Has anyone else here played the Kiseki/Trails RPGs? I am almost caught up with the storyline that is released in the West (playing Cold Steel 4 now) and I find it admirable that it is not just a great RPG series with no modern gaming bullshit (it actually works on release, the very few MTX can be easily ignored, no Western sensibilities, a surprisingly good localization despite NISA doing half the games), but on top of all that it's taking on the ambitious task of telling an overarching narrative that spans 10+ games. Character arcs from the very first game are still relevant and addressed 8 games later. The world building puts the Souls games and Elder Scrolls games to shame too. This shit is like crack. I've already beaten Azure, CS1, CS2, and CS3 in the past 4 months.
I'll try to refrain myself from sperging out too much, but yes, I've played damn near the entire series released in the West. Just started Reverie a few days ago, but been working long hours, so I haven't dived deep into it much. It is probably my favorite video game series, with Azure probably being my favorite game of all time. It is definitely a series that requires a lot of time investment to get the most out of it. It took me almost exactly one year to get from FC to CS4 (I played the GeoFront fan translations of Zero and Azure before they were localized). And when I say almost exactly, it was legitimately almost exactly a year. I looked at when I got the achievement for finishing the prologue of FC and when I got the True End of CSIV, and discovered this:
The only break I took playing the series was probably two or three months after finishing 3 before I decided to put in the work to get the GeoFront fan translation working for Zero and Azure. I was super invested in the series. In fact, it took me 111 hours to finish Azure....and I did that in ten days, all while still going to work for 9-10 hours a day.
Like you said, the world building is amazing in the series. The geopolitics are very interesting to follow , especially in regards to the smaller countries/states and their relations with the two larger nations. They put in a lot of work writing the characters and giving them great development. There have been quite a few characters I didn't care for, but ended up becoming some of my favorite as the story went on. And speaking on that, the series probably has the most disturbing moment I'd ever experienced in a video game in the third one. I'm sure it's not hard to figure out which part that was. While definitely not an enjoyable scene to sit through, the way it was presented to the audience was very well-written to hit you hard. And then, when things were confronted and resolved in the next game regarding this, it was a real emotional moment.
And that's not only with the main characters, but even the NPCs hanging around the cities. Damn near every NPC has their own stories, whether they be somewhat important to the plot or not at all, but if you keep talking to them after every checkpoint, you'll begin to recognize them and remember details about them. It really makes the cities and towns feel alive, especially in the Crossbell games where you spend the entire time in the main city and a few smaller towns around it, which gives a lot of time to learn about everyone there.
And like
@The Rrat said, the music in the entire series is amazing, which is pretty on point for Falcom in any of their games.
It's definitely not perfect. There are definitely plenty of problems within it, but I still enjoy the series a lot. Whenever I play the games, I get heavily invested in everything going on and find it hard to stop playing at times. I'm hoping to have more time this weekend to sit down and play through Reverie more because I've heard a decent amount of people claiming it to be the best in the series so far, which is a tall order considering I heard the same with Azure before I played it and came to agree with that.
