RPG Review: Legend of Heroes ~Trails to Azure~

So umm what is there to say? This is basically a sequel to Trails from Zero aka “what should really have just been one game”. As with Sky, they split up the group and they all go “training” their separate ways and we spend the first chunk of the game just getting everyone back together. A bunch of new bad guys are introduced, we fight them several times over and over, they reveal the truth about Kea and the TRUE bad guy and bam the end. But as usual it’s not ACTUALLY the end because you are now expected to continue your Kiseki adventures by moving on to Trails of Cold Steel which I will be doing next.

Look, I gotta say it. The pacing in these games is completely out of wack. There’s so much “several cutscenes will play in sequence” that I keep wanting to do something other than read characters expositioning to each other. Now yes, we did turn out cheats (I’ll get into that later) but even despite that the experience was constantly like a half hour of cutscenes of exposition before a boss fight, then the boss fight, then another endless stream of cutscenes following that, and so on. This then exacerbates the pacing problems because we’ll want to finally get on with the story, which then means that rather than exploring around town or talking to NPCs or doing sidequests (or playing minigames I don’t care about like fishing or Candy Crush), we’ll instead continue with…even more endless cutscenes. It’s a vicious circle.

It’s all the same battle system, the same cast for the most part and the only real difference is finding out the true villain and…the beach episode. So yea everyone basically decides to take a break from police and politics and go to Mishyland. There you can basically strengthen your bond with one of the ladies (aka ELIE because screw you Noel and you’re too young Tio.) There’s even an anime style optional side quest to have one of them sacrifice their dignity by having some hentai bird rip their swimsuit top off.. 😂😅 The sad part is, this part of the game was the most memorable thing aside the plot revelations in the ending.

We used cheats to enable us to oneshot all the battles, as ends up being honestly the norm for the vast majority of JRPGs that we play because well, the combat is usually unfun, too frequent, poorly balanced, unimaginative, and well, just plain bad. From what I’ve seen, we didn’t miss much. The skills are totally unbalanced (especially on hard mode where enemies take barely any physical damage), the characters are totally unbalanced, and the poorly thought out stats & items lead to one of my biggest build pet peeves. That’s right, EVASION TANKING. Evasion tanking is bad game design since it either completely breaks the game or well…simply doesn’t work at all.

⚠️ 🅲🅻🅸🅲🅺 🅵🅾🆁 🆂🅿🅾🅸🅻🅴🆁🆂⚠️

I just wanna ramble a bit about the bad guy revelation. FIRST of all I am disappointed that the TRUE bad guy was Mariabell. They turned her into this sentai style slutty villain with magical powers who just wants to take over the world. Like she was even more insane than her dad or the lawyer guy. I mean the cultists were bad in the first game and I thought they were cray but Mariabell takes the cray in pride lol. The entire thing just made me feel so bad for Elie because her parents basically abandoned her, the “older brother” figure she grew up with betrayed her and nearly killed her grandpa and now her BFF was a psychopathic ass bitch. So that’s why I also chose Elie to be Lloyd’s girlfriend because I feel like without him she has nobody. He’s such a loyal nerd he would never betray her and she truly needs someone like that in her life. Noel’s loyalty to the army was so annoying and Tio is the lil sis and she’s got Jona as her BFF anyway. Also Campanella showing up with the random exposition KNIGHT LADY was just ??? What was even the point of them. Additionally I hate that a lot of characters are just…forgiven. It’s been a problem since Sky but man I was so annoyed that Shirley wrecked Ilya but in the final battle with her they were willing to HEAL her stupid ass!! Wtf!!

Overall I actually felt very unsatisfied how the game went. There was so much police and political babble and having to fight the same bad guy not one, not two but THREE time was just so annoying. I couldn’t find a NG+ file that worked so I ended up downloading a mod that gave me 1hit KOs so I could just breeze through all these stupid battles without having to care about grinding or minmaxing my characters. Just cut scenes alone with battles trivialized to 1 second pokes, it took me 43 hours to finish this game. If you were playing for real, I can imagine it would take you hundreds of hours to get through. Especially in the final chapter, there were battles back to back and the dungeons you had to crawl through to get to all the 4 mini bosses first were annoying as hell if I couldn’t just steamroll them.

I actually kinda liked the international intrigue over oil and wealth, but again the problem became the pacing. It stopped being interesting when it was in the context of “watch a 45 minute cutscene, then make a boring patrol around the floor, then watch another endless cutscene.” I want to DO something and actually contribute in some kind of way! I want to play a video game, not read a book! And books are even better because you don’t have to do stuff like grind trash mobs or play Candy Crush or catch fish in order to read the next chapter. And on top of that, the game has the same problem that Sky SC where we’re continuing where the second game left off with very obvious plot threads to follow but nope, instead gotta do a few dozen hours of busywork first before the game will let us pick up where we left off. But as a twist, meanwhile the beach episode is technically “filler” but it was also one of the only parts of the game that actually broke up the monotony with something fun.

I honestly despite all of the trails systems and I’m just here for the story however I must say some of the cut scene sequences in this game went way beyond their expiration date. They were also just poorly timed in general so you had a bunch of nonsensical dialogue that gave “hints” without revelations and made no sense and then you just had a massive info dump of everything all at once. Unlike the first game, there was also barely any focus on character building. Everything was about politics and war and war politics and honestly the few scenes with Olivier and the beach episode were the only thing to “break” the monotony. The game also allowed me to finally have 1 SINGLE date scene with Elie at the VERY VERY end. Even the dates at the amusement park were mostly kinda lame lol. Honestly if anything, the game was only bearable because of Wazy because he was funny as hell. He really helped break the monotony in a lot of scenes at the start and middle of the game.

I could very well have been missing out on a lot of clues (especially if said clues were “talk to every single NPC in the game every single day”), but much of the twists or the “real” story came out of the er, blue. Which again makes the pacing issue really obvious where the plot hooks from the start of the game (what’s the deal with KeA? who killed Lloyd’s brother?) don’t get resolved until some of the endbosses speechify at you in the final dungeon. I contrast this to Sky FC where even when you’re still getting introduced to everything you can clearly tell that something is going on behind the scenes (and that other characters who are not adventuring n00bz already know much more about this than you do.)

So tl;dr if you love war and politics this is the game for you. If you like standard JRPG adventures and character interactions this game is not for you. However in order to understand the plots of other Trails games, unfortunately this game is a must play or at least you need to read a summary somewhere. It’s really frustrating because I really loved the characters of Sky (even when I didn’t always enjoy the plot dumps) but I couldn’t even do that in this game, and especially in THIS installment.

At least it’s better than Sky 3. That one REALLY had no reason to exist. This is more like Sky SC where I really with that they were able to combine the two game into one overarching story while cutting out the endlesssssssssssssss padding.

And finally, now that we finished both Crossbell games, here’s my collection of Lloyd x Elie scenes from our streams: