Update One Hundred and Seventy-Nine: 10 June 2018
Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd
77 hours, 26 of 26 achievements
9/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Oh, I love this series so much.
As you could probably tell from the title, this is the third and final installment of a trilogy of sorts - if you haven’t played the first two games, reading about this one is pretty pointless. So go play them instead!
Trails in the Sky the 3rd is a bit of a strange beast. Unlike most trilogies, this one is really one long story in two parts, with this installment more like a final celebratory bash, an additional last hoorah set in a world and with characters you’ve grown to know and love. I don’t know if many other series could pull it off like Trails in the Sky can - to have enough material to mine to make what essentially amounts to a huge bonus episode is stunning, especially with how good all the material is.
Okay, okay, so here’s some facts: this game largely follows Kevin, the strange priest from Second Chapter. He and his new squire, Ries, get trapped and transported to a strange, fantastical place when trying to recover an artefact - and the more they explore, the more they find other people they know trapped, too. Together, they have to find out what’s keeping them there, why, and how to get out.
The first part of the game has a real Pokemon-like feel - gotta catch all your party members from all the games, AND some new ones besides. I really enjoyed that major antagonists from the first and second games become party members in this one. The game is very flexible with who you have in your party when, a big departure from the previous installments where you rarely get to choose who is in your party.
Another big segment is the Star, Sun, and Moon doors you come across throughout the planes you explore - each door has a requirement to open, and inside each of them is a ‘memory fragment’, or a bonus side story. They’re nothing of HUGE importance, but they’re lovely character explorations. They read like fanfiction in the sense that they don’t drive an overarching plot, they just fill in more of the backstory and the world and are nice.
This review isn’t very focused - I am still incredibly people-hungover from our birthday-birthday pool party yesterday. We had upwards of 25 people over, from three different social groups, from 1 pm to the last people leaving at 2 am. It was an amazing, wonderful, fun as hell day… but utterly exhausting. Makes it hard to really cover a game as long as this.
Oh, no, one last thing: one thing that Trails is known for is its chest messages - open a chest to get an item, and then examine it again to read a funny line or something. In THIS game they go buckwild with it, like including a few behind-the-scenes notes about how the game changed in development, and even having two (2) different multi-part stories you read going from chest to chest. Most importantly, during the final dungeon all the chest messages are really sweet, uplifting, and encouraging, even including notes of thank you from what I assume to be the game’s writer and director. I definitely teared up a bit.
So! Go! Go play these games!
Next up: I’m starting this month’s theme a little late, but I want to participate. I was shocked to go through my backlog and see just how many games I still had to play were bundled at one time or another!
See you soon!
I really need to finish the second game in this series. I loved the first game, and the cliffhanger got me right in the gut. I stopped playing the second because I was trying to get some casino thing out of the way, but it was taking too long and got boring waiting for random chance. I think I can do that later in the game, though. Your post makes me wonder what I’m even doing not playing this series.
YES THAT CLIFFHANGER HURT SO MUCH
I remember that thing you’re talking about - I definitely think I cheat engine’d my way around it (My motto for games? Easy, Breezy, Beautiful, Cheat Engine.)
One thing that’s a risk with leaving these huge games off to the side for a while, for me, is that it’s very easy for me to forget what the fuck is going on… but that’s because I forget things very quickly. I hope you pick it back up again and finish it out soon because I LOVED it dearly.
77 hours in the game :O
I didn’t expect it to be so long. Do you play with Estelle and Joshua as well? I just finished the Second Chapter and I feel like their story reached a satisfying end, I don’t see how nihon would include them here, but I’d love to see them again. More chest messages is always a plus :D
the birthday pool party sounds awesome!
Aaaaa, probably 20 to 30 of those hours are idling.
You do play as them! In fact, I had them in my party pretty much whenever I could. They’re in their ‘happily ever after’ part of their story, where their lives have continued after the Big Events. So they still have some stuff going on, but don’t have the major character arcs of the game.