It’s a work that thrives off of its continuous nature; a rarity in an artform filled to the brim with resets, reboots, and retreads. Years pass, technology changes, and every person you’ve met along the way is molded by the events you all experience. It’s among the closest video games have gotten to a grand scale epic like “The Odyssey”, only instead of Odysseus possibly cheating on his wife, you watch a goth girl grow up to invent Linux. There’s nothing like it in games, and oftentimes I feel as if there will never be anything else like it when it inevitably runs its course.

As the thirteenth consecutive entry in the Trails lineage, and the third in its respective arc, Trails Beyond the Horizon is a fascinating step forward for the story; delivering not only the warm community comfort we’ve come to expect, but also a recontextualization of what everything we’ve seen up till now has meant. We’re past the era of NPCs talking around large scale issues, and Not-Organization XIII’s hiding in the shadows whilst opining about the “Truth.” We’ve learned about SiN, we’ve launched a rocket into space, and we’ve gotten payoffs to some of the longest laid bits from nearly 20 years ago. 

Trails Beyond the Horizon takes place a few months after Trails Through Daybreak II, with the Calvard Republic’s plans for the first ever manned flight into space quickly underway. As a space boom hits the continent, Van Arkride is doing his best to keep up with the various schemes and circumstances that rise to the surface amidst the turbulent times. There’s cults, political intrigue, and the everpresent meddling of Ouroboros to worry about; but also more mundane situations like stock scams, charity fraud, and all the standard troubles anyone can run into during day to day life.

There’s a balance to Horizon that matches a lot of earlier games in the series, like Trails in the Sky FC or Trails of Cold Steel. Those games spend a lot of time slowly eking out their broader conspiracy with small-scale events that gradually lead to a bombastic finish. This is a hallmark of Trails in general, but it’s a bit odd to see it done in what is ostensibly the Daybreak arc’s third game, which can definitely create an amount of friction or fatigue if you’re the type of player that somehow gets thirteen games into a series without appreciating its core conceit. 

I joke to an extent, but it is odd, especially when paired with the title change and overall belief that this would be one of, if not THE final game in the Calvard Arc; and previous third entries like Cold Steel III were able to marry a large amount of rising action with an explosive climax that sets up its finale. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the “calm before the storm” approach of Horizon, but it does mean you’re left wondering just how everything is going to play out a lot longer than you would in a more thrilling, chapter based entry like Trails from Zero or Sky SC.

A big part of that dissonance is due to the route-based structure Falcom has leaned on since Trails into Reverie once again making a return. Van shares his protagonist spotlight with Cold Steel’s Rean Schwarzer, Sky’s Kevin Graham, and to a lesser extent the ever funny Rufus Albarea who deserves so many games of his own. Each chapter has you ping-ponging between these character’s perspectives, and each has their own party composition, plotline, and resolution largely unrelated to the other. It’s an interesting format, showcasing the strengths of the series for sure, but at times it can exemplify the breaking points of Trails’ many tropes. It’s one thing to be tested by a couple tough guys as Van Arkride and his kids, it’s another to be tested the same exact way by eight other tough guys across the various routes over and over. A route change should feel more meaningfully different, but here it just feels like we’re model swapping who’s dealing with what.

Taking all this into account, we’re also back to encroaching upon the dark times of Reverie where 50 people file into a room to share their thoughts and ideals against a singular antagonist, but mercifully the overall party member count stops at 24. That is, however, still 24 different characters that the game has to balance and attempt to do justice over the course of your adventure, and inevitably this means many characters get sidelined with the assumption you sort of get them already and we can focus on something else. This is a little frustrating with characters like Fie or Crow who have a lot going on but chill in the background; it is even more egregious with characters like Kevin who has been conspicuously absent from the series for over 10 years, and seemingly almost reset to an amalgamation of what you’d expect a pre-Sky 3rd Kevin to be like.

Equipping all these characters can be exhausting too, especially with the sheer amount of quartz, spells, and accessories you have to kit in and think about across every party. Kevin’s party in particular stands out as uniquely frustrating to work with since they lack a core dedicated support unit, relying entirely on the hope and prayer that Nadia’s silly healing teddy bears will be enough (they aren’t). 

