This is the 4th in a series of reviews and like the games themselves are intended to be experienced in release order, or at least read the preface of the first one here.
Feel free to let me know if you think I missed anything!

Rejoice friends for the series is now good!
With the series leaving the Sky trilogy and entering into the Crossbell arc Falcom took the chance to shake things up quite a bit and for the better in all areas.
Trails from Zero is much more of a joy to play than the Sky games from the gameplay to the story and it really impressed me with how much better it is. I had some high hopes after playing the opening to this game and it didn't disappoint.
I have a few problems and nitpicks with the game however but I can get those out of the way here because honestly it's really not that much. I played the geofront version of the game as I wanted to just move onto Azure right after and because of that, the UI was a little big and unwieldy. I don't think this is a problem with the more recent english release however so nothing to worry about. The smaller cast of party members means some quartz don't have much use to them anymore, you don't have a situation like getting Tita and having a space quartz slot you have to fill. The main 4 party members are way too good, both in their writing quality and their gameplay that I felt there was no reason to and I didn't want to use the guest characters whenever they showed up, and finally, my last big issue is location variety. You get all of Crossbell State unlocked pretty early so that has you going back and forth from the same locations quite often.

But that's enough complaining. As implied, this game takes place in Crossbell State, an autonomous city state which both Erebonia and Calvard claim they own. This place is great, the state and especially the city feel so well realised and really feel like a home after a while. The smaller scope of the world means you really get a sense of all the NPCs living in crossbell and their lives. In Sky it was kind of a chore to talk to NPCs after every event and somebody in say Zeiss wouldn't really have much to say about the events of Rolent on the opposite end of the country. Here however everything is so much more tight knit and the events affect everybody just as much that even the less relevant NPCs can be fun to talk to.

The game looks great too, it may be just a PSP game but damn that system can go hard when it wants to. Sure it's absolutely aged but it's really perfected the art style that Trails in the Sky started and it doesn't look bad in the slightest. Not only are the visuals nicer to look at but the animations are more impressive too. Some of the crafts are incredibly impressive to look at, especially in the next game.

The soundtrack goes so hard. I liked the Sky games's OST too but I think Zero's is way better personally. Get Over the Barrier is an absolute banger of a battle theme. The Geofront slaps too hard for a tutorial dungeon and the cutscene and world themes don't disappoint either. It's certainly much more of a shounen anime OST but if that doesn't bother you then this game's soundtrack is amazing.

For a series widely known for its sweeping continuous story, this game's main storyline is surprisingly laidback. It's much more of a character focused narrative centered around a mafia investigation. The characters are so good however that I don't think sky ever stood a chance in comparison.
Lloyd is such a breath of fresh air. He's a trained detective coming back to crossbell after 3 years spent in Calvard and he starts this game off smarter than Estelle gets at the end of her arc. He's not entirely sure of himself but he steps up and gets the job done and he's a solid main character. Also I'm an absolute sucker for his cheesy speeches.
Randy is the playboy of the group, lover of ladies, alcohol and gambling. But he's by no means one note and is more of the dependable older brother of the group. His relevance shines more in Azure but he still comes up often as he has ties to Garcia Rossi, one of the leaders of the mafia in Crossbell.
Ellie sadly, is probably the least relevant of the group, she doesn't really have much to add to the main events of the game after chapter 2. That said she's still a valuable part of the team and her interactions with the rest of the SSS make her not a wasted character by any means.
And Tio is the smart one, she works the terminal and takes care of any time the group needs something done with computers. She also is the designated animal talker so she comes up whenever the group needs to talk to Zeit, their police dog of sorts. Her backstory also heavily ties her to the main antagonists of the second half of the narrative. Finally she also gets most of the funny lines so Tio's great overall.
There's a lot of other characters who are great like Sergei, Dudley, Rixia and a lot of the smaller NPCs around town even but if I talked about them all we'd be here forever. There's also KeA but I'd rather save talking about KeA for Azure.
Something else of note is, Ouroboros is almost entirelly absent for this whole game. They obviously have their hands in events that are transpiring but their absence really lets Lloyd and the SSS breathe and grow without being held down by the big overwhelming plot in the background right away.

