The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure review

thesixthaxis.com:

Getting into The Legend of Heroes series is a tall-order for even the most hardcore JRPG fans. Despite boasting some of the best characters, most engrossing world-building, and sharpest storytelling of the entire genre, the franchise is made up of sets of trilogies and quadrilogies that require knowledge of every prior entry in the series to truly digest. Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel make up the iconic modern stories in the franchise, but there was always an iconic duology in the franchise that never saw an official English release – the Crossbell titles Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure. Now Trails to Azure has made the journey West.

As is the common warning with this series, if you haven’t played the prior entry Trails from Zero, then Trails to Azure will be pretty hard to comprehend and appreciate. That said, because this is merely a duology, they combine to be a great entry point for the series in general. They are in many ways the ultimate Legend of Heroes experience.

Taking place just a month after the events of the ending to Trails from Zero, we continue with Lloyd Bannings and his team at the Special Support Section as they race to solve tense situations and criminal cases that threaten to unravel the peace of the city.

Thankfully, the forty hour run-time of the previous game is like a walk in the park compared to the lengths of other Legend of Heroes titles — is the only required reading for getting into Trails to Azure. Smartly, the incredible new localisation by NIS America sprinkles some minor changes into the writing that drop new yet necessary connections to other titles into the events of the story — namely some references to the Cold Steel series, which take place during the same time period