It’s not as bad as it could be, mainly because a large portion of the combat is cordoned off in the “Grim Garten”, a dungeon crawling side mode that lets you use characters from all three routes in your team building. While it’s about as exciting as the Märchen Garten from Daybreak II (read: not at all), it’s aided by at least having an actual story attached to it with really charming Ouroboros characters fooling around, which is always a series highlight. There’s surprising revelations about the mostly forgotten Professor Novartis from Trails to Azure, and new character Ulrika is a standout as a streamer who spits some of the most insane lines in the entire series (done via galmoji in Japanese and modern slang in English).

Ulrika uses “power words” when she speaks that allow her to control and manipulate certain aspects of the people around her (though she insists she never uses them on-stream), which is reflective in-game via the new Shard Command system. These commands are an iteration on the Brave Orders from Cold Steel, and let you activate various passive effects for a certain amount of turns i.e. +60% Physical damage with a small part wide heal. This system is usable by enemies as well, making some boss fights a real nightmare of buffs and debuffs. Just like Brave Orders this almost works, but the inability to use it in the midst of an enemy deluge often makes it feel like it’s just sort of there. If the system worked similarly to the turn order interrupts of the series staple S-Crafts, this would be a great addition! As is, like much of the combat in the Trails series, you can pretty much forget it.

All this whining may seem odd, especially if you slid by those five stars at the top, but here’s the ultimate truth: I had a smile on my face the entire time I was playing Trails Beyond the Horizon, and the theorizing and cliffhangers it’s left open have kept my mind buzzing nonstop as I pore over the older games in the series to go “OHHHH” at. I haven’t felt this burning intrigue in my heart since the secret endings of Kingdom Heart games. At the same time, the quiet slow buildup of the game as I wandered around the now-familiar Calvard checking in with all my favorite NPCs to see what the hell everyone’s doing is like heaven to me. Synthesizing everything I love about Trails into one game, with perhaps the most bespoke localization I’ve seen in games…yeah, you can understand why I might be pretty pleased with Horizon.

Similarly to my Daybreak II review, I wanna run through the appeal of all these characters, because it’s the intersection of world building and character writing that makes Trails Trails. 

Van Arkride continues to impress as the slowly healing traumatized guy who wants to pretend he’s actually twisted and evil. Watching him continue to make the safe choices and focus on improving his interpersonal relationships with others in a way he never has is heartwarming. There’s a scene with his ex-girlfriend Elaine you can get where he finally explains exactly why he has such a fixation on sweets to begin with (this is what romance is all about). I really like how characters notice that he’s being more normal in this game too, with a lot of the more adversarial allies getting closer and conceding that he’s not the bad boy they made him out to be.

Agnes is in peak loser girl mode in this game. While there’s a lot of layers to what she’s doing and the reason she acts the way she is, I adore seeing her stumble more than anything. She wants that problematic age-gap relationship so bad, and I really can’t blame her, but also it’s so over for her. The next game is probably going to go all-in on an Agnes focus too, so we’ll finally be able to see if Falcom is #Woke or #DarkWoke.

Risette got a big boost in Horizon as the story starts to actually dig into exactly what her insane backstory might be. They do a good job of balancing various possibilities of what may have been before you finally get a clearer picture near the end of the game. A big thing that’s hit Trails as it’s gone on is this idea that you can sort of get what a character’s archetype is going to be within a few minutes of meeting them, and that persona can easily overlap with one who’s come before. There are like 3 girls who act like Tio Plato in the Trails series, and they all work at the same place. Risette could almost fall into the same gang of “disaffected voice tech women”, but her fixation on learning where she came from and how that relates to the world is uniquely cool, and instantly sets her apart.

Judith continues to fail and her mom is really hot.

Aaron has some of the worst lines I’ve ever seen, as he should. There’s a meme going around where people post a picture of a character they hate/love and say “you can tell from their eyes they genuinely think they deserve to live”. That’s Aaron. When he said “I stay in shape by going to pound town every night” I wanted to lock him in a box and throw the box into the ocean. A+ work.

Feri is…a child so she still once again doesn’t have that much going on. At the very least her brother Kasim finally had something approaching a personality in this game, but the Al-Fayed family continues to be the biggest “yeah sure” of the game. 

