After finishing Xenoblade 2 I started thinking about other stuff I might be able to push myself through since there's quite a few games that I never got far in for one reason or another. One game that's always been on the back of my mind for the past couple of years now is Trails in the Sky. I bought it a few years ago for one hell of a steal (10 bucks to be specific), but when I played it I quickly got frustrated with it's extremely slow pace and ragequit after about an hour and a half.
Both before and after my ragequit I've always loved listening to
@AdmiralMuffin talk about the games and he's shown me all sorts of cool stuff from them, every time I see something cool from it I'm like "damn, I wish I could get into these games" so it's always been on the back of my mind as I said, after all the game is permanently in my Steam library so whenever I'd be ready to take another crack at it, it'd be there. A few other things that really pushed me to really give it another attempt were both finishing Ys 8 (which is IMO the best story Falcom has ever done and like Trails it can be a bit of a slow burn) and a particularly great video Muffin showed me that talked about Renne's character arc. Combine that with my recent game slump and I randomly decided today would be the day I take another crack at this.
My first impression after trying to get back into this is that this game could seriously use a remake. 2000s-era Falcom games really do not have a nice interface and this is probably my least favorite Falcom UI by far. My main issue is with the orbments and determining what they do. You need to look it up by flipping through your Bracer Handbook since just hovering over the thing in the orbment menu doesn't tell you everything. From the looks of things the abilities you get are seemingly determined by the amount of each orbment color you have equipped... I think. It tries to be something like Final Fantasy 7's materia system but this feels a bit more clumsy to use. If there's one thing I know about Falcom games it's that it often takes them a bit to really refine something when they do try something new so I'm sure it's better in later games, but it's really frustrating to have to constantly go into the handbook to figure out exactly what you're getting. Why can't it just tell me when I hover over the thing like in Final Fantasy 7 (unless I'm looking at something wrong)? It doesn't help that the tabs are labeled things like "Magic 1" "Magic 2" Magic 3" and such. I also wish Falcom didn't have an obsession with automatically moving your cursor around everywhere in every menu. This isn't just a Trails thing, I've had to deal with this bizarre quirk in the various Ys games I've played but good lord it's irritating.
Combat is decent, I don't particularly love the combat here but there's parts of it that I think is good to have. Having a visible turn order is especially good, it helps give you a good visual of what goes on in a turn based system and once you start to really master combat it's an indispensable tool to really just hammer your enemies. I've always loved that idea since I played Final Fantasy 10 (which to this day is my favorite FF combat system) and it's great to see something similar here too. At least in these early parts of the game, combat is a little slow but you have a turbo button which can speed things up at any point in the game so you can zip through easier encounters really fast (it's also good for when you're backtracking through an already explored area but I try to use it only in combat, otherwise it's way too easy to miss things). S-Craft attacks are pretty nice too, you get a cool little animation and you can use these to wail on multiple enemies at once if you want. For example you can smack something with a normal attack, then hit your S-Craft button before the turn finishes then unleash that on another enemy. Use that at the right time and boom, two enemies dead in one shot! Pretty neat.
I don't really have much to say about the story right now cause it's a very slow burn. The story and characters come across as very average at the moment, but since this is the first game in a long running series known for story and character development I know it won't be like that forever provided I can push through. I refuse to just skip games cause for something like this it's going to ultimately be detrimental to the overall experience and if I do manage to push through, maybe my opinion of this game will retroactively improve as I play the rest of the games which almost exactly mirrors part of how I felt after finishing Xenoblade 2. And you know what, if I could get through Xenoblade 2 with all it's bizarre mechanics and frustrating elements I think there's a chance I'll be able to pull off finishing Trails. Unfortunately I can't just cheese certain sections by setting the game to an easier difficulty (lowest one this game has is Normal), but I got this! I think!
On another note, I noticed some somewhat neat details while I was playing. I probably won't go out of my way to find every single piece of worldbuilding/detail the game has but I did find two kinda cool things:
First thing I noticed was that every treasure chest in the game has a neat little message if you check it again after you open it. First time I noticed it I was like "oh hey that's actually kinda neat" cause I can't think of any other game that's done that. Second thing I noticed was actually a bit unsettling. You know how S-Craft attacks have the little cut-ins with the character's faces on them? Estelle's looks like she's gonna absolutely fuck shit up, which is the kind of thing you'd usually see in other games that have these kinds of cut-ins (like the ones in the Tales series). Joshua's on the other hand? His eyes have the "I've been through seriously fucked up shit" blank look in them and I found the contrast between the two cut-ins to be seriously eerie.
I don't want to come across as potentially too negative but the main takeaway here is this attempt seems to be going better than the first one and despite my complaints I'm finding some enjoyment. If Xenoblade 2 could grow on me a bit after a while maybe this can too. And if it does, it's perfect timing because the Crossbell arc games are almost available officially in English.
