Finished Trails into Reverie.

Well, that took a while, more than 90h, but I went for full completion - main game, post game dungeon, trials, daydreams, minigames, everything done.

I love the Trails series, it’s one of my favorite JRPG series ever, but it has its fair share of problems - they use the same formula for most games so it’s easy to get burned out if you play many of them in sequence, there’s a lot of cast bloat due it being a series with all games interconnected, an annoying tendency to keep trying to redeem villains, and just being too verbose at times (often because they want to use all members of that huge cast).

Why I’m talking about this? Because while I had a lot of fun with the previous game (Cold Steel 4), it also did showcase all the problems above at full strength, but Reverie does something different and provides a much necessary “break” from the usual Trails experience.

The game is split in three routes, two for protagonists of previous games (Lloyd and Rean) and one for a mysterious new masked character (“C”). This breakdown is a good shift from the usual game dynamic, lessens the issues with cast bloat since they are all spread around, and "C"s route is focused on new cast members making it a much fresher experience.

Another major change is the Reverie Corridor. Most of games in the series are heavy into sidequests, but this time the “main” game barely contains any, only a few optional extra-challenging monsters. Instead, almost all optional content takes place in this dream-like world where time flows differently and memories from the real world as hazy. Here you have access to the full cast of the game (and even some extras!), a randomly generated dungeon you can use to grind freely, a ton of minigames including series classics like Pom and Vantage Masters, and a very nice section called “Daydreams” with a lot of mini-stories showing what’s going on around with both the main cast and some familiar NPCs - very similar to the Doors from Sky 3rd.

This keeps the main story very tight and focused while also having a lot of fun optional content, and gives you freedom to decide if and when to focus on each. I don’t expect this to become the norm for future games in the series, but I enjoyed this structure a lot and I hope they do use something like this time to time to avoid burnout from the usual formula.

Finally, on the story, this is an epilogue for both Zero+Azure and Cold Steel 1-4, so obviously not a game for someone starting the series. It does a much better job story-wise then CS4 IMO, in particular in the Crossbell section - it’s still the weakest of the three routes largely due to it just rethreading old plot lines, but it fixes a lot of the things that bothered in the last two games. Rean’s route is a nice epilogue that touches on the impact of the last game’s events in Erebonia, and "C"s route is just great fun with a cast of anti-heroes.

And now the wait for the next game begins. Really looking forward to see the Calvard arc.

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Started Grisaia Phantom Trigger 5.5 to 08.

Phantom Trigger is the 4th game in the Grisaia series, with the three first games (Fruit, Labyrinth and Eden) being available as a bundle as well on the Switch. This last game was released as a bunch of 2-5h “Episodes”, and this is second half of that game.

The original Grisaia games have a very interesting structure. The “Common” route of Fruit is 70% of the story and it’s full slice-of-life comedy, but once it splits into the individual routes for each heroine it gets crazy dark as you learn their backstories. Labyrinth shifts into having the main story being dark (it’s the MC’s backstory) with “lighter” after-stories for each heroine. Finally Eden goes towards a more action-focused story, but I wasn’t a big fan of it, and one of the main reasons is that most of the cast was just regular girls, so having they become involved in a spy conspiracy didn’t really work for me, it was just too hard to believe.

Phantom Trigger is more action-focused, much like Eden, but it fixes the above problem by stating from the beginning that the cast is part of “school of assassin” of sorts. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier games, but so far has been a completely independent story with a brand-new cast.

The first five episodes were focused on introducing the cast.

• 01: Introduction of the initial cast (Shiori, Haruto, Rena, Tohka, Chris and Murasaki) and premise.
• 02: Rena’s backstory, adds Maki.
• 03: Tohka’s backstory, adds Gumi.
• 04: Chris’ backstory, adds Taiga.
• 05: Murasaki’s backstory, adds Yuuki.

I only had time to start 5.5 for now, but it seems to be centered on Shiori, the focus character of the first episode - a new “civilian” teacher that just joined this school. Looks like this chapter will be about how she is adapting to the her new school and students, but I’ll talk more about it next week.

As for my overall impression of the story, a redditor once described Phantom Trigger as “pretty cozy comfort food reading”, and I think that’s an accurate description. It doesn’t do anything special or amazing, but it’s been consistently fun and entertaining.