The gameplay is almost unimaginably better than Sky's on every level you can think of. First of all, the balancing is great. At the very least on nightmare I encountered not a single time I felt the game was unfair outside of one bonus DP objective early on. I'm pretty sure these are considered the easiest Trails games and, yeah, I can see it. But I would absolutely recommend anybody to play these ones on Nightmare. The difficulty felt absolutely perfect to me.
There's no longer any one single best strategy to spam. Crafts feel amazing and arts haven't lost their usefulness either. Crafts may be a little bit too strong in this game but they're by no means overwhelmingly more powerful.
The new combo crafts are beautiful. It's a fitting new addition for this game where the narrative is much more focused on these 4 and their growth as a newfound family with each other. They feel good to use and have their own use case next to the traditional S-crafts and they're one of my favourite new additions.
The new orbment, the Enigma is pretty much the same as the one from Sky SC, having 7 slots and each slot can be upgraded. However quartz has had a complete rebalance. A few of the new placements of old quartz are a little strange but as a whole this is absolutely a welcome change as previously you had some elements being far better than others and the distribution of some were heavily skewed. For example Mind quartz is now no longer water but is instead a sorely needed mirage quartz, Impede is no longer wind but time, you get the idea. In addition most arts have been completely replaced, or just moved around or changed. The La Tear series of artss are gone and replaced with the Breath series, now being a wind art instead. Clock Up is replaced with Chrono Drive and is AoE, and pretty much every single offensive art has been changed. All arts have now been seperated into categories now too making it much easier to get to and find what you want.
The overworld now has a field attack option. you no longer have the regular 3 advantage states. You can now also hit an enemy to briefly hold them in place or you can hit them from behind to stun them and provide a larger amount of advantage, giving your team several turns of crits and/or a team rush, essentially a free round of basic attacks for your entire party in one turn. This system makes overworld encounters much less of a chore than it was in Sky and I found myself enjoying the combat as a whole because of it. On top of the other improvements too of course.

The biggest barrier (haha) to this game is honestly the requirement to play Sky beforehand to get the full experience out of it. Otherwise I would absolutely recommend this game to any JRPG fan out there it was a blast to play and I loved it.

This is the 3rd in a series of reviews and like the games themselves are intended to be experienced in release order, or at least read the preface of the first one here.
Feel free to let me know if you think I missed anything!

I really really want to love this game. I really do. I want this game to be a 10/10 I adore it. But it just has too much going against it. This is the first game I went into straight on nightmare which was honestly a mistake. That said this is still the peak of gameplay in the Sky trilogy.

First though let me get story out of the way first this time as it's much easier.
This game is a dungeon crawler. Gameplay is much more at the forefront in this one than any other Trails game thus far. I honestly think this was a bad idea. I don't think the dungeon crawler format mixed well with the story they wanted to tell. I don't think the game being a dungeon crawler in itself is a bad thing but I think that it was split too heavily between the dungeon crawler gameplay and the story focus of the Trails series. This game was very very clearly made as a bridge reusing assets and setting up for the future. Half the locations in the game are reused areas from the previous and the other half are featureless mazes or corridors.
The story itself, honestly great. I love Kevin's character and backstory and I love the doors which I'll get into a bit later. The problem is how it's split up. The format goes a bit like this once you get into Phantasma. You explore the dungeon layer a bit, collect a character, they go "wow this is crazy." you unlock the 2nd half of the floor, maybe clean up some doors you can now access, you fight the boss, you get the next chunk of story and repeat.
For fans who prefer the story there's a lot of busywork needed to get to the next story beat and there's nothing interesting or relevant about the areas you're going through.
For fans who just want gameplay, first of all how did you get to this point, secondly the doors are still pretty important on that end for money and gear and upgrades and they can be long with no skip other than turbo mode and mashing through dialogue. I don't think they hit a great balance between the two even for people who really like both aspects.
In terms of the main story too the side characters don't really provide much of anything it's pretty much all Kevin and Ries. they'll give you some comments when talking to them after story events and that's about it for the most part with the exception of 3 characters and their specially designated time to be relevant in chapter 6.
But again, the main story surrounding Kevin is great. It's a lot darker than the previous two games for sure but every part of his backstory and relationships is engaging and interesting. It's a shame how little he ends up being relevant in the future because this game provides Kevin with so much growth and character that borders on overtaking Estelle and Joshua
However where this game really shines is the Doors. As a quick explanation the Doors are split into 3 types. There are Moon Doors which provide a lengthy side story, star doors which give a shorter one or an expansion on an element of the world that's been left in the dark thus far, and the sun doors giving a minigame. The sun doors are pretty bad in all honesty but the Moon and Star doors give so much lore and background to characters who honestly desperately needed it and provide a look into where everybody's been since the end of SC. I don't think I'll ever forget Renne's backstory in Star Door 15 and how well such a sensitive subject matter was handled. Was it perfect? No definitely not, but it was far far better than I ever expected. There is very little from the Star and Moon doors that I would say is outright bad. They're absolutely the highlight of the game and possibly the arc as a whole.

