The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure Review: An Old-School JRPG That Will Ring Your Cross(Bell)

To play The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure is to pick apart a tiny, yet still crucial, thread in a large interwoven narrative tapestry. While the game’s story is already fairly complex and richly fleshed-out in its own right, Trails to Azure functions as only a small part of developer Nihon Falcom’s ever-growing Trails expanded universe, an extremely ambitious JRPG franchise with a staggering 15 interconnected entries so far in counting.

More specifically, Trails to Azure makes up the second part of Trails’s Crossbell arc, which is set smack dab in the middle of the series. The game fully expects you to come in having already sunk 80-plus hours into the previous installment, 2010’s The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero, in order to have a decent working sense of what’s happening here, at least at the very start. Whereas most sequels to long-standing role-playing games try to provide some basic context for new players, Trails to Azure keeps it decidedly old-school, granting zero capitulations to those unaware of the inner-workings of this world and the characters who inhabit it.

Regardless of how familiar you are with its mythos, Trails to Azure still goes to great lengths to immerse players in the everyday struggles of the citizens of the city-state Crossbell, which serves as the game’s central hub location. As Lloyd Bannings, the appointed leader of the Crossbell Police Department’s Special Support Section unit, players start each in-game day by making their rounds across the massive city, speaking to each shop owner and resident about ongoing issues they may need to be resolved. It’s then that you head out to tackle the game’s more pressing and overarching objectives related to warring street gangs and corrupt political figures. These tasks range from the mundane, like retrieving articles of missing clothing, to more demanding, such as vanquishing a series of pesky monsters from a neighboring village.

Trails to Azure’s procedural elements require you do to a lot of chit-chatting, and whether its the first or 15th time you converse with any of the side-players, most of these interactions, which frequently drag on a tad too long via text boxes, help situate the stakes of just what exactly the SSS is fighting for at any given time. A lot of thought and care went into most of these seemingly minuscule interactions, and the relationships and rapport you build at the start of the game pay off in increasingly emotionally satisfying ways, often from the least expected of sources.

In an effort to help pick up the pace a little bit, the game does allow you to easily slip in and out of a High-Speed mode by pressing the shoulder button, which will, as its title promises, speed things up quite considerably. In practical terms, it doesn’t really offset the walls of text that will still loom over each interaction. It does, though, make for some fun enemy encounters where you can gleefully blast through most lower-level baddies with next to no dead air dragging the game’s pace to a grinding halt, which tends to be the Achilles’ heel for most JRPGs of this ilk.

Even without the High-Speed function, though, the battles you enter throughout the game move at a reasonably quick clip already. Also, there’s plenty of variety in terms of available attacks, which include regular physical strikes, magic blasts, special skills, and powerful super moves, meaning that each strategic skirmish feels like a wholly unique experience.

Also, Trails to Azure’s dialogue-heavy sections serve as a good counterbalance to the turn-based combat and open-world exploration that make up much of the lengthy campaign, resulting in a game that never becomes too lopsided in one direction or another. Indeed, right around the time that you might be feeling numb with boredom at the prospect of escorting small children around popular landmarks, a pathos-packed, story-driven mission will be thrown your way.

While Trails to Azure’s barrier to entry is quite high for those who’ve never played a Trails game—and even if you’ve played Trails from Zero, there’s still a mind-numbing amount of new lore here to keep up with—the game’s still worth the plunge. You’ll be lost in the dark for a few hours, and probably for several more after that, but few JRPGs in recent memory can boast gameplay mechanics this dynamic or storytelling abilities as accomplished.

This game was reviewed with code provided by NIS America.