FC: unengaging combat and character building. Mediocre sidequests. Forgettable NPCs to catch up on so don't bother. Aesthetically it is an isometric game where you are looking down at samey green fields and rocky ravines. Three of the five towns look samey. The spritework is good. Good soundtrack with lots of keepers. The first 20 hours of the story is overall boring. You have some fun personalities in there like Olivier and the bandit girl but otherwise it didn't have me super invested and on the edge of my seat until the men in black showed up in chapter 3, which is when finally you start getting tension and an interesting conflict between characters. I like how characters come and go in the main story when relevant to them, which feels very natural and immersive, rather than just having everyone hanging around as your party the whole time for flimsy reasons. I also liked the side characters like the B-team Bracers, the Liberl leaders, etc. Feels like an immersive world with stuff going on outside of what your protagonists are doing.
SC: same gameplay issues (boring combat, boring sidequests, boring townsfolk experience, etc) and aesthetics as before. Does not introduce any new towns or regions to visit. The new tracks are overall forgettable. Story wise, it is a 60 hour long game, but you spend 40 hours of it meandering around the same towns you have been to, bump into a supervillain who is wrecking havoc for no good reason, you beat him in gameplay but then he beats you in the cutscene and waltzes off. Rinse repeat. Meanwhile, the B-team of bracers are offscreen doing the actually meaningful plot-progressing stuff of finding the bad guys' secret base. The ending is quite frustrating as the heroes finally KO these mass murderers, only to not finish them off or arrest them and instead just walk away, allowing the bad guys to wake up and escape and continue haunting the franchise in future installments. There are some good moments like the Ragnard arc in chapter 5 but it is overall boring for a 60 hour long game.
3rd: combat is a little improved. The main story takes place in either new spacey looking dungeons or in old locations with a sepia filter, so it looks more novel than SC was. Has more new, good tracks than SC did. The main story has an emotional ending. The sidestories were overall good, either retroactively providing an epilogue for Sky that SC didn't do, or setting up interesting plot threads for future games.
Zero: same gameplay issues as the Sky games (boring combat, boring sidequests, boring townsfolk experience, etc). The talking to NPCs experience is pretty bad in Zero, as the game is centered in this city with 200+ NPCs whose text is constantly updating. So I am constantly having to put the plot on hold and spend 1-2 hours running around talking to every NPC. 7 years later I can scarcely remember any of them and overall regard it as a waste of time that also harmed the pacing of the game. Aesthetically the game suffers from taking place in a boring modern urban city with brutalist architecture and people in modern clothing. You do not get the adventure feel of hiking across the world and visiting different regions and towns. Soundtrack is forgettable. There is some wonky writing stuff like the game starting off claiming that Crossbell is crime ridden, that the police are overworked, that the police have a bad rep compared to Bracers, etc, but none of this is reflected in the rest of the game. There are some conspicuous retcons from Sky. You run around and nobody is talking about break-ins or shittalking you, etc. Story was forgettable. The ending is aggravating as it does not climax with being about the characters of this game, but being about the characters of the prior arc, whose story was supposed to have already concluded in SC and 3rd. I did not like the main cast of playables. There were a few side characters I liked.
Ao: all of the same issues as Zero (gameplay, aesthetics, music, characters, etc). 60 hour long game but the story is overall a boring slog up until the first half of chapter 5, which is really exciting, but then you reach the top of the tower and the story plummets. The ending is extremely aggravating and made me despise the main playable cast, particularly Lloyd Bannings.
CS1: I started this on hard and became engrossed in the combat and character building. The sidequests are also okay, and talking to NPCs is a little more worthwhile, though mainly just the Thors student and faculty. Aesthetically the game is very good. It's a romanticized 19th/20th century Europe, with picturesque farms spread across rolling hills, grandiose castles and steel fortresses, noble swordsmen wearing trenchcoats and cravats practicing special sword techniques in their dojos, cool airships flying overhead and mechas, etc. I like the character designs and the monster designs. The VFX is neat. It just looks pleasing visually. The soundtrack is fabulous with many keepers. It has a large cast of characters that are overall very likeable. The story was pretty engrossing, with a cold war brewing against an antagonistic republic and turmoil within the empire. The English dub was unusually good.
CS2: I started this on hard, once again engrossed in the gameplay. Gameplay is very good, and this time also has optional hard bosses - the Cryptids and the Magic Knights - to defeat out in the world. Aesthetics are also good, with a lot more cool mechs too. The mech battles are exciting. CS2 is the first sequel to introduce new towns to visit, and also redresses old locations with snow so it doesn't look like you are running through the exact same stuff as before. Fabulous soundtrack. The story is very engaging and has a novel twist ending. I became very invested in the protagonist.
