Over ten years ago, when I was just getting started in this business, I played a game called The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. It was a rickety-feeling RPG on the PSP, a port of an already low budget PC game from several years earlier from Falcom, a little-known developer. I’d later learn it was part of a series dating back to the TurboGrafx with a localization history, but without much notoriety at least here in North America. It was kind of slow-moving and dull-looking, but before long I’d come to realize I hadn’t played anything like it. Estelle is a goofball who’d be right at home as a protagonist in a shonen manga, while Joshua is a brooder with a mysterious past. A perfect dynamic duo for interpersonal drama. The pair is travelling across their home continent to work their way up the ranks, and end up involved in some wild stuff, sowing seeds for conflict and changes on the world stage for years to come. And sequels. So many sequels. Trails in the Sky is an example of tremendous writing, both in the sense that it’s pretty good, but also, it’s massive in scope. The story runs for dozens of hours, comprising several fleshed-out and important characters inhabiting a world in the middle of a complicated geopolitical shift. Every effort is made to make everything a piece of a coherent whole, from how characters interact and build relationships with each other, to how the world changes around them whenever the story develops. For example, as events happen, NPCs around the world are updated with new, relevant dialogue. That’s crazy. These games are long and long-winded, the whole trilogy famously having enough text to rival a stack of classic sci-fi novels. And Trails has progressed well beyond three games, expanding into a series that has grown and grown over the years, making Falcom more of a known quantity and elevating other series (like Ys and Xanadu) along with it. The original Legend of Heroes brand has all but been left behind as a consequence, but that’s because this subseries has taken on a life of its own. The story has moved across continents and groups of characters, and then brought them all back together in different configurations as the situation has developed. This kind of long-term storytelling feels impossible for video games, and yet here it is. But as the series has grown and expanded. people have been left behind. This story has continued across multiple platforms and subseries in mostly linear fashion. Unless you’re willing to start at the beginning (and a lot of people aren’t because of FOMO and other factors), there’s not a good jumping on point. There’s not even a jumping back in point, really. I fell off myself, simply unable to keep up with the release schedule, and haven’t found a break or opportunity to try. For as much as the hype has been building, and the sickos who have kept up have been beating the drum and blaring the horns, Trails is intimidating. It’s like walking into a comic book store for the first time and trying to figure out how to start reading Spider-Man. So, as the series has arguably peaked and re-peaked with new storylines like Trails of Daybreak, a way to start that isn’t a relatively ancient, niche PC game has been loudly demanded, if not sorely needed. Enter Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, a total remake of the first entry in the Trails of the Sky trilogy, a total overhaul of that PSP game I played at the start of my career. Now curious parties have no excuse. And for someone like me who happened upon the series from the “start,” it’s a heck of a way to re-experience the story. Obviously I think there’s plenty of value in playing the original anyway, but if a remake is the unavoidable, optimal path, 1st Chapter goes above and beyond to make that path as welcoming and rewarding as possible. This is a good-lookin’ video game For starters, 1st Chapter is gorgeous in a way that was jarring. Part of that is because when I fell off from the series, it was still when Trails of Cold Steel was the current run, and those games were still kind of building off Falcom’s PSP era. I hadn’t seen Daybreak in action, which is when the developer took another big step forward. Regardless of if you’re new or not, you can get a little taste of what Trails in the Sky looked like as the loading screens feature the original character sprites. It’s a massive shift. This game looks like a low budget RPG with a big budget. That sounds silly, but it exists in this space that isn’t quite a recognizable AAA blockbuster excess, but is alive, bold, colorful, and expressive in a different way. There are aspects that still betray Sky’s vintage (the maps for example), but everything looks and moves in a way I’ve never seen before in a Falcom joint. Characters wear their facial expressions on their own bodies instead of dialogue portraits, their hair sways as they walk or run, and animations in combat are aggressive and play with the camera and lighting as if there are few remaining limitations. On the topic of visuals, one of the reasons this review is a bit later than others is because I played on