Quatre has another great event related to their gender identity, as well as a separate absolutely insane one. I think it’s really interesting to continue leaning into what it means to be a gender non-conforming person in what has ostensibly been a very conservative world up to this point. Falcom has basically confirmed HRT in Zemuria! Persona could never! There’s this really charming bit where Quatre’s friends show up to hang out with him in the city for a day and talk about loving his anime girl v-tuber streams. You get the real energy that they have no idea what gender he is transitioning to at any point and I eat it up. 

Bergard is an old man, so I adore him as always, but he continues to just be there. There’s always been this undercurrent in Trails that the Old exist to guide and light the way for the Young and it feels like it’s really hitting its culmination with what Horizon sets up. It’ll be very interesting to see if there’s anything more to his bizarre circumstances given the ending’s revelations.

As for the other parties, the Cold Steel party is extremely the Cold Steel Party. Crow is putting on the “I’m not gay” show, while gazing longingly into Rean’s eyes and recoiling in fear from women. Towa is continually the perfect woman, and Fie continues to be chilling since she’s found her calling in life. I wish they had a little bit more going on beyond the classic “haha oh Rean you are dating 10 people” joke but at the same time, when they make a joke about how Rean is never going to marry anyone because he’s dating 10 people… I’m just saying some real people might find that a little relatable.

Kevin and Rufus’ group is a little disappointing, but only by virtue of how strong these characters usually are. Kevin is almost a decade out from overcoming his trauma, but at the same time it feels like he isn’t allowed to do that much, especially bereft of his sister Ries. There’s this interesting angle of Kevin trying to sacrifice his ideologies for the sake of the world that could definitely be approached, but as I mentioned earlier, it almost comes across as a retelling for the sake of nostalgic remembrance. Like “Oh you know Kevin! He had a darkness to work through underneath that funny guy bit! He’s back at it again!” which hits a little rough after Sky 3rd dedicates so much time to bringing him out of that darkness. 

Which is a similar problem for Rufus and his picnicking front, though it is much less severe given Swin and Nadia’s fleshing out in Daybreak II. They continue to have a great Team Rocketesque vibe going on that stood out to many when they hit the scene in Reverie, but a lot of that is stifled by their representation of a morality that Kevin must adhere to. Rufus can say he’s evil and crooked all he wants, but his actions will never reflect that because the situation will never demand it. Lapis is allowed to suck though; we all love a faildaughter.

Though I mentioned a big part of the issues with this game is the routes not feeling distinct enough, it’s not really because of any specific problem with any given party, but more Horizon’s nature as the third entry in an arc. When Van meets up with that NPC you know from previous games, there’s an immediate rapport and remembrance; we’re continuing something here. When Rean or Kevin run into someone Van’s group knows for one of their quests, they usually bemoan that Van isn’t there for a moment, before jumping right in as if the group had that level of familiarity with them.

From a player perspective this works just fine because of course We know what’s been going on with these storylines, but for the in-game narrative vibes, it sort of throws a weird wrench into things. Trails sidequests can take up most of any given game’s runtime because we’re seeing a community grow and learn interdependence as any relationship does; we’re getting the payoff of watching how all these characters change and address similar issues as they grow and learn. It’s a lot harder to get that full payoff feeling when it’s Rean Schwarzer going “oh hello, child Van helped escape from his abusive father in game #1, I guess I’m going to talk to you like I vaguely know you now.” It’s not the worst ever, but it does create a little narrative dissonance that I hadn’t really run into in past games, especially since Reverie is so uniquely structured, and Daybreak II’s routes always ensured there was a member of Van’s group around to give context. The quests are still good, but they’d hit harder if they were actually tied to the characters experiencing them, which is a problem that’s just… never come up before.

I mentioned that these quests range in severity, but things feel very similar to Trails to Azure in this department. You’re running into a lot of storylines that relate to what’s going on behind the scenes with the bigger picture, and oftentimes acting as a result of that bigger picture. Particular standouts involve dealing with the continued exploitation of migrant workers, and a homeless artist who’s turned her life around struggling with the idea of her art becoming commodified by the wealthy she disdains. These are really great contemporary concepts that wouldn’t be too out of the norm to find in an RPG, but the level to which it’s dissected and examined, as always, sets Trails apart.

