The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd is the third game in the Trails in the Sky trilogy, and finishes off this three game arc. The second game (SC) completed the story of Estelle and Joshua, so the 3rd follows another character instead. It’s a different game to what you’d expect and it took ten years before it was finally translated into English for release on PC.
The combat system remains pretty much exactly the same as the previous game. It’s even less than what you would call an iteration, with the only “major” change being that there are extra effects during battles and monsters who’s weak against elements that wasn’t possible before (the higher elements of time, mirage and space). It’s still a robust turn based battle system in which each character can move on a grid, attack with physical attacks, cast arts (i.e. magic) and use crafts (special physical attacks). Attacking and being attacked builds up the Craft Points bar which allows you to use crafts and ultimate moves known as S-crafts.
Positioning your characters on the battlefield is important since casting arts takes two turns. When an art is cast, it shows who and where they’re targeting and its area of effect, so you get a chance to move out of the way. the turn order is shown on the left hand side to help you plan ahead. Enemies roam the environment but initially they will be invisible until you’re really close. Encountering them will transition you to a separate battle screen.
The game follows Kevin Graham, the high ranking agent from the Septian Church that had a supporting role in the previous game. He is joined by Ries Argent, a fellow member of the church. Set six months after SC, Kevin is collecting artifacts when he eventually obtains the one left behind by the Ark from the previous game. Known as the Cube, it transports him and Ries to a separated dimension. Trapped there, they have no choice but to proceed through the various planes of the dimension to find out the secrets of the Cube.
Throughout their journey, Kevin and Ries ends up summoning more allies, joining them as party members. You can have up to four party members in your active team and keeping them all up to date with equipment can be very expensive and tough without grinding. These characters range from returning supporting characters, to returning main characters, so you should be familiar with all of them. Unfortunately, there ends up being way too many playable characters.
The structure of the game is completely different to the previous two games, to the point where it feels weird. Instead of going from location to location and helping out NPCs in sidequests as part of the Bracer Guild, Kevin instead travels through the planes of the separated dimension, which is effectively just a fancy tower. It’s an excuse for the game to reuse a lot of old areas but now with enemies placed on top.
Optional sidequests are now presented as Doors, which have a certain requirement before you can access them. This can be having certain characters in your party, or completing a certain amount of battles. Once it’s fulfilled and you open the door, you may have to fight a battle and then be presented with a long story cutscene usually ranging from twenty minutes to over an hour. These present backstory to all the characters and also serve as a way to tell what happened to the characters after SC. There are also certain doors which has minigames that you need to succeed in to get the story cutscenes.
With the minigames, the fishing minigame makes a return and is as annoying as it was in the previous games. The timing is frustrating, especially if there is any kind of display lag. It is required multiple times to progress a side story and you’ll be facing off opponents who cheats. It’s not fun at all and very disappointing that the developer added this type of frustrating section into the game.
Thanks to those extremely long cutscenes serving as optional side stories, it can throw the pacing off immensely. You’ll be traversing through the various dungeons and chapters, which feel very short, particularly in comparison to SC, and then you’ll spend more time on a side story instead. Since it takes place in a completely different area, depicting events in the past or present, it can feel jarring with the different tone and setting when you start and finish those side stories.
As the side stories also cover several minor supporting characters, you feel that it is because of the variety of these side stories that allowed the developers to tell some of these types of stories that would have otherwise felt too disjointed from the main cast. However, it is also because of this that you’ll end up controlling characters for just that short duration, forced to battle with their subpar equipment and increasing unfamiliarity, which can make parts of the game more difficult than it should. And through all this is the knowledge that any progress made on these characters will be pointless once you’ve finished that particular side story. However, the game opens up on a lot of the other countries and factions of the continent (i.e. Calvard, Erebonia, Crossbell etc) and sets up a lot of foreshadowing for events in future games.
The game features some nice quality of life improvements; the major one is that you can speed up the game at the press of a button. There’s a separate speed option for normal gameplay and battles, which is a huge boon since animations, both during story cutscenes and battle animations, are a bit slow. Do note that speeding up the game can be a little bit buggy. Just like the second game, speeding it up while walking up stairs will leave your party members on the lower levels instead of going up the level and following you.
Bearing in mind that this is a game originally released in 2007, the graphics aren’t nothing to be wowed at. The sprites being overlaid on top of the rendered environments can clash at times. On the whole, it’s still definitely not a bad game to look at, especially since the key draw to the game is the story and rich cast of characters. The game can be a bit boring when you’re basically either revisiting old areas, or any new areas will look the same being floating platforms in the midst of space. Several dungeons will have no in-game map which makes them confusing to traverse. Fixed camera angles in these areas makes no sense on why that is the case at all, and just makes it worse. There are several massive difficult spikes in bosses, especially ones that overwhelm you in number, status debuffs, insane area-of-effect super moves, or all of them together.
The game can feel extremely tedious and dragged out, which isn’t helped by the repetitive feel of revisiting old areas, several of them for the third or more time. There is some story but the dungeons are so dragged out that the story to gameplay ratio is out of whack. It sets an extremely slow pace with not enough push to the actual main plot of the game. Yes, the amount of lore and info dumps from the side stories is great, but it is not presented in even chunks. It has a tendency to throw heaps and heaps of the info dumps at you only for a long drought before dumping some more.
It takes about 30 to 40 hours to complete the game, although this depends on the difficulty, optional content, and how much grinding you do. The final dungeon can be annoying, especially if you have been neglecting several of your party members. It is fairly big but nothing we haven’t’ seen before, so it lacks that wow factor. The ending is okay and wraps up the story as you would expect, but Kevin and Ries’ story only makes up half the game so there wasn’t too much that they could have done in that short time.
Overall, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd is not a bad game but it is definitely the least captivating game of the trilogy. It isn’t helped by the ridiculously high number of playable characters, which the game wants to expand stories upon them, let alone the myriad of random supporting characters. There’s limited evolution in the gameplay or graphics, and the way the story is presented is extremely slow paced and terribly uneven at times. It is ambitious in how it massively expands the scope and helps set up a lot of little events for future games but it does not feel like a cohesive game and the story being all over the place as a result. It doesn’t feel like a proper full game as part of the trilogy at all, rather it’s like a bonus post-game expansion content. Regardless, it is still worth a playthrough for all the set up that it does for future games.
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