This is the 4th in a series of reviews and like the games themselves are intended to be experienced in release order, or at least read the preface of the first one here.
Feel free to let me know if you think I missed anything!
Rejoice friends for the series is now good!
With the series leaving the Sky trilogy and entering into the Crossbell arc Falcom took the chance to shake things up quite a bit and for the better in all areas.
Trails from Zero is much more of a joy to play than the Sky games from the gameplay to the story and it really impressed me with how much better it is. I had some high hopes after playing the opening to this game and it didn't disappoint.
I have a few problems and nitpicks with the game however but I can get those out of the way here because honestly it's really not that much. I played the geofront version of the game as I wanted to just move onto Azure right after and because of that, the UI was a little big and unwieldy. I don't think this is a problem with the more recent english release however so nothing to worry about. The smaller cast of party members means some quartz don't have much use to them anymore, you don't have a situation like getting Tita and having a space quartz slot you have to fill. The main 4 party members are way too good, both in their writing quality and their gameplay that I felt there was no reason to and I didn't want to use the guest characters whenever they showed up, and finally, my last big issue is location variety. You get all of Crossbell State unlocked pretty early so that has you going back and forth from the same locations quite often.
But that's enough complaining. As implied, this game takes place in Crossbell State, an autonomous city state which both Erebonia and Calvard claim they own. This place is great, the state and especially the city feel so well realised and really feel like a home after a while. The smaller scope of the world means you really get a sense of all the NPCs living in crossbell and their lives. In Sky it was kind of a chore to talk to NPCs after every event and somebody in say Zeiss wouldn't really have much to say about the events of Rolent on the opposite end of the country. Here however everything is so much more tight knit and the events affect everybody just as much that even the less relevant NPCs can be fun to talk to.
The game looks great too, it may be just a PSP game but damn that system can go hard when it wants to. Sure it's absolutely aged but it's really perfected the art style that Trails in the Sky started and it doesn't look bad in the slightest. Not only are the visuals nicer to look at but the animations are more impressive too. Some of the crafts are incredibly impressive to look at, especially in the next game.
The soundtrack goes so hard. I liked the Sky games's OST too but I think Zero's is way better personally. Get Over the Barrier is an absolute banger of a battle theme. The Geofront slaps too hard for a tutorial dungeon and the cutscene and world themes don't disappoint either. It's certainly much more of a shounen anime OST but if that doesn't bother you then this game's soundtrack is amazing.
For a series widely known for its sweeping continuous story, this game's main storyline is surprisingly laidback. It's much more of a character focused narrative centered around a mafia investigation. The characters are so good however that I don't think sky ever stood a chance in comparison.
Lloyd is such a breath of fresh air. He's a trained detective coming back to crossbell after 3 years spent in Calvard and he starts this game off smarter than Estelle gets at the end of her arc. He's not entirely sure of himself but he steps up and gets the job done and he's a solid main character. Also I'm an absolute sucker for his cheesy speeches.
Randy is the playboy of the group, lover of ladies, alcohol and gambling. But he's by no means one note and is more of the dependable older brother of the group. His relevance shines more in Azure but he still comes up often as he has ties to Garcia Rossi, one of the leaders of the mafia in Crossbell.
Ellie sadly, is probably the least relevant of the group, she doesn't really have much to add to the main events of the game after chapter 2. That said she's still a valuable part of the team and her interactions with the rest of the SSS make her not a wasted character by any means.
And Tio is the smart one, she works the terminal and takes care of any time the group needs something done with computers. She also is the designated animal talker so she comes up whenever the group needs to talk to Zeit, their police dog of sorts. Her backstory also heavily ties her to the main antagonists of the second half of the narrative. Finally she also gets most of the funny lines so Tio's great overall.
There's a lot of other characters who are great like Sergei, Dudley, Rixia and a lot of the smaller NPCs around town even but if I talked about them all we'd be here forever. There's also KeA but I'd rather save talking about KeA for Azure.
Something else of note is, Ouroboros is almost entirelly absent for this whole game. They obviously have their hands in events that are transpiring but their absence really lets Lloyd and the SSS breathe and grow without being held down by the big overwhelming plot in the background right away.