CS3: I played this on nightmare. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the gameplay is frontloaded in the prologue and in the first chapter, past that I did not need to buckle down and really engage with the mechanics to succeed. There was just one difficult fight towards the end of chapter 4 (the dark dragon) and that was it. The mech battles however remain challenging all the way through, probably because Falcom's designers have fewer variables to account for. One thing you will notice is that crafts balancing CS is wonky. There is no sensible correlation between a craft's damage/effects and the CP cost and the delay incurred, so some crafts are objectively a terrible opportunity cost and should never be used. This was also an issue with prior Trails games (see Richard in CS3) but I think it is more noticeable here due to CS' martial emphasis in lore and in ability animations/cutscenes. Sidequesting is okay. Talking to townsfolk is a mixed bag. I liked following the Leeves and Thors NPCs, but there were only a small handful of NPCs in the rest of the world that I can remember their stories. Unfortunately, Crossbell is in this game so you once again have the issue having far too many NPCs who are updating and it really makes that chapter a slog, and I struggle to recall any of them. Even more exciting mech battles. Visually, the increased fidelity and improved lighting is appreciated. I like a lot of the new character designs. Fie still looks like a whore, though. Unfortunately, the towns are a mixed bag. While they are well realized, most of them are retreads of locations I already saw in the first two games (Leeves = Trista, Parm = Celdic, Saint Arkh = Bareahard, Raquel = Roer, etc), which I was more invested in. I think there could have been more imagination here to differentiate them from CS1/CS2 locations. I like that you get to see new districts in Heimdallr. Soundtrack does not have as high of a hit rate as the first two games but is still overall great.
The story unfortunately drops the ball. It discards the bittersweet narrative trajectory that CS2 left off on. Rean is now no longer a lonely, angry man working for a man he hates to defend the empire in the face of an escalating cold war. The characters forget that they duped by Osborne. There has been a near total status quo reset. We are now going to school and going on jolly adventures again oblivious to what is going on when we shouldn't be. The episodic adventures are not engaging like CS1's, as here it is a rehash of SC where you run around fruitlessly chasing supervillains who commit mass murder for vague, convoluted reasons, and you never manage to put them down. It's a 130 hour long game but nothing meaningfully happens until the last 15 hours in Heimdallr. This game is also plagued by the inclusion of Crossbell and its detestable cast, and there is a lot of aggravating historical revisionism and victimizing. You also have the irritation of characters from opposing nationalities and organizations having loose lips and sharing secrets that shouldn't be shared, and people being buddy buddy with each other. No animosity or conflicting interests allowed. There is also another wave of conspicuous retcons. Fantabulous ending. The English dub (namely the new characters and recast voices) do not sound as good as the first two games.
CS4: I played this on nightmare. As with CS3, the difficulty is frontloaded and stops being engaging after act 1. There is a kinda memorable encounter in the middle of the game where you fight two bosses at once who have to be tanked apart from each other you and have to whittle down both of their HP bars at the same rate to get the AP bonus. Locations are a disappointment. You get the Witch's Village and the surrounding fantasy forest which is new stuff we haven't seen before, but the rest of the game is just stuff we have already seen before. There is a second new village but it looks just like all of the other locations we've seen, and the devs didn't redress the areas with new seasons like they did in CS2. Plot wise, it doesn't feel like anything meaningfully happens until the Rivalries begin in the last 1/3rd of the game. The intrusion of Crossbell and its cast continues to be a drag on the game. The characters are aggravating at points as they effectively commit treason and sabotage their own country during a world war, and the epilogue is infuriating. The loss of Peter Beckman voicing Chancellor Osborne is disappointing. Probably the biggest issue is the game does not deliver the promised payoff for 9 games of buildup to a world war, which is cancelled after a few hours of fighting. No cities are captured or firebombed. There is a status quo reset as all territorial changes over the past 9 games are reverted. Also, everyone who died at the end of CS3 gets brought back. I had already become somewhat steeled for this due to SC's and Ao's aversion to consequences for the main cast, as well as having played Tokyo Xanadu, so I understood that Falcom was all bark an no bite, but it still stings.
Reverie: I played this on abyss difficulty. This game remains challenging for a lot longer than CS3 and CS4 did, but still the difficult is fundamentally front loaded and it stopped being hard around chapter 3. This games introduces zero new locations. Unfortunately, about half of the story takes place and centers around Crossbell, which I loathe. The main story wisely restricts your movement and has no sidequests, so you spend very little time talking to NPCs and are much more focused on running around going on an adventure (except for the parts in Crossbell city, which has 200+ self-righteous NPCs to catch up on and always sucks no matter which Trails game you are playing). So the pacing is much better than most Trails games. The game has three routes. The Rean route and the first two chapters of the C route are pretty engaging. Lloyd's is forgettable. The final chapter is pretty climatic and is a more exciting finale for CS than CS4 was. Lloyd makes yet another bugfuck bad decision. I wish I could toss him into a woodchipper. The side stories are unfortunately overall forgettable, and do not provide satisfying resolutions, fun self-contained adventures, or setup interesting future plot points like 3rd's doors did. The tournament was pretty neat, though. There is a roguelite dungeon that lets you mix and match your favorite characters and fight hard bosses, which was pretty fun. One gripe I have is that after 3 years and 500+ hours, Rean's romance never matriculates. He does not marry Towa and have babies. Same issue with Lloyd and Tio. Sakura Wars was another serialized JRPG/VN franchise, but it allowed you to carry over your romance choice from game to game until the ending in 4. The English localization is much more dubious than the prior two games, and now introduces a lot of swearing that it makes it impossible to play this game with your window open.
