eventually, opportunities) come from people in authority dismissing you as two nobodies. Vast events seem to happen in deep background: a strange glance, an odd museum plaque, a worrying newspaper article. The actual plot is hidden from you until a rousing finale -- before then, you mostly help normal people.

And those people! This is Trails's primary selling point: every NPC has a name, a personality, a story, a bed, a family. Think Skyrim, except that every NPC's dialogue changes whenever you do a quest / time advances. It's not just a landscape full of people: it's people living in time, and over the course of the whole series, people living through major world-transforming events. The tenth game of the series opens with a group of villains explaining themselves by saying they "don't want to fall out of history." How silly, you think: Trails is all about how history includes everyone.

The music rips, and the combat - while quite unbalanced - is fun and includes everything turn-based combat should (visible and manipulatable turn order, autosaves before every fight, always-100% escape chance, ludicrous debuffs.) The dialogue is the most consistently witty and specific I've found in any JRPG save Paper Mario. The chibi toy-box style is cute as hell.

I basically have no complaints? The leveling system (think FF7) is finnicky and very trial-and-error, and Chapter 3 really slows down the narrative's pace when you want it to speed up. But that's Trails. The world is happening on its own time, with its own lives and logic. You're just doing your best to keep up.