Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter (PS5) Review

TRAILS IN THE SKY 1ST CHAPTER (PS5): 6/10

Overall, this game is lacking in fundamental game design footholds and uses the crutch of beautiful animations and environments as a band-aid for these missing elements. Dungeon/level design revolves fully around enemies which are too easily avoidable without consequence or challenge and makes for repetitive, boring gameplay. The lack of puzzle or consistent challenge/reward balance is a massive issue to have in a game of this standing. The combination of modernity and old style UI sound effects/styling hits a sweet spot that sufficiently odes to its original in the best way however at the same time, the hyper polish of the modern amalgamated graphics lose charm and uniqueness. Other improvements for the modern era have been implemented such as accessibility and seamless gameplay transitions, however that is equally set back by the stunted progression of equal human concepts such as misogyny, queerness and male cross dressing. By riding the line between joke and representation they failed both in the process. This is all topped off with an overlying romance between the two main characters that toys with incestuous themes they chose to keep and not adapt or remove that repeatedly interjects itself throughout the story, becoming incredibly grating by the end. I am intrigued to see where the story goes, but I dread if the future instalments stay at this level of gameplay. It feels as if a release date loomed and creating the foundation took longer than expected, resulting in a façade of depth in many departments that are unfortunately surrounding the very solid main story.

I wouldn’t recommend this game and I am slightly confused as to why people speak so highly of it. Yes, it is a good remake if we look at it as simply comparing graphical/technical fidelity, but there's too much conceptually left not changed or left so bare that I found myself bored way too often. 

I am doing a second play-through to see if I'm being too harsh but I unfortunately so far have been solidified in the problems I've raised.

- SPOILER FREE SECTION -

Settings…

Accessibility options improved greatly, inclusions of button mapping changes in a very simple, clear way and more detailed customization of gameplay hud feature but unfortunately still no colour blindness filters. Camera Settings are expanded which is useful for someone like me with motion sickness, just dont forget to tinker around with them!

5 Difficulty settings; very easy, easy, normal, hard, nightmare. The additional steps are welcomed, I’m happy to see the extra accomodation. However I played on normal going down from hard since battles were taking too long and were boring me, counteracting what should be a more engaging challenge of a harder difficulty.

Visuals & Animations…

Visually the models and (most) assets have improved dramatically. I say improved but it's more specifically modernized. I personally love the looks of Cold Steel 1 and 2 but the extra poly count, more powerful shaders and texture size increases have made for some really lovely details to finally be seen. Although I do have a gripe with this style. It's slightly…overdone. I've seen this style so much recently, hyper polished anime characters with glossy eyes and hair put in shaders of exceptional lighting. It doesn't have any uniqueness. A more obvious example to give is the grasslands, you've seen it as much as I have in the likes of Genshin, Breath of the Wild, Pokemon. Think of a modernised 3D Jrpg and you have likely played in the very same environment. Yes it's unarguably pretty and well made, but it's soulless, squeaky clean. I don't know how to quite put my finger on it but I'm sure you understand some of that at least.

The animations are so pretty, especially craft animations are so damn cool. Worth noting though the lip syncing is for the Japanese (which doesn't bother me but is incredibly noticable), it doesn't try to match the English dub in any way. 

The camera work was very extra, shots changed frequently and camera snapping during battles was noticeable as very specific in its movement which made me feel a bit nauseous throughout without realising. (That's mostly a me thing but I had to stop playing a lot more than other games due to dizziness and nausea. Whether it was the camera work or outside factors I don't know for sure but I completely missed the available camera settings that could have helped since I didn't know what was causing it.)

Very obvious facial blend shape animations/morphs. Bit of a weird one but when characters pull facial expressions it changes very obviously, in part from the even pace of the animation change, the animated “zones” of the face visibly moving independently (obvious as slider deformations), and the fact I can see the deformed closed eyes behind the 2D textures added on top (O_O and X_X eyes). I don’t really mind the slider morphs  but I do think the “2D” ones were quite overused and kinda ugly.

THE ANIMATION SPEED! YAY NO MORE GOOP! I didn't have to have rush mode on throughout playing which was so nice. I did find myself skipping combat animations though after seeing them so many times, so the skip button got a workout. (but having the ability to skip means this is nothing to complain about.) Traversal is a little slow though, I wish there was a third level of sprint (walk, sprint, extra-sprint that would be triggered when sprinting continuously for a duration). This would help a lot for those times you are made to backtrack arbitrarily without having to put on rush mode. 

On NPC’s…

Improvements to NPC dialog. You can now tell when an NPC is fully done in their dialog and now there are SOME non-speaking NPC's that act as the filler needed to enhance the business of the cities and bring out the named NPC's better (edit, scratch that, there are WAY too many named NPC’s, so much so that it was actually rather annoying and I stopped talking to NPC’s entirely). There's also a new addition of passing by npc’s and them speaking ambiently. The shame is I can never hear it properly and rely on captions which aren't present on these. There are no character notes to collect, something I realised way too late into speaking to everyone in Rolent. I assumed it was a Trails thing so in a way it feels a bit of a shame to not have any at all. Having them for the very obvious main npc’s would have been good since you run into them in the overworld and look so obviously different then regular named NPC's. 