The gameplay is almost unimaginably better than Sky's on every level you can think of. First of all, the balancing is great. At the very least on nightmare I encountered not a single time I felt the game was unfair outside of one bonus DP objective early on. I'm pretty sure these are considered the easiest Trails games and, yeah, I can see it. But I would absolutely recommend anybody to play these ones on Nightmare. The difficulty felt absolutely perfect to me.
There's no longer any one single best strategy to spam. Crafts feel amazing and arts haven't lost their usefulness either. Crafts may be a little bit too strong in this game but they're by no means overwhelmingly more powerful.
The new combo crafts are beautiful. It's a fitting new addition for this game where the narrative is much more focused on these 4 and their growth as a newfound family with each other. They feel good to use and have their own use case next to the traditional S-crafts and they're one of my favourite new additions.
The new orbment, the Enigma is pretty much the same as the one from Sky SC, having 7 slots and each slot can be upgraded. However quartz has had a complete rebalance. A few of the new placements of old quartz are a little strange but as a whole this is absolutely a welcome change as previously you had some elements being far better than others and the distribution of some were heavily skewed. For example Mind quartz is now no longer water but is instead a sorely needed mirage quartz, Impede is no longer wind but time, you get the idea. In addition most arts have been completely replaced, or just moved around or changed. The La Tear series of artss are gone and replaced with the Breath series, now being a wind art instead. Clock Up is replaced with Chrono Drive and is AoE, and pretty much every single offensive art has been changed. All arts have now been seperated into categories now too making it much easier to get to and find what you want.
The overworld now has a field attack option. you no longer have the regular 3 advantage states. You can now also hit an enemy to briefly hold them in place or you can hit them from behind to stun them and provide a larger amount of advantage, giving your team several turns of crits and/or a team rush, essentially a free round of basic attacks for your entire party in one turn. This system makes overworld encounters much less of a chore than it was in Sky and I found myself enjoying the combat as a whole because of it. On top of the other improvements too of course.
The biggest barrier (haha) to this game is honestly the requirement to play Sky beforehand to get the full experience out of it. Otherwise I would absolutely recommend this game to any JRPG fan out there it was a blast to play and I loved it.
Feel free to let me know if you think I missed anything!
Rejoice friends for the series is now good!
With the series leaving the Sky trilogy and entering into the Crossbell arc Falcom took the chance to shake things up quite a bit and for the better in all areas.
Trails from Zero is much more of a joy to play than the Sky games from the gameplay to the story and it really impressed me with how much better it is. I had some high hopes after playing the opening to this game and it didn't disappoint.
I have a few problems and nitpicks with the game however but I can get those out of the way here because honestly it's really not that much. I played the geofront version of the game as I wanted to just move onto Azure right after and because of that, the UI was a little big and unwieldy. I don't think this is a problem with the more recent english release however so nothing to worry about. The smaller cast of party members means some quartz don't have much use to them anymore, you don't have a situation like getting Tita and having a space quartz slot you have to fill. The main 4 party members are way too good, both in their writing quality and their gameplay that I felt there was no reason to and I didn't want to use the guest characters whenever they showed up, and finally, my last big issue is location variety. You get all of Crossbell State unlocked pretty early so that has you going back and forth from the same locations quite often.
But that's enough complaining. As implied, this game takes place in Crossbell State, an autonomous city state which both Erebonia and Calvard claim they own. This place is great, the state and especially the city feel so well realised and really feel like a home after a while. The smaller scope of the world means you really get a sense of all the NPCs living in crossbell and their lives. In Sky it was kind of a chore to talk to NPCs after every event and somebody in say Zeiss wouldn't really have much to say about the events of Rolent on the opposite end of the country. Here however everything is so much more tight knit and the events affect everybody just as much that even the less relevant NPCs can be fun to talk to.
The game looks great too, it may be just a PSP game but damn that system can go hard when it wants to. Sure it's absolutely aged but it's really perfected the art style that Trails in the Sky started and it doesn't look bad in the slightest. Not only are the visuals nicer to look at but the animations are more impressive too. Some of the crafts are incredibly impressive to look at, especially in the next game.
