Past meets present: The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure

The conclusion of the duology that released before a whole bunch of other Trails games finally left Japan.

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.

It took nearly 12 years, but the Crossbell duology has finally been released worldwide instead of just in Japan. The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure came out in March, 2023, six months after the first game of the pair, Trails from Zero, arrived in North America. Now you don’t need to have played through a patched version of the Japanese game, courtesy Geofront’s unofficial translation, to know what went down in Crossbell in between the Trails in the Sky duology and the four Trails of Cold Steel games: instead, you can play the official Nihon Falcom release, which used Geofront’s work as its base for the official localization. More publishers should think about doing things like this to help speed up the release process, cough cough, Nintendo and Square and Sega and more.

When I covered Trails of Zero in 2022, I wrote about why it mattered that it was finally available for people to discover without having to know that unofficial translations and game patches exist (and how to implement them):

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.

And Azure did not disappoint in regards to continent-altering events that pave the road for what goes on in Cold Steel. These earlier Trails games feature cutesy characters (with excellent and detailed character portrait art) and an astounding level of political intrigue and depth for games that are drawn a lot more “seriously,” never mind with these cute widdle characters who don’t have mouths. Azure spends its first half building up tension, laying out some stakes, and then uses the second half to show you should have been even tenser than you were, because the stakes are more significant and continent-encompassing than were hinted at. And it even manages to tie in the events of Trails in the Sky the 3rd in more ways than just as passing reference, with some of the characters and knowledge learned about the Septian Church and how it works proving central to Azure.

Azure starts out slow, just because it’s kind of looping you back in on what went on in the first game and starting you over in some ways, but once you get back in the feel of things, it starts going places, more so than the first game (which went plenty of places on its own). Much like with Trails in the Sky FC (First Chapter) and then SC, the first game of this pair was designed to establish the ground rules and many of the characters, relationships, and politics of the Crossbell region. The second game is designed to bring all of that together into a much grander climax and story of a more significant, far-reaching scope than in the first. Like with FC and SC, this pair still feels like one game in a lot of ways, but it’s a little less strict in that regard since this is more conclusion and continuation of a larger story with fewer remaining threads to pull on from last time, and it’s also able to blow itself up even further since we’ve already had the full reveal of what the “society” — Ouruboros — even is.

Retroactively, Trails in the Sky SC even feels a little smaller in scope after playing through Trails to Azure, since that game featured a single Anguis — a high-ranking member of Ouruboros — and their mission of domination, while Azure spends plenty of its time assuring you there are far more Anguis and much more structure to Ouruboros than you might have realized, and they’re about to do something so significant that it goes beyond the bounds of this game, which is serving as a testing ground for the events to come in Trails of Cold Steel’s four titles. There’s a ramping up, up, up throughout the Trails games, and now that Crossbell is here in its completed form, the jump from Trails in the Sky’s relatively smaller stakes to an entire continent consumed by war and embroiled in the evocation of the fantastical horrors of the past in Trails of Cold Steel feels a lot more natural.

Even with all of this ramping up and its place as a bridge, the game respects your time in a lot of ways after the initial re-introductions: the story is excellent, the characters once again well-written and containing depth and layers and backstory you’ll want to uncover, with even the NPCs full of personality and surprises and reasons to help (or hinder) them beyond the initial basic, introductory errand-boy quests you run for (or against) them. You have some fast travel options in a hurry — your party spent the entire first game complaining about having to walk everywhere, and early in Azure, they get access to a car — enemies on the highways are weak enough to be mostly ignored, with the foes you face in the actual locations of your missions being the ones you’ll feel rewarded for fighting, and even things like particular environmental puzzles in areas you’re returning to remain solved from the last game. No need to find your way to those switches in the tower anymore: the doors are already unlocked just like you left them.

It’s good that the game does this, too, because once Trails to Azure gets past the more basic elements and truly ramps up the tension and story, it spends quite a bit of time hitting you with twists and turns and false finishes — the pacing handles it all well, with the less “important” warm-up stuff not taking very long to do thanks to all of the above decisions, and then you’re pretty laser-focused in the game’s second half when things both open up and narrow at the same time. So long as you’re prepared for a final dungeon that’ll have you facing essentially every foe you’ve had a conversation with to that point in the game, before a three-part final boss fight, the pacing works once you’ve settled in. When you hit that ending, though, that’s it: no hidden bonus missions, just final cinematics and credits and scene. No super extended “wait I thought I beat the game already” bits a la Trails of Cold Steel II, which is up there with Metal Gear Solid 4 for games I regret trying to wrap up when it was already 2 in the morning.