Bolstering all this is an absolutely stellar localization that I was continually stunlocked by. Every character has a distinctive voice (aided by a consistently improving English dub that I can easily recommend), helping the prose sing in a way that showcases the quality of the translation. There were over six writers credited under translation, and just as many editors; their hard work and genuine passion shines through in every crass line from Aaron, every detached nicety from Risette, and all the shits and fucks they’ve managed to cram in. An interesting aside about the informing of the original text on localization changes, Mirabel is a character that now speaks with a southern accent since she’s supposed to be from the same area of Zemuria that Kevin does; which is very funny to see from the outside as some sort of Forced Cowgirlification.

As the Daybreak games take place in a much more familiar and modern setting than past titles, they’ve understandably leaned more into the type of slang we see in our real world. In previous games this manifested as the occasional “same” or “rizz” drop, but here we’re firing on all cylinders 24/7. When you see the new Ouroboros enforcer call The Thousand Oathbreaker Unc while they talk about him getting ratio’d online… it’s cinema. It really helps elevate the vibe of this place that’s almost like our real world, but ever so slightly different. 

This has actually been a major issue some people have had with the Trails series—technology moving incredibly fast—but Horizon takes great strides in maintaining exactly what makes sense for the setting, and also why these technological advancements might happen to begin with. It’s one thing for Apple to organically create the iPhone over a period of decades, but it’s another for Apple to receive the iPhone in 1980 and then reverse engineer it over the next few years. Human nature is all about learning and mimicking before making something our own, so it’s great for a series to examine just how far you can take that concept when married with fantastical concepts. 

It’s soooo cool that as you go around this country stupefied by the Space Launch, you’re seeing younger people watching YouTube on their phones, while news broadcasts are plastered on giant screens in the streets of popular town hubs. This is a world that never had TV! This is a world that jumped from Radios to an iPhone! That’s so cool! They don’t have a stable output of cinema yet because there’s no home market pipeline of VHS to DVD to Digital for anything to be based on! They just re-run that shit every few months like the 1900s! It rocks!!!!

It’s one thing for a world to suddenly pivot to future tech (think Final Fantasy), it’s another to gradually integrate and interrogate how the medieval peasant would be affected by the advent of the Dorito. It reminds me a lot of Ascendance of a Bookworm, one of my favorite light novel series, because Trails genuinely cares about the world its characters live in, and how it informs their world view and vernacular. Bookworm does this with the implications of what providing the working class with literature and information does to change society, and Trails approaches it from every conceivable angle. We watched our own world change dramatically as telecommunications technology developed rapidly over the last 50 years, and it hits even harder in this world where countries once separated by monsters and mountains are able to intermingle and uncover things about themselves and the world.

I don’t want to spend too much time just talking to you directly about what precisely the ending to Trails Beyond the Horizon is—everyone who’s played a Trails game knows that there are endless cliffhangers and absurdist revelations at the climax of most—but I will say the most surprising thing it did for me was improve upon what Trails Through Daybreak II had fumbled with; which is something I’ve rarely seen a game do retroactively and well. By the time you finish Horizon, you have a complete understanding of basically everything going on with the previously uninspired and confusing antagonist of Daybreak II, and not in the sense of “oh they fleshed out his backstory now with a text log” or something, but because it appears your confusion at his diatribes was intentional. It’s such a novel and interesting concept that works perfectly within a series with a defined lineage like Trails, while even series like Kingdom Hearts has stumbled to maintain cohesion.

That’s really my continual message with the Trails series distilled: it’s able to consistently pull off and do things that every game could have the potential for, if the limitations of industry and marketing didn’t get in the way. When I think of my childhood yearning for series like Dragon Age and Mass Effect—these big interconnected epics that spawn multiple entries and remember your every action—I find it meaningfully accomplished here in the budgeted and ambitious world of Zemuria. Sure you might not have the sweeping grand set-piece moments, or sexy AAA fidelity elves crooning into your ear, but the heart is here, limited only by the time they had, rather than what they think it must be, and that makes all the difference.

