Past meets present: The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero

The fourth entry in the Trails series finally got a North American release, after the ninth entry.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Ys, one of Nihon Falcom’s flagship series, is pretty easy to figure out in terms of where you should start, because there is no wrong answer. The release order of the games is not the chronological order of the series, and, for the most part, the connective tissue of them is simply “Adol Christin’s adventures,” with references to past games and characters mostly being there for people who have already experienced them rather than central pieces of whichever game you are playing at that moment. Because of the way Ys’ storytelling structure and larger narrative works, it’s a lot like reading Greek myths about specific gods or demigods in whatever order you come across them: there’s probably a best practices order to roll with, but really, you can just pick up whichever you have access to and go from there.

The Trails games, on the other hand… well, I know people ask “where should I start with the Trails games?” as if there is more than one correct answer, but there is not. Each new Trails game spends time spoiling the previous Trails game because of the way the series is structured and its secrets revealed, and because these games invest themselves so heavily into character growth and political intrigue and mysteries of the universe questions and answers, it’s vital that, as much as possible, you experience all of those layers being peeled away in the order they’re supposed to be, both to achieve the intended emotional effect and so you can keep track of what’s happening. You really shouldn’t play the four-game Trails of Cold Steel subseries before the three-game Trails in the Sky series, for instance, because a whole bunch of questions you would have in the latter if you experienced that first are played off as very answered in the former. And that’s whether you’re talking protagonists, relationships between people or countries, or just what is this group that seems to be behind so much of what goes awry on the continent of Zemuria.

The problem is that, until now — and really, not until 2023, when its own followup hits North America shelves — it hasn’t been possible to pull that off without purchasing the Japanese version of two of these games and then patching them with unofficial English translations. If you’re not new to the series and have played the four Trails of Cold Steel games, you are intimately familiar with the state of Crossbell and its inhabitants, as well as the Special Support Section that attempts to protect them from lost trinkets and petty crimes and devious masterminds seeking to reshape society in the image they wish by invoking ancient gods or frightening new technologies. And that’s the case even though, until Trails from Zero received a multiplatform release (PC, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch) in September of 2022, an official version of the first game centered around the Special Support Section and the independent nation of Crossbell hadn’t yet released in North America.

Image credit: Steam

Playing the Trails of Cold Steel subseries, as great as it was, without having first experienced the duology of Crossbell games — Trails from Zero and Trails from Azure — as the series was meant to be played, felt a lot like reading Lord of the Rings by starting with Fellowship of the Ring and then skipping over to Return of the King while avoiding the vital middle entry, The Two Towers. Sure, you can figure quite a bit out about what happened in the middle there by continuing on with the third book of three in the series, but you’re also going to be wondering where the hell everyone met these Ents, what even are Ents, and how did they manage to take care of Saruman like that, anyway? Why is, uh, this Éowyn so intent on dying? Isn’t Gandalf supposed to be dead? Hey… where’s Frodo?

The Crossbell duology is inevitably what links the Trails in the Sky subseries — its protagonists, antagonists, and everything in between — with the Trails of Cold Steel subseries. It is both a literal and figurative meeting ground for what’s going on in Zemuria, and for a series that hyper-zooms in on one region of the world at a time to detail its politics, its people, and their problems both natural and touched by man… well, that’s a bit of a problem. The Crossbell duology is a pivot point for so much of what changes in the world between the first Trails subseries and the third, especially since it occurs at the same time in-universe as the first couple of Cold Steel titles, with the second pair from that subseries heavily influenced by what went on in the preceding subseries.

So, for those of you who haven’t yet started in on the Trails games, good news: you can safely start with Trails in the Sky FC (for First Chapter), and by the time you get to Crossbell, the second of those two games should be out or nearing that point. You’ll get to play all of this in the order it was meant to be played, especially since the post-Trails of Cold Steel releases seem to now be slated to come out in North America the same way they did in Japan, just later.

