Where Trails the 3rd felt like a standalone expansion pack or cut content compilation, Trails From Zero moves on to a new setting and a new cast of characters.

It swaps the "world tour" formula of the original games with kind of the inverse. Instead of trekking from city to city solving problems, you are the cops working in a single city, named Crossbell. Instead of collecting a bunch of stray tagalongs to join your party, the game focuses very much on a core cast of four, only using the occasional guest character from time to time.

I gotta say, those four characters are much more boring than anything the original trilogy has to offer, but in true trails fashion, by the umpteenth hour with them they have become somewhat lovable in their own ways. The focus on the single city is also very suited to the Trails formula, giving you various neighbourhoods with their own local characters, all progressing their little background stories that you can see if you're willing to go around snooping on them.

Crossbell is kind of a neutral-zone, city-state, nestled between two of the countries you mostly only hear about indirectly in the first games. Your party is a new team of super special ultra cops, able to cut through bureaucracy and procedure in order to get the jobs done that boring old normal cops can't, and don't think too hard about the implications of the situation. Remember, this is some anime bullshit. Kind of like how I mentally add 10 years to every characters age to make everything less stupid and/or creepy.

It is pretty funny, though, to be playing as cops who are mostly annoyed at these asshole "bracers" out there being vigilantes without any kind of oversight, with the citizenry all worshipping them for it.

What got me hooked on the original game was the way the game mostly presented itself in its art style and surface level story as a bog-standard JRPG, almost in a cozy way, only to slowly open a curtain and reveal what it managed to sneak into the room. Somehow through the endless snippets of meandering dialog and side quests about nothing, you realize you cared way more about these characters than you thought. And somehow all of these goofy JRPG quests have morphed into a weirdly intricate political drama. Yes with some magic space mechs, or something, but hey what can you do?

Zero doesn't so much pull off the "I care about these characters way more than I thought" trick, but it 100% pulls off the sneaky exciting political drama leading to an unexpectedly high-adrenaline climax bit. Probably does that last bit even better than the original games. Even still, though, I did warm to the cast, to a degree. To the point that when characters from the original games show up for cameos, I was less excited than you'd think. Didn't help that it felt mostly like fan service, and in service to specifically what I would call the maybe second dumbest plot thread of the prior games. And this game also has sort of the first creeping in of like, Persona and dating game bullshit, just ever so slightly, at the edges. Not enough to be worthy of mention, except I'm in the middle of playing some games further down the line in the series and boy do I have opinions on the matter.

But we're not there yet. Instead, settle in and enjoy what might be my favourite game in the series, in the end. Still a ways to go.

Four Stars.

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The Legend of Heroes: Trails From Zero is the:

• Greatest Trails Game of all time.
• 2nd greatest Video Game of all time.
• 5th greatest Thing of all time.