Ever since I’ve started playing games from Nihon Falcom, I’ve heard the Trails in the Sky subseries of their The Legend of Heroes franchise brought up a lot as an example of a truly amazing story-driven game with amazing character development, deep world lore and really good narrative. And since the official international PC re-release of the first game 5 years ago the talks about these games grew even harder to ignore. So I’ve finally decided to give all of the 3 games a go.
There are 2 things common in all of the 3 games in the Trails in the Sky series that might turn you off. In fact, these are the reason I personally haven’t played these games until now. So let me get them out of the way.
Unlike a lot of Falcom titles you might be familiar with, these games aren’t quick-paced action RPGs, and instead are more traditional turn-based jRPGs. They borrow heavily from a lot of systems previously found in different jRPG franchises and build something that, I’m sure, will be exciting to learn for those who like involved battle systems. The fights aren’t “random” – you do see enemy sprites on the map, – but touching them sends you into the battle mode that is different from the exploration mode. There you have familiar for a lot of games in the genre “active time battle” concepts of turns, that aren’t 100% turn-based, but rather take into account stats and possibilities to knock the enemy/player character turn down or perform special actions out of your turn. The battle field itself can be traversed and enemies/characters must be in range to actually hit each other, meaning that some attacks and skills can move the targets away. Turns themselves have some special effects tied to them, no matter what character actually lands in that turn slot – these can be free heals, higher critical chance and such. And there are several kinds of attacks, including what works as “magic” in the series and special skills, all of which use their own stats and gauges.
And the best/worst thing about it, depending on what you like, is that if you’re playing on Normal difficulty, you must use all of this smartly otherwise any completely random encounter on the map has a pretty solid chance of wiping you out. Even on Easy quite a lot of fights are considerably more involved than most of the jRPGs that I personally prefer more, where unless it’s a boss fight or a special encounter, spamming attack is usually a good way to play. So if you’re like me, start on Easy or you’ll regret it. Though, of course, difficulty isn’t the only potential issue here.
Second big thing about this trilogy is that a lot of it is slooooooow. All of these games currently have a turbo button to speed most of the game up and I’ve had it pressed down probably 85% of the time, because apart from some good slow moments, the game just takes too long to get to the point in any cutscene that doesn’t feature just dialogue. Slow dramatic camera pans, repeat actions shown with no skipping them and yes, the battles. Yes, you can avoid a lot of them. No, you shouldn’t because, again, due to the difficulty of the game that will lead to you being under-leveled. Oh and the size of the world you traverse is huge, which does sell how “alive” it feels, but, again, even with the running speed being fast feels slow.
The start of the series, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (also known as Trails in the Sky FC), is also quite a bit slow, to say the least. The first two chapters, which can take you 15 hours to complete if not more, feel extremely boring and unrewarding. You have two young teens, just joining the ranks of Bracers – the international neutral non-military operated guild of people protecting civilians from monsters and doing more simplistic contracts of finding things and even helping with some chores. And those first 15 hours play in a most predictable way you can imagine, with rather one-dimensional character moments, some predictable comic relief characters and adventures you’d expect to find in any type of media aimed at young adults. There are hints at something far more interesting, but it’s not until the closing act of Chapter 2 that you suddenly get a huge change in narration density and genuinely amazing moments start happening. Characters begin to grow and develop, a lot of interesting nuances start to pop up, with complex political intrigue, secret plots (yet restrained and grounded in reality) and even those who seemed simple and primitive before suddenly show other aspects of their character and become interesting.
It’s at that moment the series actually kick off and you start realizing why they got so much praise. World and character building finally pays off… Even if I’d argue, that it could’ve been set up with twice less time or quicker and would’ve been better for it. And Trails in the Sky shows its true colours as a really deep, exciting, intricate in detail and wonderfully narrated game that touches upon a lot of topics and traverses a lot of genres, even if it’s very much an “adventure” at heart. Unfortunately, gameplay-wise, it occasionally starts to falter at the same time, introducing terrible dungeons with no minimap and in the end commits the biggest mistake it could do and introduces a really dumb over the top supernatural explanation to some of the story elements that could’ve worked perfectly fine remaining in the realm of politics and technology. Luckily, it’s not enough to taint the wonderful and quite self-sufficient story, even if the setup for the second game made me a bit anxious.
Playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC without playing the first game is extremely not recommended. It might not be the only game to pick up literally hours after the end of the previous title, but without the development, the emotional attachment to people and places I’m afraid that a lot of moments would fall flat on anyone deciding to start with the most cherished title in the trilogy. I’m surprised at how the story manages to build on its strongest elements from the original and continue evolving them without missing a beat. There’s even more genuinely fantastic character growth, well expanded world story with even more actually fun political situations to explore and intrigues to unravel and on top of that it manages to add the more familiar to Ys elements of ancient technologies almost without ruining the consistency of the world. Almost. Unfortunately, that terrible reveal at the end of the first game continues to haunt the game story.
You see, technically the main villains of this game are over the top, ridiculous, unnecessary and looking like they were ripped straight out of fucking Hellsing shady secret evil organization people. Which manages to be even more jarring and stupid than the whole “Darklings” situation in Ys, simply because of how well developed and not needing any kind of over the top evil villainy the world and the storyline of Trails on the Sky is. Because of that, it manages to undermine some of the good plot points and ruin some good moments in the game in addition to being just… I mean, you could easily swap them with anything much better suited with the world of the game and the story would’ve worked as well (or more likely – better). Yet, even with this unnecessary stupidity, the amazing narration and the beautiful and moving plot full of memorable characters shines through and does indeed make Trails in the Sky SC one of the absolute best examples of storytelling in games I’ve seen.
After finishing the first two games you might wonder – there’s also The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd, so what’s that about? Well… you know how there’s a joke about several sequels and a kart racing game about some franchises? I wish the 3rd was actually kart racing. This game is the second time ever I’ve stopped playing a Falcom game at about mid-point (maybe further) because I just couldn’t bother continuing playing this garbage. First off – this is a dungeon crawler game. That’s right, this is almost exclusively that battle system that you will either like and buy this game to get more of it, or hate and will cry at the thought of an entire game being just about it. It’s all about the battles that are now almost unavoidable since enemies rush at you immediately, but if you’d manage to skip them you’d be severely under-leveled, so grinding it is.
Secondly – this is… A side-story/Epilogue? I guess? It focuses on one of the most boring (and Hellsing-ish) characters from SC, on the most boring and over the top plot elements that were the worst of the narrative, and then invents convoluted ways to invite All Stars from previous games to give them some sort of “what’s been happening with them”. Worst part about it isn’t even that some of those are locked behind mini-games or other dumb unnecessary stuff, or that they’re sometimes just exclusively several dozen minutes of cutscenes, or that they’re often boring and unnecessary. The worst part is that some of them manage to actually make a lot of things dumber and “wish they wouldn’t have told it”. After spending a game and a half on specifically avoiding tropes and one-dimensionality, this is just “characters being wacky” or “characters having really dark over the top horrible moments” lazily written and lazily told. This feels like that kind of game that would end on a “but it was all a dream”, but as far as I know it doesn’t. And I wish it did.
So playing this “trilogy”, which as you might guess is more like a duology with a weird bs game to avoid, was quite interesting. It reminded me of other good stories in books and movies and games. I often drew parallels with some of the BioWare projects, to the point where I wondered if some of the best character development narrative tricks were in these games because the developers played Baldur’s Gate and KOTOR, while some in later BioWare games were there because they played these games. First two games, that can really be played as a completely finished and wonderful standalone experience, are definitely some of the best examples of storytelling executed in games I’ve seen, despite some of their flaws. But at the same time, I cannot avoid saying just how drained the whole experience was on me due to the battle system and the overall unnecessary slowness of the game. With the 3rd game being so terrible and seeming desire to focus more on the worst parts of the world story, I doubt I will check Trails of Cold Steel or any of the currently Japanese-only spin-off titles. But I’m most definitely glad that I’ve finally decided to play Trails in the Sky FC and SC.
P.S. Oh and of course the games have great music – they’re Falcom games after all.