I saw a link to Kotaku's fascinating story behind the localization of this game and its sequel, and decided to give it a look. I'm so surprised that this series hasn't hit my radar before, because I'm having such a blast.

I'm only around 20 hours in, but this game hits the nostalgia sweet spot for me. It's a great, sincere iteration of the PS1 RPGs I played in high school, but updated to be accommodating to my current grind-averse self. If I'm repeatedly failing a battle, I can automatically decrease the difficulty of the encounter (or not) and retry from the beginning. There are no random encounters. If I'm tired of fighting low-level enemies, I can enable skills to hide from them or show them on my minimap to run around them more easily.

In terms of story, you're basically a team of junior jedi who need to hop around the world solving local disputes in order to become senior jedi. World-threatening cataclysm may or may not interrupt. It's a classic JRPG popcorn story and I'm loving it.

So if you've heard some buzz about the game and are debating its $9.99 steam price tag, I think it's definitely worth it. And now, the sequel is also available on Steam.

Man I'm surprised I'm hearing to many people praise this game. I feel like I should check it out. Can you explain JRPG popcorn story? Sounds like you like it but that doesn't really seem like a compliment for a JRPG. How does the actual out of battle gameplay feel? Are you walking between towns and exploring shit?

The no random battle thing reminds me of Bravely Default. That had a slider where you could adjust the frequency of random encounters, even turn them off. It was really awesome when you just wanted to get somewhere quickly.

Regarding Trails in the sky. I bought it on steam, but never got very far in it. I guess I should get back to it since I've heard so much buzz around it.

It's kind of like a Tales game in that the plot is really just a direction to move toward and all the fun and enjoyment comes from character interactions and dialogue.

The battle system is kind of there. It's not bad by any means, but I wouldn't call it great. There's no overworld map, towns are mostly just a few screens apart.

Also be sure to check every treasure chest twice, because 100+ of them have unique text after they're emptied.

For months I saw nothing but praise for this game, but didn't think it was worth the money. What finally broke me was all the media surrounding the sequel (and the fact that the first game went on sale). I'm glad I got it! I've never been a huge JRPG guy, but like thatdudeguy said it's an excellent game in it's own right while also hitting the nostalgia notes from what JRPG games I do remember playing. The game systems and combat are solid (just complex enough to be interesting while avoiding being annoying), and the story seems to be well written and appears to span many, many hours (I've put in about 10 hours already and the game is telling me I'm still in the PROLOGUE).

It's a bit late, and I'm sure there's no end of people recommending it, but if you have any love for classic JRPG games then you'll probably enjoy Trails in the Sky. I'll probably end up getting the sequel whenever I manage to finish the first one.

@shaunk said:

Like @bocckob mentioned, I haven't hit anything too unique or new about the plot yet, but it feels like a blend of my favorite SNES/PS1 era fantasy settings. The dialogue, on the other hand, is fantastic. And regarding the out-of-battle gameplay, you're walking between towns (not on an overworld map, but on connecting areas that look the same as towns and dungeons), finishing up the dozen or so subquests that appear over time at each town's guild, and then moving on. About half of the subquests are "go kill this thing" or "go collect this rare flower" but the other half are more interesting investigations or logic puzzles. I've mostly been playing the game for the story, so I've used a walkthrough to look up any puzzles that I've gotten stuck on for more than a few minutes. Each town and surrounding area is big enough to be interesting, but small enough to exhaustively search while finishing up the sidequests.

I really liked the early psp legend of heroes games on psp but couldn't get into the 2011 one at all.

It seemed so slow and boring. Idk maybe I'll give it another shot. I loved the 2006ish one. But this one had zero of the charm for me.

I thought I'd bookend this discussion with my final impressions of the game, now that I've actually finished it. First of all, I can't believe that I finished a JRPG in 2016. I generally don't finish those types of games due to getting distracted by something else. So that's a huge point in its favor.

The game is really good. The only negative aspect I encountered was the surprising difficulty spike and design change in the final dungeon. Up to that point, avoiding most enemies and just winging my orbal configuration was cool. Once you enter that dungeon, all of a sudden getting every optional upgrade available in that dungeon is nearly mandatory to attack a few of the endgame bosses. I'm not ashamed to say that I used CheatEngine to "farm" sepith to buy the orbments I needed for the final battles, after a couple hours of legit grinding hard for sepith. The final pair of dungeons splits up your core party and forces you to make weird tradeoffs in orbments and equipment so that one group isn't left standing in the cold. And the final string of boss battles took literally 3 hours for me to clear, with no save points available. This is on Easy mode. That's a big departure from the way the rest of the game is structured, and kind of turned me off of playing.

That being said, it's absolutely worth the slog through the last dungeon because the epilogue contains one of the more interesting and nuanced twists I've seen in games. So while the final 3 hours were disappointing from a gameplay aspect, the gameplay was really fun for 48 hours and the story was remarkably entertaining throughout.