Orbments…

I have to presume that a lot of features in Sky that are different from the other games are rooted in the fact it's a remake, keeping the original designs choices in. Orbments are one of the noticeable differences. I don't really like it. I think it's convoluted, cluttered and less uniquely customisable. I liked the idea of having the quartz have an elemental value that unlock additional arts to use, however it feels too restricted. At this point it's an argument on if the remake should stick to the original, and the obvious answer in my opinion is yes. But that doesn't mean the developments and improvements to the system since the original wasn't exactly that. I got used to a different system, one that I felt was strong and then had to go backwards because of the in universe time period aspect. (In other words I have to pull a Star Trek Enterprise and restrict myself back to the old tech of the Original Series time period after enjoying the freedoms and improvements of tech in Next gen etc.)

Gameplay…

At first switching from real time to turn based was impressive but the more I used it, the more I saw its flaw. At first I really struggled to adapt to it, not entering command combat as intended and seeing it as ‘riskier’, but once I got the hang of it, gameplay felt a lot smoother. Now here's the conundrum:

I can run past literally every enemy with ease. That’s good for stopping the frustration of interrupted play by forced encounters with enemies you've already fought a lot of before. But now that means dungeons are severely impacted by this. Gameplay cannot revolve around the enemies which is such a glaring issue that by the last dungeon has a serious impact. This is compounded with the rather plain combat that due to its simplicity becomes very repetitive and a bit boring.

How I identify this is that if you increase the difficulty to make it more engaging, all it does is drag the battle on for longer, rather than making trickier enemy AI’s to deal with. 

For about half the game the combat fulfilled the needs but after a while it is holding on for dear life to the crutch of stunning animations (that I never got tired of).

If I'm now avoiding combat on account of this repetitive nature and sheer fact I can do so without consequence (since no overworld forced battling and no enemy advantage based on direction found in the Cold Steel series. It is instead ‘critical health’ based which literally never happens by either you or an enemy.), it results in lacking dungeons and level design. It is not a complete enough feature in this game and while it has such strong potential in its fluidity, it needs some big tweaks to fix the lack of consequence and battle complexity. When I say there are literally no level puzzles and all challenges revolve around the enemies, we've got a big problem.

Overworld traversal and pacing of sub missions and events left me feeling pretty drained. Exchanges between characters felt dragged on and repetitive while also never matching up with the pacing of the main story. Not to mention when I have to travel across the map to pick up a book from a random NPC when I am heading in the other direction under the guise of story pressure and time restrictions. It’s a small gripe to have but I just don't know why they set these events so far from the main story routing when otherwise they stick to in universe rules (sub missions being bracer requests within time limits imply they do canonically happen so why am I set up to break that immersion so starkly?). 

There are too many monsters in the overworld and it's quite annoying. There is absolutely no variation to how exploration works and always comes down to just sheer quantity of monsters (that again, I can just run past leaving literally no gameplay left). It also breaks my immersion frequently because they imply these people travel on the roads to visit nearby small villages (*Zeiss Elmo hotspring village and *Ruan Manoria Village come to mind) but also can't because there's literally monsters on the lit roads and it's too dangerous? You can't say it's all airliner travel because there's nowhere to land these things in these smaller neighboring areas.

- SPOILER ZONE; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED -

The Little Things:

• Sepith mass adds to the exchanges automatically, that's nice.

• No one has any bathrooms? I couldn't find a single bathroom.

• Some assets featured close up in cutscenes such as chairs the characters sit on feature incredibly low texture sizes and stand out because they are so much lower comparably. Not sure why they didn't load in higher res versions for these.

• I like how different regions have different Orbal lights outside the cities. Nice, noticeable detail.

• Movement during the turn-based combat is more free and is overall a lot better, removing the stiffness of spending a turn for movement alone like in the previous games.

• I love the sounds and look of the UI, that old school sound and pages are just so good.

• Repeated voice lines “Joshua, Dodge it!”, “HGNH”, “Go, go, Joshua!” are really frequent and annoying.

• BP answers feel incredibly random sometimes, or so obvious it feels like a trick question. Player logic doesn't line up with what is correct so it just leads to being annoyed. An easy example is being pinned in a bridge pincer attack and the weak npc your escorting is facing a line of enemies, of which logically I thought I have to defend him but the correct answer was not to split up, which while in reality would have left him completely exposed, in game was instead an advantage. Another is the game giving conflicting clues on how to pick a good strawberry or how to milk a cow. I would have expected a clue given prior in minor dialog but that didn't happen. The quantity of non BP dialog choices dithers off through the game too which is a shame.

