Trails from Zero ~ In-Depth Review

Genre – JRPG

Release Date (NA): September 27, 2022 Initial Date (JP): September 30, 2010

Platforms: PSP, PS Vita, PC, PS4, Switch

Total Gameplay Score: +8 Total Story Score: +18

Summary

Following the Trails in the Sky trilogy is the Crossbell arc, starting with Trails from Zero. First, I want to start by saying this is the best Trails game I’ve reviewed yet; this game gets so much right regarding crafting a memorable and epic JRPG experience. The whole game has the pacing and feel of a JPRG classic in a way the other Trails games don’t. There’s this sense of gravitas and weight to the whole adventure that you can feel as the themes weave through the plot and character motivations. 2022 was my first time playing this, and this is indeed the ‘official’ NIS western release, which itself is based on the Geofront translation patch.

For those unfamiliar with the Trails mythos, every Trails game takes place in the same overall setting on the continent of Zemuria. The orbal revolution took place slightly before Trails in the Sky, when airships and orbal guns were being deployed to the world. Now, during the events of this game, the orbal network is allowing the internet age to blossom. There’s a grand story that connects all the Trails games, but each arc features a different cast of characters in a new country. Trails from Zero takes place in Crossbell, an autonomous state between the militaristic Erebonia, and the Republic of Calvard, Erebonia’s sworn enemy. Political corruption is rife in Crossbell as representatives from the warring nations vie for control and power. Such a context sets up a fascinating story of intrigue and struggle in Trails from Zero. You play as rookie detective, Lloyd Bannings, as you try to overcome the red tape of the police department in search of justice. But trust me when I say the story gets supernatural and sci-fi as it develops, anime fans don’t have to worry on that front.

Thankfully, the more ‘out there’ parts of the story all tie into the greater lore of the Trails series, and the game does a fantastic job of keeping up with its own continuity. It all makes sense in the setting, and everything is painstakingly accounted for. Regarding the core plot, the pacing is really quite good after a certain point in the game. The first sections are pretty relaxed and all about doing your job uncovering corruption as a detective in the city, but in the latter half, the stakes and scale get higher, and elements from the wider Trails saga emerge, such as the mysterious secret society and an evil drug cult.

The characters are my favorite aspect of this game, even compared to the others. There’s a heartwarming and wholesome tone to how some of the characters act that is both believable and also lovable. In fact, I often found myself audibly going, “Awww,” as a character goes out of their way to find the perfect gift for the blind little girl stuck in the hospital, for example. There’s a lot of these wholesome moments that surprised me, especially since games try to act wholesome, yet end up coming off as artificial or like it’s trying too hard; this game hits you in the feels in a genuine way most of the time. If I’m being honest with myself, Trails from Zero has some of the most wholesome characters in any game I’ve played. Then, there are the hundreds of NPC characters that all have their own individual stories and comments, and yes, you can get new dialogue from each of them every time the plot advances like prior Trails games. This game uses the characters and dialogue well, but still repeats itself often, and sometimes characters will go off about really boring stuff, which amounts to empty text. There’s not a ton of empty text, but I’d say it’s about on par with Trails in the Sky 1. Still, if you can put up with some repetitiveness and small talk, there’s a lot of great writing on both the story and character axis to be had here.

The combat is your typical Trails in the Sky grid-based turn-based format. There’s a turn order bar on the left and there’s combo attacks with teammates and special moves that use CP. The leveling curve is smooth, and you’ll pretty much never find yourself grinding to reach some arbitrary level to progress. Likewise, the difficulty is just right on normal; the mobs do just enough to keep you somewhat engaged and to allow for speeding up. Bosses are quite fun, and very challenging if you take on the optional super bosses.

This game is really good. Yes, the first half of the game is somewhat more relaxed and almost sim-like, but it builds up the intriguing and epic second half, a second half that shows just how good video game stories can get. This is the best Trails game I’ve reviewed, and although my personal favorite remains Trails in the Sky the 3rd, Trails from Zero is a JRPG classic through and through. You owe it to yourself to play this game if you’re a fan of RPGs.

Gameplay Positives and Negatives – brackets around pluses and minuses indicate it’s the same as the previous entry in the series.

