The Legend of Heroes has recently drawn mainstream attention thanks to the reimagining of the first title in the “Trails” subseries, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero gives gamers who fell in love with that modern reimagining a taste of the franchise’s classic style. The real question is whether it holds up 16 years later. Read on as Cubed3 wears the badge and goes out to solve crimes!
The Trails series goes against many JRPG norms. It understands human nature, which shows in its storytelling. One common pitfall in video games is making “saving the world” the goal. Exploring a massive world is fun and part of human nature, but it can make the story feel less intimate.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero instead takes place within one city and its outskirts. At first, this makes it sound like the game world will be small, but it instead highlights how games often scale down the geography so the player can explore many places. Crossbell feels as lively as the worlds of many JRPGs on the market, and the best part of having it all take place in a small area is that everyone has connections. The citizens of Crossbell don’t feel like information signs and quest boards, but like living individuals in the massive spiderweb of Crossbell’s social life.
In all of this, the player takes the role of Lloyd Bannings, a rookie detective at a newly founded group in the Crossbell Police Department. While the game starts with a genre-standard dungeon crawl as part of the work interview, everything that follows moves away from typical JRPG storytelling. Most missions Lloyd and his team get are regular menial police work, with a focus on the mundane. Highlights involve returning overdue library books and giving out parking tickets.
It is quite endearing to see these sorts of quests in a JRPG, as they ground the game in some reality. It is refreshing to see a team of protagonists who are not chosen ones or given special privileges. Instead, no one takes them seriously despite their competence, and that slowly drives the story forward.
It feels earned and justified when Lloyd and his team stumble upon and solve high-profile cases, since they aren’t given everything on a silver platter. The corrupt system at the police department works against them, and none of them (well, save one – and it isn’t the protagonist) has any special superhuman powers.
The only sad part is that halfway through, the grounded nature slowly falls apart. Sure, the jobs are the same, and the corruption within the top brass in the police gets clearer and clearer. However, it is revealed that meritocracy might not be what led party members to hold their positions. It is quite a whiplash, since up until that point it felt like they overcame problems through competence alone, not favouritism. Sadly, just like in real life. While realistic, it takes away much of the underdog theme the story was initially going for. It does, however, add many further strings to the tapestry of the world, which is a massive bonus.
Another web of things to unravel in The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is its combat system. Its design is elegant: most characters can learn all spells, but each has unique combat skills that still give them a diverse feel, even though they can all technically fill any role. What isn’t that great, though, is the difficulty curve. Like far too many JRPGs, the game is ridiculously difficult at the start and gets progressively easier.
For this review, the game was played on the rightfully named Nightmare difficulty. It felt more insulting than challenging to lose the first boss fight before even taking the first turn, as the boss fight also served as an escort mission for two suicidal NPCs. Not because it was difficult in itself, but because nothing that followed throughout the entire game came close to that encounter in terms of difficulty.
While it in some ways makes sense to put a massive difficulty spike at the start of a very hard difficulty level to prevent the player from getting stuck twenty hours in instead of half an hour in, there are better solutions. Many modern games allow for the changing of the difficulty mid-playthrough. A great example is Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which lets the player lower the difficulty level, with the caveat that they can’t increase it later. It lets the game get gradually more difficult without locking the player out of progressing because they picked a difficulty level that was too high. It is one of those flaws that shows the age of The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero.
Another major issue isn’t a result of old design choices: textures frequently flicker in and out of existence, mostly in TV mode. While it doesn’t cause any gameplay harm, as all objects are still technically there, it becomes visually disruptive when multiple objects suddenly turn black for a split second, even during cutscenes.
It is annoying and breaks immersion, especially when it keeps happening during cutscenes. This isn’t something that happens a couple of times in a playthrough; it pops up several times per hour, especially during certain activities. One thing that definitely triggers it is using special or combo crafts during combat. However, fishing in certain areas also almost always sets off the issue.
At first, it was easy to think that it was a special effect of the combat crafts, as it doesn’t pop out too much outside of combat during the first ten hours. However, once it started happening frequently during cutscenes, it was clear this was an unresolved bug.
It is a shame, as the original product of The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is quite a good game, especially at the time of its release. It offers a good window into how JRPGs were designed for short gaming sessions on portable consoles in the early 2010s. This translates wonderfully to the Nintendo Switch 2. Sadly, these bugs make it hard to recommend this remake wholeheartedly in its current state.
