Okay, but I’m not talking about commercial appeal. I’m talking about artistic achievement.
What Nihon Falcom accomplished with this game is unmatched. Trails in the Sky is, without question, the most expansive and intricate saga in JRPG history.
Because unlike other series that reset with each new title, Falcom committed to one continuous world. Every town, every political faction, every character connects across dozens of games.
And this game was the beginning of it all.
What Nihon Falcom accomplished with this game is unmatched. Trails in the Sky is, without question, the most expansive and intricate saga in JRPG history.
Alright, I don’t think this is true lol… Just an FYI, I’m generally defending you against the person here who apparantly really likes FF7 and really hates Trails games, but… Yeah I don’t think that’s “without question” at all. In fact, I myself am questioning it right now.
Again, what other series is comparable? 12 games, multiple but interlocking arcs, developed over decades.
If there’s one that I don’t know about, tell me.
For all the good things about Trails there’s a lot of flaws as well. There’s a lot of weak plot lines, reused assets (lack of npc variety being one) and there’s quite a few logical leaps happening as the series has progressed. The games are ambitious for sure, but let’s not pretend that hasn’t had its own shortcomings.
For me Trails as a series is very much a case of being better than the sum of its individual parts, and that great, but you’re vastly overselling the importance of this series. I enjoy both Trails and Final Fantasy, but it’s wild to put them on the same field like this. Square Enix has more than 5000 employees. Falcom has about 80, I think. The scale is so wastly different.
Trails in the Sky is, without question, the most expansive and intricate saga in JRPG history.
You have Derek Smart levels of ignorance and hubris.
missingno@fedia.io 5 weeks ago
What part of this is comparable to FF7?
atomicpoet@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The big thing about FFVII when it came out was the huge—for the time—fully realized world.
It felt like stepping into a movie. There was nuance. And there were story curveballs.
Same deal with Trails in the Sky. Fully realized world—immense. And the narrative ambition is not just huge, Nihon Falcom actually pulled it off.
missingno@fedia.io 5 weeks ago
The big thing about FF7 was that it came out during a critical transition period for the industry, and Squaresoft put the highest budget of any video game to date into making sure FF's jump to 3D graphics was as explosive as possible. The game was heavily marketed on its technical merits, boasting about how everything this game does could only be possible on PS1. It's full of setpiece moments that are literally just Squaresoft trying to show off their VFX budget (this is why summon cutscenes are so absurdly long). And it blew audiences away because no one had never seen anything like it before. FF7 was a revolution.
Trails certainly has good reason to be beloved by its niche fanbase, but by 2004, it really wasn't doing anything super unique compared to its contemporaries from the same time period. It's a polished game, but I can't describe it as anything more than an evolution.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Not to mention it was amid a crashout with Nintendo where Square struck a deal with Sony making the Playstation a sudden major contender.
atomicpoet@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
But we’re not talking about technical merits but artistic.
There is no RPG series as big and immense as Trails.
This is Nihon Falcon’s crowning achievement. In terms of sheer craftsmanship, only one other JRPG compares.