Graphically, Trails from Zero isn’t the best looking game, but I don’t hold that against it considering it was originally a PSP title. I actually found the older chibi models nostalgic, as the Trails in the Sky trilogy is still my favorite arc in the series. PH3 Games did a great job of cleaning up the assets and making them look presentable for modern platforms. The main and supporting character designs are fantastic. I consider a design to be good if the character sticks in my mind after the game is finished, and they certainly did here. I, personally, liked Tio’s design the most as it had this perfect blend of modern and fantasy aesthetics. Enemy designs ranged from cute to cool to downright terrifying. The only complaint I would have is that some enemies were just color swapped versions of another, but that is a minor complaint.
Trails from Zero’s soundtrack is like a gift from the heavens. Nihon Falcom did an outstanding job composing each and every track. From the town music, to field exploration, to events, each track fits every situation incredibly well. Mainz Village has to have my favorite town BGM for how solemn it sounds. We absolutely can’t forget the battle music. Zero has some of my favorite Trails battle music of all time. “Get Over the Barrier,” “Formidable Enemy,” and “Inevitable Struggle,” are all certified bangers. And “Get Over the Barrier” is, easily, my favorite normal fight music from the Trails series. You really can’t go wrong with the music in this game. In addition to the great soundtrack, a majority of the game’s main story scenes are fully voiced in Japanese. I found the main and supporting characters’ voice actors did great; however, the voices for the more unimportant characters sounded less than stellar, at times monotone. Another complaint I have is that there is no English voice option. Every other Trails game that has been released overseas has had some type of English voice option (Sky only had English voices in battle, but I still count it). It’s a shame considering they already had English VA’s voice the SSS members in the Cold Steel games.
Now we get to one of the most important aspects of the game, the localization quality. The game’s localization is overall okay. I didn’t have trouble understanding what a character was trying to convey or what I was supposed to do next to continue the story; however, there were a couple spelling and grammatical errors in the game, stuff like missing punctuation and missing letters. These errors started to crop up more and more as the game progressed. I believe I saw more of these from Chapter 3 onwards. I’ve also seen an instance where the incorrect character’s name was shown during a voiced part. The scene in question involved Elie speaking after an event in Chapter 3. Instead of showing her name, it showed Tio’s. Now these errors I was okay with considering the heavy amount of text in the Trails games, stuff is bound to get missed. What I find egregious is leaving untranslated text in the game, and I found three instances of that in my playthrough. The first was from an NPC named Cindy in Chapter 2, Day 2 in the Residential District. The second instance was from Alec on the final day of Chapter 3 in Mainz Village. The final instance occurred in the Finale where a character’s name was untranslated – I won’t specify the scene to avoid spoilers. What makes things worse, I spotted the last two untranslated portions after the game’s release date. Which means these errors weren’t caught and fixed in the Day One patch. I reloaded an earlier save I had and noticed Cindy’s text wasn’t fixed either. I hope NIS America will go back and fix these errors, eventually.
The game runs like a dream on PC, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering it isn’t a graphically intensive game. You have a couple options to help with the game performance such as toggling the FPS limit, V-Sync, changing the Anti-Aliasing level, and changing the dynamic shadow quality. You should have no problem running this game on even a low-end PC, which makes it even more welcoming to newcomers.
It took me around 71 hours to play through Trails from Zero’s story on Hard difficulty while doing all the optional requests and completing the Fishing and Recipe Notebooks. You could probably cut out 10-20 hours if you removed all the side content, so this game will take up a good chunk of your time. If you’re a completionist, you can play again on New Game+ to unlock anything you missed, complete achievements, and even tackle Nightmare difficulty. Also, I appreciate how Zero has an offline achievement system which tracks what you’ve accomplished. This is great for platforms like the Nintendo Switch, which has no native achievement system.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is an outstanding JRPG with a great story, memorable characters, solid turn-based combat, and an absolutely amazing soundtrack. Going back to my question in the beginning, was the game worth the wait? The answer is a resounding yes. While the game’s localization can be a bit rough in some places, this shouldn’t hold you back from experiencing this title. I highly recommend this game to fans of the franchise, JRPG fans, and even newcomers. For the price of $39.99, it is definitely worth it.
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Review copy provided by the publisher.
