Intro

As the title says, just jotting down some thoughts for myself as I play through the Trails series games. Honestly not really meant for a wide audience, since it's just for my sake as a journal... or a blog, as one might say. Haven't been making much use of the community features on this site, so what better way to start doing so than writing about games?! I just need a place to exercise my fingers and ramble on about stuff I've been enjoying while this quarantine business is going on.

Alright, so to start off with context: I've actually already started playing these games a long time ago, hence the "X+1" in the title. In fact, I've already played the entirety of the first game (Trails in the Sky FC), and I'm about 35% of the way through Trails in the Sky SC. I actually started with Trails of Cold Steel 1, so that's out of the way as well. For the sake of continuity though, let's start journal entry #1 with a quick run through and thoughts about Trails in the Sky FC!

Btw: I've been playing these games in Japanese (PSP version), so I won't be mentioning specific lines or other things that may be different from the typical player's experience. Also, obviously as a nature of these kinds of things, there will be SPOILERS! Though I'll probably try to avoid super critical things (or hide them a little).

Nihon Falcom

Before I start.... Ahh Falcom. What an intriguing company they are. Founded in 1981, Falcom started its life as an Apple computers retailer in Tachikawa, Japan. Their first game was released in '82; "Galactic Wars 1", brought in by just a random hobbyist that frequented their store (Yoshio Kiya, who eventually became one of their core programmers until leaving in '93). Apparently, the name "Falcom" was taken from the Millennium Falcon, with the last "n" changed to an "m" to follow the trend back then of having electronics company names that end with "~com". What a strange beginning indeed. It's honestly kind of baffling that a company with such a long history never really made a name for itself to the wider audience, only being recognized by folks that are either A. old and Japanese, or B. old and well versed in video games history. Sure, they consistently release a lot of anime games (Xanadu, Ys) that get some level of hype in Japan, but it really never seems to be huge in the mainstream consciousness, even across the pond. Then again, I guess that's just kind of how most of them are in Japan...? (Thinking of "Tales of", another long running JRPG series that I used to adore as a kid) There's a wider conversation to be had here about the quality of games with current Japanese game devs, particularly the ones that don't make a big effort at selling overseas, but that's probably for another blog if I ever get around to it. That kind of thing is something that intrigues me greatly, however.

Trails in the Sky: FC

Anyways, enough with getting immediately sidetracked by the Japanese game industry. So what is Trails in the Sky after all? As confusing as it is, Sky FC is the first chapter of a trilogy that starts off the entire "Trails" series, which is in itself the 6th, 7th, and 8th entries into the larger "Legend of Heroes" series. Trails in the Sky FC ~ The 3rd is "The Legend of Heroes 6", Trails of Zero + Trails of Azure is "The Legend of Heroes 7", and finally, Trails of Cold Steel 1~4 is "The Legend of Heroes 8". What a clusterfuck! Thankfully, knowing anything about The Legend of Heroes 1~5 is not going to be important at all in talking about the Trails series. I started playing these games with Trails of Cold Steel 1, and enjoyed the combat and kind of stereotypically "anime" story of feel-good friendship building and love and victory... and thought it was neat that there's apparently a huge Marvel-esque cinematic universe going through the entire series. So I figured, "Why don't I try to get the back story in all this stuff going on? I might not get too invested into each entry, but I'm sure it'll be a decent amount of fun!"

... And MAN was it a lot of fun. Trails in the Sky FC is one of those rare games that have a certain feeling of "warmth" about them, where characters are lovable and the world feels like it's brimming with life. It is unabashedly an "anime" game; There's a lot of standing around and talking, a lot of flavor text, and a lot of characters that have exaggerated personalities. But it's an "anime" game that's done well. The talking in this game feels like it's written with care; people say things that make sense to their characters (though you will get some lines that are... "a product of their times," if you will). The flavor text is actually funny/interesting, and give every town a sense of fantasy realism. And the characters, exaggerated as they seem, are actually much more interesting than they appear at first.

Let's take the main character, Estelle, as an example of an interesting character. She gets introduced as the energetic, boy-ish, and somewhat of a "not the sharpest tool in the tool shed" kind of character. And she plays that part well! But the writing in this game makes you care about her much more than you'd expect. It closely follows her growth as a Bracer (the civilian police-like guild whose main purpose is to help the wider public in places that the army/police cannot), starting off as a clueless initiate and slowly growing into a keen eyed, professional problem solver with a rapidly blooming talent in combat. We also get to see her growth as a human too, starting with one-note naivete and slowly maturing to the aforementioned professional, still able to pull the story forward with her sun-like energy. And if I'd allow myself to weeb out a little... God damn her slow realization of her feelings towards Joshua, and her determination to grab him by the collar and bring him back after that heartbreaking ending, is fuckin' kawaii as fuck, for lack of better words. You really feel like cheering her on throughout the story.

