A good, if slow experience, that mainly serves as a prologue for the real meat and potatoes of the story, being the sequel.
Original Score Before Backloggd Rounding: 7/10 (Good)
For context, I've been a big fan of the Ys series for a quite some time, but have been putting off the Trails/Kiseki series, as I knew it required a lot of commitment, and I just didn't really have it in me, you know? After nearly two full years of trial and error, I have finally finished this first chapter, and I can safely say it has been a solid experience, and one which I can easily see becoming a great foundation for further entries to stand upon.
First off, to get them out of the way; the negatives. And there is a few of them. I'd been warned by several people that Trails games start off slowly, even compared to other JRPGs, and hoo boy, they weren't 'kiddin. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky essentially feels like a 40 hour prologue. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you have a lot of time to spare (I am often not one of those people or lucky enough to be in this position, but made such time for it). If you find slow starts in your games hard to get through, you'll really struggle with this one. It’s one of the worst in that regard. There are also a couple of quality of life things missing that would make the game involve less guesswork, and some balancing problems with particular fights, but thanks to the Retry function that lowers the difficulty when you are defeated, its not unbearable. The characters are also fairly archetypal for the most part, but they're at least done well with the roles and traits they were given. Trigger warning for people who have a problem with adoptive sibling romantic relationships (the writing team does try its hardest to make this one as not weird as possible), you really won't like this game, and you especially won't like its follow up. If you're running through an area, enemies slowly phase into the physical world and you won't see them until you're already on top of them and initiating battle, so random encounters might as well be a thing, and it can get quite annoying and frustrating.
As for the good, there's a lot of that. Nihon Falcom does worldbuilding in their games better than studios ten times their size with a hundred times the budget, and this legacy can be traced all the way back to the original Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes and its sequel. It's very text heavy (so if you like visual novels, bingo) but the writing is solid enough that it's fun to sit through, especially for some of the more comedic scenes and for the political intrigue scenarios. The combat itself is rather fun, and features a great degree of customisation via the Orbment system. It doesn't evolve much throughout the course of the game, but it was good enough to hold my interest for the game’s relatively short runtime, at least. I really enjoyed how most of the game is based around only a couple of permanent party members, supplemented by a rotating door of temporary characters. It doesn’t feel like any given character isn’t given enough time to get their stuff in either, and obviously further development will continue in the sequels. This trait keeps the game interesting and ever evolving, and at least for this entry, it does't feel like there's any character bloating. Every character feels interesting and has a role to play, even if sometimes they veer into cliché. The story as well, is well written, and features thought out political intrigue angles, which as a writer myself I know is not at all easy to pull off. Politics are complicated and writing them in an entertaining, but still rational way, is a tough ordeal, and one not always successfully executed.
Overall, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is, I would say, a must try for any RPG fan, and definitely a classic, if a flawed one. It's left me wanting more, and oh boy, is there more, and that's all I could have really asked for.
Original Score Before Backloggd Rounding: 7/10 (Good)
For context, I've been a big fan of the Ys series for a quite some time, but have been putting off the Trails/Kiseki series, as I knew it required a lot of commitment, and I just didn't really have it in me, you know? After nearly two full years of trial and error, I have finally finished this first chapter, and I can safely say it has been a solid experience, and one which I can easily see becoming a great foundation for further entries to stand upon.
First off, to get them out of the way; the negatives. And there is a few of them. I'd been warned by several people that Trails games start off slowly, even compared to other JRPGs, and hoo boy, they weren't 'kiddin. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky essentially feels like a 40 hour prologue. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you have a lot of time to spare (I am often not one of those people or lucky enough to be in this position, but made such time for it). If you find slow starts in your games hard to get through, you'll really struggle with this one. It’s one of the worst in that regard. There are also a couple of quality of life things missing that would make the game involve less guesswork, and some balancing problems with particular fights, but thanks to the Retry function that lowers the difficulty when you are defeated, its not unbearable. The characters are also fairly archetypal for the most part, but they're at least done well with the roles and traits they were given. Trigger warning for people who have a problem with adoptive sibling romantic relationships (the writing team does try its hardest to make this one as not weird as possible), you really won't like this game, and you especially won't like its follow up. If you're running through an area, enemies slowly phase into the physical world and you won't see them until you're already on top of them and initiating battle, so random encounters might as well be a thing, and it can get quite annoying and frustrating.
As for the good, there's a lot of that. Nihon Falcom does worldbuilding in their games better than studios ten times their size with a hundred times the budget, and this legacy can be traced all the way back to the original Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes and its sequel. It's very text heavy (so if you like visual novels, bingo) but the writing is solid enough that it's fun to sit through, especially for some of the more comedic scenes and for the political intrigue scenarios. The combat itself is rather fun, and features a great degree of customisation via the Orbment system. It doesn't evolve much throughout the course of the game, but it was good enough to hold my interest for the game’s relatively short runtime, at least. I really enjoyed how most of the game is based around only a couple of permanent party members, supplemented by a rotating door of temporary characters. It doesn’t feel like any given character isn’t given enough time to get their stuff in either, and obviously further development will continue in the sequels. This trait keeps the game interesting and ever evolving, and at least for this entry, it does't feel like there's any character bloating. Every character feels interesting and has a role to play, even if sometimes they veer into cliché. The story as well, is well written, and features thought out political intrigue angles, which as a writer myself I know is not at all easy to pull off. Politics are complicated and writing them in an entertaining, but still rational way, is a tough ordeal, and one not always successfully executed.
Overall, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is, I would say, a must try for any RPG fan, and definitely a classic, if a flawed one. It's left me wanting more, and oh boy, is there more, and that's all I could have really asked for.