Here’s my Trails Post/ Explanation of thoughts. LIGHT SPOILERS. IDK WHERE THE LINE IS THOUGH.
I’ll be working through these explanations in order.
But since this is a frickin short novel, I’ll put this up top
TL;DR
Trails of Azure - Loved this game, the best RPG I’ve ever played. No notes.
Trails in the Sky SC - Great game. Love so much of what happens here, just remove the bad/criminal (outside of Alabama) romance stuff and you have a timeless classic.
Trails from Zero- Love the characters and set up here, putting everything in place for Azure, it’s almost impossible to consider those two separately.
Sky 3- It’s more experimental, and I dug it.
Sky 1- Great game, with a slow start. It earns it, but I can see why people drop off.
Cold Steel 2 - The best game we got with the Erebonian cast, still a cut under everything else.
Cold Steel 3 - Great new characters, but the constant undercutting of tension from the antagonist’s dialogue kills the game.
Cold Steel 4 - Too damn long. The romance options are a waste of time at this point and kill all the female character’s moments and agency and gets downright creepy at points.
Cold Steel 1 - This game is a chore. High School sucks. The characters are boring.
Atop everything.
These feel like mini reviews for each game, but I’m really trying to give where I stand on each one, and what I felt stood out. What’s telling is that so much of what makes up video games is so strong across this series that even the weakest entry to me is a game a cut above many others, but the peaks of this series I consider some of the best in this genre and medium.
The music is always incredible, it’s Nihon Flacom. So are the character designs even if they are all SO VERY ANIME.
The combat in this series is my favorite from any JRPG. There are differences and it feels pretty stark to compare Sky FC to Cold Steel Four, but really it’s pretty darn consistent throughout and the tweaks and changes are welcome but I wouldn’t really put one over another. In this department, beyond being the oddball that kind of preferred the Orbal system of Sky FC.
Trails in the Sky FC
This is a good introduction, but the flaw is obvious and Falcom overcorrected for it moving forward. The start of this game is painfully slow. Literally sitting you down in school and asking you to care about the definitions of septih, septerion, the political borders, what a bracer is, etc. It’s an interesting idea to contrast how you learn about things in school and how they should be applied as you move through the world. But I vividly remember getting to my first monster with no tutorial and thinking, THANK YOU FINALLY. I jumped through the first few towns and honestly put the game down for a while until I picked it back up.
What brought me back though was the characters, the combat, and the silly messages in the treasure boxes. Honestly, Oliver and Zin might be among the best JRPG characters of all time, but for me, Agate was the guy who really kept me going. I also really appreciated that Estelle was not some cookie-cutter protagonist, but really kept things moving. I know she got cheesy as did Joshua, but it felt earnest and earned, and the scale of most of the game felt right. These bracers learning the land are dealing with criminals and monsters that beset it. It’s hard, you get why the average farmer couldn’t just go womp these things.
The random quests really made it feel that as Bracers you were helping out. The politics of having for hire cops though was considered to ensure that things were above board and used for Justice, a big deal, and really fleshed out so much of the world. From a gameplay perspective, they also had you traveling, solving puzzles, and keeping things varied and fun.
Then at the end of the game…
|| When Liberal is under siege it feels so massive. It really feels like a full-on war, and the scale is beyond what you can handle. I’ve never really seen this pulled off in a video game before. So when you’re given your mission to help the emotional pull was unlike anything else I’ve played. You’re not fighting for the political ideal of the country, but because you just helped citizens across every town of the land and spent hours with them, and now you can’t let them fall to invaders. This is YOUR HOME. Then that cliffhanger…? I’ve never booted up another video game so fast. ||
Trails in the Sky SC
After the first game, having things slow down at the start is needed, but at the same time, I remember moving through and thinking, this is not a new game, this is a true sequel. Honestly, it made me love this one more. Everything, literally everything I learned and experienced in the last game made this one richer. The sorts of details I normally let roll off me, especially in a JRPG like the town’s people’s motivations or little in-town details I found myself wishing I had paid more attention to. With the sheer attention to detail and care for the characters, EVERY character felt like a subversion of the genre as I knew it. I never got very into RPG games because there was so much focus on stories that felt disposable with tropes and cookie-cutter characters, but here, sure Trails is ANIME as it gets, but no other story from any medium had grabbed me like this.
The only thing that pulled me out of the game was the romance stuff. The incest, the age-inappropriate stuff, they work hard to sell it, but BIG YIKES. In both cases, it’s so pointless and so easily avoided.
