This review contains spoilers
three and a half corny speeches out of five
it's trails. a weird series whose style and philosophy of character and plot writing fundamentally disagrees with me, a series so frequently unbearably dorky that i find myself rolling my eyes playing it so often that some day i think i'll sprain an eye muscle and go blind. are eye muscles a thing? can you sprain them? that's no doubt one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. no, no, stop googling it; i'm on a personal quest to find out!
because i also can't stop playing these frigging games. despite my seething but ice cold hatred for the cold steel sub-series, i've played 1-3 from beginning to end, and i've restarted 4 multiple times--that's like, a 400-hour-old baby's worth of gaming hours! a big, fat, ugly baby, who just can't decide what it wants. i've also played the first two sky games multiple times, despite finding the main duo pretty annoying (i have nothing bad to say about sky the 3rd--that boy good). they are such a unique beast in the world of japanese rpgs that i very well can't just ignore them, can't not play them, and if that means i'll have to occasionally rant about them and my issues with them online, to a no doubt thoroughly captivated audience...
whhops, doing it again. moving on!
i was excited to finally jump into the officially localized crossbell games, as i've played them before with the (very rough) fan translations and found myself having a genuinely really good time--they are, as far as i'm concerned, easily peak trails, both in the good ways and in the... no, actually, peak trails in just the good ways.
the central cast is nice, tight and balanced. lloyd is a bit of a dweeb, but he gets teased for it adequately, so i can't hate on him too much. the other three are great, with randy probably being the highlight for me--despite his thorougly tired and unfunny womanizing shtick, he gets the best moments in the game in my opinion. the supporting cast is varied and colorful too--there's a lot to love there. but everyone gets plenty of screentime and good scenes and lines and moments.
the plot is.. well, it's good. it's a really slow burn, and in all honesty, i did end up dropping the game for a while after the first couple chapters cause i was just so bored with it. but, in all fairness, i did come in with the wrong expectations--i was just thinking about azure and how exciting that game gets, that i forgot that the first half of the duology is there to lay a TON of groundwork. and it definitely gets more exciting later on! i was actually surprised how self-contained zero really was, i totally remembered there being at least one very end game plot twist to hook you, but it seems i was wrong.
ultimately more or less the only bits i did not care for were any when the sky characters popped up--i frankly do not give a single shit about estelle or joshua or renne. mercifully those were fairly minor in the end. neither was i a huge fan of tio's backstory and how it was handled in the present narrative, but relegating the actually dark (and in this case, very dark) bits of the human existence to the background and then either basically just sweeping that stuff under the rug or even resolving it in the most unsincere, saccharine (relatively) feeling way in the narrative is nothing new to trails and is, in fact, one of my biggest frustrations with the series. heavy flashes of this with randy too, actually. the dude murdering hundreds or thousands of people in the battlefield over the course of 15 years, starting when he was literally four years old (according to him), is handled like it was just a neat bit of added flavor to this character, he's just a cool guy with some secret depths, a bit of darkness to him, but hey, who amongst us isn't like this? you just talk it through and it's all good. very relatable.
the combat is really good, it's fun, it's snappy, it feels good to mess around with the timeline mechanic (i forgot how strong the speed buff and debuff were in this), it offers just the right amount of variety in combat and outside of it to feel like you have plenty of options at your disposal, but without feeling like any mechanic is superfluous or encumbering or just worthless. it's like the sky games but with interesting accessory and quartz itemization, or like the cold steel games without the ridiculous systems and cast bloat.
i have found the official localization to be a bit of a mixed bag, however, to my disappointment. it's fairly breezy and casual most of the time, but on the occasion it pulls out the absolutely clunkiest possible lines that sound like they were just straight up machine-translated, like nothing a real person would ever say, not even tio, the lil' robot girl herself. those really stick out. i hope azure is better on this front. though, in fairness to nisa, this has also seemed like a staple of the series to me, even under xseed, so maybe it's mostly due to the source text.
all in all, i had a really good time thoroughly steeping myself in the slow and meticulous worldbuilding and politics of crossbell, the big and the small side quests, the npcs and their daily lives, the interesting character progression and the engagingly simple but varied combat. i'm more than ready for the shit to hit the fan in azure.
