The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC (2014) (PC) (Nihon Falcom)
0My actual experience with Japanese RPGs remains limited, although obsessive consumption of podcasts, reviews and retrospectives means that I know surprisingly much about this labyrinthine gaming niche for someone who has only finished a few titles in the subgenre.
A game (or series of games, really) that's been glaring accusingly at me from my massive backlog of shame for a number of years now is The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. A sprawling "spin-off of a spin-off" with a tremendously complicated backstory reaching all the way back to Nihon Falcom's first Dragon Slayer game in 1984, Trails in the Sky might not seem an obvious jump-off point for a relative genre novice such as myself. But since XSEED's long-awaited and newly translated PC version launched in 2014 (the original First Chapter was a 2004 release for PSP!) I've been hearing great things about the story in the Trails series - which, perhaps inevitably, includes its very own spin-off titled Trails of Cold Steel (with three installments out in Japan and at least one more on the way).
The first 20 hours make abundantly clear that Trails in the Sky is a story-oriented experience, and even by Japanese standards this is an almost shockingly verbose game. Thankfully, the English localization appears to be genuinely good and effectively communicates both the general quality of the original prose as well as small nuances in the characterization. And while anime stereotypes and melodramatic scenes abound in Trails in the Sky, there's a depth and grounding to the cast and their world - as a result of sheer word count overkill, if nothing else - which goes above and beyond what I've come to expect from JRPG writing.
Yesterday I installed an unofficial voice pack which adds the original voice acting from a Japan-only PS Vita 2015 re-release to the PC version of the game. There's an astounding 30,000 voiced lines for the main story, and despite not knowing a word of Japanese this really adds to the overall experience of such a dialogue-heavy game. While the main character Estelle doesn't veer far from what you'd expect an over-enthusiastic anime girl to sound like, her enigmatic and introspective step-brother Joshua benefits greatly from voice acting to underline his more subtle mood shifts.
In between lengthy character interactions, there's a lot of traditional turn-based combat and luckily it's all reasonably entertaining with enough complexity to reward experimentation with different combinations of Arts & Crafts (i.e. Skills and Magic), as well as a convenient option for speeding up battles whenever appropriate. I've been playing on Hard difficulty and found the first chapter to be a bit of a challenge despite making sure to finish all the side quests and grind a bit for extra levels and gear.