The Legend of Heroes: Trails series

 

So, once upon a time, when the Sony PSP was still a thing, I heard about this game called The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.  It was said to be an amazing JRPG experience, unlike nothing you had ever played before.  So, I bought it for myself for my birthday back in 2011.  Which was 7 years AFTER it originally released in Japan.  Something that would become a running theme with this series, stretching on even to now in present day.

Anyway, I played a few hours of it, and got bored fast.  The game is extremely long winded, placing far more emphasis on telling a very involved, character driven story through dialog than on gameplay, and I was more looking for a game that was a bit more action-y and a little less talk-y at the time.  So, I set it aside, and promptly forgot about it.

Then somewhere around 2017, I’d been hearing about this Trails of Cold Steel series that was supposed to be really good, and I figured, eh, why not, I’ll give it a try.  I played a few hours.  Got bored for the exact same reasons I did with Trails in the Sky, and promptly forgot about it.

I’m not sure why I decided to give the game a second chance a year or so later, but I did.  I went into it knowing what kind of game it was.  That it has a lot of story to tell, and it prioritizes that above all else, including gameplay.  That its story is almost entirely told through dialog scenes, which can stretch out to be pretty hefty in length.  And that when the game finally does let you play it, the gameplay sections are often further broken up by more dialog scenes.  I decided that I was going to just sit down and play it, and try not to expect the game to be anything more than it is.

And this time I fell into a very well told story about a pretty well developed and entertaining cast of characters in a world that is extremely well built, with believable history and interesting mythology, which both play deeply into the story.  It’s a story about a bunch of school kids traveling around an empire that’s on the brink of civil war, and basically seeing for themselves all of the tensions that have risen up between different factions of nobility and common people.  It’s really well played out.  They never actually say, hey, look, we’re about to fall into civil war.  The writers just show you all of the things that are creating tension, while your naïve school kid characters are pretty well clueless to the ramifications, so when the civil war they’ve been seeing signs of throughout the whole game actually does break out at the end, they’re taken completely by surprise.  And it doesn’t come off as them being stupid, it feels more like they’re just young and naïve, and never thought something like that could possibly happen in their peaceful empire. 

And near the end, I realized, hey, wait, is this a sequel to Trails in the Sky, that game I never finished from way back when?  So, I looked it up, and yes.  Yes, it is.  This sent me spiraling down a rabbit hole from which there was no return, into a video game series that is unlike any other that I have ever played.  So, hey.  Let me tell you all about it, and try to sell it to you, because it really is a great series.  If you can get past the way it tells its story.

The first game ends on a pretty hefty cliffhanger, so, obviously I immediately started the second game.  The third game had come out sometime during my playthrough of the first one, so I grabbed that one as soon as I finished the second.  And then I had to wait until 2020 for the fourth and final game in the Trails of Cold Steel series.

Once I finished those four games, I realized that I was missing a whole lot.  There are a lot of things that get referenced, a lot of characters from previous games that show up and I had no idea who they were, and a bunch of lore that they expect you to remember from previous games.  Upon a little research I found that there were three Trails in the Sky games, followed by two more taking place in another part of the world called Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure.  That’s five games of content I’d missed that give a pretty hefty backbone to the Trails of Cold Steel series.  So, I decided to head back and play through each and every one of them.

My PSP does not work anymore.  So.  I discovered that the Trails in the Sky trilogy were all released on Steam, and I went and picked them all up.  They were all pretty cheap, like $20 each.  This is pretty much the only place you can realistically play these games in present day.  The first two games were released on PSP and PS Vita, but Those are pretty old handhelds and were never really all that popular to begin with.

Then I ran into a bit of a roadblock.  Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure have yet to be officially released in English.  Zero comes out in September of this year (2022) and Azure has an unspecified 2023 release date.  BUT, I found that there are fan translation patches that you can get.  So I bought the Japanese PC versions from a site that the fan translators linked me to, and installed their English patches onto them and was able to play them as well. Unfortunately, as soon as an official English version of these two games was announced the fan translators took down their translation patches to encourage people to buy the official English releases when they come out (which I will definitely be doing to support the series and tell the developers that there is interest in these games over here on this side of the world).  So, you will either have to wait for these games, or *ahem* sail the high seas, if you know what I mean.

