Over ten years ago, when I was just getting started in this business, I played a game called *The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky*. It was a rickety-feeling RPG on the PSP, a port of an already low-budget PC game from several years earlier by Falcom, a little-known developer at the time. I’d later learn it was part of a series dating back to the TurboGrafx era with a localization history, but without much notoriety—at least here in North America.
The game was kind of slow-moving and dull-looking, but before long, I realized I hadn’t played anything quite like it. Estelle is a goofball who’d be right at home as a protagonist in a shonen manga, while Joshua is a brooder with a mysterious past. They make a perfect dynamic duo for interpersonal drama. The pair travels across their home continent, working their way up the ranks, only to end up involved in some wild events that sow seeds for conflict and changes on the world stage years down the line. And, of course, sequels. So many sequels.
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### A Story of Tremendous Scope and Depth
*Trails in the Sky* is an example of tremendous writing—both in the sense that it’s pretty good, and also massive in scope. The story runs for dozens of hours, featuring several fleshed-out and important characters inhabiting a world undergoing a complicated geopolitical shift.
Every effort is made to keep everything as part of a coherent whole—from how characters interact and build relationships to how the world changes around them whenever the story develops. For example, as events unfold, NPCs around the world update with new, relevant dialogue. That’s pretty rare and impressive.
These games are long and long-winded, with the whole trilogy famously containing enough text to rival a stack of classic sci-fi novels. And *Trails* has progressed well beyond three games, expanding into a series that has grown over the years, making Falcom more well-known and elevating other series (like *Ys* and *Xanadu*) alongside it.
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### From Legend of Heroes to Trails: A Series Evolving
The original *Legend of Heroes* brand has all but been left behind as this subseries has taken on a life of its own. The story has moved across continents and groups of characters, then brought them all back together in different configurations as situations developed.
This kind of long-term storytelling feels almost impossible for video games—yet here it is.
However, as the series has grown and expanded, people have been left behind. The story has continued mostly linearly across multiple platforms and subseries. Unless you’re willing to start at the beginning (and many aren’t, often due to FOMO and other factors), there’s not a good jumping-on point. There isn’t really a good way to jump back in, either.
I fell off the series myself, simply unable to keep up with the release schedule and haven’t found the time or opportunity to try again.
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### The Intimidation Factor: A Barrier for Newcomers
For as much as the hype has been building, and the “sickos” who have kept up have been beating the drum and blaring the horns, *Trails* is intimidating. It’s like walking into a comic book store for the first time and trying to figure out how to start reading *Spider-Man*.
As the series arguably peaked and re-peaked with new storylines like *Trails of Daybreak*, a way to start that isn’t a relatively ancient, niche PC game has been loudly demanded—if not sorely needed.
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### Enter *Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter*
*Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter* is a total remake of the first entry in the *Trails in the Sky* trilogy—a complete overhaul of that PSP game I played at the start of my career. Now, curious parties have no excuse.
For someone like me who started with the original, it’s a fantastic way to re-experience the story. Obviously, there’s still plenty of value in playing the original, but if a remake is the unavoidable, optimal path, *1st Chapter* goes above and beyond to make that path as welcoming and rewarding as possible.
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### This Is a Good-Lookin’ Video Game
For starters, *1st Chapter* is gorgeous—in a way that was almost jarring. When I fell off the series, it was still during the *Trails of Cold Steel* run, and those games were still building off Falcom’s PSP era. I hadn’t seen *Daybreak* in action, which is when the developer took another big step forward.
Regardless of whether you’re new or not, you can get a little taste of what *Trails in the Sky* originally looked like—the loading screens even feature the original character sprites. It’s a massive shift.
This game looks like a low-budget RPG given a big-budget polish. It exists in this space that isn’t quite a recognizable AAA blockbuster, but is alive, bold, colorful, and expressive in a unique way.
There are still elements that betray *Sky*’s vintage (the maps, for example), but overall, everything looks and moves in ways I’ve never seen before in a Falcom game. Characters wear their facial expressions on their bodies instead of dialogue portraits, their hair sways as they walk or run, and combat animations are aggressive, playing with camera angles and lighting as if there are few limitations left.