I really liked Joshua as a character, he has quickly risen to being one of my favourites in the franchise. I felt I was thinking the responses to what Estelle says and he would say them almost word for word right after. I chalked it up to relating to him being because he was written more realistically and grounded-ly but turns out he's not ‘meant’ to be like that aha. 

I also just loved his play style, I really enjoy speed builds and they're also so strong due to turn order advantage and delay combo (if anything, a bit too strong and the dev's should maybe limit how much delay they are handing out on Orbments etc. especially as it feels needed for higher difficulties.) Oh! And I recognised his voice actor Johnny Yong Bosch from the likes of Code Geass, Akira, Persona 4 and many others. Really good fit for the character and I think he does a great job. (To be honest all the voice actors did great apart from how the Queen and the Head Maid share the same voice actor AND face model, that was pretty odd.)

On Story…

There was a moment about a third of the way in where Joshua speaks on how he feels broken, the conversation starts off really great but then Estelle’s dialog is so unrefined and cheesy that it breaks the depth of the conversation, ruining it from its potential as something real and relatable. The same is to be said of the ending scene between them where Joshua spills his childhood trauma exposition and Estelle literally just professes her love for him as response??? More on that later.

There's a missed opportunity with Olivier when getting to know him. If they didn't have Joshua be 16 and Olivier an adult, Olivier being openly flirty, showing a male being bisexual would have been really progressive and something welcome to see in an otherwise inflexible genre on these topics (especially within men). Instead it feels like it's used as a butt of a joke and also just a bit gross. From my experience of Olivier he is no way near as “grossly flirty” as he is in this game. Hard to explain but he feels more reasonable in Cold Steel/Reverie and while that can be chalked up to character development I also just think he's really over-done in this game with the overtly repeated jokes. I do love however that he is known for just involving himself and tagging along as an annoying/loveable oddball. That troupe I find quite amusing since they played on having absolutely no way of working him in otherwise. 

On The Romance…

Now this is going to be quite the paragraph. If you read about the sins in my Cold Steel review you will know that I really dislike the frequent incest that occurs in trails games. I had no clue who Joshua and Estelle were playing through all those games apart from they were perhaps a debated couple. These two characters are like a final boss of trails game incest. It's so hard to explain that I understand where it's coming from between these two, but also just wish so desperately that the reasons were just damn well different from design. Why couldn't they just have been childhood friends? Why do they have to share the same name? Why couldn't they just retain some semblance of separation between the two? I understand they needed to be raised together, to have a unique bond turned romance but for gods-sake why do I just know that it was designed purely for playing with incest? If they wanted a deeper, more pained romance they wouldn't have given them the same family name, it's simply not needed. I understand it's because Cassius treated him as a son, wanted to include him as such but that could have equally been the case without the same surname and to me, that was the choice that solidified that it's just some weirdo’s desires playing out. Don’t you think it's odd how much Estelle is the one pining over her brother? How much focus is brought on him just existing and the sister pressing for it? That reeks of a gross designer. I audibly exclaimed a loud dispirited “NOoo, ugh, they made them kiss…” to my partner when that happened. I was so disappointed that it was more than the expected just ‘walking that vague fine line’ like in the previous trails games. The drug lacing for Joshua to leave would have actually had an impact if it wasn't this dumb brother sister bullshit. It is also mentioned way too much throughout the game, the crushing is unbearable, they know its taboo since they toy with it so goddamn much. Honestly, by the end of the game, I was so done with this romance, I just rolled my eyes and sighed most of the time. There's not much more I can say, we know there's a larger, country based issue here, but it's not like Japan as a whole is doing anything about it.

Total Sin Count: (10) (Aka. Icky Counter)

“You’re gonna make your big sister swoon, you know that?” (7th line into the game), “Joshua is only your adopted brother, you never know, you know?” (Cruse, a child, first time(s) talking to an NPC), Schera (adult) explicitly teasing Joshua (16yo), Olivier (Adult) flirting with Joshua (16), Shera saying to Olivier “Does this girl want to become a women, my whip can help with that” bit too odd to say imo (Shera), dissolving girlhood into talking about boys (+implying joshua felt certain ways through puberty towards his sister, adopted or otherwise), Tita and Estelle talking about Joshua in the context of marriage (again, when two women cannot be on screen together without talking about men aka Bechdel Test), Shera and Estelle talking about Joshua (again, two women talking about a man and basically nothing else.), the kiss, no dress option for Joshua on NG+ (Sounds weird but they don't actually explicitly use the crossdressing as the butt of the joke earlier on (its not made fun of). However it becomes more transparent in their views of it being ‘not okay’ despite this when Joshua doesn't unlock those costumes where Estelle does hers in NG+. They were so close to it being something progressive).

About the Sin count, I would like to stipulate I only note explicit offences, smaller frequent mentions of Estelle crushing and others teasing it, I eventually stopped counting. So it's not entirely accurate but the reason I counted the ones at the beginning despite being the same nature is because it's literally so early that I feel any player would be caught off guard by it, not a good first impression.