Start with either Trails in the Sky, or Trails of Cold Steel. They are both great starting games that introduce you to the world and such.
Trails in the Sky: First Chapter, is canonically the first game, but it is heavily dated. The game follows a brother and a sister as they follow in their father's footsteps and become adventurers. The combat is rough (don't play on any other difficulty than normal), the game has no voice acting, and the first 20-30 hours can be a snooze fest. I've heard a lot of people tried it and couldn't get into it. The game picks up at around the 30 hour mark, but it's bad form to tell people to grin and bear unenjoyable stuff with the promise that "it gets better, trust me", so I'd say that it might be better to come back to this one later once you are already into the series. As the series went on, the developers (Nihon Falcom) got better. Once you finish FC, play SC, then 3rd. Personally, I think FC is a pretty good game but it has underwhelming first impressions. Once you finish FC, play SC (Second Chapter), and then 3rd. Don't read the store descriptions for SC or 3rd or you will be spoiled!
(While I'm at it, I would strongly advise against searching for the Trails series on Google, Youtube, or visiting the wiki, as there are unmarked spoilers everywhere).
Trails of Cold Steel follows a different cast (academy students getting entangled in social upheaval), with some cameos from prior games. Falcom had learned a lot of lessons over the year so ToCS overall flows better, IMO. The Cold Steel games have the best combat and it's really fun. Once you finish CS1, simply play 2 (also a good chance to go back and play Sky but you don't have to), then 3. CS4 is coming out on PS4 later this year and will come to PC early next year. Don't read the store descriptions for CS2, CS3, or CS4, or you will be spoiled!
TL;DR: start with either Trails in the Sky: First Chapter, or Trails of Cold Steel. Whichever appeals to you the most.
There is also Zero no Kiseki, which also has a different cast (with some cameos from the other games). It's about a newly assembled unit of police officers in a city-state. The game has a more modern aesthetic than Sky and Cold Steel, if you're into that. You can buy the PC port from DLsite by following this guide, and then download the fan translation patch here (which is great and comes with a ton of touchup features). It's also possible to patch in Japanese voice acting. Not the usual first recommendation, but hey, if it looks more appealing to you than the other games, sure, why not?
Last edited by Val the Moofia Boss; 2020-05-17 at 09:13 AM.
Having a game that has no voice acting sometimes for me work better than bad voice acting like Cold Steel 1 Alisa or that girl Jingo whatever her name is in CS3 damn talk about bad voice acting choice.
Also Trails of Sky series in the steam does have voice acting in combat
Last edited by Velshin; 2020-05-17 at 05:18 PM.
I thinks it's better to wait for potential translation of new PS4 version.
FF is to JRPGs as DBZ is to anime. Ok, but targeting mass appeal far more then trying to string a cohesive narrative together.
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If by translation you mean official localization I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Let's not forget it also released on PS3 and that never got localized.
NISA doesn't have unlimited resources, even though they have more then XSeed. After CS4 is done they are likely going to work on games that are going to push more copies like YS9 and Trails of the Begining for their localization efforts from falcom. The crossbell games are a lot of localization work for something that is very niche and only die hards of the franchise will purchase(even then some may not as most might have played it by now).
I finished Cold Steel 2 yesterday. at least I thought. I cannot wait to go back home and play the rest after that ending song. I could not believe, crossbell music started and got chills all over skin.
seriously ao and zero has great soundtracks.
but seriously, I am like wtf, plan within plan, game within game its like real 4D chess. My poor ape brain.
I was referring to the old school ones too. The new gen ones 13, 15 don't even count as a rpg in my book, they're absolute trash. ff 9/10 were alright but nothing extraordinary. They got nothing on something like Chrono Trigger. The super old ones 1-5 were meh. 6 was actually the only one I found was good.
edit: I played all these games when I was younger as a kid, and also again fairly recently. They're really not that good lol. At the time I thought all the ff games were super amazing but as I revisited them many years later and also playing the other jrpgs around, I realized ff is not that amazing.
Last edited by blackpink; 2020-05-18 at 07:53 PM.
FF isn't anything particularly special today, but at the time Final Fantasy was to video games what Star Wars was to films. Incredibly production values. There was nothing like it at the time. FF7 redefined JRPGs as we know it, and pretty much all JRPGs nowadays are derived from it.
I highly disagree with FF having higher production values then other RPGs until more recent history.
Vagrant Story, Star Ocean Second Story, Grandia, Legend of Dragoon etc... all of these games where highly comparable to the PS1 JRPGs and it gets even tighter together if we start talking SNES. Sure FF games had a handful of CGI scenes, slightly more then other JRPGs where it was typically only reserved for intro and outro but I hardly consider that much in the way of production value when it amounted to such a small amount of the game on PS1.
The real split started to happen with PS2 and further into the HD era where the pure AAA muscle of the FF teams was too much to keep up with for the AA smaller teams making JRPGs so they doubled down on world building, story and characters over production value. And well that's a good thing because if we look at how studios like Falcom, Atlus, Intelligent Systems, Monolith Software etc have progressed it's far better then the high production value of XIII, XV and even VIIRemake if I'm being honest.
Sky and Cold Steel graphics basically built the exact same way, just higher res and the perspective changed to 3rd person. If there was a isometric mod for cold steel games I feel like they would look like HD remasters of Sky for the most part because the way falcom builds towns and buildings in these games hasn't changed.
Avatar pics I fully agree with though, so much better then just the in game graphic talking in a box.
I bought Trials of the Sky last summer and I just can't get into it, it feels too old which doesn't really make sense as I love replaying old FF and DQ games. I love the idea of diving into such a huge series that will probably take a thousand hours to make it through, but I might just be getting too old to enjoy something like this that I have no connection to.