[The Yen Man]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Ok, done the first one. That was pretty quick... probably 30ish hours of game time. My thoughts are, in a word, "charming". A really good old school JRPG. The characters are pretty standard JRPG fare, but other than maybe Olivier, they have enough actual personality that they're not cheesy. I certainly didn't actively dislike any of them, and (other than the two principals) because they come and go, they never have a chance to wear out their welcome. If anyone had the potential to be an obnoxious JRPG protagonist it's Estelle, but because of the sheer volume of dialogue in the game and its generally lighthearted tone, she usually just ends up being endearing. That extra writing in the English translation is pretty much what makes the game, I think. It doesn't have that "ESL" feel that every Final Fantasy game has. I read a review beforehand that suggested that it was too much - that the game takes a hundred words to say what could be said in ten - and that is simply not the case. If you're going to do a text-based RPG, this is the right way to write dialogue. I haven't ever seen a game do that aspect quite so well.

Story-wise,

Spoiler!

there's not a hell of a lot here. Most of the game is formulaic - go to a new area centered around a city, meet the people in charge of said area, discover that something seems to be rotten in the state of Denmark, add in a local temporary party member or two, solve the local mystery, oh hey what do you know it has something tangentially to do with the main plot, temporary party member leaves, move on to the next area, rinse, repeat.

The main plot was solid, the stakes were high without being apocalyptic, and the villain was actually not over-the-top at all. I thought Col. Richard's motivations made all the sense in the world, aside from the whole "I wouldn't have had to do this if only Cassius hadn't quit the army" piece. That was pretty silly. But Liberl being overrun ten years prior, having its bacon saved by a major technological leap that allowed it to repel its enemy, and then seeing that advantage quickly fade as other nations caught up and started using the same new technology... yeah, I get it. The writing's on the wall, your nation is about to be overtaken, and you want a nuclear deterrent. That makes perfect sense. It was almost sort of a cop-out that it turned out he was basically incepted to do all of it. I wished we'd spent more than just the last chapter with him as the bad guy, because it would have been nice by the end of the game to feel like you knew him. He really doesn't get much screen time - just a few cameos. That might be my biggest gripe.

The ending, which is really a teaser for SC (as the main conflict of the game was actually resolved), I'm undecided about. It sort of came out of left field. Turns out the real power behind the scenes who put the whole game in motion is a minor NPC who is basically a passive observer in a couple of minor quests, and even that character is really just a front, because he's actually a totally different person who has never been mentioned? Did I miss something, or was the name "Weissman" or the "Ourobouros" organization mentioned at any point in the game before that? That was a missed opportunity. It also felt like a bit of a rip-off that there was really no payoff to who Lorence was. I had a suspicion throughout that it was going to be Cassius himself, or maybe Cassius's illegitimate son, or something. I also thought there was a missed opportunity to have Joshua be the one who gave Richard the Gospel in the first place (under the influence of mind control, obviously). Anyway, some of these issues may simply be dealt with by playing the next chapters.

Ultimately, it felt like the whole game is less about the game's story and more about world-building, and that's fine. The music was good, nothing too outstanding, but did the job. Combat is solid, again, nothing blowing me away - it wasn't a situation where I was looking forward to getting into my next fight to try out a new skill or new weapon or a new spell, but it also wasn't exasperating (I think having visible on-screen encounters a la Chrono Trigger rather than FF-style random battles is helpful in that regard). I don't think I could really give it a score out of ten, because I don't think it's a stand-alone product. And that's fine, it doesn't claim to be, it's just the first chapter.

I did this, and I found that these quests were really pretty meaningless. There were a couple that were sort of interesting I guess, potentially important going forward, but the rest... well, helping decorate for the festival or finding books for a librarian doesn't seem like it'll have any payoff, frankly. Maybe you meant this to apply to SC or Third?

The thing is, the Trails series spans so many games (3 Trials in the Sky, 2 Trails of Azure, and 4 Trails of Cold Steel), they introduce A LOT of characters and plot points. It can get pretty overwhelming, especially with so many loose ends that get tied up in subsequent games only to introduce even more loose ends.

Overall, the store is pretty epic in that it spans multiple locations across the continent. The dialogue does get pretty cheesy (especially in Trials of Cold Steel, when they introduce the "high school is the greatest! everything after that is pretty much downhill" anime trope), so you get a lot of cheese. But as an anime fan, I'm pretty used to it.