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I want to begin with the disclaimer that we did not finish the game. In fact we were somewhere in chapter 2 before we just called it quits. That’s how bad it was. Okay so on the surface it’s a generic Falcom anime game. You got your 15 year old boku protagonist on some Gilligan’s Island where every female wants to bang him but he’s dumber than Estelle and only cares about his aniki Cygna (Insurance-kun). I’m totally ok with that premise, and while none of the character drew me in (other than Cygna being voiced by Suzumura Kenichi) I decided to just yolo and see where the story goes. I found the mascot fairy Noi incredibly annoying (reminded me of that annoying Genshin Impact thing that yaps and follows you around in the tutorial) but fine, it’s a 2012 game, I can deal with it.
Look, if it came down to it and we absolutely NEEDED to slog through this game because there would eventually be a three second long scene where a male and female character hold hands, I probably would’ve been able to manage. The jank and the boringness were manageable. The combat was way better than some of the terrible combat that I was forced to power through in games like Eternights or Star Ocean.
Where I basically called it quits was the system. It suffers terribly from “bad old platformer who isn’t sure if it wants to be 2D or 3D”. The controls are wonky and unresponsive, many enemies and attacks can CLIP through the ground. That means sometimes enemies can hit you you but can’t hit them, and vice versa. There are literal walls you cannot walk through, but somehow you can still SHOOT ENEMIES through them. Okay.
My main control issue was the camera. It’s kinda weird because it’s sorta 3D but not quite fully. You can’t rotate the camera or free roam, so the Z axis is mostly reserved for more like jumping up between floors. But not always! Where it got really aggrevating to my bad depth perception was when we had to do things like jump or shoot diagonally because you can’t turn the camera and can only run along the intercardinals, so we would then frequently fall off ledges because the inputs considered us as going south rather than southeast.
The next issue is that you can fall off the platforms. I guess I’m just too used to 2D platformers where you can only fall off horizontally in a 2D plane. Fine. In this game you can fall off in all 4 directions. So you have that same issue we had with Sonic Adventure 2 where you have a shitty camera, can’t see, and then you jump into the wrong 3D plane and end up god knows where. Everything about the entire platformer system is just clunky, hard to see, hard to know where you’re jumping and it’s just NOT FUN. In fact it quickly went from not fun to just fucking annoying and irritating and I would constantly get lost on where to go, get frustrated and just hand the controller over to Kanade. After we got to the armored fish boss, and couldn’t figure out how to do it, instead of finding a guide, we just decided to call it quits.
Now the bigger issue is just that…I don’t particularly like platformer games in the first place. Pretty much all the games I play are just RPGs (WITHOUT kissing) or boring ass strategy games, so this is pretty far off from something I’d have interest in. I’m never going to go and play one on my own, so the bar for me to throw in the towel was incredibly low. COULD I have made it through? Yeah, but I had no desire whatsoever to.
The reason being is I just wasn’t interested to suffer through this nonsense for these cast of characters. Nothing was interesting to me, and some of the humor in the game felt very outdated old man humor that should stay behind in 2012. I know it’s an old game, but I thought maybe with the remaster it received, I could have made it through. I did buy it on sale but now I wish I never bought it at all. In fact I think I will actively make sure I never buy another platformer game again. I really liked the art and 2D stills/sprites because they were the usual Falcom quality but I just could not continue with that old ass platform system. Weirdly enough, as much as I hate platformers, somehow I am able to do them in Infinity Nikki – probably because it’s smoother, easier to see, and a much more refined game made in the year 2024. It’s unfortunate that our Trails adventures kind of end on a sour note, but I am looking forward to the Sky remake and will just have to wait and play other games until the Kai continuation comes out.
I think the final issue is that technically this game was for PSP. Like with Crisis Core before it, you could tell that the game was designed to be something that you would pull out and play for five or ten minutes while you waited for the bus or whatever. There’s really only so much the game can even do when it’s assuming that this is all you’re going to play for. The gameplay needs to be short and quick, so also you can’t really even have any kind of meaty character interactions. You can’t tell someone that Several Cutscenes Will Play In Sequence if they only have a few minutes to put into the game.
Bread Master Lee 
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