There are also three more games that take place after Trails of Cold Steel called Trails into Reverie and Trails into Darkness 1&2.  Reverie has an unspecified 2023 English release, and the Darkness games have no English releases as of yet.

Anyway, what are these games all about?  There are four main story arcs in this series at present.  The Sky arc, the Crossbell arc, the Cold Steel/Reverie arc, and the Darkness arc.  All of these arcs take place in the same world.  The events of each of them impact games later in the overall series, and characters from previous arcs often show up in later ones.  It’s one huge interconnected world and story and it is unlike any other game series I’ve ever seen.  Its like one huge 12 game long story.  And as of this writing, the developers say that they’re only 60% of the way through the full story they intend to tell, so this will be going on for years and possibly decades to come. Just the enormity of this connected world and story with all these dozens of characters that show up in all of the different parts of the narrative is kind of mind boggling.  You see stuff like this in big epic fantasy book series, but you really don’t see it in video games, which makes this series pretty unique.

So, lets start at the beginning.  It’s a pretty good place to start.  The Sky arc consists of three games.  Trails in the Sky, Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, and Trails in the Sky the Third.  The first game is available for PSP in English.  The first two are available as digital only downloads for PS vita in English.  And all three are available on Steam in English, and that is the only place where you can get the Englsih version of the third game.  The first two games are basically one game that was split into two because it became prohibitively huge for a PSP game.  And the third is kind of like an epilogue that focuses on another character, but all the characters from the first game do show up, it’s just not narratively focused on them.  It basically sets the way things are going to go throughout the arcs.  Same world, same characters, same events, just experienced by different characters, with old favorites showing up to help now and again.

Trails in the Sky – This game follows Estelle and Joshua Bright as they travel the Kingdom of Liberl, learning about the history of the nation and world, while meeting new friends, working their way up in the Bracer Guild, which is basically a guild for adventurers seeking to help people out, and unravel the mystery of the disappearance of their father.  At first, this game feels like a very generic JRPG, but as you play further, you begin to see hints of things much deeper than what you’re seeing on the surface, and as the characters and world gain depth, it becomes clear that this is far more than the generic game it looks to be on the surface.  Unfortunately, a lot of people never get past this game because it does come off as so generic.  Even I lost interest in it and set it aside for quite a few years before picking it back up and finishing it.

Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter –This is the second half of the story from the first game.  An evil, shadowy society is behind the disappearance of Estelle and Joshua’s father, and they’re seeking an ancient relic that caused the collapse of civilization 1200 years prior.  Estelle and Joshua team up with all their allies to stop them, and avert a war that their nation is sure to lose.

Trails in the Sky: The Third – This game follows a new main protagonist named Kevin Graham, a Knight of the Gralsritter (Grail Knights) serving the church.  The ancient artifact from the previous game is recovered, but when Kevin comes to collect it for safekeeping by the church, he and basically all of the characters from the first two games are sucked into a world crafted out of Kevin’s own guilt and suffering at the horrors of his life.  They must fight their way through literal hell to reach the personification of Kevin’s worst sin and defeat it, before it all collapses around them and they are lost into nothingness forever.

And then we move into the Crossbell Arc.  This arc takes place in a small citystate sandwiched between two far larger nations, which resemble the USA and the USSR during the cold war.  Crossbell serves as a sort of buffer between the two nations, where they can trade and spy on one another while pretending that they’re not trading with or spying on one another.  The Crossbell police have decided that they are going to form a new unit to mimic the Bracer Guild called the Special Support Section, and these games are the adventures of the SSS, as they fight their way through mysteries, rebellions, terrorist attacks, and the worsening political climate between their neighboring superpowers.  Zero releases at the end of September on Steam, PS4, and Switch, and Azure releases sometime first quarter 2023 on the same systems.  Or you can sail the high seas and snag the English fan patches, and install them onto the Japanese versions of the games if you can’t wait that long.

Trails from Zero – This game follows Lloyd Bannings, a newly minted police detective as he is assigned to the new Special Support Section of the Crossbell Police.  His goal in becoming a police officer is to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, who raised him, and to solve his brother’s murder.  So, being dumped into a new unit that is trying to steal the Bracer Guild’s thunder is not an ideal situation for him, but he and his fellow SSS members make the best of it, and find that even in doing simple, every day tasks for the people of Crossbell, they can make a difference that can steer the course of their nation.  I thought I was going to hate this game, because, on paper, it sounds pretty boring, but with all of the political intrigues going on, a very well put together mystery story about an evil cult quietly trying to take control of the city in the background, and the mystery of who killed Lloyd’s brother, the story is actually really good, and I think this arc has my favorite main cast of characters.