The soundtrack goes so hard. I liked the Sky games's OST too but I think Zero's is way better personally. Get Over the Barrier is an absolute banger of a battle theme. The Geofront slaps too hard for a tutorial dungeon and the cutscene and world themes don't disappoint either. It's certainly much more of a shounen anime OST but if that doesn't bother you then this game's soundtrack is amazing.
For a series widely known for its sweeping continuous story, this game's main storyline is surprisingly laidback. It's much more of a character focused narrative centered around a mafia investigation. The characters are so good however that I don't think sky ever stood a chance in comparison.
Lloyd is such a breath of fresh air. He's a trained detective coming back to crossbell after 3 years spent in Calvard and he starts this game off smarter than Estelle gets at the end of her arc. He's not entirely sure of himself but he steps up and gets the job done and he's a solid main character. Also I'm an absolute sucker for his cheesy speeches.
Randy is the playboy of the group, lover of ladies, alcohol and gambling. But he's by no means one note and is more of the dependable older brother of the group. His relevance shines more in Azure but he still comes up often as he has ties to Garcia Rossi, one of the leaders of the mafia in Crossbell.
Ellie sadly, is probably the least relevant of the group, she doesn't really have much to add to the main events of the game after chapter 2. That said she's still a valuable part of the team and her interactions with the rest of the SSS make her not a wasted character by any means.
And Tio is the smart one, she works the terminal and takes care of any time the group needs something done with computers. She also is the designated animal talker so she comes up whenever the group needs to talk to Zeit, their police dog of sorts. Her backstory also heavily ties her to the main antagonists of the second half of the narrative. Finally she also gets most of the funny lines so Tio's great overall.
There's a lot of other characters who are great like Sergei, Dudley, Rixia and a lot of the smaller NPCs around town even but if I talked about them all we'd be here forever. There's also KeA but I'd rather save talking about KeA for Azure.
Something else of note is, Ouroboros is almost entirelly absent for this whole game. They obviously have their hands in events that are transpiring but their absence really lets Lloyd and the SSS breathe and grow without being held down by the big overwhelming plot in the background right away.
The gameplay is almost unimaginably better than Sky's on every level you can think of. First of all, the balancing is great. At the very least on nightmare I encountered not a single time I felt the game was unfair outside of one bonus DP objective early on. I'm pretty sure these are considered the easiest Trails games and, yeah, I can see it. But I would absolutely recommend anybody to play these ones on Nightmare. The difficulty felt absolutely perfect to me.
There's no longer any one single best strategy to spam. Crafts feel amazing and arts haven't lost their usefulness either. Crafts may be a little bit too strong in this game but they're by no means overwhelmingly more powerful.
The new combo crafts are beautiful. It's a fitting new addition for this game where the narrative is much more focused on these 4 and their growth as a newfound family with each other. They feel good to use and have their own use case next to the traditional S-crafts and they're one of my favourite new additions.
The new orbment, the Enigma is pretty much the same as the one from Sky SC, having 7 slots and each slot can be upgraded. However quartz has had a complete rebalance. A few of the new placements of old quartz are a little strange but as a whole this is absolutely a welcome change as previously you had some elements being far better than others and the distribution of some were heavily skewed. For example Mind quartz is now no longer water but is instead a sorely needed mirage quartz, Impede is no longer wind but time, you get the idea. In addition most arts have been completely replaced, or just moved around or changed. The La Tear series of artss are gone and replaced with the Breath series, now being a wind art instead. Clock Up is replaced with Chrono Drive and is AoE, and pretty much every single offensive art has been changed. All arts have now been seperated into categories now too making it much easier to get to and find what you want.
The overworld now has a field attack option. you no longer have the regular 3 advantage states. You can now also hit an enemy to briefly hold them in place or you can hit them from behind to stun them and provide a larger amount of advantage, giving your team several turns of crits and/or a team rush, essentially a free round of basic attacks for your entire party in one turn. This system makes overworld encounters much less of a chore than it was in Sky and I found myself enjoying the combat as a whole because of it. On top of the other improvements too of course.
The biggest barrier (haha) to this game is honestly the requirement to play Sky beforehand to get the full experience out of it. Otherwise I would absolutely recommend this game to any JRPG fan out there it was a blast to play and I loved it.