And if, like me, you’ve already played the Trails of Cold Steel games and hadn’t yet experienced the Crossbell duology, well, the news is still good, just not quite as good. Very vague spoilers for the rest of this paragraph: You’ll finally get to discover the origins of Lloyd Bannings, Randy Orlando, Elie MacDowell, and Tio Plato, even if it comes with you already knowing which close associate of the Special Support Section is going to betray the four, or the true identity of the secret frenemy, or even what certain characters’ backstories are that are supposed to be given time to develop and be revealed. It ends up feeling more prequel-y for those of us in that boat, but at least we still get to see how everyone and everything got from Point A to Point B — those bits will still feel new, even if we know what or where Point B is.

Am I ready to talk about the game itself yet? No. No I am not. First we have to bust out the chart to explain how Trails came to be, and then we can discuss what’s within. Here goes: Dragon Slayer was Nihon Falcom’s first hit in the 80s, back on Japanese computers, with Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu being the real liftoff point for them, as it was at one time the best-selling Japanese PC game ever. Dragon Slayer would spin-off into multiple different series that aren’t subseries so much as their own thing, at least in part because Dragon Slayer creator Yoshio Kiya left Falcom in 1993 — Xanadu being one of them, and The Legend of Heroes another. You might recall that the first Legend of Heroes game was in fact a Dragon Slayer game, and that spawned a series which eventually dropped the Dragon Slayer moniker just like Xanadu had. After a number of The Legend of Heroes games, both original and Playstation Portable remakes, Trails in the Sky released, and Trails became its own subseries of The Legend of Heroes. Now, we’re 12 games into Trails titles, supposedly a little over halfway into the subseries’ expansive, decades-spanning narrative, but just four of the first five have been released in North America, and number 10 isn’t set to release in 2023 until after that fifth one does in the same year. Got all that?

Trails from Zero is a great game in its own right, but also benefits from being part of this larger whole: you’ll finish Trails from Zero with questions, but they’re ones that are going to be answered in later entries — some, presumably, in Azure, and others in all but the first Cold Steel title. It remains wild that Nihon Falcom is intent on both zooming into the everyday lives of random NPCs to add a still frankly astonishing amount of local color and depth to the proceedings, while also zooming out into how the day-to-day of specific regions impacts this continent as a whole, and even wilder that they are pulling it off. If you don’t want to read and don’t like intrigue but instead prefer things being a bit more straightforward, the Trails games aren’t going to be for you. But if you do want depth wherever it can be placed, if you want to fall in love with protagonists and feel as betrayed or concerned or invested as they are, then Trails is going to have you covered each time out.

You occasionally see these games dinged by critics because they require so much prior knowledge in order to enjoy them to the fullest, but I always find that to be a bit off the mark. It’s a true statement, I mean, but punishing them from a critical perspective for deciding to reveal a story over time like these are a lengthy series of fantasy novels instead of self-contained video games is what’s off base. Storytelling in games should take risks more often, and while you might find certain elements of the Trails games — Zero included — to be cliche or heavily steeped in tropes, this larger vision of how to tell a story shines through in all of it, and the story itself is gripping, too.

As for how things actually play, Trails from Zero is a turn-based JRPG where you’ll spend quite a bit of time exploring, running errands, and fighting. Combat is enjoyable, and there isn’t an overabundance of it, either: encounters aren’t random, while experience received is tied to what your characters’ levels are, so you get much more of it if you’re behind and it’s easy to see when you’re caught up. Fight the enemies you see when they’re strong enough to give you larger bits of experience, and avoid the weaker ones who aren’t. You’ll also pick up a ton of experience and levels over the course of the game by doing as many of the optional side missions as possible, but even these are skippable to a degree if you just don’t feel like doing them. You’ll have less money to spend, miss out on some items and gear, and finish the game with a lower Detective rank, but it’s your call: you’ll have to make up for lost opportunities elsewhere, so you might as well just do the side missions whenever you can, especially since so many of them let you learn more about Crossbell and its people.