Trails from Azure – This game is one of the best of the series.  All of the political machinations of both superpowers, and of Crossbell’s leaders collide in hugely epic ways as the corrupt president of Crossbell uses mercenaries to stage terrorist attacks all over the city so that he can seize power, and uncover another ancient artifact that contributed to the downfall of civilization 1200 years ago.  It’s up to the SSS to stop him before the full might of the neighboring superpowers can be turned against them, and Crossbell is crushed between them.

Then we come to the Cold Steel/Reverie arc.  This one is probably my favorite of the overall series, mostly because the second two games have a lot of extremely epic payoffs for people who have played through all of the games.  Parts of Reverie are also pretty good, and it ties up a lot of loose ends while also acting as a bit of a prologue for the next story arc.  It centers around Thors Military Academy, Rean Schwarzer and his class at the academy, Class VII.  The first two games are two parts of the same story, and the second two games are two parts of the same story.  So there’s two stories with these characters with a year between them.  Rean is a student in Class VII in the first arc, and the teacher of Class VII with a new batch of characters in the second arc.  1&2 are available on Steam, PS Vita, PS3, and PS4.  3&4 are available on Steam, PS4, and Switch.  I imagine that Reverie will also be available on those systems as well when it’s released in English at the end of next year.

Trails of Cold Steel – This game is basically entirely setup.  I already explained above what it’s about.  Students going all over the empire to see the tensions building between the nobility and commoners, widespread terrorist attacks by people who want to change the status quo, and the outbreak of a civil war.  This game and Cold Steel II take place at the same time as the Crossbell arc, so there’s a lot of discussion about what is happening in Crossbell throughout the game.

Trails of Cold Steel II – This game is considerably better than the first.  After the outbreak of the Civil War, Class VII were scattered all over the empire.  Rean must reunite them, and all the other students from Thors and bring an end to the war by uncovering the truth behind its beginning, and the shadowy organization pulling the strings from behind the scenes.  This game is really great right up to the ending.  It ends.  It has a great ending.  It’s really epic, and emotional.  And then the game just keeps going for like another 15 hours.  It drags on, and on, and on, and ON before it finally meanders to a close, and it really kind of drags the whole rest of the game down with it.  This is also where you might start to suffer a lack of not having played any of the previous arcs in the series.

Trails of Cold Steel III – Rean has graduated, and taken a job as a teacher at the Thors Military Academy Branch Campus, mentoring a new batch of Class VII.  This game follows the same general format as Cold Steel 1, with the class heading to places all over the Empire to see how all of the political stuff fits together and how everyday places in the Empire are run.  This game, however, learned from Cold Steel 1, and instead of being entirely set up with little in the way of action, it ends off each chapter with a huge epic climax which really helps the pacing of the story.  The shadowy organization is at it again, causing mayhem everywhere Class VII goes, culminating in a showdown in the imperial capitol where the imperial Chancellor activates an ancient curse to brainwash the entire empire into following him in a war to conquer the entire world.

Trails of Cold Steel IV – Every single character from every game leading up to this point bands together with all of their resources to make a last ditch attack on the Chancellor during the opening battle of the world war, Punching through the battle and fighting through every single enemy that you have ever faced in the entire series (that are still alive at this point) to end the curse before it forces the entire world to fight until there is nothing left.  This is my absolute favorite game in the whole series.  It is a massive, epic payoff for all of the 8 games that came before it, and the only thing in media I can really equate it to is the last half of Avengers Endgame.

Trails into Reverie – This game has not yet released in English, and wont until the end of 2023.  I bought the Japanese version off of steam and installed this English patch: https://mega.nz/folder/FVQglRyZ#Ko2ORdPVz6MEXx_hx3aKFQ.  The entire story is translated, as well as most of the side content.  There are a few minigames and non story related NPC dialog that are still in Japanese, but it’s enough to get the story and the bulk of the side content finished.  This game follows Rean, Lloyd, and another character named Rufus, and all of their allies as they try to unravel a mystery who kidnapped the prince of the Empire, and fight back against a terrorist takeover of Crossbell.  It acts as kind of an epilogue to everything that came before, and a prologue to what’s coming next.  What really drags this game down is the Reverie Corridor.  It’s where all of the side content is in this game, and it really serves no narrative purpose in the game, except providing a place to level up.  Some of the side stories here are pretty good, but, on the whole, it felt like a waste of time to me, and it just bogged down an otherwise excellent story with a bunch of unnecessary fluff.

