What I'm Playing - No. 125
Welcome back to another weekly wrap-up of the games I’ve been playing over the past week!
The only game I played last week was The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. There are minor visual spoilers of the final dungeon and a few enemies in it, but no major spoilers are covered in the text or shown in the screenshots.
Click a title to skip to that section. Games contained within this post:
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (PC)
The journey is over: I finished Trails in the Sky this week! Like the other Trails games I’ve played, it was a solid JRPG. The final dungeon was a really fun bout of dungeon crawling, it made me wish that there had been more dungeons like it in the game. There were really only a few dungeon crawling moments in the entire game, about 1 per chapter. Otherwise, most of it was exploring paths between areas, which were mostly straight shots with the occasional fork. I guess the dungeon crawling isn’t really what the series is about though, it’s much more focused on characters and world building between games and arcs.
The final chapter of the game was probably the highlight of entire experience. The story keeps you invested, there are some nice character moments, and of course there’s the aforementioned final dungeon. The ending also has some pretty big reveals. Last week, I guessed that Joshua’s past would remain a mystery until later games in the trilogy, but I was thankfully proven wrong! They do a very good job of setting up next game in the trilogy, and there was even a cool post-credits promotional movie for it.
Before the final chapter, there were definitely times that dragged. The first chapter was a good start and had an intriguing story, but then it took a while for the overarching plot to rear its head again. The events of chapters 2 and 3 seemed mostly disconnected from the main plot, at least at first. A lot of RPGs have inconsistent pacing, and it’s something I’m generally pretty tolerant of. Trails of Cold Steel 1 is pretty similar in this regard, and actually might be even slower paced. This doesn’t ruin the experience by any means, but it does mean things are less interesting at times.
Trails in the Sky was a strong start to the trilogy. I’m definitely planning on playing Trails in the Sky SC (Second Chapter) at some point. I’m interested in seeing the story continue, as well as seeing if any of my complaints about the gameplay are addressed in the sequel. But I probably won’t be playing SC for quite a while. I don’t even own it on Steam yet! My final playtime was 36:22:20, and that’s having skipped a lot of the side quests in the game.