The post A Great Beyond – The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon (PS5) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

As seems inevitable with such a long running series however, developers Nihon Falcom announced they were working on a remake of the first Trails title, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, earlier this year. Although I understood the logic behind attempting to ‘create a more accessible entry point’ for the series, I was filled with trepidation. How could they possibly capture the charm and swag of the original’s picturesque diorama- style world? How could the more modern low-budget 3D the series pivoted to after its Cold Steel arc even dream of matching the feeling that you’re watching a bunch of dolls get mashed against each other while you look at all sorts of beautifully retro expression sheets in dialogue boxes? How could any sort of remixes live up to the raw early 2000s just-evolved-past-MIDIs jams?

While there are a couple snags, I have still found myself reasonably impressed by Trails in the Sky’s “1st” remake, and I think it establishes itself as a fantastic gateway into a series that many have viewed as impenetrable.

Trails in the Sky takes place in the fantasy nation of Liberl: a small country that’s slowly healing from a brutal war just a decade earlier, and one continually coming to grips with the changes brought on by a technological revolution. Its story follows Estelle and Joshua, two adopted siblings who have trained through their teenage years to become “Bracers”, a community-focused group of everymen who solve all sorts of problems from finding missing family members to eliminating dangerous monsters that roam the countryside. Just as they finally complete their training, they are quickly swept up into a series of seemingly unconnected events that take them all over the country, forcing them to learn about (and help) all sorts of different people.

From that basic description, Trails in the Sky sounds like the most RPG an RPG could be. Plucky young heroes… fighting monsters… going to various towns… it has a vast amount of the staples that make up not just its gaming peers, but the fantasy genre as a whole. 

What makes the Trails series distinct is just how in-depth and reactive its world and characters are. Every NPC updates their dialogue after nearly every story beat, creating arcs out of their own mundanity, and adding to the feeling of a dense and alive setting. You’ll learn about random family drama, complaints about supply lines that are gradually dealt with, maybe even witness the seeds of what will become important plot info for future quests. While most RPGs are beloved for their flavor text, Trails takes it to the extreme, and as intimidating as it sounds, it cultivates an extremely cozy and exploratory vibe that you can’t find anywhere else, even in juggernaut RPGs like Baldur’s Gate.

I could keep going on and on with a base level explanation of what Trails in the Sky is, but as I’ve established, I’m a Trails sicko! I played Trails in the Sky years ago now, and I’m all the way into the crazy modern games where you’re finding the super advanced airships from this game in junkyards while the new main character drives his Ford truck past and calls them old! I can’t sit here and pretend to describe this game from the basic level when I basically have a PhD in Trails! Instead, let’s spend some time talking about what has and hasn’t been remade and adjusted in this more modern take on a game that I absolutely adore.

Immediately, the biggest change is with the combat system. No longer bound by the isometric grid based environments of yore, Trails in the Sky 1st adapts the hybrid “real-time into turn-based” style of combat that the recent Trails games have cemented as a new standard. You’ll do some pretty basic hack and slash combat, with the ability to switch to turn-based gameplay in a fixed arena with the press of a button. In-practice, you’ll generally go for stunning an enemy with attacks in the overworld, and then finishing them off with more precise and elaborate moves in a turn-based battle. Just as in Daybreak, the real-time combat isn’t anything to write home about, but it does allow you to deal with repeated random encounters with incredible ease compared to the average turn-based experience of mashing the run button once you’ve had your fill of fights.

Also brought in from future titles are things like support XP and party gauges that can be utilized for strong and flashy follow-up combos, which are incredibly welcome improvements over the clunky chain attacks of the original. 

Interesting as well are changes to the timeline buff system that the Trails games have all used. Every character’s turn has a random chance to gain some sort of passive attack – things like a guaranteed critical hit, or mana restoration – and the tactical idea behind the combat was that you would try and use characters’ speed stats, as well as their turn stealing S-Craft moves, to exploit these buffs in your favor. In practice, however, this meant you basically just saved your S-Craft moves for whenever you saw that guaranteed crit coming up, and then just blew all your enemies up in a single turn…over and over again. In 1st, you have to use moves on your assigned turns that have a ‘steal modifier’ instead, forcing you to plan ahead if there’s danger on the horizon. While you’ll quickly find yourself in new routines of combat like the original, I found that this change had me thinking a lot more strategically about the harder fights in the game, especially when playing on the higher difficulties.

