Currently Online 
#48
Change YoY: NEW! My Rating: 9.0 / 10
The first entirely new game on my list, and the first The Legend of Heroes title as well (there'll be plenty more to come). These days I'm playing about one new game in the series every year, and almost every time that game makes it onto my top 50 at the end of that year. This year the honor goes to Trails to Azure, the second and last part of the Crossbell Arc, which is the second of four parts of the Trails storyline that now spans a dozen games, with more yet to come. Azure was a notable improvement upon its predecessor, which very much felt like a game where everything was about setting up story beats that would pay off in the future, and that's exactly what they did in Trails to Azure.
Of course, while Trails to Azure is the end of the aforementioned Crossbell Arc, it's also only the fifth game in the larger overarching storyline, meaning that at the same time it's setting up and building off from games that came before and after. Regardless, it serves as an excellent conclusion to its own self-contained story, and does a great job at making the characters far more well-defined and captivating, who in the first game had felt distinctly less interesting than the main casts of the other sub-series. Still, there's no question that in order to get the most out of these games you kind of need to play the earlier titles first, as well as play the ones that came after in order to see the payoff to things that were set up here.
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The Trails series is starting to become one of the most extensive and expansive continuous storylines ever told in any form of media, as by this point anyone who might want to experience it from beginning to end would have to spend in excess of 500 hours just to get up to speed with what's happened thus far, and we're still not at the end of the whole thing. The second Trails in the Sky game alone has a script that is longer than the entire Lord of the Rings-trilogy, and it's not even close to the longest game in the series. To call this a daunting series to dive into at this point would be putting it lightly. Anyway, I think it's great, but I also got into it back when there was only one game out.
Last edited by Darashiva - 4 days ago
