The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

In the early hours of the game I came across a wood-textured hexagon sitting behind the starting town's magitech upgrade shop, with some smears of color on in, and my instinct was to regard it as a generic videogame junk object. On a later visit I realized it was the same model as the sign in front of the shop, and thought it was a clever reuse. Later on, though, the owner of the shop mentions, in a scrap of dialogue one will only see if one makes a point of talking to everyone in town after every plot update, that he was trained as a clockmaker as a young man. The next time I passed into the alley behind the shop it struck me that the object back there had a worn-away painting of a clock on it: it's the sign the store had it front before it made the switch to selling orbments. *Trails* isn't interested in challenging the genre of fourth-generation JRPGs in which it's working: none of this detail feels incompatible with or even complicates the archetypal town NPC to whom it applies. It makes him and the world he constitutes substantial, taking the utilitarian ephemera endemic to the form and imbuing it with more care than it was meant to hold. *Trails*' design is informed by an unaccountable belief that JRPGs are important. I can't, in spite of its best efforts, share in that belief, but its love for both the genre and the specific world it presents worked on me. This all requires a certain amount of player buy-in, a willingness to participate in the imaginative exercise of stitching these details together, which I was only able to offer this attempt. I'd started the game twice before and quit in Rolent with the impression that the 00s-style localization was nicely written but that I wasn't terribly interested. It's a game which gives back what one's willing to put in, and in light of that I think that my own playstyle this time around was the ideal way to experience it: with friends, assigning each character as a voice role. This mildly inflated my playtime from the sensible 30-40 hours the game seems to have been designed around to 104. By volume, about half the dialogue in my particular amateur-theater playthrough of *Trails in the Sky* is not in the script of *Trails of the Sky*: most of that inflated playtime came from us improvising skits between the cast. The specifics of this approach are, of course, non-transferable. The pure serendipity of being woefully underequipped to deal with Lorence because I'd insisted on giving Estelle and Kloe matching Lily Necklaces and Wool-knit Hats as a matter of role-playing, and still managing to pull it out first try by having Scherazard feed Estelle jelly beans and a tomato sandwich so she could get a well-timed crit, was totally unique, but I recommend playing *Trails* as fanfiction-inflectedly as possible. For posterity, I did call the ending: not the obvious fact that Joshua was a child assassin from a shadowy organization but the beats of him confessing to Estelle before revealing that he'd have to leave her, as well as some specific bits of phrasing, like his saying that the five years he spent with her were a dream from which he'd have to wake. This was in the context of Joshua getting early access to White Gehenna, an AOE move that feels broken in the first chapters of the game: after some intermittent bad jokes about this being his Whiteboy Blast I suggested offhandedly that this was power he'd gained in a pact made in his shadowy past with the White Pharaoh, that he'd draw on his last reserves of it in the final chapter to save Estelle's life, and that he would then be forced to tell her that he was always with her on borrowed time and that now, per his contract, he would be taken to Utah to build pyramids, with the second game following Estelle's journey to rescue him. This was more or less it. Worst aspect of the game was, without a doubt, Carnelia. As for the best NPCs, I'm torn between Stella, Estelle's possessive childhood babysitter, Reina, the boarding school girl devoted to ruining her roommate's life, and Ralph, the neglected househusband unhappily married to a woman whose sole passion in life is bloodsport.

The remake is not a replacement this game is still really good and a cheaper entry if you just want to try it

Estelle repeatedly saying the line "NANDES TTEEEEE" always keep me entertained

Аниме залупа для идиотов которые хотят проебать своё время, то есть для фанатов дедпи 47

10/10

Legendary JRPG, I even suggest this OVER the remake- mostly because the remake renames NPCs which is VERY important for immersion in this highly persistent world. What, does Gung-Ho think their going to get the rights to every Legend of Heroes game? 95% of the games are already released! Anyway playing this game is like playing GTA2 (or Fallout) when GTA3 (Fallout 3) is out, it only looks better.

Bro what a game. Easiest 10/10 of my life. Story had no reason to be as good as it was, did not expect that. The way it ends too will make you instantly want to go to the next game.

The beginning where it has you messing with orbals is confusing, and I wound up stuck talking to the tan white haired lady, and having her not let me pass. There's no way to get past it, tried for 30min, I even opened there book that i'm guessing your supposed to study to go to the next section... not fun. I uninstalled... good dialog tho.

1ST重制版出了通关后，买了原版为我的青春补票！07年空轨陪伴着我，给了我最好的体验！ 无论是BGM、剧情、玩法都太精彩了！ 可惜STEAM上没有日版和中文，期待SC和3RD的重制版！