Visually, this may be the best looking game to come out of modern Falcom. Earlier I bemoaned the sort of budget 3D the series has become known for, and even with more recent entries like Trails Beyond the Horizon amping up the style and camera direction that’s started to feel stagnant over the years, it’s always been much less compelling to me than anything else they’d put out in the decades before ‘HD’ poisoned the well. Look at Popful Mail! Look at Trails to Azure! These are games working with what they have, rather than what they feel like they have to aspire to, and it’s always felt meaningfully distinctive to me.

Sky 1st goes for a cel-shaded aesthetic that really helps emphasise the strengths of the original’s early 2000s anime design philosophy. Characters constantly switch between gag manga style expressions with dotted eyes, or foaming mouths when overwhelmed or knocked unconscious, and there are a lot of great comic book style thwack effects accompanying every move that captures the inherent goofy low-fantasy vibes the Sky trilogy relished in. On a more technical level, being able to actually see Joshua’s eyes dull during certain attacks because of the increased fidelity makes certain sequences pop even more than they did in the original.

Every map has been faithfully recreated as well, albeit in a more seamless form. The original Trails in the Sky was formatted similarly to a lot of older RPGs with maps occupying certain amounts of “screens” separated by load times, an approach which has its own sense of charms, and in some cases let developers (like the Monster Hunter team) create environments that were both visually and structurally different without having to worry about world consistency. While this mattered more in games like Final Fantasy, where the creatives wanted to cultivate complex and fantastical worlds that felt larger than they actually were, it mattered less in Trails in the Sky where things are a lot more grounded. 

With open areas, you get a sense for just how big (and small) Liberl is as a nation, and the way areas lead into each other feels incredibly natural. With the only real loading screens being the interiors of houses and border checkpoints, the vibe of the world ends up being a lot more cohesive. You understand full well why Bracers like Joshua and Estelle are hired to protect people in the unkempt wilderness between settlements (there’s so many freaking monsters around!) and you understand why the rise of the airship and other forms of transit have completely changed the way these people are able to navigate the world around them. At times I did miss the feeling of “hey they used the language of a video game dungeon for the generic outdoors, that’s super cool”, but being able to just seamlessly enter towns and listen to the music change and watch everyone tuck their weapons away feels just as satisfying.

Similarly, the improved camera direction – especially in the more important scenes like character introductions or crucial moments – helps add oomph and impact to a lot of fairly basic sequences. There will always be that appeal to the original’s aforementioned doll mashing, but I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t dying to see all the pop-off moments from Sky Second Chapter done like this whenever they get around to it. The Aura Farming is much more impactful when they can have the wind blowing through their hair, and the camera slowly panning up billowing coats.

Other than that, the meat of Trails in the Sky is pretty much completely intact here. Events unfold exactly as they did before, even in spite of comments made in pre-release interviews suggesting that there was going to be “new content linked to future games”, with the exception of a few side quests added to flesh out characters that are further expanded upon in Second Chapter. Unfortunately, there was no hidden child Rean Schwarzer cameo for all the power scalers out there, and honestly I think that’s for the best since it helps keep the quaint and low-stakes setup that Sky establishes for itself. 

A huge benefit to replaying Sky all these years later is realizing just how much Falcom had seeded and remembered throughout each consecutive title. Every time I ran into a reference to something I knew mattered more in a later arc, I had to double check the original every time to make sure it hadn’t been added in, and almost every single time it was just already there. All of the setup for Second Chapter, and characters like Loewe especially, had me blown away by how much they had actually told you over the course of that original game, mostly through subtext and one off lines. Trails is a series that rewards you for caring about its world and characters, and seeing how it was already like that right from the get-go felt like renewing vows with my beloved video game wife.

The only thing that really hurts this remake in the end – and unfortunately, a pretty severe thing – is its localization. 

If you know anything about Trails in the Sky from the outside, chances are it’s about the infamous task of localizing the original Trails in the Sky trilogy into English. Long story short: it was a huge pain! There’s a lot of dialogue in a game with constantly updating NPCs, and with terms and items that are maintained across several games, it was an ordeal that required tons of patching, editing, double checking, and reworking over five or so years. Some complain that its end-state can be a bit heavy-handed when it comes to characterization, but to me it’s a shining example of exactly what a localization should do: accentuate character voices and rework prose into a state where it feels more natural to read in its new language. When I think of Trails in the Sky I think of the specific way party member Olivier talks when he cracks his stupid smile, I think of the tenderness in Kloe’s mannerisms, and I think of Estelle and how often she threatens people with her giant Staff.

