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.