That you can retry battles at a progressively lower difficulty (without being locked in to that difficulty going forward) and play the entire game in “High-Speed Mode” if you so choose helps quite a bit. If you want to give a battle another go and do it right, you can, but if you mostly just want to see what happens after a fight’s conclusion because you’re riveted by the story, then lower that difficulty. And High-Speed Mode… there’s nothing wrong with the speed of Trails to Azure, necessarily, but Falcom loves to do a real slow pan, and then another slow pan, and the characters all take their time walking to and fro, even in battles. High-Speed Mode is just fast enough to look a little silly in action on occasion, sure, and if you’ve got auto-text going in dialogue you might miss some things every now and again when a dialogue box doesn’t have that much in it, but if you’re in a hurry and want to move things along, run faster while traveling, cut down on wait time during battles, etc., then it’s going to be your preferred mode. It’s not new to Azure, and is pretty standard procedure for Trails games at this point, but it is welcome. Because seriously: the camera slow pans a lot. Like with Trails from Zero, you just press the left trigger to enable it, and press it again to turn it off: easy and accessible whenever you’ve decided you want to speed things up or slow ‘em down again.

What helps, too, is that you should be familiar with how these turn-based battles on a grid work, and how to equip your Enigma (II) with quartz gems in order to customize the “Arts” — spells, basically — that you’ll have on your person in and out of battle, at this point. You can go back for an extended explanation if you need to with the engineer at the shop where you can acquire quartz and customize your Enigma II so that you can equip more powerful quartz and have more technique points to cast your Arts with, but Azure doesn’t force one on you. It assumes, for the most part, that you know what’s happening here, with the only forced tutorial being the game telling you to equip a new kind of quartz — a master quartz that will boost abilities and guide stat growth in a character in a given direction depending on whether its focus is on offense, defense, healing, etc. — before proceeding any further.

Image credit: Noisy Pixel

It figures you know about Team Rush, which, if you manage to attack an enemy from behind to daze them in a dungeon, on the highway, wherever, you then have a percentage change of a four-way attack that’ll most likely defeat them or get them real close to it. And it assumes you know all about Crafts, which you spend accumulated Craft Points (CP) to utilize in order to perform special skills, or let build up to either 100 CP or the max of 200 CP for some massive, battle-altering techniques. And the duo attacks where two characters team up and spend 100 CP each are also just mentioned as a reminder: there are a lot of reasons to not start with a game that takes place in the middle of the series and is also the finale of a two-part story, but the assumption that this is all designed as if you’ve played the first game already is right up there with the strongest of them.

As someone who had played all of the Trails of Cold Steel saga already, I knew quite a bit of what was going to go down in Crossbell this time around. Not just because — and here’s your spoiler warning for a whole slew of games — the events of the Crossbell arc happen in parallel with those of the early Cold Steel titles, to the point you end up controlling a couple of Azure’s characters at the end of Cold Steel II to set you up for what’s to come when these casts come clashing together in the back half of that quadrilogy. It was already clear to me who would be turning on you, who they would be working with, what was in the future of a number of characters Azure was introducing as a mystery to be unraveled, and so on… and yet, the way it all comes together here, and how it impacts these characters who don’t have this empirical understanding of what’s next, is so well done that it didn’t matter that I knew when we’d get to the fireworks factory.

The journey there was plenty enjoyable, the emotional beats still worked, there were still characters whose turn (and redemeption, in some cases) I wasn’t aware of since it was self-contained within this duology. Now I’m curious to see how the Cold Steel foursome will play differently post formal introduction to these characters that Japanese players (and those who played the Geofront-produced unofficial translations of Zero and Azure) had when they first played through those titles. (Given that’s 300 hours worth of game that I went through fairly recently, though, that’s curiosity that will have to wait to be sated for quite a few years.)

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At the heart of Trails to Azure’s story and ethos is a response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Obviously, you’re going to want to avoid this part of the feature if you don’t want to be spoiled on key plot points from Trails to Azure — pick up again after the line break.

Here’s Le Guin on Omelas, from the short story compilation The Unreal and the Real:

“Omelas (which is pronounced OH-meh-lahss) is a fable, I think. Its premise was stolen from the philosopher William James. You can find it also in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, being told by the Grand Inquisitor, with a somewhat different purpose. My version of it has had a long and happy career of being used to by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality.

Role-playing games love to argue fiercely about morality and philosophy, so letting so much of a game’s central conflict hinge on an Omelas-esque question is perfect, really. The quote from James that inspired Le Guin comes from The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, and reads:

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

Le Guin creates this “utopia,” where a single child is tortured, kept in perpetual darkness, alone, with no one to speak to, or interact with, to help keep them clean, all in the name of keeping said utopia going. Omelas is a world of almost unimaginable happiness, with food, nature, beauty, plenty of all that anyone could need found in abundance. The price of this is that one child’s misery. Don’t worry about how the torture of this child results in bounty for everyone else, just know that in this fable, the two are intrinsically linked. Everyone in Omelas eventually comes to meet the child — not to speak to them, or care for them, but to see what the cost of their own joy and happiness is. Some eventually shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives, deciding this is just the price of things and the cost is worth it to them, while others — the titular ones who walk away — cannot stand to benefit from such an atrocity, and leave this seeming paradise to go elsewhere. Where? It doesn’t matter, so long as the foundations of that place aren’t constructed out of intentional suffering inflicted to benefit others.

