Update Three Hundred and Thirty-Four: 13 October 2019

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

HOOOOOO

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is, overall, my favorite JRPG, so I had very high hopes for its successor, Trails of Cold Steel. While its evolution into full 3D and full voiceacting proved uneven and perhaps a little jarring, and its focus on more just straight-up shonen/school life tropes worked less well than I had wanted, what makes Trails games lovable and enjoyable shined through to still make an experience that I genuinely did enjoy.

Set in Erebonia about two or three years after the events of Trails in the Sky, Trails of Cold Steel follows students at a military academy. Rean Schwarzer, the player character, is part of a brand new Class VII, an elite, experimental class bringing together all different types of people from across the country, social classes be damned. Political intrigue intertwines with worries about field studies, classes, and managing friendships, until the class finds themselves right at the heart of events that will bring Erebonia into the midst of a civil war.

First getting into the game proved…. very… difficult for me. Despite what everyone else says, I ADORED Trails in the Sky’s art style - I found it charming and unique and still incredibly emotive, even though its heavily stylized. It’s not ‘old fashioned,’ it’s retro!! So seeing that iconic art style exchanged for incredibly generic 3D anime style (poorly done, at that - shit clips all the time, hair has no physics on their own, THERE’S ONLY ONE WRIST JOINT IN EVERYONE’S WRIST SO EVERYONE ENDS UP TWISTING LIKE A TOOTSIE ROLL WHEN THEIR HANDS MOVE BC YOU GOTTA HAVE FIVE JOINTS IN THE LOWER ARM TO REPLICATE THE WAY THE WRIST WORKS, GUYS, COME ON!!!) really pissed me off until I eventually just… got used to it. Never LIKED it, but got used to it. This game is HUGE, and the budget was never really enough to make it go where it wanted to go, so while they pushed the envelope with more emotive scenes, animations, etc, their limitations kept them from really landing. A lot of uncanny valley stuff here.

The characters at the beginning also started out as INCREDIBLY one-dimensional and unpleasant, which could very well be on purpose, and over the course of the game they did end up developing into interesting characters. I ended up liking everyone in the party, which is rare for me, and all their nuances melted together well. By the end, they felt like real people, and so did everyone else, too.

One of my FAVORITE parts of Trails games is the absolutely EXHAUSTIVE amount of world- and character-building the games undertake, and this game continues that proud tradition. For an example: This game takes place over the course of about seven or so months, and is split into different ‘segments’ - a free day period where you run around the academy campus and nearby town, and field study segments where you’re sent to different places in the empire to help out there. In those school segments, there are DOZENS of named characters you can go and talk to, classmates, townsfolk, and teachers alike, and every time the time changes (one night into the next morning, say) EVERY single one of them has something new to say. There are tons of little side plots that you can follow if you keep talking to people as the time continues (one family’s mother and father keep fighting until their children finally tell them to wise up, one little boy has a crush on an older girl who is training to become a nun, two students are rivals in business, etc) that are completely non-essential but completely cute as fuck to read. Erebonia feels as full and complete and special as Liberl did, and that thread of charm kept me going through the reactive ‘it’s different and kind of worse I don’t liiiike thiiiis’ feeling until I got settled in.

The voice acting is great and works well, and I especially love whenever I catch references to Trails in the Sky. Olivier plays a large role in this game, and Matt Mercer does him a ton of justice. Apparently other familiar faces show up in other games? Will we get to see Estelle and Joshua again?? PLEASE??

The game ends, like Trails in the Sky, on a big cliffhanger, and the political intrigue (when not hampered by the over the top shonen ‘there’s mechs now’ bullshit) works great. Unbelievably, I’m almost down for immediately getting the second one and continuing on. Almost. I’m not doing that, I’m playing shorter games. I only have two and a half more months to play some new(er) releases before I spend a lot of time down memory lane, after all!

Next up: SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT - AND MUCH SHORTER!

See you soon!