Also in contrast to where things are going, I’d point to the fact that the BIG BAD in this game is dealt with but is never codled, nor do our heroes try to sway him to just be better, if anything Estelle chides him for having all that power and influence and being a jerk. Honestly, her sense of ‘right’ and ‘justice’ kind of came off as just being the main protagonist kind of thing early on, by the end of this game with all the corruption and pain and other aspects of male bravado she stuck out as a necessary female character in all of the best ways. This makes Sky relevant so many years later even as the series seems to want to leave this trilogy behind at this point.
Trails in the Sky the Third
No game has ever set itself up as a black sheep quite like this one. It’s a weird game that told a series of character moments outside of a larger narrative (sans Kevin and Ries) and I just love it.
I get why some people like it less, but honestly, this game takes some risks and cuts out SO MUCH FAT. It’s the shortest game on this list, and honestly, it does SO MUCH to add to not only the past two games but seed ideas and connections moving forward, it actually does more to earn character interactions than later ones.
But the movement through what amounts to an elongated spooky hallway with doors, unlocking a new character every few feet is VERY videogamey. But the peeks into character motivations and seeing how this world operates when not in a crisis really does a lot for me. I loved that this game is basically a way to flesh out smaller (and predominantly older) characters.
You do get to play with everyone, which really highlights how much of a cast you had. I’ve played games like Chrono Cross before where you could use tons of characters, but ultimately most of them barely mattered to the story. Here every combination evoked different feelings or thoughts on how they’d interact.
It is a touch odd that this game focuses on Kevin who’s never really seen again outside of a short cameo.
Trails from Zero/Azure
I feel like I should note I’ve only played the Geofront translations, and haven’t played the official versions yet.
Coming off of Sky, I was curious to see how this would work. Honestly, I was surprised how little prior characters were used even when you add them all up there are quite a few in this game, they often only really interact for a brief bit of dialogue. This game overcame a huge hurdle by letting this be the SSS’s game while also truly tying it to our prior series. The times you see Estelle and Joshua were exciting and elevated the game, never feeling like a crutch.
The flash forward opening for Zero seemed like a waste, but the drop you in opening of Azure worked well for me.
I love Crossbell. People often talk about environments being lived in and whatnot to varying degrees. For my money, Crossbell is up there with the Yakuza games in this aspect. If I could visit any video game city, this would be the one, and that does a lot to keep me invested.
Then, there’s Lloyd. After Estelle Lloyd could have come off as pretty boring, and in some ways he does. But he’s a bit of vanilla against so many other flavors that it’s hard to not love him a bit more here. As the platonic ideal of a cop he should be easy to hate, but this game pulls hard when the SSS are at odds with the Crossbell police and investigating police corruption, this game got real. If more cops were like Lloyd ACAB wouldn’t be a thing. But having the SSS, regular cops, railway police the Military, and the Brancers all there made me think about security and justice in an interesting way. By just representing all these factions and giving them characters and not cutouts to represent them along with simply cutouts at times, I feel like this game said so much more about how these ideas intersect by simply exploring systems and how they almost need to come into conflict with each other. Especially when we see those systems affect transportation, food availability, mining, ect. Narratively this is a height I simply haven’t seen in any other video game, and seen plenty of movies, shows, comics ect, try to do and fall short on. It really is something else.
The Arios fight is the hardest damn fight in this series and beating that was rough. Maybe the only fight where it feels like you should have more of an edge or an out.
But this pull in the narrative to earn a paragon and why we need them is how a story that overcomes the “Superman syndrome” goes from good to great. Also Randy is just a fun character, Elie was the boring one to me, and Tio grew on me. The Wazy/Wald gang rivalry really pulled me in as well.
I romanced Wazy, the simple fact that you can, is a huge win over the others in the series.
Some might think of this as a negative, but I genuinely think even trying to evaluate or consider these two games separately is a mistake. More than Sky one and two, or anything in Cold Steel this is one game with an intermission.
Quick note
Also as a note, moving forward the chests no longer have funny side comments. We move from isometric to polygons which is a downgrade IMO. Isometric lets your mind fill in for a lot of details and the world will naturally feel more fleshed out, and in a game where 8 NPCs are placed to represent a small town this feels more in line. Also, things in combat are inferred and can be displayed faster. There’s no way around it, the turbo button helps these games along, but Cold Steel would be unplayable without the feature. The move to polygons really does just highlight the details that are missing, and waste more of the player’s time.