You play as the members of the Special Support Section, or SSS, a new branch of the Crossbell Police Department that is meant to avoid some of the limitations of said department. Like, for instance, all of the corruption and red tape that let the elites of the city do what they wish, whether it be illegal trading, or accepting bribes from the mafia, or taking part in secret black market auctions in an impossibly huge mansion full of stolen and illicit goods. The work of the SSS ends up mirroring quite a bit of what the politically neutral and international Bracer Guild does, which, if you’ve played Trails in the Sky, you are already intimately aware of their whole deal since you played as fledgling Bracers. The difference, for narrative purposes, is that the police have more authority to break up sources of corruption and involve themselves politically in local affairs, whereas the Guild is supposed to stay neutral unless the lives of local citizens are in danger. This allows opportunities for the SSS and the local Bracer branch to work together, rather than be in competition with each other as the rest of the Crossbell Police Department seems to view the relationship.

Along the way, you’ll find out the origins of the SSS, why Lloyd, Randy, Elie, and Tio all ended up joining the CPD and, inevitably, the SSS in the first place. You’ll learn that there’s more to all of these people than what you find on the surface, just like within the city and its people. You’ll find the true source of many of the issues plaguing Crossbell, as well as help it to usher into an age free of the corruption that’s taken root… in theory, anyway. You’ll find a fight worth fighting, at the least, and people worthy of fighting it.

If you’re familiar with how battles and magic work in Trails games, well, Zero isn’t different, not really, especially since it initially served as a bridge between two other subseries. The one significant change is the Team Rush, which appears often when you manage to get the jump on a stunned enemy from behind, and lets all four of your characters beat up on basically everyone on screen at once. It shows up at other times, but far less frequently: I maybe had two Team Rush moments in the entire game outside of battles where I got a preemptive advantage.

Otherwise, you still equip elemental Quartz to an Orbment, which is an in-game device with multiple functions, but for your purposes as the player is just a menu you can manipulate in order to setup different spells to cast. The more of a certain element (and the stronger the Quartz equipped), the higher level spells you’ll be able to cast, and you earn the ability to utilize those stronger Quartz by upgrading the Orbment itself using the same sepith (small gems you receive for winning battles, opening treasure chests, as rewards for completing missions, etc.) that you use to create new Quartz in workshops. There’s a lot of freedom here for customizing characters how you want them to be: each has their own elemental affinities you’ll want to lean into that make one better suited for offense vs. healing, but you can tweak things enough that everyone can be useful with either offensive or defensive magic, and the same goes for the kind that buffs up your party or debuffs foes. You’ll need to experiment a bit, but the game explains it all well enough that you’ll get the gist and be off to the races, as they were, without too much effort.

As for the battles themselves, they’re turn-based but on a grid that you need to maneuver around. Enemy spells have ranges within which they’ll cause damage or debuff you, and you can move your own characters out of range if they’re targeted to a specific part of the grid, or move the targeted character away from your other characters to limit the scope of the attack. There’s a turn order on the side that’s vital to pay attention to, as so much of battle is tied up in trying to keep your foes from attacking you, whether by delaying their attacks with certain skills, or just targeting the next enemy in line to attack you so that they’ve been defeated before that happens. You can also interrupt the turn order by using your special skills that use up Craft Points: CP is earned whenever you successfully attack or take damage, and when you’ve collected 100 of it, a special equipped skill can be used whether it’s that character’s turn or not. Deploying these at the right time can save all of your characters through healing, or let you steal a turn to defeat foes that would have just caused some major damage or interrupted your casting or what have you.