Nobody talks about the trails series without talking about the NPCs, and for good reason. Whereas even highly acclaimed story RPGs like The Witcher 3 and the likes would have town fulls of nameless NPCs that mutter fairly generic lines about their towns, Trails games have NPCs where 90% of them have names and actual tiny stories about themselves and their lives. Each time you progress the story a little and come back to town, talking to these NPCs is a little treat of its own, and this progression even carries over to the next game (SC). For example, Portos, the director of the docks at Ruan, seems like a nice guy that everyone at the docks looks up to... and Norman, the hotel owner at the business district, seems like a stern but respected businessman... and by the time the story gets back to Ruan in SC, they're in an election battle for the position of mayor; their votes split among the blue collar workers that want to sustain the jobs at the docks and the business owners that want to expand tourism. These NPCs are often involved in the numerous side quests that the story crams into the game, and sometimes show up again later in a different town. Help an engineer test a pair of sneakers in one of the early towns of the game? He shows up again when you visit the industrial city of Zeiss, doing more research in the labs there. There are many, many more examples of townsfolk that just feel alive. The ones that I mentioned don't even have character portraits like the more important NPCs in the story! I feel like this insane attention to detail has slightly slowed down in the later titles (at least from what I've played of Cold Steel), but maybe it will pick up as I play more of Cold Steel 2.

The pacing, however, can be a bit divisive I feel. The story starts out with Estelle and Joshua (adopted into the family in the prologue) becoming Bracers-in-training, getting ready to take on the many challenges that they are required to overcome in order to become a full fledged Bracer. However, their father Cassius goes missing in a supposed airplane accident; They take it upon themselves to tour through the entire country, taking on tasks and earning their certifications for promotion while searching for clues about their missing father. This intro alone can take HOURS.... While the strong point of this game is the extensive writing and the attention of detail, these same traits can lead the game to progress VERY slowly at times. And due to the nature of the game being split up into Sky FC and Sky SC, the first couple hours of FC can feel very inconsequential in terms of the actual events that take place. You hop from town to town, taking up side quests (some may say a few too many) and solving the big issue in each town before going to the next. While this progression can start to feel fairly repetitive, there is a payoff at the end, where all the foreshadowing that was scattered throughout the story culminates into an exciting finale of a coup d'etat by a division of the royal military.... followed by a goddam BOMBSHELL of a reveal in the epilogue, taking you straight into the next game.

Continuing with points that may potentially divisive, the combat is slightly different from what one would expect from a traditional JRPG. I've heard criticisms that it is far too easy; some spells and special moves were broken in terms of balance, and most enemies are pushovers once you get the hang of it. Personally, I liked what I played in the game, without trying to optimize too carefully or relying on aforementioned "broken" tactics. In short, it is a turn-based battle system where characters can move on grids, with some moves targeting a single enemy, or being able to hit multiple targets in a specified area. It has a third bar to manage on top of the usual HP and MP (called EP in Trails) referred to as CP, which is required to use each character's unique special moves. This intricate balance of three bars, along side the turn order displayed to the left of the screen and the positions of the enemies, made for a surprisingly tactical feel to the combat, making you pay attention to everything that goes on in the battlefield while trying to predict what will happen a couple turns ahead. The character stat building is my favorite (and again potentially divisive) feature of the battle system, where each character has a predetermined "slot layout" on their "battle orbments"(i.e. magical pocket watches). By slotting in "quartz" of various colors and effects, many of which carry stat bonuses, each character can use "orbal arts" (i.e. magic) that manifests according to how much of what color element you've slotted in to each line of "connected" slots. Makes no sense in writing? I think so too. Apparently the developers thought this was too confusing too, since the whole color counting system was abolished by the time Cold Steel came around (Perhaps it was gone in Zero/Azure as well?). In my opinion, it made the character builds into a sort of puzzle, and was rather enjoyable. Playing through FF7 for the first time with the Remake and seeing the Materia system somewhat reminded me of this system in Trails. I suppose the more "refined" system in Cold Steel was closer to what was in FF7R, however.

At this point I feel like I'm just explaining the game, so this is probably a good point to wrap up. I've heard that Sky FC is perhaps the shortest game in all of the Trails series games... and it still took me 50 hours. I am both excited and afraid to take on the rest of the games in an attempt to catch up with this loooong series. But I just can't seem to get enough of this game's charms! The "harem anime"-fication of Cold Steel was unnecessary, but that game had a fairly interesting plot as well, so the future seems pretty bright! And what's even better, we've got a Steam release (with both Japanese and English audio/UI! Now THAT'S rare) of Cold Steel 3 so I don't have to sit in front of my TV and PS4 to play! And even EVEN better, we're eventually getting a Steam release of Cold Steel 4! Awesome! Here's the plan for me... I'm going to try to play as often as I can (I do have a job) and write down what I think here as I do so in the form of a blog, updating every so often. If anyone finds that interesting, feel free to join me in discussion! This whole thing is mostly just for my purposes as mentioned at the very beginning, but I'd love to hear what other people think too.

What's that? Falcom is releasing ANOTHER game into the series in August this year?

...... We're in for a long haul, folks.