Kuro 1: I played this on nightmare difficulty with the fan translation patch before the official Western release patch. The difficulty only exists in the prologue chapter and during the last 15 minutes on the final boss fight. Otherwise, the game never forced me to buckle down and engage with its systems to continue. Aesthetically, this game marks another leap in fidelity from CS3. The lighting, character models, and VFX are very good. In particular are the ability cutscene animations and camerawork, which reminds me of RWBY at times. Unfortunately, the setting is not compelling, as like with Crossbell almost all of them are boring modern urban cities. The only interesting looking settlements are the Eastern Quarter in Langport (which is small and not as grandiose as the calendar art implied), and Oracion. I guess Basel with the cable car moving between the three different plateaus was neat, and has nice music playing, but I did not like the brutalist architecture. Unfortunately, this game is very heavily centered in urban cities, and has little wilderness to traverse. Kuro also suffers from Crossbell City syndrome where there are hundreds of NPCs in the capital city of Edith to catch up on, multiple times in each chapter for 6 or 7 chapters, and it kills the pacing. Calvard as a setting has no other traditional elements going for it like witches, castles, noble swordsmen practicing in dojos, etc. How much you like this game will boil down to your tolerance (or like) of modern urban cities. I suppose some of the futuristic sci fi tech like Marduk's weapons or Quatre's robo dog are neat. Soundtrack is overall not that memorable compared to CS, but has a few keepers.
Plot wise, this is another filler game, and not a very satisfying one. It suffers from the same problem as SC/Ao/CS3 where you run around fruitlessly chasing supervillains and never accomplishing anything for 70 hours until chapter 5. Chapter 5 is the only arc in the game that is somewhat exciting, but even then it is bogged down by pacing issues (namely lots of updating townsfolk NPCs who update a lot but have forgettable stories) and Falcom's aversion to loss (it's billled as a shounen death tournament but nobody kills each other). The main cast of playable characters are overall meh, though the side characters are pretty interesting. I wish the game had an FC format where the relevant side characters like Alvis, Aaron, Dasawni, Judith, etc, wove in and out of your party when relevant, rather than having this constant roster of boring party members chilling leaving their homes behind to chill in your apartment for flimsy reasons. This game has a little bit of choice. Some sidequests let you pick 2 or 3 different endings, such as choosing to hand a con artist over to the police or to a crime syndicate (presumably to be sent floating down a river). There is a chapter where you can pick which organization (Bracers, Jaegers, Crime Syndicate, etc) to bring as guest party members. You also get an opportunity to spare or execute a couple filler supervillains. However, like Suikoden 1, the game strongly tries to guilt you into sparing them.
Kuro 2: I am playing on nightmare difficulty. I am now in the final chapter. The combat is much more difficult and engaging than Kuro 1 was, and has forced me to engage more with the combat and character building, though not to the extent that I need to minmax my shard skills or micromanage SCLM chains like how I micromanaged links in CS2. Once again, the game is based in modern urban cities, with even less wilderness to traverse in the main story than in Kuro 1. A large percentage of my 75 hours of playtime thus far has been spent on catching up on the hundreds of cityfolk NPCs, which can be an entire play 2 to 3 hour long play session in of itself just for one NPC update. There are some neat tracks. There is a Reverie Corridor esque roguelite dungeon called the Marchen Garden, which has more fantastical environments to run through and lets you mix and match your favorite playable characters, though unfortunately they are all teenagers or young beautiful 20-somethings. The Marchen Garden sadly does not have much meat, as the only challenges in it are the bosses at the end of each layer, but there are has only been half a dozen layers over 75 hours, so just six bosses. Story wise, it's another filler adventure like Kuro 1, though in this case it has been more entertaining as I have not been fruitlessly chasing supervillains around. I instead just get into a lot of pointless scraps with people I already know, not much of an improvement but not as aggravating either. I tried the English dub for a few minutes, but couldn't stand it and switched back to Japanese voices. Good thing too, because there is a lot of swearing in the localized lines and taking God's name in vain. Wouldn't be able to play these NISA Trails games with the window open anymore.
