Just to be clear, I'm a bit of a Trails superfan here. I got into the original Trails in the Sky games after they were mentioned on Kotaku and have been hooked on Trails since, even buying Japanese versions of the two games that were originally skipped by localizations (and playing with a translation patch) just to keep myself fully up to date. Moreover, even after playing 12 of these games, the original Trails in the Sky games might be my favorite due to their simple but refined gameplay and incredible story and characters they contain, especially the slow-burn coming of age romance story of protagonists Estelle and Joshua Bright. The original Trails in the Sky games also contain what might be the most perfect localization, which really punches up the script to add fun and lovability to the characters. So yeah, this game is a remake of one of my favorite games ever, which means I'm holding this game up to an incredibly high standard.
And to its credit, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter does a remarkable job remaking the original game here into something more modern audiences might be willing to take a chance on and enjoy. The game has gone from mini 3d sprites to full cell shaded 3d graphics and looks absolutely beautiful, the voice acting is generally really great, and the gameplay mixes real time and turn based combat like the most recent Trails games in an excellent and addictive combination. They've kept the original story pretty much entirely, but thrown in a few extra new sidequests that flesh out a few of the side characters and are enjoyable in their own right without being too distracting, which I very much appreciated, and some of the rebalancing of existing abilities from the original game work pretty well. This is a really good game and definitely one I recommend playing either in general or for those who have always been curious about Trails and never knew where to start. That said, I do have a few complaints that make me wonder what could have been: the game loses quite a bit of the original's difficulty as it has added more gameplay systems and most importantly, the new localization by Gung-Ho Games doesn't adhere to long established series terminology (which is really annoying) and doesn't carry over some of the most charming and highlight lines of dialogue/translation that was present in the original localizations. But even this more literal localization still conveys about 95% of the charm and fun of the original to the extent that new players will still find out why I love this story so much, so it's not nearly the problem it could hav been.
I'm going to go into more specifics beneath the jump here, but not too specific since I don't want to bog down this review. I have made a separate post where I go way WAY too in depth into my thoughts on the gameplay and mechanics and localization stuff, for anyone who might care. You can find that overly specific breakdown HERE.
Trails in the Sky tells the story of Estelle and Joshua, two 16 year old teenagers who have just become Junior Bracers - members of what is essentially a combination adventurer/monster-hunting/mercenary/general do-gooder guild whose primary goal is to help the common people. In order to become promoted to full time (senior) bracers, they need to earn the recommendations from all 5 Bracer Guild branches around the kingdom of Liberl, and so Estelle and Joshua travel around the country throughout the story in order to achieve that goal, with each chapter taking place in a new region of Liberl. Along the way, they get involved with more serious matters taking place around the country, such as the disappearance of their seemingly famous dad, an airship hijacking by sky pirates, the burning down of a long-established orphanage, and more events that will shape the course of Liberl's history. And through it all, Estelle and Joshua learn more about themselves, each other, and other people in Liberl, and Estelle especially begins to realize she's in love with Joshua.
This is the type of story I'm used to seeing in a coming of age YA Fantasy Romance, and Trails in the Sky is terrific at telling this story. Estelle and Joshua are fabulous characters, even if they're certainly tropey, with Estelle's tomboy, naive, and just sometimes ridiculous attitudes being utterly delightful, even if her comments are a bit toned down (sadly) in comparison to the original game. The romance is really well done, and you just grow to care about the duo so much through it all.
Then there are the other major and minor characters we meet along the way, from party members (who range from other bracers/fighters, to a student, to a wandering minstrel from a foreign nation who's a bit of a loon, to an 11 year old girl who's an engineering prodigy) to other voiced minor characters (like the mayors of each reason, other bracers, nobles, a pair of fun journalists who happen to repeatedly cross paths with the protagonists, etc.) to even small bit characters without even unique character models. The original game was famous for the fact that even those smallest characters would basically have their own plot arcs in how their dialogue changes after every story event (sometimes resulting in quests down the line) and that's still true here and it remains wonderful at conveying such an alive and real world. And the voice acting now added here in the remake for much (but not all of the dialogue for cost saving reasons) is generally excellent at emphasizing these scenes.