As said before this game is a dungeon crawler and so you'd hope the gameplay is good and yeah, it is. I really liked this game's improvements on the Sky formula. It still has a lot of sky's issues but I doubt they'd completely upend the format for an epilogue like this. We're still with the same orbment and quartz as the previous game but we get a much faster and smoother progression of it this time. Along with that gear tends to be far more interesting. You have much more accessories that provide stats rather than just debuff immunities and a lot of them give both upsides and downsides, you have weapons that can provide Arts Strength or accuracy or evasion. Chest armour is mostly disappointing just being +def but there's a few interesting ones there.
The best part of building in this game however is the sheer scope of characters. Every single playable character returns (except kurt) plus 2 new ones. and for most of the game you're only locked to Kevin meaning for a good chunk you can take any 3 others you like, sometimes you're locked to Ries too but occasionally you're not locked to anybody at all and can take whoever you like. You can also select one character as a support member to provide modifiers to your stats or other bonuses
Trails in the Sky 3rd's gameplay is really a Sky playground and that's why I want to love it.

The game is unfortunately not balanced in the slightest. I hold some blame for this by playing on nightmare but it honestly really was just not tested in the slightest. Some fights were just not possible without some earth wall cheese or retry offset. It's a shame because I really really wanted to push the game to it's limit in this playground environment but when the required strategy for some fights is really unengaging spam of "i'm invincible" it sours the experience. And it's not like every single fight was like this either. Some felt almost perfect on this difficulty which only makes it sadder when I hit those walls because it could have been an amazing experience with all these tools to play with.
When it comes to the dungeon of Phantasma itself, shockingly the featureless mazes and corridors were actually the best parts. Chapter 2's turning Grancel City into a dungeon was really cool but the other reused areas were already dungeons and going through them again with little to no changes was really disappointing, especially after just coming from them in the previous game. 3rd was very clearly made on a tight budget and timeframe because half the areas were barely changed repeats of previous ones. You have the first dungeon of SC except now the water is lava and when you lower it to walk on it it hurts. You have a mid game dungeon from SC that is indentical in every single way even the boss fights except now it's flipped horizontally. I'd honestly rather the entire game be those featureless mazes than redoing the exact same thing again.

Maybe I'll soften on 3rd if I do a replay without coming directly off of FC and SC sometime but as it is it's a game that I really want to love but just can't.

This is the 2nd in a series of reviews and like the games themselves are intended to be experienced in release order, or at least read the preface of the first one here.
Feel free to let me know if you think I missed anything!

Up front, Trails in the Sky SC is better in every single way than FC. Characters, Story, Gameplay. It's all better. The problem is it's not better enough. And that's my real issue with this game.

SC picks up immediately where FC left off which is right away a much more engaging start than FC's prologue. You're already a high level and you have your crafts still available to you. This is something the series keeps doing and I gotta say I love it it's one of my favourite things they do in these games. We still have a lot of the gameplay issues in regards to movement and the grid but overall, possibly due to just higher stat totals in general, your options are much more open this time. Physical damage is now worth using, bolstered by much more useful crafts overall and it leads to a much better play experience especially with the party members who really don't use arts at all.
Speaking of arts, we get a new orbment in this game. There's now a 7th slot for quartz and though you start with every slot unlocked from the start slots can now be upgraded to slot higher level quartz. This is so great I can't even begin to describe. A big problem in early FC is that you just don't have enough options. You have limited slots and limited quartz to work with that there's not much you can really do in terms of build or strategy. In this game however right from the get go you have a full 7 slots to play with and slot whatever you want in without losing that progression of unlocking, or now upgrading, your quartz slots. Everything feels so much more free and you can be a lot more creative. New quartz and more slots also means new arts and it's not great still but in this game there's a lot more use for the other arts other than the 3 you'd spam in the previous game. Along with physical damage now being usable and a full set of crafts (with some new ones) means every character can utilize their own niche much better and you're not doing the exact same thing as often.
The revolving door style of party members is also a thing of the past. Now once you get a new party member they stay with you, although for most of the game you're locked to Estelle, your chosen ally at the start of the game, and the region's new party member your 4th, sometimes 3rd and eventually even 2nd party member can be swapped out for whoever you like. It's great to get to pick and choose anybody you want to take with you, build them however you want and give everybody a much bigger time to shine.