After that is the Trails into Darkness arc.  Or, at least, I would translate Kuro no Kiseki to Trails into Darkness, but who knows, they translated Hajimari no Kiseki to Trails into Reverie, where I would have translated it to Trails Toward a New Beginning.  Neither of the two current games have English release dates, and probably wont for some time to come.  The first game, Kuro no Kiseki has an English patch in progress that can be installed onto the Japanese version of the game off of Steam, and you can find it here: https://mega.nz/folder/AYthzT6C#CzegMJ8nUEDi3HhsqYd2Aw.  Personally, I’m giving it a few months for them to translate more of the side content before I play through this one, but I did already buy the Japanese version from Steam since it was on sale.  I’m excited to get into it, I just want the fan patch to be as complete as it’s going to be before I do.

 

And that’s the Legend of Heroes: Trails series in a freakishly large nutshell.  As each of these games can run from 50-120 hours in length, I think I did pretty well condensing them.  Also, something to note, is that these games are notorious for having very slow animations in both cutscenes and in gameplay.  Thankfully, the Steam versions of the sky arc, and all modern console versions of the rest of the games have a speed boost option that speeds the animations up to something more like a bit faster than normal speed for other games.

 

Here's my rankings for the series, with the games I haven’t played yet marked as 0s.  There are no bad games in this series, this is just my personal preferences on which games I liked more than others, but I liked all of them.

 

 

1.)     1.) Trails of Cold Steel IV

2.)     2.) Trails To Azure

3.)     3.) Trails of Cold Steel III

4.)     4.) Trails in the Sky the Third

5.)     5.) Trails in the Sky Second Chapter

6.)     6.) Trails of Cold Steel II

7.)     7.) Trails From Zero

8.)     8.) Trails Into Reverie

9.)     9.) Trails in the Sky

10 10.) Trails of Cold Steel

0.)   0.) Trails Into Darkness

0.)    0.) Trails Into Darkness II: Crimson Sin

 

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

So, probably my favorite current JRPG series is a tossup between The Legend of Heroes: Trails series, and the Xenoblade series.  And the 4th Xenoblade game just came out at the end of last month, conveniently titled Xenoblade Chronicles 3, just to make sure no one is confused.

Anyway, I've been following the Xeno series since its first entry, Xenogears, back in the late '90s, which went on to Xenosaga in the early 2000s, and then Xenoblade in the 2010s.  The gameplay and graphics haven't always been great, but the stories and the characters have been.  The series takes very complex philosophical and religious arguments, and applies then to everyday people, then lets you watch them suffer, grow, and eventually overcome.  It's always been a series that's not afraid to go very, very dark, and treat its players as adults, which is one of the things I absolutely love about it.  There are, of course, light hearted, comedic, and child friendly parts tossed in for levity, but the core stories and struggles of the characters has always been very dark, complex, and oftentimes hopeless, which makes moments of triumph hit a bit harder.

Anyway, my top videogames of all time list fluctuates pretty regularly as I play new games, or revisit old favorites, but nearly all of the Xeno games, especially the Xenoblade games, are usually near the top of that list, with the previous game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, holding the top spot since I first played it 5-6 years ago.  I absolutely LOVED that game, and nothing has come along since to knock it off the hill for me.  So, I was pretty excited for this new entry in the series.

Unfortunately, it had a very, very, very, very tough act to follow, and it really suffered from the comparison for me.  Xenoblade 3 is, by no means, a bad game.  It's actually an extremely good one, with a decent story, mostly great characters, a mind-blowingly HUGE world to explore, and great gameplay.  It's just not Xenoblade 2 good, and I found myself mildly disappointed by it.  Don't get me wrong.  It is a great game.  It's just not as good as the previous game in the series, and that had me constantly thinking, "the last one was better" throughout the entire game.

