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Make no mistake - starting out on your Legend of Heroes experience withThe Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverieis generally ill-advised. In an age when gaming budgets balloon to the point that every big publisher hopes to sell potential buyers on the promise that sequels are a great place to jump into ongoing stories, Falcom probably knows they should hardly even bother with that claim.
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There is so much backstory acrossnineprior Trails-related Legend of Heroes games before you’ll boot up Trails into Reverie, and that’s felt from the get-go. But thereareways to get a passable grip on all that’s come before without dedicating hundreds of hours to playing catch-up. Here’s how.
The easiest (and most obvious) thing to do if you’re not caught up on The Legend of Heroes is toread the summaries of events availablefrom Trails into Reverie’s main menu. These summaries cover the following titles:
Put another way, they encompassthe Crossbellian and Erebonian arc games, which is reasonable - after all,Trails into Reverie is a cap-off to both arcs. The number of pages per game summary varies from five on the low end to around 12, depending on how integral it is for the writers to accentuate a given event.
This is apassableway to get a feel for the casts of Crossbell and Erebonia, though it misses 99 percent or more of the fun of the Trails series. Still, if all you’ve got time for is a string of incredibly straight-to-the-point recaps, this is your best bet.
Find The Fan Vids
The Trails fandom is small but mighty, as is frequently the case with relatively niche interest groups. (And to be clear, itisgetting bigger - it’s just never going to have the widespread appeal of, say, a Final Fantasy or Persona.) Since fans love spreading the good word about Trails,there are ample videos and text-based chronicles on the netthat can be considered a crash course in the series' complicated timeline.
That’s the advantage of Trails being one of those less-noticed JRPG series, actually - there’s all the more passionate discourse to guide your path. Fans have entire articles up coveringthe correct playthrough order, or - perhaps more up your alley, if time is of the essence - extensive coverage videos of each game’s major events.More extensive than the summariesthat come with Trails into Reverie!
Don’t be afraid to give these digests a try. They’re thorough. Of course, there’s always the ideal path…
Give Sky A Try
You can supplement the summarization of the above games in various ways, but if the most daunting aspect about Trails for you is the mountain’s worth of games before Reverie, you should knowthe games that started it all arequitenewcomer-friendly.One might say, well, of course they are; after all, they’re the first. But if you start reading those summaries, you might wonder if things wereeversimple.
They were. In fact,Trails in the Sky: First Chapter, the game that kickstarts the entire Trails saga, ishard for some to get throughbecauseit’s got a slower pace. It’s an unfortunate roadblock, since we reckon more players have triead Trails in the Sky than any other installment, felt like it was too slow-going, and left the franchise behind.
The nice thing about all this is that, with ten Trails titles released in the West and counting, it’s becoming more apparent than ever to curious onlookers that Trails in the Sky: First Chapter had the unenviable task of letting folks dip their feet into an increasingly deep world. Plus, First Chapter leads directly into (the aptly named) Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter, which iseasily one of the most heartfelt emotional tales in the series.
From Sky To Zero
If you manage to make it through enough of Trails in the Sky to get a feel for why these games are such a big deal to the diehards, don’t stop now!You have a serious leg-up on those who stick to the in-game summaries in Trails into Reverie now, and you should keep at it at your own pace. Fans waited quite a few years for Falcom to begin porting these games over to the West; you’re able to wait a little longer!
Trails from Zero is next after the Trails in the Sky trilogy, andTrails from Cold Steel (1) happens around the same time. You can choose to start with Trails of Cold Steel if the Crossbell games' more vintage graphical approach puts you off, but trust us, you’ll end up wanting to play them all in due time!
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