I’d only ever played The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky via the PSP version, and then via Anbernic handhelds, where I would putter around with it for a short time before inevitably finding something else to play. I came to the Trails series much later (with Cold Steel), and by then the game was just way too old to get around to properly sit down to. Especially when I always have such a library of new games to work through. Point is, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, a full remake of the game, is the perfect excuse to remedy that item on my JRPG bucket list, and based on the demo, this may well become my favourite in the entire series.
A big part of that is Estelle, of course. Estelle is an absolutely magnificent protagonist, and adorable to boot. The character already had plenty of personality from the bits of the original game that I played, but that was all delivered by text boxes and a little sprite with relatively limited animation. Now, thanks to this remake, we get to enjoy the full glory of 3D Estelle, with hugely entertaining facial expressions, in particular, adding even more to one of the Trails series’ more bubbly, charming girls. There are both Japanese and English voice tracks available, and while I preferred the Japanese with subtitles, I did flick on the English voice track and the actor seems to have done an exceptional job in translating a very Japanese anime character style into the English language and American accent. It’s rare that that works (at least, to my ears). In fact, only Persona 4 and NieR (not Automata) have ever really worked in English for me in the past.
The other characters are great too, and the free camera and closer camera than the isometric perspective of the original game really does give you a more intimate and immersive perspective on events, even if the story is, at least from the demo, an almost totally faithful recreation, with minimal effort to remix the beats or individual dialogue sequences.
What has changed, quite significantly, is the combat system, which brings in the blend of real-time action and turn-based combat that the more recent Legend of Heroes games have tried on. I’ve been sceptical of this system with how it has been implemented previously, but the development team at Nihon Falcom has done a significantly better job of it this time around. For one thing, the action combat system has a much nicer flow to it than in previous Legend of Heroes titles. Dodging out of the way and launching powerful counter-attacks has a really slick, twitch-like quality to it, without being overly difficult or feeling too punishing. And then the transition to turn-based combat, for when you do want to plan out moves more strategically, is so seamless that more than a few times I hadn’t even realised and wondered why everyone was standing still for a split second.
Where, in other Legends of Heroes titles, I’ve used the action combat system as little as possible, with Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, I was immediately more comfortable with blending the two and taking advantage of the situations where one or the other is preferable. Who knows if I’ll end up favouring one or the other in the longer term, but for now, this is one of the better efforts to meld turn-based and action combat that we’ve seen from developers that are trying to appeal to fans of both styles simultaneously.
It’s worth pointing out that Trails in the Sky is something like a 50-60 hour game, so having a demo of the first fraction of it really is just a fraction, and having not really played the original enough I have no sense of the kind of narrative I’m going to be in for as I get deeper into the game. But what is in the demo is a genuinely impressive taste that has me incredibly excited to bite down into the full game. I do know that it’s already a legendary part of the series, considered one of the better entry points (in what is an enormously complex and convoluted series at this point), and as having one of the better narratives and cast. All of that is improved on with the added detail and depth that modern visual systems offer, combined with Nihon Falcolm’s iterative approach to gameplay development hitting a new high. Now I just need a swimsuit costume for Estelle and we’ve got my game of the year here.
