If you liked the earlier Trails games, there's a decent chance you'll like this one too, despite the somewhat dorky story, the limits on where you can go and when and a somewhat disappointingly sparse, dumbed down magic/orbment system. The story is just cheese all the way through and often pushes the limits of even willingly suspended credulity, though the game is about high school kids and there may be something to the simplistic yet ridiculous plot that is intentional for that reason. It is the first of a four-game arc, so I'm hoping this was more an intro and there will be plenty of time for the characters to grow up. The magic/orbment system has been being slowly stripped down ever since Trails From Zero, so I can't say I'm terribly surprised by how basic it has gotten by this game. I can say I"m disappointed, but there s a good chance a lot of players will appreciate the simplified version as the need to strategically arrange quartz along orbment lines to have them combine into new, cooler spells has been eliminated entirely. Instead, all the spells are in their own, self-contained quartz and some of the better ones come with stat boosts, which makes the overall effect nearly the same as before. I'll admit that it takes less time to set people up, but I actually liked that part of the older games. Squeezing every last bit of power out of an orbment and getting characters who were just insanely over-powered was fun. You could get a feel for how you wanted a character to turn out and spend a good portion of the game honing them in that direction and when the project finally came together, it was pretty rewarding. So, that part may be more a matter of play style that anything. The fact that the magic itself is somewhat sparse is a bummer though. It isn't terribly well balanced either. There are probably 2.5 fire spells for every offensive mirage spell, for esxample, yet the mirage master quartz are some of the best in the game, for casting mirage magic fast. Too bad there's only like two of those spells. The fast casting is through bells, like in Azure, but by the end of the game, none of the primary elements are much worth casting and the higher elemental spells bur through magic like crazy. Like needing 3 EP Boost Plus in a sub-boss battle kind of expensive. I don't know, I'm sure this being the frist foray into full 3D was a learning curve in and of itself and I'm hoping that's why some of those aspects seemed to suddenly have become lackluster. The combat is fun enough and the character link concept is cool. That sort of suffers too though because the game keeps dictating which half of the party you're able to run around with in the various episodes the game is divided into ad those party members are rarely consistent from one chapter to the next, so as soon as you get the hang of one group, they're gone and here's some people to frustrate you for a minute until you get them working just in tine to mix the whole thing up again. This also makes it difficult to establish strong links with more than a few people. So by the time you pick your party for the end, you know who you're going to link with the main character and the other two party members will likely have next to no link as they were only on the same team once so far in the entire game. Which takes a lot of the fun out of things because if you want to take advantage of links, you have to hit each monster in their weak spot, which varies by monster, but it's wise to have a party where between the four of them, you'll be able to hit those weak spots. But since this means bringing along people you wouldn't otherwise use, those people have weak links and even if they get a chain going it's like two moves and their partner will likely be about as effective as a screen door on a submarine when they jump in to help. A lot of the ideas are there, I think, for a fun game, but need some polish, which I'm hoping to see come in the next game. The series is very good at introducing a concept in one game and then folding it into newer elements in the following games, so I'm looking forward to the next game. Over all, for all the criticism, I have to say, I didn't hate this game, it was okay. Which, from some standalone game, wouldn't have me bothering to type all of this Given how good all the other games have been though and this one being just sort of typical JRPG fare made me feel like I wanted to really think about why that was. Like I said, if you liked the other ones, you probably not gonna hate this one or anything. But if you're like me, you'll probably be ready for it to be over and the plot to move on before it's over.
