Following the Trails: Where to Start with the Trails Series
The 7th July release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie marks the 10th game in the Trails series (as I’ll be referring to it – the “Legend of Heroes” part is a holdover from a largely unrelated series by the same developer, Nihon Falcom) to come to the West, and comes at something of a high point for the series’ popularity in this part of the world. The last 12 months have also seen the long-awaited localisation of fan-favourite duology Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, based on a fan translation that was itself years in the making, as well as a limited anime series filling a gap in the games’ timeline. It’s a welcome change for a series that’s been largely overlooked outside of east Asia.
Trails fans tend to be evangelical in their praise for the series, and it’s not hard to see why. As internally complex as Kingdom Hearts or Metal Gear Solid (albeit less esoteric than either), with a uniquely rich setting developed across a couple of decades’ worth of games, it’s a series that starts slow, but draws the player inexorably deeper with its charming characters and gradually revealed depth of worldbuilding. So let me indulge in my own evangelism here, and tell you why you should really give this series a go, if you haven’t already.
As already suggested, the series has had a bumpy road to popularity outside of east Asia. The first game in the series, Trails in the Sky, came west until 2011, seven years after its initial release in Japan, while its direct sequel, Trails in the Sky SC, wasn’t localised until 2015, due to the absurd size of its script (significantly longer, in English, than War and Peace). Given that Sky ends on a cliffhanger, the delay did little to help retain fans who were intrigued by the first game – I myself went almost five years between first playing Sky, around the time of its 2014 Steam release, and finishing Sky SC. The later Trails of Cold Steel games fared rather better, each of the four being localised into English within about two years of its Japanese release, though some fans lamented the lack of crucial context from Zero and Azure, which came in between the Sky and Cold Steel games both chronologically and in release order, and which themselves would take over a decade to officially come west.
This lack of context is particularly unfortunate given that the Trails games are closely interrelated. They can be divided up into three distinct arcs, which differ in protagonists and setting, but whose stories tend to feed into each other. So, for instance, the upcoming Trails into Reverie acts as an epilogue to the four Cold Steel games (otherwise known as the Erebonia arc), as well as the Crossbell arc (comprising Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure), featuring characters from both prominently, while also introducing elements that will feed into the future of the series. This means that the games are best experienced in chronological order, to catch references to past events and track characters through changing circumstances, though Falcom have made attempts to onboard new players with the relatively blank slate of Trails of Cold Steel and (the currently Japan-only) Kuro no Kiseki. Yet even in Cold Steel, a playable character from the Sky games is one of the major movers of the plot, while references abound to the contemporaneous events of Zero and Azure, especially through in-game newspapers and NPC dialogue.
These are mere details, of course, but that doesn’t make them unimportant. “Detail” might well be the word that best describes Trails’s story and worldbuilding, both at the macro and micro levels. In terms of the former, the nations of Trails are better defined than in any other series of games I’ve ever played, in terms of their economic imperatives, their political leadership, their histories, even their infrastructure. Probably the best example is Crossbell, setting for Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure and a secondary location in the Cold Steel tetralogy, an economic powerhouse claimed by two militarised superpowers, whose political structure is a hopeless compromise between nominal independence and the interference of those major powers. It’s a rich, nuanced tapestry that plays into the lives of the characters in any number of ways, as both protagonists and antagonists prove to be either taking advantage of the deadlock or attempting to break through it. This is a game series in which an international trade conference proves to be one of the most exciting and tense set pieces of the game in which it features – and not just because it’s under threat by terrorists, but because we understand the stakes of the talks that are taking place there for the people outside.
On the micro level, then, there’s the NPCs – not just major players in the plot, but random people standing around in towns, whether they be shopkeepers or just civilians going about their lives. For the most part, these people get names, personalities, and even their own mini stories which play out, sometimes over multiple games – reuniting with their estranged families, finding success in their chosen career, pursuing love across the continent. They’re believable, and often entertaining, and a great resource for the attentive player. Most of all, though, they make the world feel more real. No matter what earth-shattering events are taking place outside their door, they’re just living their own lives, trying to get by as best they can. Just like people do.
So it’s clear that the writing is good, but what about, you know, the gameplay? The games to date have followed a similar, fairly traditional if solid JRPG pattern of quests – both mandatory and optional – dungeons, and field encounters, along with the requisite ton of stats and customisation. Among all of this, what stands out most as most unique is the combat. It’s a turn-based grid system in which the order of combat is decided based on characters’ speed stat and their most recent action – so movement allows a character to act again sooner than an attack. There’s a lot of tactical thinking involved in positioning characters on the grid, and making the most of the turn order, which gives bonuses (guaranteed critical hit, HP recovery et al) on certain turns.
There are also magic and special attacks (amusingly named “arts” and “crafts” respectively) which have their own effects – arts are often powerful, but take time to cast, while crafts have a variety of effects and can often hit multiple enemies at once, but cost points from an extra gauge. Build up enough of these points and you can unleash a particularly powerful craft at any time, even interrupting an enemy turn. It’s a simple enough system, though it gets added to gradually over the course of the series, but it works well, and while you’ll settle on tactics that work well pretty quickly, the enemy variety is such that every mechanic will come in useful at some point.
One small caveat as far as availability goes: by far the best way to experience the series is to start with Trails in the Sky and keep going in (Japanese) release order, to experience the story in roughly chronological order. At present, though, the only current-gen console on which the three Sky games are playable is PC (the more recent games are available on pretty much everything). That said, if you wired up a potato with a CPU, it could probably run the Sky games, which were made for the PSP in the mid-2000s, so access to a PC with decent specs is by no means required, and all three are available on Steam for less than €30 each.
Getting into Trails is a substantial time commitment – even the shorter games generally take about 30-40 hours to complete, while the longer ones approach 100 hours, especially if you’re dedicated to exploring side content and optional quests. The reward, though, is one of the richest and most compelling stories in gaming. The first game in each arc can be a little slow for some players’ tastes, but that’s only because it’s laying a lot of groundwork – and once that groundwork starts to pay off, you get some extraordinarily moving and memorable scenes – separations and reunions, noble antagonists up against conflicted heroes, and storytelling on a truly massive scale which never loses sight of the ordinary people on the ground. There’s nothing else quite like Trails out there, and if for no reason other than that, you owe it to yourself to give it a go.
