I’m not going slow, am I? It has been so long since I’ve played a JRPG that I have completely forgotten how these games are paced. When I was making this thread I actually thought it had taken me 17 hours but I was mistakenly reading the time of day of my save file instead of play time at completion of the game’s Prologue, which was actually 9 hours and 40 minutes. I would say that 70% of my playtime has been spent running around the village talking to every NPC again between every single plot event, looking for new dialogue.
There is a lot of NPC dialogue in this game! It does a good job of keeping the town from feeling stale and the fact that your characters actually converse back to them makes things very lively but it takes a lot of time if you want to see that kind of stuff. But honestly so far the game probably fits into the comfort food area of games. The battle system is a little neat but it’s a '90s JRPG through and through with its writing and characterization; nothing particular stands out about it so far aside from the quantity of extraneous dialogue. I had always heard how amazing the narrative is but the internet is known to exaggerate at times; should I temper my expectations?
This particular trilogy is designed to be an extremely slow burn! They are primarily interested in world building and character establishment. They could be thought of like a series of books, but neither the narrative or the writing is exactly literary quality. The battle system is not very interesting either, it operates at a level just enough to keep the brain activated.
It is a series with a lot of fans because of that slow burn, because some people like that world building and these characters, and because there are some people who would play a JRPG even if it were just towns! Some people adore the Suikoden games, even though the battles are dead simple and can mostly be auto-attacked through. I am one of them! If you are someone who can enjoy the construction of a Suikoden or a Grandia without feeling like you are wasting your time, you might like to play more of this game. That is the standard it is attempting to achieve, and no higher. It’s not going to open up or change on you! It’s happy to simply pick it’s own pace and remain steady.
Oh for sure, I’m still sticking with it and I’m enjoying it simply for the fact that I haven’t played something like this in a long time. I had bought it way back when and now that Trails of Cold Steel 1 arrived on my doorstep I figured maybe I should get around to playing Sky past the tutorial. It’s just a really interesting pacing for a game. 10 hours in I’ve only walked around one village and some outlying fields, chilled around town, and did some menial labor. I literally have no idea what the game is about yet.
I can appreciate it as giving you time to get acquainted with the finer details of the world and people but it’s hard to tell how original the game actually is despite how long I’ve played it. Since my perspective has been restricted to the sterotypical humble opening RPG village the setting appears to be a typical sci-fi fantasy world you’ve seen dozens of times in other JRPGs and there’s yet to be a hint of it going elsewhere. I’m not sure how well this game would have stood out in the heyday of PSX JRPGs. Intimately getting to know the world is one thing but if the payoff is getting to know the same characters or settings you’ve seen dozens of times before I’m not sure whether that one particular kink is as good of a differentiating quality as it could be.
Might have convinced me to pick this game up, I’ve been pretty disappointed this year with the slew of RPG’s that have no interest in world-building or developing characters (X, Legend of Legacy, Monster Hunter, etc.) and I would love to chill out with something and take my time listening to cool music and hanging out with NPC’s.
I’m not sure whose been feeding you all this bad info. Monster Hunter has never been about story and is rarely classified as an RPG and Legend of Legacy is spiritually a SaGa game so one shouldn’t expect much character development in there either. Xenoblade X is understandable, although in my experience I had read beforehand that it’s essentially an offline MMO which removed any expectations I had for its writing.
Trails in the Sky probably rates higher on the hangoutitude scale although I feel like the sense of scale is a little small. For how big the map looks traversing from landmark A to landmark B is typically a trivial amount of seconds.
@Red0 Is the love life of Mr. Rinon, the general store merchant in Rolent, a continuing side plot? Does his mother scour the globe looking for the perfect wife for him? Do any of these small NPCs have their lives developed over the course of the game?
I am still sorting out my feelings on Trails in the Sky. I have complained about the game a lot on Discord (boy do they know), mostly about how the game rarely transcends typical JRPG tropes and writing, but in the end I still don’t feel any regret for playing it all and I don’t think “JRPG comfort food” is good enough of an excuse. But The Trails franchise as a whole is a crazily ambitious concept and I wonder if Falcom believes they will actually “complete” it. If they were to develop more entries at their current rate- which of course is impossible because this industry will change so much so quickly- it would probably take another 15 years for the Trails franchise to complete what it’s trying to do. But it’s great that there is a company that has the focus to attempt something like this.
The Trails series is essentially writing a long story about seven magical artifacts over the course of god knows many games. Trails in the Sky introduces and revolves around one of them but neither the artifacts nor the bad guys after the artifact are explained in Trails in the Sky 1-2. You’d assume they would then be explained in the third and final Trails in the Sky game but that’s not the case. At the end of the day you still don’t know who the bad guys are, what they’re trying to do, or what these artifacts are (you do at least learn some general details about the one artifact most important to those games though).
