In recent years, Japanese role playing games have received a lot of flak for relying too heavily on the over-the-top antics and heavily clichéd and convoluted storytelling so strongly associated with anime. So too has the gameplay in this genre been criticized in some cases for offering nothing new, and in others, for being too dense. And though Falcom’s The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky doesn’t offer innovation, it does offer simple and snappy gameplay in a world full of fleshed out characters and a plot that manages to be compelling without being incomprehensible.
Your main characters are Estelle and Joshua Bright, two teenagers who are finishing up their training to become Junior Bracers, rookies in the game’s adventuring police force. In order to reach the rank of full-fledged Bracers, Joshua and Estelle set off on a quest to receive recommendations from Bracer Guilds in others cities, when they help find the hijackers of an airship and become involved in solving something bigger.
As much of a Bracer’s work involves defending townsfolk from monsters and an assortment of criminals, combat is of course present throughout the game. Battles are turn-based and take place on a grid, giving players the option to attack, move, use items, or use Arts and Crafts (read: magic and skills, respectively). A meter on the left side of the screen displays the turn order for each unit, and most of the game’s strategy comes from using Arts and Crafts to either manipulate turn order directly or by inflicting status effects to hamper enemy actions. Particularly useful in managing turn order are S-Breaks, powerful Crafts that can be used at any time as long as a character has 100 or more CP (skill points). Running alongside the turn meter are icons representing bonus effects that are conferred to whatever unit is taking action when the icon reaches the top of the screen. These effects may replenish EP (magic points) and CP, health, or provide critical damage, as well as a few others. Outside of the game’s most demanding fights, however, these bonuses are just that, and aren’t essential to victory.
For the most part, having the option to use a turn solely to move in battle seems extraneous, as the benefit of being able to walk out of an attack’s area of effect doesn’t usually outweigh the benefit dealing damage, even when your character will just take the most direct route to hitting an enemy. But, while most of the battles don’t require you to spend a great deal of time planning things, neither do they overstay their welcome. Most attack animations play out quickly, and the longest ones (usually the more powerful Arts or S-Breaks) are used more sparingly. Some quirky monster design that includes flying cats, monkey sheep and gator sharks also keep battles feeling fresh.
Through battling, your characters will level up, gaining stat increases and new crafts, but new magic and customization options come through the game’s Orbment system. Orbments, as the name implies, are little, magic orbs that characters can equip into devices with interconnected slots to gain power. Each Orbment has an elemental type and value as well as a name to indicate what kind of stat boost or effect it provides. In order to access the more powerful magic in the game, players will need to equip Orbments of the correct type and elemental value, the combinations for which can be viewed in the Bracer’s Notebook, which, among other things, serves as a reference for the game’s mechanics. Where things get tricky is that each character has different arrangement Orbments slots, and spells are only available when the minimum elemental value is reached on a single line. Furthermore, most characters have at least one or two slots that accept only a certain elemental type of Orbment.
The Orbment system may seem a bit complex at first, but when you get used to it, having to puzzle together some stronger builds becomes interesting in and of itself, and seeing the results in battle is rewarding. That said, acquiring some of the game’s most useful spells is a simple matter of equipping as much of a single elemental type of Orbment as possible, so you don’t have to spend a great deal of time with the Orbment system if you don’t want to.
Outside of combat, you’ll spend your time exploring cities and dungeons and the trails in between. As you would expect, cities house the bulk of the game’s conversations as well as various facilities like shops and inns for you to keep your party in fighting form. You also accept the majority of the game’s sidequests from within a city’s Bracer Guild. These quests often include exterminating a strong group of monsters, playing escort to NPCs, or finding some object with significance to the requester. You’ll be glad to know that the escort quests, while they do involve protecting an NPC during combat, are very manageable. The people you’re protecting usually do a good job of actually moving away from monsters, and some even assist you by inflicting status effects on enemies.
The fact that all the sidequests, including those found in unconventional places, are tasks that Bracers of any rank are expected to deal with serves as a strong contextual motivation for spending time helping townsfolk with smaller matters other than just because of the compassion found in the heart of every JRPG protagonist. Indeed, this device goes a long way toward reinforcing the sense of duty and work ethic shared by Joshua and Estelle. Even more, it’s also one example of the game’s greatest strength.
What sets Trails in the Sky apart from other games is the lengths it goes to in fleshing out its characters. I don’t just mean those important to the plot; I mean all of its characters. After every event, every sidequest, almost every NPC throughout the areas you can explore a given point in the game will have something new to say, and it’s this dialog that makes the Trails universe feel dynamic and lively. NPCs will still tell you their thoughts one or two sentences at a time, but they’re not cursed to repeating the same thought for the next 10 hours of gameplay. The more you progress, the more you’ll learn about how the events in the game affect (or don’t afftect) the everyday lives of these people. If an event has put a character’s livelihood at stake, you’ll know it. If there’s inter-family rivalry or marriage trouble, you’ll know it. If a little kid is proud of the artistry he puts in to stacking merchandise for display, you’ll know that too.
And the writing for the main cast and story isn’t any less well executed. Trails in the Sky may take place in a familiar fantasy setting with magic crystals and monsters and airships, and there are many other conventions that will be familiar to RPG veterans as they progress through the game, but these conventions are never presented as being the most important or most interesting aspects of the plot. They’re always supplemental. It’s the difference between being told a character has a dark and mysterious past and being led to believe there’s more than meets the eye. This practice holds true even on the basic level of interaction between characters. There are indeed characters that fit in to broader archetypes such as the flamboyant philanderer and the surly, standoffish swordsman, but there are always other facets to their character, and even when they’re behaving most according to their archetype, the writing tends to steer away from the most inane outcomes for this behavior, favoring instead social interactions that don’t feel like they could only happen in a cartoon.
Trails in the Sky isn’t without its share of problems, but even the more noticeable ones come up so infrequently that they’re not a big deal. For example, there’s no option when buying new weapons to equip them immediately and then sell old one. But, you don’t typically have to update every bit of your party’s gear at the same time more than once a chapter. And, unlike many JRPGs, NPCS will usually say the same thing if you talk to them more than once at any given point in the game. This isn’t a problem per se, but there will be the odd NPC who says something else, and since the writing is the best part of the game, not knowing just when there’s some more of it can be a little annoying. Again, however, what flaws Trails in the Sky does have are small and don’t detract from the elements that make this one of the most engrossing and entertaining JRPGs of all time.