Jessu
I really like the premise, the settings, and the art style.
But sadly it all come with a huge blemishes, namely the combat and the narrative. I really love some aspects of the game. I feel it could've been special, but for me the glaring issue is holding it back so much.
- Amazing art style.
- Great voice acting.
- Sound effects and music are good.
Atmosphere is spot-on.
Combat, especially melee, has zero weight to it. You can do heavy attack and it won't affect the enemy at all, no stagger, with virtually no movement ability to evade incoming attacks.
Gameplay feels like it's trying to be like Metro, but you have limited firepower as the game is not built for combat.
Narrative story that is too artsy for my taste. If this is a movie, it is one of those movie that has very interesting premise but it spiraled out of control and lead you to nowhere by the end of the story. One might say it's a bit pretentious.
At the end of the day, it's an indie game and games like these are needed for creativity to thrive in the industry. It's definitely not a great game, but I'd say try it for yourself especially if you can get it on sale.
This game is quite a big step in Trails series for me.
There are a lot of good things gameplay wise, while there's also some questionable directions. But of course in Trails series, story trumps above all.
I think the biggest success of previous Trails games is that they succeed on world building. I keep thinking that early Trails games walk so future Trails games can run.
This game in particular seems to be taking inspiration from Persona series as well, as I can see some fingerprints of Persona in this game.
- Yet another exciting storyline, following Trails to Azure in the series.
- Rich characters create rich world. I like that even NPCs always have their own mini-stories so you can feel the world alive,
- Great music as always.
More fun quartz orbment implementation that let you go all out on building your characters.
Turbo mode feature is not toggle-able and felt like a step back from Azure.
Auto-unequipping your party gears whenever there's party change in the story is tedious. They should have asked if we want to keep the gear or not.
It seems they have mixed direction when making this game, as the protagonist is muted on a big chunk of scenarios, but fully voiced on the other half.
That cliffhanger at the finale is so mean. It really makes you want to go to the next game. Luckily I am playing this on 2025 and I can go ASAP. It must have been torture for OG fans.
Definitely would recommend this game if you enjoyed the previous Trails games.
Surprisingly fun games. I recommend anyone who are planning to play Eiyuden Hundred Heroes to play this first as a prologue to the universe. It done a lot of things right, but not without a few gripes, understandably.
- Really fun game if you like 2D/2.5D side-scrolling game.
- Introduced the universe of Eiyuden in a fun way.
Seeing the city progress felt satisfying.
No voice acting.
Towards the endgame, the grinding can become a tedious, and boring, activity. Felt like they overcooked the game for time-padding.
A good game that is very close to Suikoden experience. I like the story and the gameplay in general. Although it's REALLY hard to say that I would recommend this game to other people due to so many downside to this game that really ruined my experience. Apparently someone got dropped as a baby and they created a horrible game design to ruin this supposed-to-be great game.
- Closest game that you can get to Suikoden at core.
- Decent story, if not generic.
- Good soundtrack.
- Great voice acting.
Nice art style.
Everything is so painfully slow, as if it was designed this way to time-padding the game. Fighting animation, movement speed, field combat speed, even conversation bubbles, and many more.
Duel is not as good, designed to be more cinematic rather than for gameplay. It works especially for the final part of the game, but it's redundant on the rest of the game.
Field combat is horrendous. Slow speed, no tactical design whatsoever. Might as well have Suikoden 1 style combat as it was better.
A vast array of game features are tied to RNG. Guild missions? RNG. Fishing? RNG. Eggfoot racing? RNG. Buying recipe? RNG. Work in Konami for far too long and all you know about game design is gambling.
Horrible drop rate.
Very bad at explaining game mechanics.
Terrible mini-games. Most of them are pointless and serve only as time waster. The only good one is the card game .
While everything in the game is extra-slow, somehow the dev decided to make the credits roll quickly. You'll barely have time to read the epilogues. So they know how to make something fast after all, albeit in the wrong section of the game.