And since the turn order also features specific turns — but not characters — receiving random boosts like a guaranteed critical hit or a bump to their CP or recovering a chunk of their hit points, figuring out to when to spend your CP for these turn-stealing skills becomes about more than just wanting to win as fast as possible. To throw another wrinkle in there, if you wait until you have maxed out the CP meter at 200, you’ll do an even stronger version of the equipped skill: Elie’s first S-Craft, as it’s referred to, revives, heals the status of, and recovers HP for everyone in your party within a pretty large range at 100 CP, but at 200, it also restores all of their HP. You can imagine how that sort of trump card could turn the tide of even the toughest battles in your favor. And in addition to these enhanced versions of S-Crafts, there are also standard Crafts (like Lloyd spending 30 CP to attempt to cancel an enemy’s casting with a targeted attack) and duo Crafts that use up 100 CP from two characters to perform a special maneuver that’s otherwise unavailable. So you’ll want to figure out the ebb and flow of CP usage in a hurry.

You’re going to spend quite a bit of time battling, and even more running back-and-forth in the Crossbell region for one mission or another, but Trails from Zero has something very useful for you to utilize in all of that: a high-speed mode. With the press of a single button, high-speed mode turns on, and it’ll make text appear faster, your characters run at a pace that’s at first tough to get a handle on, and for battles to finish far, far quicker. Remember, fights are turn-based, so you’re not in danger of being overrun if you play in high-speed mode: you simply speed up all of the movement and animations that occur, in a way that’ll shave entire hours off of the experience if you so choose. I’ve seen reviews say Trails of Zero takes 50 hours to complete: I had high-speed mode on quite a bit, finished probably 98% of the game’s missions, and wrapped in more like 33 hours. You don’t have to play in high-speed mode, but if you’re in a rush or just don’t need to see every detailed animation happen yet again in battle, or want to get to the hospital a lot faster this time when the bus service is down, well, high-speed mode is there for you.

And since it doesn’t speed through dialogue — voice acting is delivered at the same speed, while text just appears faster but still requires you to manually advance to the next dialogue box — you’re not missing anything or causing the game to sound off by using the option. Plus, it can be shut off again with the same button press that enabled it: you might find it useful even if all you use it for is to speed through the multi-screen introduction to new regions of the game that do take an admittedly long time otherwise.

The truth is that, even if you spend the entire game in high-speed mode, you’re going to be slowly working your way through everything there is to learn in and about Crossbell and its people, as well as starting to get an inkling for its place in the world as a supposedly independent nation sandwiched between two powers that would like nothing more than to conquer the other. There is so much here that you couldn’t possibly speed through if you want to actually glean anything from it, so, it’s a game that you can take your time with even if you’re seemingly rushing from place to place at a cartoonishly funny speed.

The one thing you might need to know before diving in is that this is a game from 2010 that released on portable platforms of the time: it looks like a PSP game, albeit one that’s now in high definition, and even at the time of its predecessor subseries, critics felt Trails games were lagging behind a bit visually. The other is that there is no English voice acting in the game — NIS America leaned heavily on the unofficial translations of Zero and Azure by Geofront to localize these games, and didn’t invest in voice acting in the process despite so many of the characters already having North America voice actors who have worked with NIS America for the Cold Steel games. Then again, you can get a digital copy of Trails from Zero for $40 on Steam, and for $50 instead of $60 on Switch and PS4, so at least some of those budgetary savings were passed on to us regular folks.

Don’t start with Trails from Zero. You might be tempted to because it’s the newest game available in North America, but you at least need to get through Trails in the Sky FC and Trails in the Sky SC first, especially since more than a couple of important friends from those games have a major role to play in this one — and you wouldn’t want to diminish any of those relationships for yourself by experiencing their highs and lows and challenges out of order. Still, it’s worth it to put in all of that effort, and I’m a bit jealous of folks who were able to experience Trails from Zero (and the forthcoming Azure) prior to diving into Trails of Cold Steel. A wrong has been righted, though, or is at least in the process of that, so start at the beginning and enjoy: Trails from Zero will still be there when you get around to it, and it’ll be worth the wait when you do.

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