The Trails Northern War gacha game is bad and Falcom should feel bad

This is what happens when you outsource your IP to shitty Chinese mobage companies (　´_ゝ`)

I know I know, why am I even playing another gacha game right? Well I’m in the midst of the Cold Steel series games and I figured why not? I was getting kinda bored of Love & Deepspace cause they haven’t made any improvements since my post a month ago despite there being a user survey. I thought maybe I could play a different game for a change of pace. Unfortunately this experience only lasted about 3 hours for me and honestly I should have just stopped at the 1 hour mark because LMAO.

Ok so let’s put aside all the usual gacha bullshit. Paid costumes, Pay 2 Win memberships and stats, insane amount of confusing currency, too many stupid tasks. This is all the kind of stupid shit I hate in gacha games but I’ve become jaded to it and I kinda just expect them all to have this shit now. If using LADS as my comparison though, there’s a lot more stupid busywork garbage in this game than in LADS though. The worst part is the more of the story you do the more random busy work pops up at you. My final straw was when they actually made me run through a crappy dungeon with their awkward touch screen controls. Like hello this is an afk-mobile game, people press auto and do other things. Nobody wants to sit there going through an actual dungeon on their tiny phone screen. It was so awkward I just ragequit on the spot. The dungeon is a side content and was not required to continue the story though.

On the topic of story, the story is just stupid. If you’re thinking you’re gonna come in and see a great Trails story, this ain’t it. In case you missed out on the terrible Northern War anime, this game will basically catch you up on everything all the way to the actual scenes from the show. We had watched the anime very recently and along with terrible animation, the plot was a complete snooze fest. All the random OCs they introduced were also forgettable and honestly they should have just focused it on the POV of characters from Cold Steel. Instead they used it as fodder to just throw in random cameos of characters doing nothing useful (like Joshua and Estelle) for the sake of being like “look who it is!!” So yea the anime was bad and this game’s entire story follows the terrible anime. Need I say more? This was the first time I actually just started skipping the story in a game because I really couldn’t care less to slog through that snoozefest yet again.

And finally the biggest pitfall of this game: the localization. And holy shit is it BAD. It looks like it was run through some shitty AI translator because you have characters whose gender is listed as both HE and SHE in the same paragraph. You have characters whose titles are completely mismatched (i.e. Laura being listed as a musician instead of Elliot.) You have character background stories that are completely straight up WRONG like saying that Rean was in Trails in the Sky. 😂😂😂 (For anyone who has yet to play the Trails games: he wasn’t.) Then they butchered names like writing Duvalie as “Du Barry” or Kloe as “Crosay”. On top of this there’s various typos and just badly translated sentences that make no sense in English. It’s clear they were shoving this game out the door quickly with no care about Trails. All Trails serves is a reskin of some shitty battler busy work afk mobile game and nothing more. Hell some characters, even SSR ones, don’t have voices in the game. I won Ennea’s SSR and during the battles when doing her S-break she was basically silent while others had some kind of one liners. Check out the gallery below of some screenshots of the terrible localization blunders:

Anyway everything about this game is bad. It reminds me of that terrible FF15 mobile game that I never touched with a 40 foot pole but it’s also giving me dejavu flashbacks of the terrible FF7 mobile game that I quit after 2 days (though not because I wanted to….blessing in disguise there lmao.) Unless you really enjoy busywork and just want to look at your Trails waifu PNGs, I would not recommend this game. Hell even the 3D models are wonky and not worth it. I only got up to around chapter 4 when I quit, but I imagine the higher you go the more complicated it gets. 13 hours after the game went live I saw the rankings and there were people already done with chapter 15 so I’m guessing they all skipped/botted the game because what else is there to do in this badly localized waste of time?😅