The Trails series has always been a bit of a blind spot for me, a person who considers herself a JRPG sicko. Truthfully, I’d tried many times to get into the series, with Trails of Cold Steel on the PS Vita, and even the original version of Trails in the Sky, given how much praise this series has gotten. Now that Falcom has finally deigned to remake the very first game that kicked everything off, I think this may finally be my time.
Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is a remake of Falcom’s beloved 2004 JRPG, which only got an English release many years later. By all accounts, it starts off as your typical classic RPG. You’ve got a young, sprightly protagonist eager to prove herself in battle. You go through a tutorial section learning all the basics while she trains to become a Bracer (a town protector of sorts who fights the monsters and baddies). Then, an earth-shattering plot twist happens, your house burns down basically, and you’re off on an adventure to recruit allies to your cause and save the world. There’s nothing really new to write home about, but as the saying goes: if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
The problem with playing the original Trails in the Sky, though, is that I can see it being a little bit too outdated for a modern audience, myself included. I never played this game when it launched, and while I have zero issues playing something as ugly as the original Final Fantasy VII in this day and age, I simply can’t bring myself to play older games that I wasn’t there for when they launched. Despite my best attempts to get into Sky on the PS Vita, I ultimately bounced off. Trails of Cold Steel fared a little better as a newer game, though I also fell off simply because I felt I needed to play the games that came before it first.
With Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, I no longer have any excuse, and I’m glad to be immersed in the world of Liberl. For starters, the entire game is now fully voice acted in both English and Japanese, and the combat has been redone to make it feel like the more modern Trails entries. Battles are both real-time and turn-based affairs, giving you the best of both worlds. You can hit an enemy with your weapon before you properly engage them, try to stun them with a skill, then enter turn-based combat, which is where the fun really begins.
I’ve also found myself completely enamored with the game’s Orbment system, where you can slot different colored Quartz into an Orb slot in your equipment. This affects your stats and abilities, allowing you to build party members however you want. If you know me, you’ll know I’m a complete sucker for malleable character builds in JRPGs, and this Orbment system has been a dream so far.
The combat and Orbment systems alone are already more than enough to get me invested in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, but really, it’s the voice acting and world-building that have me completely hooked. While I’m not a huge fan of Estelle’s English voice, her Japanese voice actress knocks it out of the park. The Trails games are also famous for having an insane amount of NPC dialogue, and you’ll want to talk to every NPC you see each time something important happens in-game. They seem to always have something new to say, and the amount of dialogue that’s been cramped into this game is just unfathomable to me.
Overall, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is a shiny new package that seems to have kept all of the important original elements intact, and that’s exactly what a series newbie like myself needs. I’m currently playing through the game myself and will have a review up this month, or whenever I actually beat this thing…