[+] Art from characters and monsters to towns and fields are detailed and animated well. Characters have an FF Tactics look to them, and it’s well done and charming. The monsters look surprisingly detailed and have an interesting design unique to this game, which made fighting them more enjoyable than it otherwise would be. Unlike the Sky trilogy, Trails from Zero doesn’t have a fully rotating camera in towns and fields; instead, the environments have a static 2D overhead view similar to the PS1 Final Fantasy and Resident Evil games. This limited camera panning works well, just as it does in, say, Final Fantasy VIII, because the artistic intention is more curated and what you see is what the game was designed for. In fact, vistas and portraits have never looked better in the series, with wonderful lighting and environmental viewpoints such as the Armorica farmscape or the mysteriously ominous ruins far in the distance creating a panorama effect.

[+] Orbment system allows for lots of customization in playstyle and moveset. Orbments pretty much operate similarly to materia in FF7. You can customize your orbmet slot to choose what stats and moves you want, and the customization is pretty fun. You can pretty much create your own ‘class’ by choosing time magic, fire, magic, earth magic, etc., or using all forms, but sacrificing higher tier magics in just one form, or you can focus on min/maxing stats instead of magic; it’s all up to you how to customize materi…I mean, orbments.

[+] Battle system is a fun combination of traditional turn-based and grid-based strategy. It’s not fully a strategy game, but it melds straight-up turned-based with strategy, and it does it pretty well. The mouse controls and UI are extremely convenient and automate your cursor to the enemy next in line and to the furthest grid, which goes a long way making the battle system fluid. The turn meter is visible and really helps keep track of the battle in a way that many RPGs don’t (It’s surprising just how many RPGs don’t have a visible turn order bar). Orbment customization makes battles fun to try out new attacks and techniques, and the animations themselves during battle are fun to look at. The special limit attacks can’t be abused too much, but offer enough opportunities to use to be very useful and well-designed. One of my only complaints are how ineffective and useless directional attacks tend to be. I thought it would be like Chrono Trigger where slashing through two or three lined-up enemies would be a very useful technique that would get milage, but directional slash attacks have such a small window and area that there are rarely more than one enemy in line of sight for it to be a useful attack. Area attacks on the other hand are well balanced; they aren’t powerfully broken because enemies move around a lot and the skill point and magic needed for large DPS attacks are a lot, but are very useful anyways to push enemies back or wallop lots of damage at once when the time is right.

[+] Pretty good UI/integration with mouse and keyboard, and good menus. This game is well suited for mouse only or keyboard only, or mouse and keyboard, or for controller on a console, which is how I played it this time, and all of these playstyles fit the game like a glove. Most actions like canceling out of a window or checking equipment take a single mouse click. On the menu most options you click bring up a menu box that conveniently highlights just what you want to know and boxes your cursor in to mitigate excessive menu traversal, getting you clicking exactly what you want in a quick and convenient way that doesn’t hamper choice. The menus are really clean and uncluttered while being colorful and thematic. UI during battles are convenient and fast-paced. The auto cursor on next enemy in a queue, as well as the auto click to the furthest tile space is a godsend to speed up gameplay and automate elements that most all players will want automated. Thankfully, if there are players that want no automation you can just move the cursor where you want to go yourself.

[+] Quality of life features such as fast-forward, hot menus, and the usual fast navigation in the Trails series earn at least 1 positive.

[+] Difficulty curve and experience curve are very well designed. The whole game is mostly designed to set up dungeons with enemies on screen that you can avoid which aren’t too hard, with the bosses of the game being the real challenge and unavoidable. The bosses are challenging in a good way, they aren’t designed to make you grind levels, they’re there to test and challenge your skill and strategy and gear setup. You can pretty much go through the whole game without grinding and do fine granted you know what you’re doing and understand the systems well. Regular enemies aren’t designed to take long, but are still fun to experiment your skills, strategy, and gears against and prepare you for the real challenge that is the bosses.

