Bear with us for a moment because this will sound intimidating. Don’t worry, it isn’t and you’ll absolutely want to know more! For a series that spans both decades and consoles, the Legend of Heroes series is remarkably consistent in one area – quality. If you play a LoH game, whether it be the original Dragon Slayer for PC Engine or the latest entry in the Trails of Cold Steel series, you know you’re getting some of the best content that the JRPG genre has to offer.
For fans, Falcom has been consistently amazing in producing great games and last year, the announcement of localization for Trails From Zero, Trails To Azure, Trails Into Reverie, and The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails. Four new titles (or at least new to the West)! The first of those releases, Trails From Zero, slots right after the PSP Trails in the Sky trilogy and in the middle of the Trails of Cold Steel quadrilogy. Whew. What does that mean if you have no idea what’s happening right now and aren’t familiar with all the titles in this series? Well, it means that this is a great jumping-on point for newcomers to the Legend of Heroes series and that Trails from Zero is a solid game in its own right.
Trails From Zero from Falcom and publisher NIS America was originally released in Japan in 2010 for the PSP and follows the exploits of Lloyd Bannings, an incredibly young detective with the Crossbell Police Department. Crossbell is both a city (Crossbell City) and a nation-state (Crossbell) which is slightly confusing. The nation is smack dab between the Erebonian Empire and the Republic of Calvard, leading to decades upon decades of strife and territorial disputes. The LoH series is pretty heavy on the political intrigue spectrum and the names definitely aren’t just made up as filler here. There’s a ton of background detail to pretty much every component of the series so expect some crossover if you’ve played other entries or plan to.
Lloyd is joined by a motley crew of young teammates, all with rather unorthodox backgrounds for police work. They’ve been tapped to form the Special Support Section (SSS) of the Crossbell Police Department. Yes, all this background is necessary. That’s part of the charm of the series, the complexity of the plot. Anyway, Lloyd, Ellie, Tio, and Randy find themselves pulled into a lot more than just helping the good people of Crossbell with their problems. Turns out there is a deeper plot going on behind the scenes and it’s not what you’d expect at all. Story and dialogue are the key components of Trails From Zero of course. The slow warming of characters to each other, their conflicts and resolutions, the overarching politics and religion that slowly take over the plot, it’s all fascinating and compelling. You’re instantly pulled in and even small fetch quests end up being more interesting than you’d expect. There’s a fair bit of actual detective work here too and your decisions increase your detective rank so your decisions actually matter. It’s great to feel like you’re actually working to solve a case rather than riding the coattails of the SSS and spectating.
It should be noted at this point that there’s a fair bit of borderline adult and questionable material in Trails From Zero as well. This is a game that’s written for an adult audience and some of the dialogue is either questionable or outright sexual. It’s clearly meant to be funny, but in this day and age, it’s good to at least know what you’re getting into. Randy is particularly libidinous and some of the other statements you’ll encounter in the dialogue border on tasteless. They certainly catch your attention though!
Don’t worry though, the gameplay is just as fun! Combat takes place in dungeons, town streets, and outside of the city boundaries as well. Enemies are visible on the screen (no random encounters) and you can sneak up on them or simply walk into them. Running into an enemy from behind allows you to stun them with a preemptive attack, raising your attack power and randomly enabling a powerful ‘Team Rush attack similar to the Combat Link attacks in the Cold Steel series. Hitting them will provide an even stronger attack, flashing ‘Party Max Advantage’ on the screen and making battle a snap with more frequent Team Rush attacks. However, this is a game that was originally made before Cold Steel so don’t expect the same level of complexity. These team attacks happen occasionally in regular combat but are much more frequent when you stun enemies.
This is a standard turn-based JRPG which uses bonuses and queuing in order to add extra layers of depth and lining up your moves in the right way can boost your effectiveness in battle. Your arts (spells) are generated by your orbments and you’ll also get Crafts that use special points earned in combat to do extra damage. Learning which quartz to equip on which characters is part of the fun, but it takes a bit of tinkering to get the best results. You can bulldoze your way through if you really want to, but refining your tactics based on the abilities provided by your orbment loadouts is highly recommended, especially if you’re planning on completing every single side mission.
On top of standard spells and attack crafts, you also earn S-Craft special attacks if you max out your SP meter, doing massive damage to enemies or healing your entire party. Each playable character (and there are a couple more waiting in the wings) has a powerful S-Craft attack that obliterates either one or a whole host of characters. Some are definitely better than others though. Lloyd’s attack for example only hits a single enemy. One of the only minor issues with the entire combat interface is that once selected, an S-Craft must be used and you can’t de-select it, leading to a few wasted attacks or heals before you start to remember which character has which attack. For example, Tio’s default orbment loadout is a healing quartz and she becomes your defacto healer early on (in the PS4 version, the Switch version asks you to choose your loadouts). But when it comes to S-Craft attacks, Ellie has a healing Craft while Tio has a massive laser blast that hits multiple targets, leading you to reconsider where you’ve assigned your quartz in order to select proper characters each time based on their S-Craft abilities (unless you have a better memory than some of us).
As you might suspect from the above information, the orbment system is back from Trails in the Sky but it’s a bit more complex here and tinkering with which quartz to slot can really improve your battle metrics as well. You collect quartz fragments called sepith which are used to open up new slots on your orbal devices and create new quartz that increase battle effectiveness. Different combinations of quartz in your orbment slots can also combine to provide more powerful attacks, so the more thoroughly you upgrade your orbment slots and the more carefully you plan which quartz to slot, the more powerful you become. Many of the game’s more powerful arts are hidden until you tinker about with your orbment loadouts and this offers a significant depth of strategy for the game’s combat. Quartz can also be exchanged for cash at store and bank exchanges, a welcome necessity as enemies don’t drop nearly as much cash as you’ll need to keep your team kitted out properly.
