Game #1328: The Legend of Heroes - Trails from Zero

 From Zero to Hero.

 'The best modern JRPGs' is but one of the many ways I've seen people call this series, but being so massive, it always felt as if it was impossible to just get into it. So one day I opened up wikipedia, figured out which games I could access and finally took the plunge, The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is not the first game in the series, but it's my first one, and lemme tell you, I liked it.

 First of all, the plot is very... cozy. The entire game takes place in the city of Crossbell and its vicinity, and there are no world-shattering menaces to deal with, it's only Crossbell in danger. If there's a thing I hate about modern JRPGs is how small-potatoes the scale feels, I much prefer the SNES and PS1 world-trotting epics instead of this new trend of small-scale conflicts, but in THIS particular case... I'll take it. It's fine, and the characters are quite endearing. Since you play as a newly form sub-division of the police, seeing the townspeople growing to depend on your team of characters was well done too.

 ...it's not perfect though. If there's a thing I hate it's kids characters, and quite late in the game a young girl is introduced, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, every single character starts simping for her. How now they have something worth fighting for, how her smile just revitalizes them, how precious she is... it's so stupid. Honestly, this character is the single sour point when it came to the story, heck, right after she is introduced you get an 'intermission' chapter focusing on her, and it was such a bore, such a pace-killer.... I simply don't get it, she adds NOTHING to the game except making the script dumber.

 The combat system is fine, it's a bit strategic since you have to be mindful of positioning on the battlefield as well as to how you set up your Orbs in order to gain access to the passive abilities and the spells that you want. Besides HP and MP, there's a third gauge that governs a sub-set of unique special moves for each character, which is a neat idea. That said... the flow of the battles is very slow, the animations are very slow as well, thankfully the Switch version has a toggleable Turbo mode, and I spent 85% of my playthrough in Turbo mode.

 The last thing I'd like mentioning is that the game takes quite seriously the "cop division sent out to help the city' bit, so there's a bunch of non-standard sidequests, some only involve talking with NPCs and zero battling, which was quite interesting.

 Trails from Zero is a winner, it's not the type of JRPG I like best, but it's pretty darn great at what it does. I set out to buy the sequel immediately.... which is already out of stock in most places, jesus!

8.0