It's not all good news unfortunately. The balancing in this game is not great to put it mildly. For context, I personally played through this one on Hard. I was considering nightmare but was warned against it and thank god for that. The prologue is absolute bullshit to put it mildly. You have to either rely on RNG or use the game's retry offset feature to weaken an encounter on successive retries to even get past it. After that for about 5 chapters you'll have the experience of basic enemy fights being the most brainless easy thing of your life with bosses being near impossible at times. I cannot imagine playing through this game on nightmare without some absurd luck and cheesy strategies. But then, once you get past about chapter 5 the game completely flips on its head and every single encounter become incredibly easy. Maybe I just found a winning strategy but I barely had to think about what i was doing after a certain point.

The story is also much improved from FC's. This is our first face to face introduction to the ""secret"" society of Ouroboros. Who as far as I know are our main antagonists moving forward for the entire series. The good news is everything involving Estelle and Joshua is great. Absolutely no complaints there. Seeing how Estelle has grown since FC is a highlight of the game and how she now makes smart intelligent decisions and works as a competent senior bracer. It's great to see and compare to how she acted in FC. And the scene where she and Joshua finally reunite is the emotional high of the entire arc. The other party members also finally get their time to shine. Kloe takes more of a backseat in this game having most of her development take place in FC but every other party member really steps up to the plate.
Agate's backstory and his relationship with Tita is really heartwarming and made me like Agate as a character much more than the very little he got in FC. Zin actually gets a character for the first time in his interactions with Walter. Schera's backstory finally comes up and her relationship with Estelle is much more fleshed out than just a generic mentor figure. Olivier's true purpose and identity is revealed and he gains a lot more depth and even some side characters like Julia, Josette and Meuler get some growth.
Kevin Graham is a great new character and this game serves as a really nice introduction to him but I don't want to talk too much about Kevin until 3rd.
Leowe and Weissman are really fun villains, they're both decently interesting on their own, mostly Leowe over Weissman but they really shine in what they add to Joshua than just on their own. Meanwhile Renne, although there's not much to her in this game she at least gets more than 5 minutes of screentime and is nicely set up for the future. and her interactions with Tita are great.
Unfortunately the other enforcers are not nearly as good. Luciola is quite literally nothing. She exists only to serve as a prompt for Scherazard to give her backstory. She's so meaningless that I can't even find more to say about her good or bad. I guess she's hot?
Walter is kind of the same but for Zin but at least he has a somewhat interesting thing going on with his past with kilika, zin and their old master. I feel like these two could have been much better villains if their existence didn't boil down to "I've been fucking with a gospel see you in chapter 7 fight these monsters instead" "ive been fucking with a tower fight me then ill see you at the end" "okay its the end lets fight one more time" but I don't know.
I fucking. Hate. Bleublanc. I don't know why. I don't have even slightly a good reason. This guy is just my least favourite character in the entire series. Fuck this guy.

I don't have a good place to put this but I really want to mention how much chapter 8 feels like a lot of busywork. I really liked having the entire country open for you to go through but it had no required fights and just 3 easy sidequests per region that it felt really meaningless other than to be like "hey isn't it crazy that you can't use orbments." it could have been cut down or made more important and it'd be a way cooler experience. The final dunggeon also was really really cool visually and conceptually but again it left a really sour taste in my mouth with how you had to keep going back and forth through a really long path and slow elevators and trains to swap your party out between each fight to not miss out on scenes that vastly improve the experience.
The final half of the game, although being really easy and had those sour spots was really fun though, having the best dungeons and the most engaging gameplay with all the options available to you with a freely swappable party, fully unlocked slots and high level quartz made it great fun to play around with. I do want to mention though that the dungeon in the first half are kinda dire with slow switch puzzles and confusing mazes and really terrible balance.

