Games inside games: Pom! Pom! Party! (The Legend of Heroes: Trails series)

Falcom's long-running RPG series has often included a "mobile" falling block puzzle game for over a decade now.

This column is “Games inside games,” in which I’ll write about game contained within — and only contained within — another game. No secret playable Wolfenstein inside of a different Wolfenstein here, but original games exclusive to the games they’re contained within. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Game

Pom! Pom! Party isn’t limited to just one game in The Legend of Heroes: Trails series. (Series? Subseries? It’s confusing talking about Falcom’s franchise nesting sometimes.) Rather, it was introduced in 2010’s The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero, which was the first of the two Crossbell arc titles staring the Special Support Section, and the fourth game in the Trails subseries overall. Though Trails from Zero wouldn’t release in North America until 2022, North Americans still received a taste of Pom! Pom! Party! before then, as the game within a game was included in 2020’s Trails of Cold Steel IV. Which was actually the third game in the series to feature Pom! Pom! Party in Japan, as it also appeared in the second Crossbell title, Trails to Azure.

And now Pom! Pom! Party has appeared in a fourth Trails title, as 2023’s The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie also includes the puzzle title. While Falcom can do whatever they want here, this might be the final title in Trails to include Pom! Pom! Party!, given that Trails into Reverie is meant to cap off an arc that’s been going since 2010. Like how Trails in the Sky the 3rd put a bow on Liberl and many (but certainly not all) of that region’s characters and storylines, Trails into Reverie is meant to do the same for the Crosbell and Erebonian regions and storylines that have been intertwined this time, across two different subseries within Trails. And since Pom! Pom! Party hasn’t appeared yet in the two thus-far Japan-only Kuro no Kiseki titles yet — the arc that follows Reverie’s closure of the previous one — it’s at least plausible we’ve seen the last of it.

If all of this is confusing, well, that probably just means you haven’t played the Trails games yet. Which, sorry about that, but you kind of had to be there. At least for this introduction, anyway, because the rest of this is about a falling block puzzle game.

The Game Inside The Game

Pom! Pom! Party! is, as said, a falling block puzzle game, where the goal is to defeat your opponent in a head-to-head match. Pairs of blocks — styled as an enemy from the Trails series, the Pom — drop from the top of the screen, and you’re able to switch which block is on top and which one is on the bottom until they make contact with another that’s already in place. The Poms come in four different colors (red, blue, green, yellow), and a fifth variant, the Shining Pom. (The Shining Pom is a rare enemy type in the Trails games worth loads of experience; essentially it’s the Metal Slime of this particular universe.)

When you match three Poms of the same color, they vanish and award you CP — more on that in a moment — equal to the number of Poms that were cleared. If you’ve built things up well on your side of the screen (or are just lucky), you’ll see a bit of a cascade effect, too, with the vanishing Poms clearing way for Poms above them to fall and match, creating combos worth more and more CP. While you can get away without much planning in the earliest “levels” of Pom! Pom! Party!, you’ll have to be both strategic and quick in order to defeat the toughest opponents. Of which there are more and more the later in the series the Trails game you’re playing is.

Your character is represented by a super deformed chibi avatar, which sits in the background of your side of the screen. If you’ve ever played something like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, it’s the same idea. You can change your avatar to that of a character you’ve defeated, as well, which will also use their voice clips instead of that of Lloyd Bannings or Rean Schwarzer. Instructor Sara fans, rejoice.

How To Get Pom! Pom! Party!

In-game, Pom! Pom! Party! is a video game developed by one of the continent of Zemuria’s tech giants, the Epstein Foundation. As the Epstein Foundation is headquartered in Crossbell, and one of its key members, Tio Plato, is in your party and a member of the SSS to boot, you get the chance to beta test the program and its connectivity features. While in Trails in the Sky, the handheld communication devices characters held were basically just standard cellphones, by the time of the Crossbell arc, technology has rapidly progressed, and the age of the smartphone (that also lets you cast magic spells) has begun. Pom! Pom! Party is a mobile game for your ENIGMA battle orbment unit, which again, you use for communication and to cast spells. This sort of thing is inevitable, isn’t it? Classic-style cellphones had some basic games on them, which progressed to the likes of things like mobile Katamari for very specific phone platforms, and then smartphones obviously ratcheted all of that forward and unified development under just a couple of operating systems for the most part.

Anyway, the SSS receives a mission to play a video game developed by the Epstein Foundation, with the stated goal of both your play and the game’s development itself being that it’s meant to test the communication network that the battle orbments of the world use: so, head-to-head battles, with each player using their own ENIGMA unit to play on, will allow for that. Chief Roberts, who gives you the mission, is very excited about Pom! Pom! Party!, and also very bad at it, so even if you don’t quite get it, you’ll defeat him with ease.