And it’s not like these two things are just an under-current to the actual story that you can notice but ignore so Trails in the Sky has to create enough stakes in other plot threads that do resolve to make up for the fact that the games aren’t going to resolve the larger plot threads. I think it does an admirable enough job navigating that challenge. But both the artifacts and same bad guy are important again in the second arc of Trails games (two games long). They aren’t resolved here either. Now the Trails franchise is in its third story arc (three games so far) and these two plots are back for the third time and they probably still aren’t resolved.
Following this trend and some inference from the lore, there should be seven countries housing seven artifacts and if each country gets its own arc of two to three games then that means this over-arching story about this bad guy and these artifacts could take 8-12 more full length RPGs to tell. Maybe more if Falcom decides to do some sort of eighth “conclusion arc”.
All the time that could be spent explaining the “gotta save the world” plot are instead spent on establishing the culture and politics of the countries each arc takes place in, which informs the plot about the artifacts that eventually develops in each arc. Once all of this world building eventually comes to a head the series will have built a fairly large but developed setting to play around in. Another interesting tidbit is that the third arc of games takes place concurrently to the second arc and intersects with its story, letting you see what’s happening on the either side of the second arc’s plot. That’s kind of a neat idea.
yeah i played like 8 hours of the first one of these on a plane and i found it really really limp. horrifically slow, nothingy combat, and all the same writing that’s in every one of these c-list jrpgs. i’ve read some stuff about the series as a whole that makes it sound interesting, but my god, on a moment-to-moment (and hour-to-hour) basis that first game, at least, is really insufferable
Yeah, those are both accurate sentiments I’d say. A lot of people say the games start slow but, really, I feel like that’s just the games’ pace all the way through. You leisurely solve a small problem in one town, a problem that requires much investment from the characters, and then walk to the next and do the same there. The personalities of the characters or locations never transcend the character archetypes they are immediately introduced as. There are a ton NPCs with individual names and small plot (and sometimes your characters even have back and forth conversations with them) but the writing is so bland and boring. I admire the amount of time Falcom spent writing for the game but barely any of it is interesting. It’s a typical JRPG through and through.
I’d the say the one thing it does better than other games might be making the locations feel like they exist alongside each other rather than just being single points on a map. There’s a lot of discussion on each towns’ roles within the country and how they interact with each other and the game exhibits that culture in each town with their layouts and the things NPCs discuss. And I suppose something could be said for a game making you feel the distance between locations in the world with the trails (hurr hurr) you have to travel to get from one place to another… That is nice, although it’s a small consolation when the towns are still pretty boring, run-of-the-mill JRPG towns. You’ve got your fishing town, your rural town, your market town, your capital town, and your science town.
But I still completed them and am now 35 hours in Cold Steel 1! Maybe they are just comfort food for me since I haven’t played a JRPG in like a decade. Cold Steel still retains the nice parts of the world building- creating relationships between towns and its people- but it is supremely modern anime. Maybe The Legend of Heroes is one of those series where each arc is representative of the anime/JRPGs of that era (I never played the pre-Trails games). At least the characters have some motivations and histories this time.
I really like the concept of multiple storylines that develop in parallel as you progress in your adventure, and the over arching plot that takes several games to go anywhere. I’m really intrigued about this game, and would like to see what it has to offer.
It’s a bit disappointing to hear that the writing is that bland all the way through (what’s the point of creating such a rich world if it’s not an enjoyable world to be in?). I also find the graphics pretty ugly, with the muted grey-brown backgrounds and the ugly prerendered sprites. It all add up to something I’d probably get very disappointed about.
Are there any other RPGs that attempt a similar model of worldbuilding?
Classic Fallout or Wasteland 2 perhaps? Anything else?
So I’ve been playing through these.
Trails in the Sky 1-3, Zero, and finishing Azure.
Cold Steel will be next.
I’m head over heels for these games. I love the writing, the concepts, the battle systems, the weird continuity, there’s so so much here that I wish more games would bother with.
I’ll admit getting past the psudo incest and a couple other relationships was… difficult through.
I love the ornament system! It really lets you make each character do what you want to do, and if you’re struggling, you can just gear someone to exploit a weakness, then mold them back. It’s BEAUTIFUL.
playing through all 4 cold steel games will test your devotion, good luck! (i’m still very much looking forward to the now two new kiseki’s they’ve gotta bring over)