All of those character traits remain to some degree in publisher Gung-Ho’s new localization, but they are continually subdued and marred by a baffling decision to focus on a direct translation to “Honor the original Japanese text”. Gone are most of Estelle’s lightly reactive quips in favor of dozens upon dozens of “what was that?”s and “huh?”s. There are countless line changes that come across as amateurish in the remake, even if the original could be considered over the top. One that stood out to me specifically was during a tournament late in the game, where two divisions of the military are fighting each other. The original localization had the line “We’ll show em twelve kinds of hell, army style!”, while the remake instead offers “Special Ops…We will show them the power of the regular army!”. Even if the first line is a bit excessive, it fits into the cartoony presentation of the army that has been seen across western media for years upon years, while the new line comes across as clinical and divorced from any individual voice; a functional line, which is a concept that runs completely antithetical to what the series has been about to-date!

Similarly, several series staples and titles have been renamed inexplicably, with some being fixed over the course of patches for series consistency, and I just…don’t understand why? Why after so many years would you decide to change “Divine Blade”, a title critical to so many characters in so many games, to the incredibly basic “Sword Saint?” Why would you change the genetically engineered Acerbic Tomatoes, named as such because they were cultivated by a scientist who would use that sort of elaborate naming convention and which are consistently called as such in all subsequent games, into the incredibly childish “Bitter Tomato”? Did they really read the line now present in Sky 1st of “Bitter Tomatoes…wow this is bitter!” and think they nailed it? Am I supposed to be impressed by flavor being taken away?

By changing so many of these names with little thought directed towards the established series vernacular, it actively gets in the way of those big ‘recognition’ moments that makes the Trails series what it is. How will a new player who decides to go more in-depth into the series feel when every other game has entirely different names for things? Sure, they’ll eventually figure it out once they get past this one game, but shouldn’t this be THE new entry point that makes the rest easier to stomach?

There are other miscellaneous NPC name mix-ups that have gradually been fixed over time, and I’m sure other things will get ironed out as people point them out, but I just don’t understand how or why this would ever happen, and it really bums me out that for a remake that otherwise does basically everything you would want a fancy remake of an old game to do, Sky 1st stumbles in what should be its strongest aspect. The game is still fundamentally based on that original script done by XSeed, but sucking out so much of its soul hurts as someone who loves the game because of how I got to experience it originally. The defining point of the Trails series is its characters and watching them grow and change over time, and seeing that disrespected in favour of either acquiescence to the worst Internet posters you’ve ever seen, or obsession with some platonic objective ideal of translation is incredibly saddening and worrying to me with a Second Chapter remake on the horizon.

I worry that my complaints here seem too severe, especially since most new players probably won’t notice what’s missing or what’s been done (especially with how historically bad most localizations can be in terms of stiffness and clinicality) but I have to be true to my beliefs…my beliefs that Estelle should be asking Olivier if he’s “one of those boys who likes boys”, instead of the incredibly dull “wait you have that kind of preference?”

There are plenty of things this remake does well enough though for me to easily recommend it as an entry point for anyone who’s been scared of trying Trails before. Quality of life changes extend beyond just the battle improvements and world traversal, bringing more modern conveniences like no longer hiding side quests, and marking important objectives on the map. It’s no exaggeration to say that once Trails Through Daybreak added the ability to see what NPCs you’ve already talked to with different icons, and letting you know when shops had added new items, it changed everything for the better, and it’s wonderful to see these features ported backwards.

At the end of the day, though, I struggle to validate a remake in a culture full of remakes. It is at least nice to see one that has mostly tried to just redo their freshman foray into something that feels tighter; hopefully issues with the localization will in fact be cleaned up with more patches, and this remake can be a shot in the arm into finally tricking all of those people who whine about there being no turn based games or RPGs that aren’t Persona into expanding their worldview and experiencing joy for a change.

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