Cold Steel 1
This game is a fucking chore. I genuinely don’t understand how people hold it up or enter the series on this game. If this was my entry point I would have never played another one of these games. I H A T E, HATE, hate all the high school bullshit. WHICH IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME.
After such an interesting exploration of justice and use of force in our society, we’re now just playing in a MILITARY SCHOOL where our cookie cutter protag, Mr. Everything Happens to Me and I have no driving force of my own (Rean) is our guy. After Lloyd and Estelle, honestly, inexcusable. By the time we get to Cold Steel 4 Rean is a bit more excusable, but here in one? He’s literally the most boring character of the franchise. I can’t hate him, I just wish I could have played as anyone else. He does the JRPG thing of talking to people for sidequests. But this is a terrible decision. After Estelle does so because as a Bracer that’s literally her dayjob that she trained to do, and thus feels like she’s helping others. Lloyd does this because the police have a bad rep ( mostly for the money siphoning, and murders you find out) but the SSS are there to model after the bracers and help out, and as such you work with the Bracers in Crossbell and start some friendly rivalries, and again know that you’re helping people. Rean? Even the writing of the other students gives Rean meaningless things to do because they’re sorry for him but don’t want his boring self around so they give him little things to keep him busy. I’ve never felt like I was wasting my life more with these games. Simply painful.
The fact that Class VII is molded after the bracer guild makes so much sense. Everything around you is too weirdly militaristic, but the writing doesn’t really hone down on that it just kind of how things are in Erabonia I guess?
Then IDK the rest of the cast is just here. Fie has a personality, and was my favorite other than Sara, the big booby teacher lady. The forced lame romance they push with Alisa didn’t work at all she was never a romance option for me. Emma sure was… there. Laura was great after beefing with Fie that worked for me. Machias is the worst. I don’t understand how they can have an everyman be made at nobles and the way it was written I’m left sitting here thinking, no I get it Jusis IS just a better person than you in every conceivable way Machias. Oh and Gias was there too. Elliot is such an oddball in this crowd it’s hard not to like him a bit. Crow’s inevitable betrayal sure was… inevitable. They did an interesting switch by making Millium so annoying that her ||eventual murder by the ol’ Blood and Iron made him more sympathetic to me, because I’d want to shut her up too.||
The game is ugly, and the big conclusion feels so out of left field I genuinely don’t understand how they landed on it unless someone was writing the sequel already and they shoehorned it in.
This game also barely feels connected to the rest, there’s a few things that show it, but it’s nowhere near as deftly handled as the Crossbell games.
Cold Steel 2
The Civil War. WHAT an improvement over the previous game. It’s a shame that Class 7 wasn’t more split. The high school stuff is much more toned down. Going around and helping people, actually feels helpful. Every character becomes far more interesting through the course of this game as well.
The ending really robs a lot of the rest of the game of its gravitas. || Osborne having orchestrated the whole thing just to vie for power and succeeding unopposed and ADMITTED THIS TO SEVERAL GROUPS AT ONCE and it still working feels insane. Like the machinations of Erobnia are so thin this sort of thing was waiting to happen, and the royalty are all feckless dullards without any pride or wit to justify their rule of the land. Also, the last little chapter is big for the plot but doesn’t make a ton of sense character-wise. Why is Rean just going along with it, and why does Lloy respect Rean despite what he did? They should be enemies for at least a little bit. ||
I chose the Laura Romance option, (as I always do in Cold Steel) in the game it felt like a CRIME when it was forgotten for the next. Making these choices and having them wisped away when every other character interaction is so important really brings Cold Steel down to new lows.
Cold Steel 3
The setup is better, but it is a high school. Doing random things as an Instructor makes more sense than in 1, but is still a step back from every other game. The new cast is tighter and I like all of them (eventually, especially for Altina) more than everyone in the last cast. Though the previous cast as side characters here really does help the game move along.
The flash forward intro, simply wastes your time, annoying because the slow start and build would have been more of a shock if we didn’t know it was coming, quite like that.
The inclusion of Randy and Tita do connect this game in a big way to the others, and while feeling a bit forced worked overall to bring a larger context to the game.