The plot is a bit of a slow burn, let's be clear. I've played a bunch of games recently which begin with a major event to set forth major stakes right from the get-go, whether that be the slow evaporation of humanity (Clair Obscur) or a serial killing monster on the loose in the city (Trails through Daybreak 2), etc. We don't get that here, and the game really trusts its gameplay and the character development to pull you in without a major motivating factor. Thankfully the character development succeeds wonderfully at this....and the gameplay certainly does as well.
Gameplay wise, the game takes the core of what made the original game's gameplay and adds in basic versions of features from later games in the series, most notably Trails of Cold Steel and Trails Through Daybreak. Like the original game, each chapter of the story features your characters obtaining quests from the local Bracer Guild (and from the story), which then set your characters off to do tasks either in town or out on the roads of each region, requiring you to traverse roads and areas infested by monsters. In a change from the original (and coming from the Daybreak games), Fighting these monsters requires you to engage in a combination of real-time and turn based combat. The real time combat requires you to mix dodges, attacks, and charged attacks to stun or kill enemies and at any point you can switch to turn based combat to fight in that mode as well...but if you do so when an enemy is stunned, you'll get a bonus attack (coming from the Cold Steel games) of a sorts as well, encouraging mixing and matching the two. It's a really addictive form of combat, and the game throws in new hidden areas for you to fight large amounts of monsters to further encourage it...and the rewards for fighting can often be very significant, allowing you to power up your characters at a very nice and satisfying pace.
That said, just to be clear, turn based combat remains the star of the show, and the real time action-y combat is not particularly deep or difficult - I played the game on Nightmare, and pretty much never felt ever threatened by it even despite the fact I suck at playing games that require reflexes and whatnot. Every boss battle or required battle here is played in turn based mode, which is nicely deep as you have to figure out your options between magic (arts) and non-magical (crafts) attacks, have to keep an eye out for enemy elemental weaknesses and their stun meters, and take advantage of things like extra attacks you may get when you stun enemies and turn order bonuses that can fall on both yours and enemies' turns - although unlike in the original game, you don't steal these bonuses by using s-crafts (the series' limit breaks that can be used at any time as long as you have enough CP) but by using one of many abilities that might have the "steal bonus" attribute. This remake contains a lot more options of what you can do during these turn based battles than the original game did, which can really enhance the different strategies you may come up with....but also really prevents the game from feeling too difficult even on the hardest difficulty if you learn and understand how the game works. The original game for example had an optional boss fight near the end that was genuinely insanely hard on the highest difficulty (and on that difficulty required some luck to win) but here that battle is very very doable without any luck at all. Still, even without difficulty, this combat gameplay is very satisfying to pull off, so you'll never be bored, and it's not nearly as broken as some of the other Trails games.
Just to be clear, not every gameplay shift in these games really works as well as you would hope. The game adds a number of quality of life improvements, such as fast-travel and markers as to where you should need to go to get certain items and sidequests, and in many cases these are welcome additions that update this game to where later Trails games are. For example, the original game featured hidden secret sidequests, some of which you'd almost never find unless you checked everywhere, and hid the ultimate weapon behind you collecting 11 copies of books that could only be found by talking to the right people at the right time...and some of those times were downright stupid and nonsensical. So the game here pointing out to you where those books and secret sidequests are is a nice improvement. But the game also tries to point out where to go even at times where it basically breaks the entire purpose of the story of the quest you are going on. For example, there are a number of quests that you need to solve riddles to figure out where to go to advance; in the original game this required you to well, learn about this world and hunt down what the riddles could point to. In this game, you can ignore the riddles entirely since the game tells you exactly where to go. At some points, the game tries to mitigate this by changing the map marker showing you where to go when you are close to an object to a large blurry circle, but that just makes it more frustrating than trying to force you to figure out where something might be. This happens way too often, to be honest, and happens because the game is trying to import this quality of life improvement of showing you where to go into a game whose quests are meant to challenge you and force you to explore and it just seems rather dumb that the game doesn't have an option to turn off the assistance entirely for those quests.
Overall though, my complaints about these things are minor. Despite the issues I had with localization and these minor issues about gameplay and difficulty, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter remains an incredible game that everyone should play: both for its fantastic coming of age fantasy story with romance and for its really addictive and deep gameplay. It's a fantastic way to start the series, and it will make you yearn for the second game's remake to come out the moment you finish it. Just an absolute blast that I hope more and more people play. T
No comments:
Post a Comment