There have been countless arguments and discussions over the years about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, and even accusations that Le Guin didn’t see a way to change anything about Omelas, that the only solution was to walk away. That’s just how the fable goes, though, and isn’t necessarily what the author believed, as you can imagine if you’ve read anything else by Le Guin and her clear belief that a better world was worth aspiring to and fighting for. Interpretation takes a life of its own, though, as N.K. Jemisin said in an interview with The Paris Review that came out after she wrote an anthology piece titled The Ones Who Stay and Fight:

With Le Guin’s story, at the end of it, she’s suggesting that the only way to create a society that is a better place is to walk away from this one or to go off the grid. That’s not really what she’s saying, specifically, but that’s what a lot of people have concluded. But no, you’ve got to fix it, especially when there’s nowhere to walk away to. You go anywhere else in our current world and you’re either being completely exploited by capitalism or somewhat exploited by capitalism. So, I mean, it’s just a question of what kind of suffering you want to put yourself through.

In Trails to Azure, your party is faced with the question of whether improving Crossbell’s standing in the world, giving it the chance to defend itself, to have its independence, to be free from being used as a chess piece in the violent game played between its powerful neighbors it is suzerain to, is worth the cost of one young girl, her freedom, her happiness. The first half of the game weaves a tale of political intrigue showing you what’s at stake, and how Crossbell cannot tolerate being under the thumbs of the continent’s two major powers — the Republic of Calvard and the Erebonian Empire — any longer. Crossbell, as a land, has existed for ages, but Crossbell, the state, is far more recent: it was carved out as a buffer state between these two perpetually warring and bickering nations, heavily taxed by both, kept from forming its own true national defenses or writing its own constitution, and perpetually under threat for a total takeover from one or the other if it refused to remain this way — if you know anything about Japanese history, it’s not exactly difficult to be aware of where the non-Le Guin parts of this particular story came from.

All of this can end, Crossbell can become independent and successfully defend itself, can even use its vast resources — to this point taxed heavily and distributed between not one but two major powers — to become a leading power of Zemuria, if not the leading power. And the cost will just be the freedom and happiness and life of this one young girl — again, heavy spoilers haven’t ended yet — whom you know as KeA. KeA wasn’t born, but was created for a specific purpose: to be used to recreate the lost Sept-Terrion of Mirage. What’s a Sept-Terrion? An all-powerful gift from the goddess, and Mirage had blinked itself out of existence a millenia before because of the heavy emotional and moral weight of its role as shaper of the fabric of reality. KeA could be used for a similar role, to subtly change fate and make Crossbell the leading power in the world, free from its neighbors and the life of a suzerain, bringing happiness and bounty to everyone within its lands… but the cost would be KeA’s freedom, her happiness, as she’d be bound up, not in darkness, but still bound to a singular place never to live a normal life, perpetually weaving the threads of fate in the way her self-appointed handlers had decided was most appealing. Even with the best of intentions, which it’s not clear said handlers have, that is precarious and not the clearly morally correct path.

Walking away wasn’t an option: KeA, in this form, could change fate all over the continent, and as you’ll learn, had even done so previously in a pretty meaningful way. This was going to be life for everyone, whether they agreed with the cost of living in this world or not. Lloyd Bannings and Co., and their allies around Crossbell, wanted to free KeA. They wanted a free Crossbell, too, one that didn’t suffer at the hands of Calvard or Erebonia, and they certainly didn’t want to open Crossbell up to invasion by Erebonia following the repeal of their bid for independence, as had been threatened. But they knew that this “free” Crossbell promised by those who set this plan of self-determination into motion wasn’t free, that there was a cost, and that it was one they couldn’t abide. So, rather than walk away from Crossbell, they stayed, and they fought. It’s not just a story of love for KeA, which the party, having adopted her into their “family” following the events of the first game, certainly had. It’s also a story about what’s right, morally speaking, and the prices we should be willing to pay for our own happiness and fulfillment, and which we should reject as too costly, philosophically speaking.

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Trails to Azure is one of the better Trails titles, between the ways it respects your time, the actual satisfying gameplay, the realized world that’s rich with depth and personality, and the moral questions at its center. (Also, this is a Falcom game — the soundtrack is full of bangers.) It’s an excellent modern RPG, despite its more classic-looking appearance, and while it’s certainly no place to start your relationship with Trails, it’s worth going back to the beginning to get to this point, and then to continue your travels beyond. No longer do you need to patch a Japanese Windows copy with an unofficial translation patch: now you can just pick up the game on Windows worldwide, or your Playstation 4 or Nintendo Switch.

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