I've played nearly 30 hours of Trails in the Sky so far (I'm at the beginning of chapter 3) and thought I'd share some quick impressions for anyone who's still on the fence about it:
You follow Estelle and Joshua Bright on their quest to become full-fledged "bracers" and meet a lot of different characters who'll join your team along the way. (The bracer guild is there to protect and help civilians; they aren't affiliated with the government). Now, if you are expecting epic, world-changing events to happen right of the bat, you are going to be disappointed: your first quests include finding a lost kitten and helping farmers to get rid of some pests. Of course bigger events happen later on, but the game clearly focusses more on building the characters and the world than on action-filled happenings.
I thought this slower beginning was a nice change of pace from the usual stuff you see in a lot of other JRPGs. I'd wager the following installments are going to be more fast-paced than this one, since it seems to be a sort of introduction for them.
If you are averse to reading a lot in games for story advancement, you should probably steer clear of Trails in the Sky. This game is filled to the brim with very long dialogue heavy scenes, including a whole stage play. Even some sidequest-givers are going to try and talk your ear off. I liked most of those scenes and the banter between the characters, since I thought it added a lot to the atmosphere and the world-building of the game. There has only been one scene so far where I thought: "This is going on for too long".
Even the treasure chests in the game talk to you when you try to look into them again after looting, which is a fun little gimmick.
The battle system is similar to SRPGs in that you fight turn-based battles on a gridline battlefield. The turn order is displayed at the top left of the screen, with random bonuses added next to some (like "Heal HP" or "Str up"). If you are escorting civilians, they will also be part of the turn order. Although they won't engage the enemies in battle, they can steal your precious battle bonuses.
Difficulty-wise, the game has been fairly easy so far, there were only 2 fights I had some problems with. I don't think there's any need for grinding if you try to do the sidequests.
By the way, there are no random encounters. You can see the enemies on the map and choose to engage them, or try to run from them if they spot you.
There's a complicated quartz-equip-system which affects your stats and what skills you can use. I thought that system was pretty neat, but I can't be bothered to go into detail here ;p
Besides the usual killing of monsters and traveling from city to city, Trails in the Sky also has serveral instances where you have to play detective to solve a crime. This involves searching the crime scene for clues and then drawing deductions (the right answers are always really obvious though).
You can save your game anytime you want (well, not during battle).
There are a ton of missable items and sidequests in this game, so if you want to get everything on your playthrough you'd have to always carefully talk to everyone. Part of these missable items is a book series and issues of a newspaper, which you can both read (at least I think they are missable, maybe you can get them somewhere later on in the game). If you're into collecting you can also try to get every recipe in the game (you can cook meals and use those to heal yourself later).
The soundtrack is very good and enhances the different situations well, but it's nothing special you'd remember for years to come or you'd find yourself humming along to.
Mapping the camera movement to start and select is certainly an....interesting choice, especially since the shoulder buttons aren't used at all. I think you can re-map the buttons to your liking, though I haven't tried it myself.
Spider warning for zkylon, dot and other arachnophobes: There is an optional sidequest, where you have to exterminate some spiders in
. If you want to see what they look like, click
this link here. You later have to enter this building as part of the main story line, I don't know if they'd show up then if you haven't previously killed the spiders. I can't say if there'll be any more spiders later on in the game.
Technical issues I had:
- Some achievements are bugged
- Sometimes the textures of the flora aren't loading properly
- I got stuck in a non-closable textbox of one treasure chest
Besides that, everything worked fine.
I'm sure I missed mentioning a ton of stuff, but this has already gotten a bit big for "some quick impressions".
As you might have guessed from my playtime, I'm genuinely enjoying every bit of this game so far. I really hope the sequels are going to be brought to steam soon as well.
ノ ︵ ┻━┻
