Best Trails Games Ranked: Which Trails Games to Play and Where to Start | Push Square
Over the last few years, the Trails series has started to find some footing in the West, largely thanks to the localisation of the Trails of Cold Steel saga on PS4. And now that publisher NIS America is committed to bringing the franchise overseas, we finally have enough Trails games to warrant a guide like this. What a time to be alive!
But before we get into the discussion of which Trails game is best — as voted by Push Square readers — we're going to give an overview of what the Trails series actually is. Hopefully this article is of some help to those who are new to this dense franchise...
Okay, so the Trails series is itself a subseries of a long-running property called The Legend of Heroes. It's a little bit like how the Persona series started life as a Shin Megami Tensei spin-off, but blossomed into its own franchise.
Officially, the Trails games still have The Legend of Heroes in their name. For example, the full title of Trails of Cold Steel is The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel — but at least here in the West, fans have taken to shortening the names for the sake of clarity.
Anyway, the Trails titles are role-playing games developed by Japanese company Nihon Falcom (often referred to as simply 'Falcom'). They have a very heavy emphasis on character-driven stories, and feature a turn-based combat system that has steadily evolved over the course of the series.
The biggest strength (and arguably the biggest weakness, from an outside perspective) of the Trails games is that they all tie into each other. All of the Trails games have overarching plot elements, returning characters, and a clear timeline of when events take place in relation to other games in the series.
This massive, interconnected style of
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