I played the original Trails in the Sky growing up, and seeing it brought back to life like this is so incredible. So much nostalgia mixed with genuine love for a series of titles I've grown up with. If you've never played the Trails games, wanted to know the story from the beginning chronologically, but didn't want to play the OG 2.5D game, then please get this, you won't be disappointed.

For once i am not a hero of ages nor am I overcoming evil with the power of friendship. So far its just a couple of kids trying to do their job with surprisingly good writing and a solid combat system.

This is my first time playing a "Legend of Heroes" game, and it was awesome. TLDR highly recommended classic-modern turn based JRPG with great writing, characters, cutscenes, and combat system. Unstructured review incoming, my dump of notes taken over the past 6 weeks playing this.

I love the characters and just watching and listening to the cutscenes play out. It's entertaining and paced well enough to put the controller down, especially scenes with voice acting - like a convincingly high quality coming-of-age fantasy adventure anime. Estelle and Joshua are just great together in every scene. The overall story is good enough, but to me the character interaction just carries it - I loved just the plain adventure and travelling around the world. Relatedly, the side quests, which there are quite a bit of, aren't always the most interesting. But they beat the FF7 Remakes, at least.

Pressing Up to view any conversation history is like the best JRPG QoL feature I've ever seen. End paragraph.

Combat. The battle system just keeps reminding me of Grandia 3, to which it is strikingly similar in presentation and mechanics - a huge plus, being one of the best JRPG battle systems ever made. Just like Grandia, the core engagement with combat is mastering turn order, delaying and interrupting opponents, and it's very satisfying here. The cinematic presentation of spellcasts and actions in combat is really slick, again the absolute spitting image of Grandia 3 - look it up if you haven't seen or played it, we need a rerelease. Also the 3D "Tales of..." games are likely a big influence, really pioneering that anime-style 3D-model JRPG combat, even though they're not turn-based. The combination attacks and S-moves all cut out to quick shounen-anime cutscenes, with characters shouting a move or a tagline, but I guess a lot of games do this now. I'm old. Also I don't play gacha games. Oh, and there's cutscene skip options and a 2x speed mode are there for when it drags on too much as well.

Anyways, I wish you could see the battle timeline and turn order more accurately like in Grandia, instead being a bit more abbreviated like in Final Fantasy X, only showing the rough order of the next turns instead of their exact speed values. And a lot of things can suddenly impact the turn order, sometimes unpredictably, but you get used to it. It also does not show you who enemies are targeting in advance or what action they're taking like in Grandia, but you can see if a spell is being charged in general for interrupting it. This also has a stance-breaking/stun system, with every enemy having a posture bar and certain attacks and situations causing signficant posture damage. Another unique difference is movement in battle; you have free movement within a radius before executing your action within a turn, more similar to - oh hell yes - Quest 64, the legend. Yeah, this is basically "Tales of Grandia 3 x Quest 64". We'll go with that. I'm probably irking the long-time fans by now, sorry.

There's also this less-relevant "field battle" mode to kind of bridge the gap between running around on the field and being sucked into a traditional random encounter. Coincidentally, Grandia 3 also had a primitive version of this sort of system, but it basically boiled down to hitting an enemy once with your sword for a free preemptive. Metaphor Re:Fantazio has the exact same concept, but I liked it a bit more in this game. In any case, these systems still have nothing on traditional "Tactical mode" combat still, but it does help pace grinding and farming if that's your jam, which this game does offer a fair bit of with the Rewards system.

Equipment variety is pretty basic, except for some accessories, and the upgrade system is fairly pointless. Regarding Orbments, the structure is overly complicated with weird inconsistent terminology, but you get used to it. Customizing the Quartz loadout on each character is definitely the most interesting system, finding the right combinations of passive bonuses and available spells. It usually boils down to going all-in on magic damage or physical damage on each party member and choosing a combination best for each. And always include some Time elements on each character for access to speed buffs. There are a few really tricky encounters that benefit from well-thought out builds, status prevention, weakness exploitation, debuffing and crowd control, even on Normal difficulty, which was my setting.

I suppose I ought to criticize a lack of variety in environments, with plain grassy fields with dirt roads taking a vast monopoly of your time spent running around. When you finally stumble into the occasional unique cave or dungeon, you hope it keeps developing, but then it's right back into the rolling hills. It's also strange that In some conversations, your main characters will not be voiced, but the NPC you're talking to will be. But I'm really reaching for criticisms here.

And the soundtrack is excellent. You can choose 3 different versions from the various remasters over the years, although I kept it mostly on "Original". The main theme and harmonica version, The battle theme is fire, sufficiently prog rock and easily holding up across hundreds of repetitions, a classic JRPG mandate. The sad theme "In my heart" got on that heartstring wavelength pretty quick, the fight/chasing theme "Recapture" has embedded itself in my head probably for a few more weeks, dungeon themes and town themes are awesome. It all hits that folk, symphonic, synth wave, prog rock JRPG fare.

Finally, the software itself is actually good. An apparently shockingly difficult ask for PC games these days. For me, this means: it starts up and shuts down very quickly, menuing is ultra responsive, Playstation button icon options (how is this so hard for other games after literal decades), confirm-cancel button swap option for people used to Japanese games - thousands of hours in Final Fantasy Tactics with circle-to-confirm will be the catalyst to some form of schizophrenia for me as a western gamer if it weren't for options like this - and zero crashes after 90 hours. I do see a frame stutter here and there after exiting a building or battle scene sometimes, though.

So it was a wonderful game. I've always seen Legend of Heroes around over the years, to me a daunting series with its huge number of entries across multiple platforms. This remake seemed the opportune time to break in, and I think it was. I'm not sure if I'll play the originals yet, but I absolutely recommend this one. Can't wait for 2nd.