Okay, so, what it did better than previous games.  The character models are much, much better in this game.  Xenoblade 1 had blurry, pixelly characters.  Xenoblade 2, they didn't have a character designer on staff, so they went with the lowest bidder, who happened to be a porn artist, so all of the characters are scantily clad women with enormous boobs.  But here, the characters look great.  They have a sort of subdued, anime style that's more on the realistic, rather than stylized end of the spectrum of anime characters.  The world is bigger than that of Xenoblade 1, 2, and X combined.  The combat is the best the series has ever seen, including Saga and Gears.  The class system was a lot of fun to mix and match with.  Most of the characters are great, with really well fleshed out back stories, deep trauma from a life of neverending war, and hope for a better future.  The English voice acting is great.  And it is genuinely fun to play and explore.

There are a few things that I didn't really like about the game too.  First is the music.  The music in Xeno games has always been S tier amazing.  I own every single soundtrack from every previous game going all the way back to Gears.  The music in this game is really bland, mostly forgettable, and just kind of generic sounding.  There's one or two good tracks, but most of it just sort of blends into the background, rather than standing out.  Some of the characters are somewhat less well developed than others.  It's clear that the writers had their favorites.  Each character has their own side story that focuses just on them dealing with something from their past.  But, for one of your main party members, her side story isn't even about here.  She's just there as a background character in her own freaking story that's supposed to develop her character more fully.  The game has this enormous open world to explore THAT IT KEEPS BLOCKING YOU FROM FREELY EXPLORING.  I can't tell you how annoyed I was to constantly have my characters running into invisible walls out in the world with text boxes saying "Oh, we shouldn't go that way yet".  That was NEVER a thing in previous games.  The only thing that kept you from exploring was the level of the monsters in areas beyond where the story wants you to go.  It was annoying.  Frustrating.  And really made this huge world begging to be explored feel smaller and more cramped.  The boat controls leave much to be desired.  That stupid boat is so frustrating to try and steer.  The difficulty of this game is very low.  I rarely play games on hard mode, because I'm there to relax, not stress out more.  But this game is so easy that I actually cranked up the difficulty to hard because normal was so easy.  Heck, even hard was too easy near the end of the game once I'd hit the level cap (which is extremely easy to do well before hitting the end of the game) and loading out the best classes with the best abilities.  I praised the character models earlier, but I do have to take issue with the villain character models.  They were red and white armor with elaborate, often silly looking helmets, and they just look so out of place in the game.

One last thing that kind of held the game down for me was the villain.  Nowhere in this 100+ hour story is his motivation EVER given.  In fact, by the end, you still don't even know what it is he's even doing, how it helps him achieve his goals, or what those goals even are.  Like, how could you forget to put in what the villain is doing and why?  That's like basic level writing right there.  Because of this, a lot of aspects of the story and the worldbuilding just kind of flat out make no sense at the end.  You're never really told WHY any of this is all happening, and toward what end.  It's all just happening because reasons.  I did a lot of the side content in this game, and it's not even explained there, or if it is, it was in some obscure sidequest I never bothered to pick up and complete.  The end of the game is clearly meant to be an emotional gutpunch, but all I could think of was how confused I was by the villain's lack of motive, and it kind of ruined the impact for me.  In the end, there's just way too much mystery for the sake of being mysterious, and not enough resolution to go around.  Sure, some of this may be cleared up in the story expansion set to be released next summer, but that's a long time after the end of the game to wait to find out what the villain is even doing and why.

So, at the end of the day, it was a good game, but it wasn't a great one.  I liked it.  I had fun playing it.  I'll probably play through a new game + sometime in the vague future.  But there are other games in the series that are much better than this one.  In a series of god tier amazing games, a game that is just merely good kind of stands out in all the wrong ways.

My rankings for the Xenoblade series is:

1.) Xenoblade Chronicles 2

2.) Xenoblade Chronicles 1

3.) Xenoblade Chronicles 3

4.) Xenoblade Chronicles X

For the Xeno series as a whole:

1.) Xenoblade Chronicles 2

2.) Xenosaga 3

3.) Xenoblade Chronicles 1

4.) Xenosaga 2

5.) Xenogears

6.) Xenoblade Chronicles 3

7.) Xenosaga 1

8.) Xenoblade Chronicles X (sorry X, you're kind of the black sheep here)