#7
YoY: = My Rating: 9.6/10
Trails in the Sky SC is the absolute peak of the series, one that no other game in it has managed to reach despite several excellent entries having followed it since. Picking up pretty much immediately after the first game, following mostly the same cast of characters with a few nice additions thrown in, SC uses the foundation set up in the first game to push the story to new places and start to reveal the larger world that would soon be explored further. However, even with the scale of later games dwarfing this one, none of them have quite reached the same heights of storytelling and character development as Nihon Falcom did here.
The writing here is excellent (owing much to the wonderful localization work), and though it's not quite as vast as some of the other games in the series, anyone who wants to experience everything this game has to offer can still expect upwards of 60 hours of game time, almost all of it brilliant. Another element that makes The Legend of Heroes games stand out, are the little stories that happen around the main characters. There are several minor characters in this series whose exploits have spanned through several games in the series, across different sub-series. You can meet characters here that will later appear in the Trails of Cold Steel games for example. It's not something the developer needed to do, but it makes the world feel so much richer and lived in, simply because it's not just the main cast that have lives. People around them travel the world, get married, find jobs, and it's all up to the player to witness these little stories should they choose to do it.
With an excellent score and a great, tactically deep battle system rounding things up, this is simply one of the best games I've ever played. I started playing video games over 30 years ago now, and in that time very few games have had such an impact on me as the first two Trails in the Sky games. This is the best game in a series that is behind only Final Fantasy and Dark Souls in my personal ranking, and I can't wait to find out what the next games in it have in store.
