I just finished the latest game in the Legend of Heroes: Trails series, after 110 hours, getting all achievements, doing one normal and one nightmare run, and shouting curses to the screen a handful of times.
While I love the Trails series as a whole, I can’t seem to get hooked when it comes to the Calvard arc. I find myself spacing out constantly; either because I’ve developed a non-existent attention span due to too much mobile doomscrolling, or because the large parts of the story is kind of uninteresting.
I feel like all Calvard games so far has a tendency to use a lot of filler until the last chapter or two. Same here. Without spoiling anything, it’s a lot of talk about the space shuttle launch in every single chapter, and it pretty much takes until the the last chapter to reveal anything concrete. The last part gets very interesting though!
Don’t get me wrong though; Trails keeps setting the gold standard of JRPGs in my book. The characters are mostly interesting, there’s a lot of things to collect, world building is superb as usual, and the battle system improves a lot from the earlier “chain with the person of your choice simulator”.
One last thing though – and I know this has been said many times before – but why won’t anyone truly die in this series? Every single person is magically revived, didn’t die for real, went back in time and quick-loaded, were just a fake evil twin doll – name your reason for that person to come back. I don’t mean that they should remove loved characters just for the sake of it, but I feel I can’t get emotionally attached to the story in the same way when I know that every tearful farewell will end up with that person waltzing back in the next game.
Any way – I love Trails and will keep supporting the series through thick and thin.
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