I’d bet that most gamers are familiar with the most popular JRPG series – Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Persona – but not so many are familiar with the Trails series by independent Japanese developer Nihon Falcom, and that’s a huge shame. Over the last year in between new releases I racked up over 300 hours in this series and it’s become one of my favourites of all time.
The Trails series of games started with the Trails in the Sky trilogy, then a duology of games not released in the west and recently finished with the Trails of Cold Steel quadrilogy. While these arcs have different main casts, they are all set in the same world and the same story continues through them all. Think of this series almost like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Infinity War saga that concluded with Avengers Endgame.
The 9th game in the series released last year, Trails of Cold Steel IV, and that game took us to the halfway point in the planned story for these games. Cold Steel IV (which recently launched on PC via Steam and Epic) was a huge culmination of every game that came before it, mixing the majority of the casts together for an epic finale to that first half. It answered a lot of questions from the past 9 games, but also posed a ton more that have me itching to play the next game when it comes west. Think of Cold Steel IV as the first Avengers movie – bringing everything together for an explosive battle where you truly care about all the participants as you’ve been playing these games for hundreds of hours.
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But what’s the secret here, why are these games so engaging and why is the story so good? What grabbed me the most was the incredible worldbuilding and the excellent characters.
Just from playing the opening to one of these games you’d be able to see the love and effort that has gone into the world in these JRPGs. The Trails games are all set on the continent of Zemuria, but what makes them an interesting and tumultuous place to tell stories is something that happened years before the games – the Orbal Revolution. Think of the industrial revolution but imagine if we went from horses and carts to smartphones and the internet in around 30-40 years.
Obviously a huge technological leap like this affects every single aspect of this world. 20 years ago crossing into another country might take weeks by horse but now a train or an airship can get you there the same day. Where your father might send a letter to a friend and it would take weeks to arrive, now, thanks to Orbal technology, Zemuria has the beginnings of an internet making communication instant.
The juxtaposition of the new technology and the old ways of Zemuria causes a lot of friction. Countries go to war with each other, class systems that have held strong for centuries are upturned by new money made by companies who pioneer this technology and there are people who are abusing it for their own ends.
But this is still an old world, and while there are mechs and airships and laser guns there are also demons and witches and (of course) monsters roaming the roads between every small town and village across the continent for you to fight.
Now I would forgive you if you had read all of the above and thought to yourself that maybe this sounds like a fantastic movie, TV show or anime (there is a Trails of Cold Steel anime coming to Crunchyroll soon) but the game part is also really fun. The Trails series isn’t going to convert anyone who hates turn-based, story heavy JRPGs but I think the gameplay of this series and the combat system is second to none.
Instead of having a line of allies facing a line of enemies (the traditional JRPG battle style) the Trails series has combatants moving freely around the field of battle. Every attack has a range for you to avoid or to try and line up as many monsters as possible. It’s a simple system that is elegantly expanded as the series goes on and it really works. It kept me captivated enough that I spent several hundred hours playing through a lot of 2020.
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While Animal Crossing was the escape a lot of people fell into last year, for me it was an incredible journey across Zemuria with a cast of characters that grew, changed and evolved in a world that was so well written and conceived that it just felt so real.
There is one unfortunate thing about the Trails series, and it’s that two of the series of nine games haven’t been officially released in the west. And these two are right in the middle of the two major arcs, and are very well regarded by series fans.
While there is a very good fan translation of the first by the Geofront group (a translation by the same team of the second is due to complete this year) a lot of people are waiting to see if those games will get a modern console release overseas. I’m one of those people, and with this year being Nihon Falcom’s 40th anniversary, and comments from their president Toshihiro Kondo that they’d like to bring them here, I’m still holding out hope!
The Trails series has everything that I love about JRPGs and games in general – an incredible world like you’d find in any Final Fantasy, fantastic character design you’d expect from a Dragon Quest and as well rounded and well written characters as you’d expect from a Persona game.