Poor English localization.
This game truly felt like a love letter made by video game fans for video game fans. They picked so many good aspect of great games before them and they just compiled it into one solid package. I think the longer your track record in video games, the more likely you will catch on to those aspects and appreciate it.
As someone who have never experienced this game growing up, there are a lot of things I can say about this game, both good and bad.
But in short, if you are a JRPG lover, you might as well play this game before delving into FF7 Remake. I do think it will help to enrich your experience on playing the remakes later on.
Pros:
+ Timeless amazing story.
+ Extraordinary storytelling, especially if you remember that this game came from the 90s.
+ Memorable characters.
+ Amazing soundtracks.
+ Perfected the old-style battle system of FF. The implementation of materia revolutionized the game. Opening up countless possibilities with your creativity.
Cons:
- You might want some mods as Square don't really care about improving user experience and just port this game as is. Low frame rate might be quite jarring. Mods can do that for you and then some.
- The game might hide or never explain some stuff and you got to figure it out by your own. You might even miss something and never know about it even after finishing the game. Some would argue that's the characteristics of JRPG, but I would say it's just the old game design as every other game from that era would also do the same thing.
- General jankiness. You might experienced jankiness here and there. As example, the game was designed with d-pad movement in mind, so you might find movement awkward if you are not used to it.
- Especially in minigames, they are doing a poor job on explaining things to you on what you are actually doing. The good news is, there's only a few of them in your entire playthrough.
Even with all of the small hiccups, I don't think you should skip this game. It's worth the effort to experience this game at least once.
In a way, this game felt like a spin-off with continuity rather than a sequel because I think Estelle saga practically ended with SC, but at the same time this format works really well because FC and SC has built the foundation for it to work. All the backstories and in-between stories for all characters are really good and it makes them very rich in personality.
- This game is quite heavy emotionally than I expected it to be. It also delves into darker theme on some parts that made me surprised that this game is not rated for mature audience.
- I enjoyed the combat more in this game, maybe because in FC and SC I am quite overwhelmed by what I was doing, but on this game I already know what to do and all I am doing is enjoying the combat fully.
Music is amazing as well, especially towards the end of the game.
There are a few parts when the narrative is exhausting as it is basically just text-dumping on you. The positive is it's the optional part of the game and you can just skip it.
FC walked so SC can run. This game worked so well as FC has built the foundation and world building for this game.
Gameplay is virtually the same, except that there's more room for you to customize your team as you can switch around your party members as you wish, to some extent relative to the story.
Story wise it's definitely far much personal and emotional than the first one. All those things in FC is leading up to this.
Most of the characters shine through, while a few of them not so much.
I have to say though, with the world is now opening up, it can be quite a chore to go backtrack when there's no fast travel available. Then again, it's yet another old game so you just got to live with that.
Despite of the oudated game design, it's still a solid JRPG and definitely a really good sequel to FC.
It's a bit tricky to give a review to this game, because it has so many small things that I just straight up dislike. But at the same time it has strong positives that can't be brushed off.
- Great main story.
- Tons of side quests that is satisfying to finish.
- Fun combat system.
- Mostly decent writings with likeable and memorable characters.
Has an in-depth character building and might be really fun for some type of players.
Rough scaling towards endgame. Everything become a chore as normal enemies becoming too tanky and you'd feel like that you are trapped in a perpetual underpowered state.
The in-depth character building can become too much and too complicated for its own good.
The game constantly change your teams, which makes the point above very painful process to go over and over again.
The game seems to be built with the idea of multiple playthroughs, but the outdated game design might impact the replayablitiy value for some players.
Considering this game is practically a 2004 game, moreover since this game is also the first in the series with a very interesting story to it that gave birth to one of the most popular game series, it's hard to not recommend this game. Try to bear with the downside of the game. Worth the time investments to enjoy the following sequels.
