The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero review: politics and RPG battles collide
About a decade ago, a global simultaneous launch was unheard of for Japanese games outside of the biggest publishers such as Nintendo or Square Enix. That’s slowly changing as more publishers embrace worldwide launches for a style of game that was sometimes exclusive to one part of the world. Japanese developer Falcom has been slow in picking up this trend and you can see that reflected in The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero. The RPG was first released in 2010 for the PlayStation Portable in Japan, but was never released for the West — until now. NIS handling publishing duties.
The Legend of Heroes franchise is the closest franchise that gaming has to something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Characters and events from The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel games are all interconnected. Those games already received official localizations with the Crossbell arc, which includes Zero and its upcoming direct sequel, Trails to Azure, being the last ones.
With the duology officially being localized, players outside of Japan will now be able to understand and contextualize all of the events in the city-state of Crossbell that interconnect with those of Sky and Cold Steel. This is important going forward because future games in the franchise will contain characters from all three of these past titles, including the upcoming The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie, which is also slated to come out next year for the West.
Despite being over a decade old, The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero‘s fantastic story still holds up thanks to phenomenal world-building fraught with the political subterfuge and likable characters that the franchise is known for.
Trails from Zero
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