I really liked SC honestly and I could see myself going back to it sometime but it ultimately was not better than FC enough to not leave this really sour taste in my mouth and make it feel worse than it actually is

So a quick preface before I go into any thoughts; First of all, I'm not the best at writing shit I gotta be honest. I'm much more of a rambler so please don't expect any sane cohesion from this or any review of the other games in the series. Secondly, I'm going to be rating these games on the merits of themselves and how they differ from past games, I won't be taking into account future reveals to bump up nor put them down in any way but I will take into account how well they pick up threads or improve upon previous entries.
Feel free to let me know if you feel I missed anything!

My relationship with FC is a kinda strange one. You see, I have this friend who fucking adores this series. You'd be hard pressed to find somebody who has trails living in their head rent free more than this guy to the extent he was given a £100 bet to shut up about it for half a year. However this guy talks about this game being incredibly boring and bad but that "It's okay because it's setup for the future games in the series!" So when I picked this game up for the first time something like 3 years ago I dropped it right after the prologue which was very slow and pretty uninteresting. But recently I was bored and had nothing to do so I picked it back up again and decided I was going to get through it.

Honestly, I'm pretty soft on this game. Although I can't place very many areas I can call it great or even really good I think those low expectations really helped me get past its shortcomings and enjoy what it does have. This series is old and you honestly wouldn't be able to tell with how creative some of its systems are. The game looks great even today, The spritework has aged really nicely with those little chibi pseudo-3d clay model sprites and nothing looks really out of place. There's a few issues with a widescreen display where in cutscenes the corners will be either low quality or just a black void and the cutscenes have animations which are about 50% too slow to really be engaging but those are really the only complaints I can give to the visuals. The 90s to early 2000s anime style portraits look great and I prefer quite a few of them to the newer game's art. The soundtrack is a joy to listen to and I'll never get tired of the battle theme.

The gameplay can be pretty lackluster unfortunately, it's a shame because the systems in play with some tweaking that just wasn't in place in time for this game could have been really great. The grid based battle system has so many opportunity for interesting fight mechanics that this game unfortunately doesn't take advantage of at all outside of "how many enemies can you hit with an AoE." There could have been interesting movement based mechanics but with moving taking up your turn all on its own it's practically never worth doing even in situations where an enemy is targetting where you're standing.
Quartz however is great, even this early on it's an amazing system. Very similar to Final Fantasy 7's materia you can slot quartz into your characters to provide them with stats and abilities. and although it's nowhere near as in depth as later games it's still a fun system to play with. It's not the most well explained system outside of the very basics and it can be tough to get a handle of good setups on your first time playing with it but there's a lot of freedom in how you set up your characters with quartz in lieu of any really interesting gear otherwise... or at least it would be.
Unfortunately this game in particular is horrendously balanced. There is a very clear winning strategy that comes to light very early and nothing else is really worth using the entire game which is a big shame. it really feels like every game going forward that I've played thus far has been trying to solve this problem little by little and not exactly hitting the mark, at least not in the Sky trilogy. Physical damage is outright worthless in this entry and any arts not called Aerial, Aero Storm or White Gehenna are barely worth a second look outside of utility and support arts. It really is a shame because there's a lot of room for personalization and experimentation even this early with the quartz system but it really tends to boil down to just making sure you have your wind, your have your mind quartz and you have your action and cast quartz and everybody spams their biggest AoE. Thankfully this problem does get mitigated as we go on.

When it comes to the story let me get this out of the way. Yeah, there's no grand sweeping narrative here yet. Yes it sets up a lot of the things going forward that will become important without directly involving them much if at all. But honestly I disagree with the notion that this game "Doesn't have a story."
I personally enjoyed Estelle and Joshua's journey to become senior Bracers. Was it an amazing epic narrative? No of course not. But we do watch these characters grow into their roles that they'll take moving forward and to act like there's no narrative at all in this game is just a lie. From searching for your missing father and the hijacked airship and the mystery that starts witth the capua family's contacts with masked soldiers to finding them assisting the mayor of ruan's plan, to discovering the gospel and the kidnapping of professor russel and finally the coup d'état and the first seal of the aureole there is a plotline through this game that I personally found interesting enough to want to keep going and see what was really happening. Maybe it's an issue of Trails superfans looking back on all these callbacks and plot threads that connect through the series and thinking "yeah none of that really mattered though" and forgetting that, at this point of the series this stuff does matter. This is your first interaction with all these things going on behind the scenes and your first interaction with, what you'll eventually come to learn is the first stage of ouroboros's plan.

