A follow-up to the third Trails in the Sky game, this one takes place in a different location and features a mostly new cast. So you don’t need any familiarity with the earlier games to understand what’s going on (though knowing who Oliver is and what Bracers are will help).
It took me this long to play it due getting burned out on the constant combat (not this series’ strong suit) of the aforementioned 3rd Trails entry. Which ended up being a good thing since it meant I got to play Tokyo Xanadu first. As it turns out, ToCS is half Legend of Heroes (the combat and field trips) and half Xanadu (pretty much everything related to the school).
The characters are stereotypical for the most part and thankfully display only a minor amount of cringe-inducing behavior while event developments are just what you’d expect from Trails game. The combat as mentioned is pretty much the same as previous franchise installments, as is the ease in which you can miss optional content. Using a guide is pretty much mandatory if you want to see/collect everything and even then you’ll need at least two playthroughs. Only want to get the max bonuses for an import into ToCS II? That’s also going to require two playthroughs (unless you do an insane amount of grinding).
And while at first glance that can seem daunting with the massive amount of dialog the game has, if you make good use of Turbo Mode combined with holding down the ‘Cancel’ key to fast-forward cutscenes a second run through the game shouldn’t take nearly as long as the first. Incidentally, if you happen to have the Japanese audio enabled you may notice that the translation trends toward the liberal side of things. Not enough to character assassinate anyone mind you… but enough to be noticeable at times. Oh, and avoid the various DLC since they’re completely worthless (unless you really like the costumes I guess).
Anyways, it’s a decent enough game with a lot of content (60+ hours if you talk to everyone), but if you’ve recently played those other games mentioned above I’d strongly suggest holding off on this since it’ll likely come across as a tiresome retread if you don’t have some distance between them.
“It took me this long to play it due getting burned out on the constant combat (not this series’ strong suit) of the aforementioned 3rd Trails entry.”