Nintendo Switch 2. This port was announced quite close to the release date, and seems like it came in a little hot (there are patches on the way to add a performance mode). It’s an interesting example of what the Switch 2 is capable of, though, and some of the apparent challenges as well. When I played the demo for Switch, it ran remarkably in TV mode, but struggled in Handheld Mode. Inversely with the upgrade, 1st Chapter runs swimmingly in Handheld Mode but struggled some in TV Mode. It seems like developers have to make careful decisions in what to prioritize when porting games to this system, especially with its capacity for high resolution and frame rates (seems like doing both without compromises is an issue). The point is, though, that it’s awesome to be able to play a new Trails game on a handheld that isn’t a bulky, warm PC crammed into a handheld shell, and have it running comparably. 1st Chapter is almost fully voiced as well, and each character is more emotive and personable than ever. I used to be pretty ambivalent about voice acting in games in general (I like to read and you should too! It’s good for your brain!), but it feels like having a double-hitter of excellent and well-directed voice talent between this and Final Fantasy Tactics has shifted my mind on the matter somewhat. I have a soft spot for characters like Estelle as well, and having her antics and haphazard wholesome energy reinforced with an off-kilter but still believable and earnest voice performance is infectious. Another win in the column for RPG voice acting, from a hater no less. The numbers are still goofy, though Speaking of combat and limitations, this is an area where 1st Chapter kind of starts dropping things, largely because it’s trying to carry so much at once. The original game was strictly turn-based, with a sort of grid system that wasn’t quite a tactical system but encouraged some attention to placement and reach. Here combat has this bizarre split between real time and turn-based tradition, in which you can roll around and bonk enemies out on the field for some extra damage and an advantage as you shift into turn-based on command. It feels fast and intended to shake things up, but it feels a bit half-hearted. Major encounters force you into turn-based to start anyway, and the real-time attack options are very simple and repetitive. Not to mention 1st Chapter shares an issue I had with the original, in which enemy HP and your damage are extremely off-balance, even if you crank the difficulty down. Even the weakest enemies still take way too long to take down, and EXP scales down so aggressively I find myself running away from combat constantly, since the math between time in and reward out makes little sense most of the time. Adding the real-time gimmick compounds this issue, turning trying to get a stun before locking in for regular combat an annoying button-mashing bout I’d rather not deal with at all. It’s a shame because like I mentioned before, animations in combat are awesome, the pace is definitely yanked up from the original, and there’s a lot to like between tweaks and changes made to make the original game’s ideas work in 3d space. But there’s so much weird padding and balancing it hurts the game’s pace anyway, making being prepared for boss fights and side challenges feel unpredictable in ways that aren’t interesting to deal with. It’s just, “oh, my EXP gains have dried up, guess it’s time to stop grinding. Oops, the boss has fifty thousand HP and my big attacks feel like needle pokes!” It’s bizarre that with all the tweaking, upgrading, and overhauling, this still seems to be the way Falcom handles “challenge.” Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is an ambitious, transformative revisit of a modern classic RPG, one that was a formative experience for a small, but hungry audience that caused a groundswell into one of today’s most absurdly epic storytelling experiments in video games. In a world full of remakes that feel like expensive wastes of time, 1st Chapter feels like it meets a moment in a helpful and genuinely impressive way. It’s mostly a massive presentational overhaul, but one that makes the “breathes new life” cliche feel like a genuine descriptive statement. The way combat is balanced is still annoying, and the weird real time, turn-based hybrid gimmick feels pointless and confused, but even so I found myself getting lost all over again in this game’s absurdly well-executed storytelling ambitions. If you’ve been hearing about Trails for years from the sickos and wanting a cleaner way to give it a shot, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. And if you’ve been a Trailshead for a long time, you’ve obviously already decided to play this, but it’s a worthwhile excuse to go back to the beginning. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is now available for the PC, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and PlayStation 5. A Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher for this review.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146342/trails-in-the-sky-1st-chapter-review-score