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### Performance Insights: Nintendo Switch 2 Port
On the topic of visuals, part of why this review was a bit later than others is because I played on the Nintendo Switch 2. This port was announced quite close to the release date and seems to have come in a bit hot; patches are on the way to add a performance mode.
It’s an interesting example of what the Switch 2 is capable of — and the challenges it presents. When I played the demo on the original Switch, it ran remarkably well in TV mode but struggled in Handheld mode. With the upgrade, *1st Chapter* runs swimmingly in Handheld mode but struggles somewhat in TV mode.
It seems developers have to make careful decisions about what to prioritize when porting games to this system, especially given its capacity for high resolution and frame rates—it looks like doing both without compromises is still an issue.
The takeaway? It’s awesome to play a new *Trails* game on a handheld that isn’t just a bulky, warm PC crammed into a portable shell, and to have it running comparably well.
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### Voice Acting: A Surprising Win
*1st Chapter* is almost fully voiced, and each character is more emotive and personable than ever. I used to be ambivalent about voice acting in games (I prefer reading—it’s good for your brain!), but having excellent, well-directed voice talent here, plus in games like *Final Fantasy Tactics*, has shifted my mind somewhat.
I have a soft spot for characters like Estelle, and hearing her antics and wholesome energy reinforced with an off-kilter but earnest voice performance is infectious.
Another win in the column for RPG voice acting—from a former hater no less.
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### The Numbers Are Still Goofy, Though
Speaking of combat and limitations, this is where *1st Chapter* starts to drop the ball, largely because it’s trying to carry so much at once.
The original game was strictly turn-based on a sort of grid system—not quite tactical, but encouraging some attention to placement and reach.
Here, combat has a bizarre split between real-time and turn-based tradition: you can roll around and bonk enemies for some extra damage and an advantage before shifting into turn-based combat on command.
It feels fast and intended to shake things up, but also a bit half-hearted.
Major encounters force you into turn-based mode from the start, and the real-time attack options are simple and repetitive. Not to mention, *1st Chapter* shares an issue I had with the original: enemy HP and your damage are extremely off-balance, even if you crank the difficulty down.
Even the weakest enemies still take way too long to defeat, and EXP scales down so aggressively that I found myself running away from combat constantly. The math between time invested and reward earned makes little sense.
Adding the real-time gimmick compounds this issue, turning attempts to stun enemies before locking in for regular combat into an annoying button-mashing chore I’d rather avoid.
It’s a shame because, as mentioned before, the combat animations are awesome, the pace is definitely faster than the original, and there’s a lot to like in tweaks made to adapt the original ideas into 3D space.
But there’s so much weird padding and odd balance that the game’s pacing suffers. Being prepared for boss fights and side challenges feels unpredictably frustrating rather than interesting.
It’s a constant cycle of: “Oh, my EXP gains have dried up, guess it’s time to stop grinding… Oops, the boss has fifty thousand HP and my big attacks feel like needle pokes!”
It’s bizarre that after all the revamping, Falcom still seems to handle “challenge” this way.
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### Final Thoughts
*Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter* is an ambitious, transformative revisit of a modern classic RPG. It was a formative experience for a small but dedicated audience that helped spark one of today’s most epically ambitious storytelling experiments in video games.
In a world full of remakes that often feel like expensive wastes of time, *1st Chapter* meets a moment in a genuinely impressive and helpful way.
It’s mostly a massive presentational overhaul—but one that genuinely *breathes new life* into the game.
The way combat is balanced remains annoying, and the weird real-time/turn-based hybrid gimmick feels confused and pointless. Yet, even so, I found myself getting lost once again in the game’s absurdly well-executed storytelling ambitions.
If you’ve heard about *Trails* for years from the “sickos” and wanted a cleaner way to dive in, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for.
And if you’ve been a *Trailshead* for a long time, you’ve obviously already decided to play this—but it’s a worthwhile excuse to go back to the beginning.
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### Availability
*Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter* is now available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PlayStation 5.
A Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher for this review.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146342/trails-in-the-sky-1st-chapter-review-score