In Trails to Azure, Chief Roberts installs a beta of Pom! Pom! Party onto the computer in the SSS headquarters. While playing Trails to Azure, you will collect the information of various characters you can play Pom! Pom! Party! against. If you happen to defeat all of them, you’ll reveal a secret final opponent, and defeating them will earn you a Master Quartz, a special item for your ENIGMA unit.

In Trails of Cold Steel IV, Jona, who works for the Epstein Foundation, hacks into Rean Schwarzer’s ARCUS II unit (the Erebonian version of an ENIGMA; the Android vs. iOS battle of this world) and places a copy of Pom! Pom! Party! on there. Now, you’re able to play it from anywhere, against other characters whose game ID you’ve had shared with you. If you miss any game ID, it ends up available for sale in a curio shop, as well, so even as areas and people are locked away from you, you can still complete the game within a game here. Sure the world is ending, but you’re spending a lot of time commuting on an airship, anyway. There’s time to unwind with some matching blocks.

And in Trails into Reverie, you can play Pom! Pom! Party! within the Reverie Corridor, once you’ve completed enough missions within the corridor to unlock the area where it’s housed. Spoiler alert: the Reverie Corridor is essentially a pocket dimension in which time flows freely for the characters while, on the outside, it’s stopped, with the idea being you can train here as much as you need to in order to resolve a crisis that, under normal circumstances, your party would not have enough time to bulk up to stop. So theoretically you could play Pom! Pom! Party! for weeks on end while the real-world crisis waits for you to wrap. Sure, you wouldn’t be ready to stop said crisis once you exit, but you’d be really, really great at Pom! Pom! Party.

What is Pom! Pom! Party!

Distracting. That’s a compliment, by the way. A good falling block puzzle game is a distraction, and while Pom! Pom! Party! distracts you from your many other tasks in whatever Trails game you’re playing, that’s fine. It’s a good puzzle game, let yourself be distracted!

While there aren’t very many different colors for the pieces, you’ll be glad about that when you start facing off against opponents who move a whole lot faster than your early ones. Like with Puyo Puyo, you don’t want to just automatically clear blocks at every opportunity, but instead try to build a bit of a future combo machine. Stack blocks in a way where the later clearing of some blocks will create a cascade effect that chains clears together, giving you tons of CP, which you can then use for either offensive or defensive purposes. While clearing just three Poms (the minimum) will award three CP, a lengthy chain will give you more than you might even need at that moment. A “6 CHAIN,” for instance, is worth 75 CP on its own, and by that point you already received a bonus for five, and four, three, and two. They all stack, so 75 is actually… a lot more than that, especially if you manage to clear any Shining Poms in the process.

CP is, in Trails games, basically a gauge for performing special maneuvers. There are smaller special attacks and healing skills and the like that you can perform with 15 CP, 30 CP, 80 CP, whatever, but many of the best and strongest ones cost 100 CP. (With enhanced versions of those possible if you save up to the max of 200 CP). For Pom! Pom! Party!’s purposes, 100 CP is the minimum needed to perform a special attack or defensive move. An attack will raise your opponent’s blocks up closer to the top, while choosing defense will eliminate blocks from your own to help lower everything. How high or low things end up is based heavily on how many CP you invest in a move: they’re all or nothing, but you can go much higher than 100 here. Each Pom you clear is worth a single CP, a Shining Pom is worth 100 on its own, and you can keep going well beyond that until the gauge fills up to around 800-900 CP. This will either allow you to hit very, very hard, in a way that all-at-once raises your opponent’s blocks near the top of their screen, or let you escape basically any horrid situation you’ve been placed in, whether due to your own misplays or your opponent attacking you.

You won’t win (or lose) simply by raising any portion of the screen to the top: it has to be the very middle, where additional blocks spawn from. If that’s blocked up, no new pieces can come down, so the game ends. The side columns, though, can be ratcheted all the way to the top the entire game, so long as you can keep that middle entryway clear.

Games can seem like they’re moving slowly, and then ramp up in a hurry, thanks to the deployment of CP. It’s incredibly satisfying to time a massive attack for the moment after your opponent has launched a desperate assault on you in the hopes of defeating you in one go, because then they can’t defend against your coming onslaught. Similarly, it’s hilarious to see someone save up to go all-in on you, but you can then defend with your own ample supply of CP, basically negating their effort. A game within a game within a game, if you think about it.

Simple to pick up, but difficult to master the timing and nuance of, especially since there is absolutely no give in Pom! Pom! Party!’s block placement. You can’t keep rotating a piece as it’s landing, like in many versions of Tetris. Once that thing touches down, it’s on to the next one, so get it right the first time. And just know that you actually will have to practice, practice, practice if you plan on defeating every character in each Trails game, because the late-game ones are fast and strategic in a way that you would expect someone powered by technology or dark magics to be.

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