Reviewing a Video Game is not something I normally do on this blog, although I've done it for a few games, most notably those in the Trails series. But after spending two months (140+ hours) basically playing this game instead of reading, I really feel like I want to give a bit more of an effort into my review of this game, even if I will be retreading some ideas that have been covered in other pieces.
Trails Into Reverie is the 10th game in Falhom's "Trails" ("Kiseki" in Japan) series of Japanese Role Playing Games. Unlike a lot of other long running series of video games or RPGs, like say Final Fantasy, the Trails series does not try to keep each game independent of each other so that newcomers can play them without having to play earlier games first. Instead, the series is like a long running steampunk-ish fantasy book series, with each game building upon the past installments such that new readers who start in the middle are going to miss at least a little bit - if not a lot - if they don't go back and read what came before. That's not to say there aren't on-ramps into the series other than the beginning; like a long running series, there are different arcs in the series featuring different countries in the setting, so if you start at the beginning of an arc you can probably get by just fine and enjoy....but events and characters of prior arcs will get involved in new ones not before long. As someone who has played all 9 prior games to this one - and even played the two of those 9 games that weren't localized in the US until last year well before that due to a translation patch - I guess I'd kind of be considered a major fan of the series, so this isn't quite a dispassionate review here, and I'm not going to take too much time to try to get people up to speed on the story in this review either...I don't think it's necessary for my judgment of this game or my judgment as to whether you should be interested in the series in general based upon this review (there won't really be spoilers here either in specifics in this review).
Like many long running fiction series, particularly in science fiction, fantasy or romance, a key element involved in Trails keeping me interested 10 games in are the characters and their development. The plotting in the games has runned from really great romantic fantasy (the first two Trails in the Sky games) to solid geopolitical thriller with questions about whether Omelas-like-suffering might be worth utopia (the Crossbell Games, Trails from Zero/Trails to Azure) to complete and utter mess, sometimes in infuriating ways (the Trails of Cold Steel Games). But each game in the series develops major characters - many old, some new depending on the game - and develops so so so so so many side characters who aren't really important such that you can't help but loving and wanting to spend time with almost everyone, even if there are some characters you likely cannot stand. So even after the 9th game in the series, Trails of Cold Steel 4, was a bit of a disaster in my opinion even in the character development department (particularly in how the game handled a major antagonist from the last 7 games), well, I couldn't help but want to plaly Trails Into Reverie as soon as it got over here like 3 years later, just to spend time with the characters again. And Trails from Reverie is a game built upon feeding that desire - this is a game that, even in introducing a new plotline and new small party of characters for a 1/3 of it, is really built upon giving you as much time as you could possibly want with almost every major character of the last SEVEN games and beyond. It's a fanservice game in the non-sexual meaning (although there is some of that too because sigh, it's a JRPG) to the extreme, intent on giving you more more and more - more character interaction, more gameplay of all the main systems and side mini games, more utterly bonkers possible ways to break the prior games' already broken combat systems. And the game is so so good at doing that and is simply incredibly addictive.
The first Trails game (Trails in the Sky) started out as the story of two 16 year olds (Estelle and Joshua) who were travelling around their small country in training to become "bracers" (sort of like mercenary adventurers with a strict code of helping people), who along the way got into adventures that became incredibly more complicated and caused them to team up with various other characters in hopes of resolving the conflicts...while also developing the 16 year olds into a relationship (Estelle and Joshua forever) and developing each of those major side characters personalities and conflicts as well. Like many a JRPG this plays out with you going from place to place, doing side quests, and when encountering monsters or enemies, going to a turn based combat system in which each of your characters has different types of attacks based upon their own growth (which get stronger and more varied as they grow and "level") and based upon how you set up the characters (magic/arts in the series can be personalized by the player to adapt to both a player's preferred and how a character's best used playstyle). In a sense of course, this leveling system and growing of characters allows the games to mirror characters' personal developments with their gameplay developments - Estelle in game 1 at the beginning is a weak girl with very little ability - Estelle in this game has some of the most powerful single hitting attacks in the game and her most powerful attack from game 1 is now a normal attack for her. The combat system has been expanded and expanded with more things for characters in general to do since Trails in the Sky but the basic concept remains the same.
What doesn't remain the same is who's available and what there is to do with them. Trails Into Reverie decides to serve as a post-wrap up of the last two arcs and seven games, and thus brings back almost all of the playable and non playable characters from those games. The game is split into three plots (Lloyd's, Rean's, and new character C's) you can advance one at a time in any order until the game forces you to switch to another, two of which contain basically just old characters you've played before. These are characters' whose plotlines and gameplays you've played lots already and so there's really nothing super new here too them - even some of the plots of these stories feel like direct rip offs of the prior games (Lloyd's plotline is pretty much a direct copy of his plotline in the finale of his last main game, Trails to Azure). The new characters and their plotline are pretty good and enjoyable (that's the mystery new character C's) so there's some character development and gameplay development that occurs there, but even with them as kind of the center of it all it's the mass of old characters who still will attract major interest. And players and the game can thus combine characters, gameplays and personalities they've only dreamed of in the past, to see how they interact both on a gameplay and a personal level. And this turns out to be so so so so good and fodder for so much entertainment.
