3/5 ★ – QuilDewIvy's review of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.

This is going to be a bit of a rant, maybe more than FC deserves. It's difficult for me to do otherwise though, considering the cultural recognition Trails in the Sky now has in its diehard Falcom community. Really it's just unavoidable now, as any conversation I could have about Trails in the Sky will inadvertently be tied back to the reverent fanbase. I don't think that's what the general public who play this game will experience, but when you're about as online as I am, it won't come as a surprise that a lot of what I COULD'VE talked about when it came to this game was quickly dismissed. I don't hold that against the people who love this series, but it was very interesting to me when I came out the end of this game quite positive after the first runthrough. Specifically that any and all talk I could make about the specifics of this game were weirdly shouted down as "this game is just setup for the entire series and it should not be judged without that retrospection in mind." So you know what, I kept my mouth shut. It's not a terrible enough point to consider, even though I thought then as I do now that it's certainly a weak excuse. So I kept going, I went ahead and immersed myself in a fat load of Trails discourse and ended up surrounded by it, being spoiled on several things before I even thought to finally pick up SC. I may not be an expert on Trails in the Sky at this point, but I do feel a lot more informed about the series and FC's place in it as a whole. And it is sorely not the conclusion I think those people really hoped I would come to. FC is not just a setup of Trails in the Sky's series narrative that leads to interesting payoff, it is a setup of Trails in the Sky's criminal flaws and trends. It's literally a walking simulacra of what the series stands for in its biggest moments, from its biggest positives to its awful issues. I'll start on what I still reminisce fondly, which is FC's sense of character. After a pretty dogshit poorly paced intro, there's more moments than I can effectively count where the cast of FC ends up bouncing in my head with their sense of heart and strong humanization. Dialogue is very reflective and strongly well written for each of their characters, and it all contributes to comfy vibes that define the midgame, which I'd say is where FC certainly peaks. Worldbuilding is no slouch to get you into the setting either, with a pretty grounded dialogue and well setup stakes for adventure that feel refreshing. The story keeps that idea in mind, which makes the endgame feel rather deserved even when the stakes are still pretty fate of the nation-heavy. The story, however, is also when the cracks really start to show. FC is really quick to show its hand that a lot of the characters it puts at you are effectively tools, motivations that are nice setting dressing but completely thrown out when it's suitable. To make it clearer what I'm talking about, FC establishes a villain who is fighting for a past idea of his nation in absence of someone he respected. They then literally, and I cannot stress this enough, throw this out that his motivations and his choices were brainwashed by some other guy we don't fucking know at all from the get go. Even if I were to pretend that didn't happen, FC really does not explore this theme much if at all, or this backstory to an even genuinely sympathetic level. This is the clinching issue with Trails stories, the setup politics that points at interesting themes are wallpaper, torn asunder right in front of you at every turn you could get. The villain I quote here is really not the first time that the inner themes of a nation you visit are hamstrung for a big bad that is neither emblematic of the themes to be a good metaphor or interesting in their own right. There's even more stuff I can get ranting about, but talking about the ramifications of moral motivations and how quickly they are side-stepped was already a poor errand for me to rag on when this game pushes that incest is fine, actually. The combat is about as disappointing, but has more to do with the base mechanics that Trails seems to care about rather than its potential. Early-midgame is a bit interesting initially, where the grid-like structure and the meter management of arts ends up forcing you to take encounters by the skin of the teeth while you're trying to figure out your strategy. Immediately after this, it falls apart as you begin to realize that Trails could not give less of a shit about the action economy it makes, never going beyond "lose a turn" or "gain a turn" in terms of time. Positioning, while sometimes tested with genuinely solid superbosses, also ends up turning into dominant strategies of doing the same thing ad nauseum. I highlight the endgame for this especially, where p much all enemy fights are weakly put a massive fucking AOE to encapsulate as much as you can, and then repeat. Were it not for the customization and good user experience for figuring out the combat systems on your own with solid feedback, I would say this combat is average. And I'd like to say that my issues here are FC-only still, I really would. I really would like to believe the narrative that keeps getting wrapped in front of me that this is at worst just a middling setup that then gets into the real kino shit that is the series and fixes all of this crap. But no, it's not. Trails does get better at its strengths from here as it goes on. The character writing continues to be good, and gets great and even excellent often. The vibes do get stronger, especially in terms of the soundtrack that gets outright legendary. But the poor foundation in story, general thematic writing, and combat is what you see here on full display. It's so vastly the embodiment of Trails that it's stunning how much talk about the series now feels like gaslighting to me. Trails in the Sky FC is not a good game, and though I still lean positively on it, I would not recommend it to most. Worth a try at least, if you can get past the awful pacing in the first arc or two and end up enjoying yourself a ton then you absolutely will love the rest of the series. Is it worth trudging through if you don't enjoy it superbly to get to the rest of the series? I'm still not really sure about that.