Unfortunately this cool opening movie was not in the Steam edition but hey why not? 😂 Anyway this game concludes my Trails in the Sky (空の軌跡) adventures so let’s see how it went? Kanade’s comments will be in blue as usual.

Unfortunately it went terrible. It was the kind of game that should just have been a DLC with clickable stories. Instead it ended up being a rehashed segmented game that’s like the reject child in the Kiseki series.

So here’s how the game works: You are all trapped in this “other dimension” and as you go through it, you bring more of your Trails friends into it. As you bring more characters in, you are then able to unlock Moon and Star doors, which have side stories that continue from where Trails SC left off. (There are also sun doors but we don’t talk about those. 🌞) In other words, they are basically DLC style stories that should have been what it is – a damn DLC. Instead you are stuck going through stupid maze like dungeons until you find these doors only to be told you have the wrong characters with you – forcing you to teleport back to the “main hub” and change your party. Absolute stupidity.

I don’t even think this should’ve been a DLC. It doesn’t even feel like that to me. There’s no feel of cohesion or anything to all those side stories at all. Some range from a short little story to a really really long uninterrubtible cutscene to a decently lengthy dungeon plus a lot of cutscenes (and all the minigames that we simply skipped). It all just felt like…a bunch of random stuff with no actual vision of any kind behind it.

And the plot of the game? ⚠️Spoilers⚠️: The entire thing is just one giant Kevin fanfic turned to life because he wanted a place to “die” due to guilt of killing his childhood friend and foster sister Rufina. He’s been hiding the truth about this from his childhood friend Ries, who is also his battle partner nun (but with a sword and not a gun.) So the whole time we’re fighting all these random old characters from the last games and seeing side stories but somehow they managed to make their way inside Kevin’s fanfic world, along with Gilbert (who the fuck knows how he made it in there!?) It all ends with us defeating the fanfic world boss Shadow Lord Rufina and then everyone returns home and continues whatever they were doing. More importantly, Joshua and Estelle chasing Ren into Crossbell to segue into the next game, Trails from Zero.

The Kevin story was kind of a ripoff Joshua’s with the whole “he’s harboring a dark secret” but unfortunately Ries was not remotely as funny as Estelle. In fact I found her sister Rufina to be the one with the sense of humor but welp! The side stories for the main cast were mostly good but I skipped the ones for the REAL side chars like Anelace and accidentally did one for the 3 stooges that we beat up early in the first game. (;^ω^) The dungeons were giving me Tales of the Abyss vibes with how boring and samey they were. They also forced us to go back into dungeons from the last game (like that cursed Orboros airship which I absolutely refused to do and had Kanade just go through for me.) By the end of the game I had almost no motivation to do any of the dungeons and I just asked Kanade to go through even the easy ones for me.

Look, I’m not one to complain about ~reused assets~ when it’s stuff like “some of the trash mobs will be reskins”, but most of these were the exact same dungeons from the previous two games! (This also made them Not Mazes because we while were going through them I would vaguely remember the layout from when we did them a few months ago.) And then to really half ass it, the boss fights within the dungeons were with random NPCs from the earlier games rather than the actual characters from those dungeons!

They also ruined the ONE thing I enjoyed about trails: Chest messages. They were funny in the first 2 games, but then in this one they added a story with like 36 chapters but of course they were completely out of order. So you’d open a chest and it would be like “6/36”. This was so aggravating and annoying I actually stopped checking chest messages because of this. GJ game. (　´_ゝ`)

So needless to say, the entire thing was a huge drag for me. If they just made it DLC style where I could just click a story to view it then it would be fine. Most of Kevin’s story was through flashbacks anyway and honestly we didn’t need the whole fanfic dungeon shpiel to show that Ries is there for him. I also would have loved to get more character development for her because as of now her only stand-out trait is “glutton kuudere” lol.

The whole structure of the game also felt like they weren’t even trying. For about 75% of the game, you walk through the reused dungeons until you find another NPC from the first two games, who then says “hmm, where are we? What’s going on?” There isn’t really any attempt to give any of these specifics a purposes. The game even starts fourth walling some of this stuff, which makes things even worse because that lets you know that the devs also know that they’re out of ideas. The random boss fights often have the enemy say something like “I don’t know where I am or why I’m here, and I don’t have any particular reason to fight you, but I’m being compelled to do this against my will so yeah”. And then because there’s way too many party member characters, they often get put into situations where they wouldn’t understand what’s going on because they had nothing to do with any of this in the earlier games and have nothing to contribute to the scene (cough Annelace cough).

If you’ve played the first 2 trails games, and aren’t a huge fan of the battle system or those dungeons, I suggest giving this one a skip. If you really care to see the side stories, there’s probably tons of youtube videos floating out there somewhere. I also have a few highlights on my twitch channel as well. Otherwise I suggest giving this one a pass and just moving on to Trails from Zero – which I will eventually get to when it goes on sale and I’ve made a dent in my huge end-of-year-sale backlog.😂