[+] Like the Sky games, Zero gets another plus to a good experience curve, for example, weak enemies can get one-shotted on the field (like Earthbound!), which is a very satisfying thing that not enough games have. There are good exp ratios in general similar to in Paper Mario. You get more experience if you win a fight under-leveled, and get less exp if you win a fight over-leveled. This helps let the player know where they’re at in terms of power at any point in the game. I was able to understand when to skip fights on the field because I was getting very little exp. All in all, I found Trails from Zero to be one of the better-balanced Trails games, it’s not all that hard and not all that easy, just right all the way through, granted you’re familiar with turn-based games already. (I played all Trails games on normal difficulty, fyi)

+ Gameplay-related music such as: combat themes, dungeon themes, town themes, etc., are nice as background music, but more importantly, exciting when battling and downright awesome as in the case of the final dungeon theme.

+ Trails from Zero has, perhaps, the best dungeon design in the series so far, though, that isn’t saying much since dungeons in Trails games tend to be on the basic side. The Revache dungeon in particular is good. The compact mazes with the switch puzzles aren’t annoying and make enemy encounters actually play into the design of each room. The final dungeon is long and maze-like, but there’s good checkpointing and legitimately fun traversal throughout.

+ Final boss fight is well-balanced, fun, and epic.

+ Surprisingly deep new game+ features. I like how KeA interacts with the new game+ menus. Having a limited amount of points to spend on what gets transferred over to the new game will no doubt be annoying to some, however, it does add replayability and more reasons than most other games to replay due to the unlockable art and minigames. Should I spend my 200 points on bringing exp over to new game+, or on the ‘minigame’ extra menu? Good new game+ features with a fun twist to the concept.

– Unskippable cutscenes, especially considering how long they are

– Far too many side stories, quests, and content that is entirely missable without any indication that they are or where to find them. This ties into the empty text problem the whole series has with the tremendous amount of dialogue in the games, most of which is optional. It’s difficult to know which NPCs or dialogue is actually worth listening to, resulting in a plethora of empty text small talk unless you’re willing to use a guide to find the good stuff or miss out on good side content entirely.

– Various side quests basically requiring a walkthrough because of how vague and nonsensical progression can be at times. A prime example of this is Phantom Thief B’s quest requiring you to go to the airport, a location in the game that is closed off at all times except the brief moment you have this quest active. Hints are vague at best, and the whole game prior to this trains you not to even attempt going to the airport because of its constant unavailability.

+11 -3
Total Gameplay Score: +8

Story Pluses and Minuses

[+] Localization is great, as per usual for the series.

+ Story-relevant music: scenes, character themes, event themes. Zero’s music portraying the detective life is represented well throughout with its ’80s detective mood music. The action music and emotional music also goes along good with the story.

[+] NPC stories and banter all add to phenomenal worldbuilding consistent with the rest of the series. This game in particular hosts a gigantic amount of side character dialogue, each character having new things to say whenever a main objective gets finished and the story advances. What’s different from the Sky games here is that Crossbell is the only city you visit in the game, aside from the small outskirt towns. The lack of multiple cities creates a more intimate cast of side characters that you feel you’ve really lived with throughout the course of the game. Each time the plot moves forward each NPC has something new to say, which makes this feel like a living, breathing world, and helps flesh out background lore and characterization.

+ Treasure chest dialogue is the best in the series here; legitimately incredibly humorous and self-aware. The chest responses got me to actually chuckle out loud on occasion, matching the humor of the Paper Mario series.

++ Internal continuity is consistent throughout the length of the game. A seemingly meaningless off-comment by a butler will often weave into a quest or smaller storyline later. A businessman whose papers got torn by what is revealed later to be a lost cat that you find later in a different quest is just one example. There are even more details that add to the immersion like characters visiting the hospital and getting on the bus back with you when evening hits.

+ External continuity to the wider Trails series is, a usual, vast, consistent, and well organized

+ Randy

+ Team dynamics/relationship

+ Good dialogue with some particularly believable and realistic conversations, like the hospital patients.

+ Secondary support requests have some fun character moments and showcase the dazzling internal and external continuity typical of a Trails game.

