The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie

After ten games, so far, completely Localized and ported in an official manner, I of course have my favorite games and moments, but I have to say that Trails Into Reverie here is much more than I was expecting and, believe me, I had high expectations, but this game surpasses all of them, big time.

I knew this was going to be the actual end of both Crossbell and Erebonia’s sagas, but Nihon Falcom went above and beyond all possible expectations, honestly, if there’s such a thing as being too satisfied…that’d be me right now, after playing this game, including all the post-game content of course.

Let’s take a small detour from the review itself to talk about Performance and, at this point, this is the part that surprised me the least, because the game has Stellar Performance, as it is tradition with the ports produced by PH3.
On my Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3060 Ti this game performs quite similarly as Cold Steel III and IV, so I basically played the whole game at Max Settings, 1620p DLDSR downsampled resolution to 1080p native, with fullscreen MSAA 4x too, and very much stable and locked 60 FPS, at all times, not a single drop in like 100 hours of playtime.
It is possible to play at 1440p and locked 120 FPS, reducing the amount of MSAA to 2x, but I prefer the maximum image quality possible and 60 FPS, for a game like this.

This game I also feel it looks slightly better than both Cold Steel III and IV, it’s not a huge difference but, considering it is the last entry using the old engine…it serves as a good send off for it and I think it looks pretty decent all things considered, especially with the extra PC specific settings that we’re used to get in these excellent ports by Durante and his team.
Having the Graphics Settings available within the game itself, instead of a Launcher, is a great QoL addition too.

Continuing with the regular aspect of the review, well I won’t get into spoilers but it’s obvious that they went all out with the Fan Service, but the good type, the one that’s done correctly, aimed at fans of the series as a whole, making it so worth it if you played the previous arcs.
This was strongly solidified for me when I started doing the Daydream episodes and, let me be honest here, Trails in the Sky the 3rd is a favorite of mine, not just for what it represents, an obvious connection point between Liberl and both the Crossbell and Erebonian arcs, but also because of the Door System it had.

With Reverie here, the Daydreams felt pretty much like those Doors, they are all really great, I enjoyed them so much, and of course they even added a couple of special ones teasing the “future” in the series, or more almost like the present at this point, hopefully soon for all of us waiting for the official Kuro No Kiseki English Localization and Voice Over announcement (I sincerely cannot wait to meet and learn about the new cast and their actors).

Speaking of the Actors: simply bravo, all of them, incredible performances all around, going from the main protagonists in their respective series to all the supporting characters, they are all great and this is something NIS America seems to improve with every new entry, and I hope they continue to do so with the Kuro games.
It is not so much about sounding exactly like the Japanese actors per se, but how they convey the personality of their respective character, and I believe they all did an excellent job.
The Japanese actors sound amazing too, so being able to compare how both sound, really makes me appreciate how most of them are so very cleverly chosen, in the English voice over.

Lastly, as it couldn’t be any other way, the Soundtrack in this game is also fantastic, especially the new tracks, some of the new combat theme songs are quite catchy and I can’t get them out of my head honestly, they’ll be there for a while I feel.
Having one last chance to listen to a certain track for the final post-game boss was also quite hype, couldn’t have been any other track, it was the correct one : )

All of the new added small Quality of Life changes too, compared to Cold Steel IV, felt quite welcome as well, and I really love the Reverie Corridor system, since to me the Trails series is, currently, one of the best Turn Based JRPG series out there, so having a chance to battle enemies to my heart’s content feels great, while also being rewarding at the same time.

I’m really looking forward to the future of the series, now that we’ve crossed that half point.