With characters I honestly wish I had more good to say, the format of this game has you journeying with a revolving door of characters who will become much more important as the series progresses but at this point outside of Estelle and Joshua many of them don't get enough time or effort put into them which is sad because I came to like a lot of them in future games but here there's just nothing to like about a lot of them.
Estelle is our protagonist, she's a headstrong act first questions later tomboy who wants all the adventure of a Bracer with none of the thinking. I really like Estelle even here. She's dumb as bricks most of the time, especially in english. But she's fun and enjoyable and a great PoV character especially as an introduction to this heavily bracer focused narrative. Her father is Cassius Bright, widely considered the best bracer in the entire continent and one of if not the strongest fighter and best strategic minds out there. She feels like she has a lot to live up to and strives to become as good as, then surpass her father. Her relationship with Joshua is sweet and pretty believable most of the time but I really feel that, despite how you feel about their romance, they go at it far too quickly and that kinda bothers me in this game. Along with the weird switch they pull about halfway through which I'll talk about in Joshua's section so I don't give it all to Estelle.
In gameplay she's an arts caster all around jack of all trades character. Unfortunately with this game's balancing it doesn't really work out that way. the slightest drop in strength against an enemy's defense means you're gonna be doing no damage at all with basic attacks or crafts and her crafts in this game are lackluster at best.

Joshua is Estelle's adoptive brother, brought in by Cassius years before the start of the game. He's a kind boy who tends to push back his own feelings to not worry those around him. He grew up with Estelle and the two are incredibly close and even as early as the prologue it's clear that he has romantic feelings for her which Estelle is blind to. Which is incredibly frustrating when halfway through the game they completely drop his feelings and now it's Estelle hiding romantic feelings from Joshua and his are never even brought up again until the very end of the game. I don't know it's really strange that the second Estelle thinks that maybe she likes him that now all mention of Joshua liking Estelle is completely gone. It's not like it was just one or two mentions before either, it would constantly bring up Estelle not noticing Joshua's feelings and the implications that there's somebody he likes and Estelle teasing him about maybe liking somebody else and Joshua's insistence that there's somebody else.
And in true ramble fashion I'm completely dropping my gameplay discussion per character here because there's too many characters and the jokes I wanted to put in are no longer worth it with the length this review is getting so I'm gonna talk about the last 2 party members in the story that are interesting enough to warrant it and then move on.

And I'm also just gonna group these together, it kind of fits anyway considering who they are.

Olivier and Kloe are probably the only other party members to really get any development and character to them.
Olivier is a traveller from the neighboring empire of Erebonia with which Liberl was in a war with in the past. Pretty early on it's shown that there's clearly more to him going on than he lets on but as displayed to the main party he's an easygoing over the top wandering bard with a playboy streak. Olivier is fucking hilarious. Especially with the evolution voice acting mod every single moment Olivier is on screen is an absolute joy to watch. Trails in the Sky without him would not be even close to as fun and I really mean that I fucking love this gremlin of a man. Easily my favourite character outside of the main 2.
Kloe meanwhile is pretty much on the complete opposite side of the coin. She's secretly the princess of the kingdom and she's very polite and reserved. She probably gets the most character growth in this game of any character outside of our protagonists and although it's a completely different vibe to Olivier I really enjoy the time you get to spend with her as well. It's cute and comfy and you really do get a feeling that she and Estelle become really close friends through their time together.

Ultimately FC is a game that I enjoyed but it could have been much better than it ended up being. A lot of its systems sadly fall too short and a majority of its characters don't get the time they need. It's a fine introduction to the series and there's a lot to like but I wouldn't by any means call it a great game. There's nothing incredibly wrong with it but there's nothing amazing either, it's just barely above being a completely mid experience.