The game recognizes that too and does two smart things: first it provides a gameplay area where all playable characters, no matter where they are in the plot as long as you've got them somewhere, can play together without affecting the main plot (the Reverie Corridor) and it brings back from the series' third game (Trails in the Sky the 3rd) a series of 20+ side stories that you can unlock in that area, in which you get to see little vignettes about playable and non-playable characters interacting. These side stories - here called "Daydreams" - and minigames range from small explorations of prior themes and characters to heartwrenching or heartwarming developments to utterly outrageous and hilariously funny as you see characters from different worlds suddenly interacting - for example, you have the by the books stuck up cop from Crossbell, Dudley, teaming up with the administrative inspector from Erebonia, Machias, to stop a counterfeit and theft ring that has interfered with the supply of coffee from their favorite local coffee shop. Some of these stories actually have gameplay, but most do not (although the gameplay in them is generally not adjusted for difficulty, making it clear the gameplay is really just meant to serve up story more than anything else) but they're generally at worst somewhat forgetable or tropey (there's a romantic culmination between two teachers of the original Cold Steel games that's just pretty bread and butter, if still cute) and at best just so so enjoyable. Again, there's so much here in terms of character development that it's so so so addicting to try and do everything in this game to make sure you don't miss any of it - the game even includes little bits of funny skits of characters interacting in post-game as a reward for using certain characters: totally inessential (although the rewards are nice) and will require you to do extra work to make it work, but the interactions are for 30 seconds pretty damn cute! Trails Into Reverie is a game that knows that you're probably into this series for the characters, and it well, gives you that in spades....it's like a long running book series that then publishes an anthology featuring a ton of short stories for its fans, only its...a video game.
And well, as a video game Trails Into Reverie similarly tries to provide more and more for those who might love the gameplay. As mentioned before, you have the same general gameplay as in the Trails of Cold Steel games (themselves a refinement of the prior games' systems), but here they've added (thanks to DLC that's automatically included in the US version) an extra difficulty level to make things a little more challenging for those looking for a struggle (Me - the prior games were getting easier and easier). They added several new gameplay mechanics to it all, and of course the billion old and new characters provide you with a ton of diverse gameplay options like never before: we previously got to play with some of the old guard in the last game for example, but in doing so you were limited with what you could equip those characters with which made playing with them kind of pointless even in the small chances we got - here we're given the full run of the kitchen eventually, even if the game doles out characters only a bit at a time.
And then of course there's the minigames. The Trails series has featured a number of minigames - a fishing minigame, a puyo puyo esque mini game called pom pom party, a collectible card game minigame called vantage masters - and this game features not just all of them, but also a mechwarrior esque simulator (that's kind of lousy) and a magical girl art-style shoot em up as well. And of the existing minigames, well, the game contains SOOOO much of them - so many possible opponents with levels of competition and even ways you can keep playing the minigames even after you've seemingly exhausted all possibilities - Pom Pom Party for example, which is addictive as a competitive puzzle battler, has now an endurance mode that you can play forever (although honestly that's a bit easy). There's just so much to do here in terms of gameplay of minigames and the regular game that it just gets well utterly ridiculous and way way too easy to sink countless hours into this game.
Trails Into Reverie is far from perfect of course. As I mentioned before, parts of the main story plotting are repetitive from prior games, some characters I disliked are again in major roles (I don't love the protagonist of the last four Cold Steel Games, and he's a main character here again sigh), and notably, the game features a lot of translation errors not in the dialogue or story, but in terms of game mechanics which can lead you astray if you're not paying attention (the result of this being localized by a not huge english company of course). The game reintroduces a battle type from the Cold Steel games as part of the final boss fight which utterly sucks and just takes a lot of hassle to get through, which was probably its lowest moment. Lots of the content is locked behind what are essentially "loot boxes" or "gacha" mechanics - meaning that you have to not only beat certain monsters to win the content, but that what content you get from doing so is essentially randomized and may not give you what you are looking for, forcing you to play more to get that. But even that unlocking isn't that bad as I managed to get everything without TOO much grinding, which I told myself I wasn't going to do, and well, it was pretty fun to do when I had to. And of course while the new Abyss difficulty makes early parts of the game actually challenging, by the later stages of the main game any competent player should be able to utilize the many many game mechanics to break even that in half, with the post-game content being more about how a player can choose to break the game rather than whether they'll be able to handle it (Post-Game adds the ability to raise enemy levels by 100 to add to difficulty, but this only allows your characters to level up themselves faster since it's not too hard to deal with the raised level enemies given how powerful you can make them already). That said, I did find breaking the game in half in the final parts of the post game to be extremely extremely enjoyable, even if it meant I wanted to watch on youtube to find out what enemies actually were supposed to do since I never gave some of the coolest ones a chance to act (sorry final boss).
And yet Trails Into Reverie, despite its flaws, is such perfect fanservice and the perfect example of why I love this series, the Trails series, so damn much. Fanservice games aren't new to gaming of course - you have games like Smash Bros and Dissidia Final Fantasy that try to mash up characters and ideas from multiple games for the fans to enjoy. But few things take the fun of an expanded fictional movie/book universe anthology and translate that into a game like I've ever seen this one does, and it does that in service of a world and characters who are just so so fun to be with and just make it so so addictive to want to stay involved with. If you like playing role playing games, I'd so recommend trails in the sky...and if it leads you eventually to Reverie, you'll find yourselves so so happy in the end.
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