+ Elie’s backstory of being the daughter of a shunned political reformer in a city that ripped her family apart is well-told in the scene in chapter 2, with some excellent quotes from her as well. Her story also ties together the overall themes of political corruption and following the status quo to the world’s detriment. Crossbell’s status as an autonomous state is represented by Elie’s backstory, “a house divided cannot stand”. Answering to 2 opposed special interests rid Crossbell of identity and reform.

+ Aggregate positives to a couple characters. Mayor McDowell is an awesome character that is really the only thing holding Crossbell together. His encouragement to Elie during his recovery and his sense of duty is genuine and written well. Ilya and her scene taking in her stalker as a protégé without hesitation is so wholesome and heartwarming. An example of how a real human spirit should act.

+ Shizuku is a rare sweetheart of a kid. Her innocence is almost too much to bear, and she’s written well, with some respectful responses to her blindness disability from the characters. The scene with her crying around Estelle and Joshua’s visit was overwhelmingly wholesome.

++ Renne’s quest and scenes with Joshua and Estelle.

+ KeA is just too wholesome and adorable to not earn a plus. Her running away at the thought of Lloyd and Tio leaving her at the hospital makes sense for an attached and innocent kid like her, it also fleshes her out beyond just being perfectly adorable and perfectly innocent. Her dialogue is some of the best child writing I’ve seen in a game.

+ Character writing in general is better across the board than other Trails games.

+ Tying the police theme of fighting injustice from the inside to the bracer theme of fighting injustice from outside the system is cleverly woven throughout this game and serves as a bridge between Sky and the Crossbell duology.

(Spoilers ahead, read at your own risk)

+ Pacing of the finale is breakneck and some of the best in the series

++ The DG cult and its methods and goals are some of the more perverted and despicable I’ve seen in a game. Renne’s backstory in Sky builds up a hatred for what they’ve done really well. One plus to excellent continuity with Sky and one for just how messed up testing kids to their breaking point (and hosting a child trafficking ring,) to create a superhuman drug is.

+ Garcia is a multi-dimensional antagonist that you can’t just point at and call evil. He’s a jerk mafia leader, yes, but he has honor and is very intelligent. Good on Garcia for refusing to accept the Gnosis drug from the beginning. The mafia still surrendered to the drug, but Garcia was always against it because he’s one of the few villains with an actual brain. Garcia showing respect to the SSS at the end of the game is heartwarming and paints him in a positive light.

+ Outro is fantastic other than everyone randomly feeling sorry for Joachim

+ This game expresses the theme of modern convenience making people more lazy and complacent better than other Trails entries.

– Story pacing in first half is just a tad too slow. The wider plot with the Ouroborous doesn’t even get hinted at until 20 hours into the game at the end of chapter 1. The problem is that even for newcomers to the series, the first section is slow with little in the way of plot progression; the game almost seems like a slow-paced Atelier story or a slice-of-life detective sim without the advantage of easing newcomers into the wider Trails universe. The pacing in the first quarter just isn’t that great for returning fans or newcomers alike.

– Arc en Ciel assassination plot loses its footing at the end of act 2. Coaxing the 1st division to guard Ilya and the performance in order to covertly assassinate the mayor in the same theater doesn’t make much logical sense and comes across as a plot hole. Security would find Ernest’s weapon, and security would be extremely tight on the rafters where the mayor was since it was a perfect spot to scope out Ilya.

[- – ] Lots of empty text, repetitive text, and instances of ‘as you know’ dialogue. These issues have plagued every single Trails game I’ve played so far, and Trails from Zero is no exception.

– Lack of proper foreshadowing for the numerous plot twists…some of which come out of seemingly nowhere. The villains of the game have no foreshadowing AT ALL when it’s revealed so and so is actually the villain and a complete scumbag. It seems like the direction of the twists was to make it seem completely unpredictable, which ends up being a detriment to an otherwise tightly-written and intelligently done story. There’s no indication whatsoever that some seemingly harmless characters you meet early in the game turn out to be villainous.

– Everyone feeling sad when the final boss died….after discovering what a disgusting monster he is, essentially being one of the most perverted villains in the entire series. Lloyd and Elie feeling sad for him in front of victims Tio and Renne actually kind of makes me sick, (although, to be fair, even they felt sad for him…or it).

+24 -6
Total Story Score: +18

Overall Score: +26