By now you may have also heard about some of the controversy surrounding Trails From Zero. Yes, there’s controversy. Part of it stems from the fact that preorders on the game opened months before release and until about a week before release, there was no notification that the Switch and PS4 version of the game were fundamentally different builds. The PS4 version uses the Kai build based on the original Japanese release, while the Switch and PC versions are the most current versions of the game, hosting a plethora of quality of life updates that are subtle but noticeable. The Switch version of the game has upgrade graphics, aspect ratios, UI, pop-up elimination and more, as you can see in this post. After spending time with both versions, it’s clear that they are quite similar but the differences make the Switch version clearly more preferable. This is odd since the Trails series has consistently been focused on the Playstation release for consoles for the life of the series and most serious Trails fans automatically order Playstation versions of the series. Abruptly tossing the older build to long-time fans is a bit of a smack in the face. That’s not to say that the Playstation version is bad. In fact it’s nearly as good as the Switch version. It just doesn’t have every major update it could and that’s a shame.
There’s also a bit of controversy online about Trails From Zero in the fan community. NIS America hit some of the fan sites for the Trails series with cease and desist orders in relation to their fan translations of Trails games. This is particularly strange since they actually worked with fan translation site Geofront to translate Trails From Zero. Unfortunately, that means that content from other fan sites that had been years in the making was forcibly shelved and a lot of fans are upset, especially since the fan community for the Legend of Heroes series is particularly dedicated. While it’s understandable that they’d be upset but having an official translation from NIS is of course what everyone wanted in the first place and partnering with a fan site to accomplish it is very cool. It’s just unfortunate that it took so long for us in the West to get Trails From Zero.
For a brand new game in the Trails series, you might also be surprised (if you didn’t pay attention to the original release date) how old Trails From Zero looks. Don’t expect the same level of cinematic polish and visuals that you get with the Cold Steel series here since it’s a bit older. The character designs are charming with an almost clay doll look to them in-game and the character art has been upgraded a bit from previous releases. If you’re a fan and you’ve been on board with the Trails series for a while, the artwork for Estelle and Joshua might be a bit weird, but aside from that, the visuals are great. For a game this old, everything is noticeably crisp and clean and the update to HD looks just a hair nicer on the Switch than the PS4 but unless you’re really paying ridiculous close attention (like say to write a review), you probably won’t even notice.
However, Trails From Zero isn’t big on flash. This is more of a substance game and while everything runs smooth as silk and looks great, you’re not going to see too many outrageously over-the-top attacks or anything. S-Craft attacks are cool and all but they never vary and regular art and craft attacks don’t look overly fancy, though some do manage to get a bit cooler as you power up. You might note where the drivers sit in the orbal cars or the background in some areas, particularly since you can buy extra knick knacks for your playable characters’ rooms, but by and large nothing is going to blow your mind visually.
The audio on the other hand is outstanding here. As you may or may not know, Falcom has an in-house band, the JDK Band which does a lot of work on the Ys games as well as the trails series. That means that there’s literally decades of experience behind the soundtracks for all of Falcom’s releases and Trails From Zero hits that high standard with ease. The soundtrack is excellent, picking up at the right places, cooling down to focus, and shifting comfortably in order to accentuate key elements. This is a solid set of compositions and would be well worth picking up in its own right. Falcom always delivers on tracks and chances are you’ll love the Trails From Zero one as well.
While Trails from Zero isn’t a long game, it’s not short either. There are only five chapters and a prologue but each chapter is broken up into multiple days and a ton of events. There’s also a fishing mini-game and a fair bit of cooking that can save you a lot of sepith on healing items! If you’re not a completist, you might squeak through those chapters in about 35-45 hours unless you’re using the accelerated text skip to skip all the dialogue. As a side note, that function is awesome but blows through text so fast that it’s inevitable that you’ll miss a key detail or two using it. If you’re an intense player, expect to near double the time you spend to do every little thing. That’s a pretty good chunk of game for a $40 game and with the quality of the script and the solid gameplay, you’re definitely getting your money’s worth.
Trails From Zero is quite simply awesome. A solid RPG with decent tactical depth, a plot that’s both interesting and unexpected, and characters from other entries in the series coalesce here to create a wonderful experience that stands on its own even though it’s part of a duology (along with the forthcoming Trails to Azure). On top of all that, the entirety of the story slots nicely into the overarching tapestry that is Trails of Cold Steel and if you’ve already played those games you’re even familiar with most of the characters in Trails From Zero. It’s a win-win regardless of whether you’re a new initiate to Falcom RPGs or an old pro who’s been waiting with bated breath for these lost entries to finally come Stateside. Trails From Zero is probably one of the best RPGs that will be released this year and that’s no exaggeration. A pretty impressive feat for a game that’s over a decade old but Falcom gets it right and NIS is finally bringing us the goods! Regardless of which version you get (and while the Switch version is superior, both are excellent), you’re going to have a great time! Don’t hesitate to pull the trigger on Trails From Zero!
This review is based on a digital copy of Trails From Zero provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and on a PS4 Pro, both using a Sony 55” 1080p TV. Trails From Zero is also available for PC on Steam.