It’s simply impossible to ignore that the Crossbell section of the game feels tighter and more compelling than most of the rest of the game. The town is simply laid out better and the sights and flavor is more memorable. I still get confused about some podunk towns in Erobonia for eachother because it’s just a place with an inn and a few shops, and a bunch of forgettable nobodies. They make a point to have Bareahard be expansive and a pain to navigate, yet Crosbell pretty much has everything, but in a more compace that can actually be navigated. I get they want the ‘old money’ feel of Erobonia to feel like Rome and be big and expansive, but it just feels like dead space you need to traverse or fast-travel through.
Acting like Crow with a mask on was a mystery was a weird choice for this game. I’d dock more points for it if they didn’t mock this themselves in four.
Once we get into the last third of this game, the writing drops off.
The endless fighting these ‘big’ battles that don’t even matter because you win, it turns out the opponent was stronger than you, and you rush ahead while someone else takes up the fight becomes unbearable. All the emoting before every fight with this happening is just saccharine to a fault. There’s been things like this in the series before, but it was a breaking point here and moving forward for me. Too many blood enemies causing war and chaos, supposedly trying to kill you talking about how far you’ve come, and being chummy with you just robbed the end of this game of any excitement.
Cold Steel 4
The opening was like dessert for having played all the games thus far, that worked well!
Juna stole this game, they should have kept her as the protagonist.
For just shoving so many characters in not having Wazy and Kevin felt weird since it would have been so easy to just have them pilot Merkabahs at one point and just leave it there.
|| Given the stakes as presented when you get to all the characters meeting, it’s odd that most of the old casts step aside and say Class 7 this is your bag, deal with it. It’s literally the fate of the world here, You’d think this is the time to have everyone jump in and help. ||
So much of this game has the boss problem I talked about before. The tension is basically dead in this game. Nobody is taking the fighting seriously, they’re just sparring to see who can one-up each other. Also, combat against say the cryptids early in the game is hard, by the time you get to the end of the game, there isn’t any really challenge left. This is the first game where I felt that.
The Hammel section || was weird. This is the only time we get Ash’s connection to Joshua to play out and Rean is stepping in. Just a waste. It felt so tacked on and I wish they would have just saved this to be explored in a later game. Also, the whole section where you go to finish side quests should have just split the relevant cast to where they needed to go and have you play through. The fact you don’t go to Liberl at all in this game atop that felt REALLY WEIRD since you go everywhere else. Let us see Liberl again! ||
This damn game is just too long. It wastes so much time and drags. So much could be edited out to make it stronger overall. Especially the robot fights in this game, they are SO SLOW, speed that shit up!
The romance part of this game also feels like a waste and the writing for all the options proves it. Clearly, Rean has been with SOMEONE before at this point, but the game can’t know who. Then because so much of the game is dedicated to the romance options, only for Rean it hampers all the character development for LITERALLY EVERY FEMALE CHARACTER, and why isn’t Crow an option? There’s no good option anymore the game refusing to remember what happened previously here and building to what you choose through the entire game just is at odds. Also, why are ANY of the students of Rean an option? They make a big moral point about how he can’t do anything anyway until later if you were to try, so don’t. Leave it off the table and let those girls have their own moments and romances. How much better would it have been if there were even only three or four options and everyone else paired off, and you saw it happening around you?
Apart from that Rean… || never is given any damn agency or choice. He was pushed to everything and is just following the plot. He doesn’t make decisions in this world, the world wraps around him. It’s just bad writing and at this point, it’s old hat. Even him being considered a master of the Eight Leaves just randomly happens in this game. Why now? He didn’t even do any special training, what happened? Oh well, new Ultra move I guess, yay. In four games Rean has NEVER been as interesting, and for a chapter, Juna was leading and was more interesting. Why do we spend so much time with this boring character?|||
Why does all the romance happen at Mishland? Doesn’t Erbonia have ANYWHERE romantic on its own?
|| Of the lame duck boss battles McBurn really left me cold. After building him up across GAMES, he just walks away at the end because, of nothing he’ll actually tell you? At this point, I stopped caring but was determined to finish the game because how could I not?||
Then the ‘true ending’ thing is BS. The nontrue ending is just a fake out not a dire possibility. Just let people finish the series even if they skipped finding some idiot’s pocketwatch earlier and didn’t complete EVERY QUEST. The final boss had an interesting mechanic that I wish I had used earlier. Having a fight on multiple fronts and having to share certain resources, and affect one field mattering to another is really interesting and there was a lot to be explored here.
That’s my thoughts… for now.