RPG Review: The Legend of Heroes ~Trails into Reverie~

	It’s time for Trails 3rd Remake
	there is a VR segment where you can stare at your waifu’s b00bs

So we finally made our way back to our Trails adventure after a long break with FFXIV. This game basically runs in the same format as Trails 3rd where you’re thrown into an instance called the Reverie Corridor and as you kill random durds and bosses you unlock stones, aka gacha tickets, to then unlock scenarios that took place before or after the ending of Cold Steel IV in addition to some previews about the next Trails games.

Then there’s the overarching story, where the evil AI is generating 3 legged anime girls clones to run around and be impostors of their original selves. One of those impostors just so happens to be Rufus and he wants to make Crossbell be a dictatorship yet once again. In reality it’s just the stupid AI named Elyisum who is going around sending its clones so it can take over the world. Orboros is somehow partially involved but we barely see them aside the scientist kappa man. So now it’s up to the real Rufus and his army of…underage children and a loli-looking doll to save the day (I know it sounds ridiculous to me too but here we are.) He ends up joining forces with the rest of the Trails crew from Liberl, Crossbell and Erebonia which makes this basically an All-Star trails game.

This was probably the best Trails game since Trails in the Sky. It greatly benefited from FINALLY being a Trails game that wasn’t either “do homework for 40 hours” (AKA the first game in each series) or “get your team members back for 40 hours” (AKA the second game in each series). This time we had one tight central story which unfolds through three separate parallel routes, plus an endgame epilogue. No Bracer licenses, no field exercises, no support requests, just a story that for once doesn’t consist of the same copy and pasted encounters (THAT WON’T BE NECESSARY!) over and over again. My only real complaint about how the story unfolds is that it would’ve been a little better for the pacing if there was a few sets of floors of the Reverie Corridor that happened during the MSQ rather than in the postgame. The postgame set of floors went on way too long and meanwhile there were times where we wished we could’ve broken up the SEVERAL CUTSCENES WILL PLAY IN SEQUENCE with a little more exploration of the dungeon.

This was probably the first Trails game where I actually didn’t use some cheats to get through. The easy mode was fairly easy and I could actually get through every battle in the main story with just the items I earned going through the quests and doing a few Reverie Corridors. I finally turned on huge damage multiplier at the very end after the story ended to get the FINAL true ending (which is more Corridor grinding post credits) because I was just so utterly sick of having to just run around the same boring dungeon and fight the same big chunguses over and over.

This was by far the easiest Trails game we’ve played yet. The story mode difficulty is so easy that even minibosses die in a couple hits. The on top of that, some of the added mechanics like Unified attacks or having so many backup party members to swap in give you even more high damage AOE attacks to plow through the battles effortlessly. There’s also so many characters to choose from that I’m sure that on top of all of this if you were actually trying to minmax the game’s systems that even on higher difficulties you could figure out ways to annihilate everything effortlessly.

The real treat of the game were actually the mini games and the side stories in the corridor. Like yea sure uh cool story bro with the stupid AI but the scenes with the Bright Family beating the crap out of Gilbert or Lechter being owned by Kloe and Lucy was way more interesting to me. Also who can forget Magical Girl Alisa!? It was so over the top and ridiculous I loved it! The many stories of Freddy poisoning people with his weird cooking was pretty funny too and the sweet story about Olivert and Schera’s pre wedding shenanigans. So overall, the little extra stories were way more fun to me. I couldn’t care less about the AI crap and the stuff post credits with the fake KeA was boring and not that interesting to me because it was “yet another clone”. I almost wish it didn’t exist because it didn’t really leave any kind of lasting impression on me. Meanwhile the story of Renne becoming the student council president and kicking rich boy’s ass to the curb was awesome and I wish it was more than just a manga style visual novel.

The Reverie Corridor was the best implementation yet of the staple Trails grinding dungeons like Tartarus Mementos Tristram Cathedral Palace of the Dead the old schoolhouse or Eryn Forest or the new schoolhouse. The dungeon itself wasn’t really much different from the other ones, but the innovation is that it serves as a hub for everything. It’s where you can do your sidequests, minigames, skits, etc. as well. This was a lot better than most of the recent Trails games where it was easy to miss stuff that you would otherwise want to do because you were overwhelmed, bored, tied up in the story, and so on. This way you can do all that stuff at your own pace rather than everything being now or never.

This was most obvious with the daydream sidequests. They unlock as from defeating minibosses as you progress through the dungeon, but didn’t start doing them until we saw some that looked interesting. We realize that most of these are really fun, so then went back and did all of them and made sure to do all of them each time we unlocked more. If everything was as tightly tied to chapters or specific days or limited bonding points like in the previous games we almost certainly would’ve missed out on a lot of stuff that we ended up enjoying a lot. If we were back in an earlier game like CS3 we absolutely would’ve never bothered if we got a sidequest about someone like Freddy, but when we got a daydream for him we did it right after we got back.

So overall it’s definitely a game that all Trails fans should play. It covers a lot of lore and interesting/funny stories with all the characters. It has bit of shipping between Lloyd/Elie and Joshua/Estelle. The game also weirdly ships Juicy and Millium and Rufus and Lapis (the doll) and makes it seem like both of them are cradle robbers which is really fucking weird like….Falcom why. (　ﾟдﾟ) The game has been shipping Agate and Tita for a while too, but at least now she’s basically 18 at the end of the game and no longer illegal but the fact that we saw her being like 12 years old in the beginning makes the whole thing just weird anyway. Agate doesn’t treat her like a lover by any means, but it feels like the entire Trails cast is shipping them and honestly it sometimes made me a bit uncomfortable. If anything, I was lacking Alisa x Rean ships but at least I got to do some weird VR beach date with her so I guess that’s something. ┐(´д`)┌

One final thing I want to say is the localization this time around was fucking awful. Some characters were using such crude language it was very out of character for them. It worked for some characters (like Ash or Crow) but it was completely weird for others like Millium or Lechter. It was so bad to the point that I actually decided to just get the Japanese version of Kuro no Kiseki and also because with it being on sale and the Japanese yen being so low, it ended up costing me like $35 instead of $60 lol. Therefore I will be playing the rest of my Trails games in Japanese on my PS5. Been a while since I played games in Japanese since I always play localized versions of RPGs but eh it will just be like playing an otome game again. 😎

Oh and unlike CS2 and its horrendous epilogue that made the ending of Lord of the Rings feel abrupt, the final epilogue daydreams here instead got us so excited for the Calvard games that we dropped our plans to play Nayuta and instead will jump right into Trails into Daybreak. Well okay, the Rean one was kinda lame because the fight scene in it with the ninjas went on wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too long but the ones with Renne and the new character Elaine do a much better job introducing the setting and background for what’s going on right now in Calvard.

As usual feel free to check out my small collection of highlights from our stream on Twitch.