Trails From Zero is one of the many games from the Legend of Heroes franchise and this game focuses on the Crossbell arc of the series. It is self contained so you won’t have to really worry about playing any other game as this is honestly my first time getting into the Trails canon.
It focuses on a group of police officers who are part of a newly formed unit called Special Support Services. The SSS consist of Lloyd, Ellie, Randy and Tio. The unit is assigned to low priority cases and is seemed as unimportant by the rest of the police force and even the press. However, the SSS takes their responsibility seriously and soon discover the deep corruption that runs at the highest level in the city.
It is a turn based game so the onus is on you and your allies. Sometimes you get someone during your journey to help you in combat going against the enemy.Sometimes you get the chance to use all out attacks once the meter for it is full.You can use special abilities like break whenever you deal or take damage from enemies and, be able to upgrade and buy a wide variety of items and to cook food and unlock new recipes.The game has a feature where you can use orbals to cast spells or other abilities to help with exploration or boost certain stats and you can trade extra orbals for money especially with how grindy it may be at times.You can get special gems to give you special bonuses to help you in combat on your journey.
You can take on side quests too from the police to the bracer division, some of them being required to progress through the main story.The side quests themselves are not really anything that special just typical kill enemy and find certain item and that’s it.The more you do as well as answer certain answers correctly, you gain detective points to increase your rank for special bonus items typical of a Trails game from what I looked up.
The game advertises itself to be a gritty crime story, but honestly at least for me it just comes across as a NIS parody of the cop genre and a cheesy one at that. I wasn’t really too engaged in the characters since I just found them tropey and bland for my liking. The dialogue and the comedy and voice acting well the general localization of it from NIS just comes across as really cringey and it tries way too hard to be funny but it just annoying. The graphics were pretty decent and the artstyle is ok. The music too was pretty good. The pacing was slow as there was some filler here and there that just made things more boring. There is quite a bit of back tracking that only drags on and doesn’t serve much purpose but to annoy you. The lack of map while exploring dungeons and inevitably some backtracking was pretty annoying.
Kind of a nitpick but it was annoying how the gps was there while exploration on other areas but not with dungeons but at least that was rectified with future games like Cold Steel. The Pom Pom mini game was a pretty fun distraction.
Overall it was a decent jrpg.
It gets 3 out of 5 stars.