it's trails. a weird series whose style and philosophy of character and plot writing fundamentally disagrees with me, a series so frequently unbearably dorky that i find myself rolling my eyes playing it so often that some day i think i'll sprain an eye muscle and go blind. are eye muscles a thing? can you sprain them? that's no doubt one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. no, no, stop googling it; i'm on a personal quest to find out!
because i also can't stop playing these frigging games. despite my seething but ice cold hatred for the cold steel sub-series, i've played 1-3 from beginning to end, and i've restarted 4 multiple times--that's like, a 400-hour-old baby's worth of gaming hours! a big, fat, ugly baby, who just can't decide what it wants. i've also played the first two sky games multiple times, despite finding the main duo pretty annoying (i have nothing bad to say about sky the 3rd--that boy good). they are such a unique beast in the world of japanese rpgs that i very well can't just ignore them, can't not play them, and if that means i'll have to occasionally rant about them and my issues with them online, to a no doubt thoroughly captivated audience...
whhops, doing it again. moving on!
i was excited to finally jump into the officially localized crossbell games, as i've played them before with the (very rough) fan translations and found myself having a genuinely really good time--they are, as far as i'm concerned, easily peak trails, both in the good ways and in the... no, actually, peak trails in just the good ways.
the central cast is nice, tight and balanced. lloyd is a bit of a dweeb, but he gets teased for it adequately, so i can't hate on him too much. the other three are great, with randy probably being the highlight for me--despite his thorougly tired and unfunny womanizing shtick, he gets the best moments in the game in my opinion. the supporting cast is varied and colorful too--there's a lot to love there. but everyone gets plenty of screentime and good scenes and lines and moments.
the plot is.. well, it's good. it's a really slow burn, and in all honesty, i did end up dropping the game for a while after the first couple chapters cause i was just so bored with it. but, in all fairness, i did come in with the wrong expectations--i was just thinking about azure and how exciting that game gets, that i forgot that the first half of the duology is there to lay a TON of groundwork. and it definitely gets more exciting later on! i was actually surprised how self-contained zero really was, i totally remembered there being at least one very end game plot twist to hook you, but it seems i was wrong.
ultimately more or less the only bits i did not care for were any when the sky characters popped up--i frankly do not give a single shit about estelle or joshua or renne. mercifully those were fairly minor in the end. neither was i a huge fan of tio's backstory and how it was handled in the present narrative, but relegating the actually dark (and in this case, very dark) bits of the human existence to the background and then either basically just sweeping that stuff under the rug or even resolving it in the most unsincere, saccharine (relatively) feeling way in the narrative is nothing new to trails and is, in fact, one of my biggest frustrations with the series. heavy flashes of this with randy too, actually. the dude murdering hundreds or thousands of people in the battlefield over the course of 15 years, starting when he was literally four years old (according to him), is handled like it was just a neat bit of added flavor to this character, he's just a cool guy with some secret depths, a bit of darkness to him, but hey, who amongst us isn't like this? you just talk it through and it's all good. very relatable.
the combat is really good, it's fun, it's snappy, it feels good to mess around with the timeline mechanic (i forgot how strong the speed buff and debuff were in this), it offers just the right amount of variety in combat and outside of it to feel like you have plenty of options at your disposal, but without feeling like any mechanic is superfluous or encumbering or just worthless. it's like the sky games but with interesting accessory and quartz itemization, or like the cold steel games without the ridiculous systems and cast bloat.
i have found the official localization to be a bit of a mixed bag, however, to my disappointment. it's fairly breezy and casual most of the time, but on the occasion it pulls out the absolutely clunkiest possible lines that sound like they were just straight up machine-translated, like nothing a real person would ever say, not even tio, the lil' robot girl herself. those really stick out. i hope azure is better on this front. though, in fairness to nisa, this has also seemed like a staple of the series to me, even under xseed, so maybe it's mostly due to the source text.
all in all, i had a really good time thoroughly steeping myself in the slow and meticulous worldbuilding and politics of crossbell, the big and the small side quests, the npcs and their daily lives, the interesting character progression and the engagingly simple but varied combat. i'm more than ready for the shit to hit the fan in azure.