The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Review (PSP)

This game, like many Japanese RPGs is really slow moving. The game opens with a fairly quick (20 lines or so) text-based dialog between a father and his daughter. Cassius has been traveling and Estelle is upset that he has been gone so long. She hopes he’s brought her a present, and he has, a mysterious boy. Then, of course, it kicks into high gear with an anime montage introducing all of the characters and some of the regions you’ll see in the game.

After that five minute cut scene you get back to the game where some time has passed and inexplicably, the boy and girl are now brother and sister. Hey, I didn’t say it was a well-thought-out story, just a story. Another four hundred lines of text later and you get to do something with your characters which is go and finish your training in the Bracer Guild, which requires another hundred lines of text to read through and some basic, introductory tutorials. Then, over an hour into the game, you finally get to play a mission which is still part of the tutorial and introduces you to all the aspects of the turn-based combat system.

Once you’ve nailed that down there are loads more text to plow through and finally, you are on your own. There are still some further dialogs you need to pass before getting into more gameplay but they’re minor in comparison to all the intro dialogs.

The gameplay is a standard isometric view for the main world and encounters then are instances, also isometric, and turn-based. The game was originally developed in Japan back in 2004.

After about 10 hours of play the story still hadn’t gotten rolling. There were some hints of what was going on and some very minor events but overall you’re sort of left with this ’what am I doing’ feeling much of the time.

The gameplay unfolds through missions (quests) that you undertake for members of the community which  provide you with experience, Sepith (a mineral of some value that can be turned into quartz which allows for special magic), Mira (the monetary unit) and helps push the extremely slow-moving story forward. Twelve and a half hours in and I still haven’t got the full information on what’s going on in the world but there were enough hints that give me a general idea.