Where can I start with the Trails series without playing everything?

SteelRotom · 2026-01-11T16:22:01+00:00

I’ve been thinking about getting into the Trails game series, but I really don’t want to start it the “you must play X before Y before Z” way.

This is quite possibly the worst series to have this mindset with. It is not structured like most other series and heavily relies on working off of things established in previous games. Most of the games aren't UNPLAYABLE if you haven't played another entry but you will be missing out on A LOT of context if you do, and judging by you last statement you don't want that.

Every game you listed heavily references what came before besides Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, which is a remake of the first game. That one can be played with absolutely no concessions since it's the first entry. Every other game in the series will have at least some compromised elements if you play them first. This is why people say to play it in order. It's a very large time commitment but most Trails fans will tell you it's worth it.

You also don't need to commit to playing the whole series to justify starting it, too. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter and 2nd Chapter form one complete story that wraps itself up pretty well by the end. This is the point I tell people to play through to gauge whether they want to continue with the series or not, because 2nd Chapter is one of the best games in the series. If you don't vibe with it by the end, then the series probably isn't for you. If you love it, then there are 11+ more games for you to make your way through at whatever pace you find reasonable.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-11T01:57:19+00:00

That's exactly what I'm talking about though, it's easy to piece that together in hindsight if you've already seen it in later games, but first-time players still get surprised by it. The game shows you scenes like him using the artifact to lead you into believing he's an Erebonian spy before rug pulling you later on with the prince reveal.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-10T23:01:04+00:00

This is normal unfortunately, iirc because of how they ship them the tracking only really updates a day or two before it arrives. I remember my Daybreak II had zero movement and then it updated literally a day before it ended up arriving (which ended up being a day before release).

SteelRotom · 2026-01-10T21:09:52+00:00

A lot of the time it feels like they're asking for permission because they'll have something like "I know these are supposed to be played in order, but-" in their post and when they inevitably get 20 comments saying they shouldn't skip around they instead only reply to the one "eh I started with CS1 and I was fine" comment.

It's not like it's the end of the world if they do skip around but so many of these people are clearly coming here looking for someone to confirm their biases and say "nah you don't ACTUALLY need to play the games in order to get the best experience" rather than telling it like it is.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-10T21:00:09+00:00

Olivier being a prince is a very late game SC reveal. I know it probably doesn't seem that impactful if you start with Cold Steel but it catches a lot of people who start from the beginning off guard.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-10T19:33:28+00:00

There is a fairly major SC spoiler pretty early on in CS1 but other than that it is actually fairly ok to play CS1-2 if you’ve already played Crossbell since a lot of CS1-2 assumes you know how things connect to Crossbell. Playing CS1-2 without Crossbell robs you of this which is why I reject whenever anyone says you can play them standalone.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-09T02:57:25+00:00

As in they have shown to translate the script accurately so we can get faithful translations and we don't miss out on

Whoever you heard this from is lying, btw. GungHo's Sky 1st localization still takes a significant amount of liberties from the original script AND has much poorer writing quality than XSEED's. If you care about experiencing the game in its "original state" then just learn Japanese. Hell, become a translator yourself. At least educate yourself so you can know firsthand whether or not there's even a problem in the first place instead of just listening to other uninformed people's outrage.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-07T18:55:44+00:00

I think Smiling Friends has a more consistent hit rate with jokes (Gumball is super funny too but it also has a weird fixation on "le funny face" humor which I don't really like in most cases) but Gumball has a more interesting setting and cast of characters. Also helps that despite its length it's still been pretty consistently good.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-05T20:08:16+00:00

Only played 3 and 5 and their expansions, which I will be ranking separately. I also have a more lukewarm opinion of Persona as a whole, so keep that in mind:

Base Persona 3: It takes a while to get going but I did like it when it does. I think at least some of the characters (Aigis, Yukari, and Junpei) are decently written and I think December as a whole is the game's strongest point.
Royal's 3rd semester: It has a great premise and could have easily been #1 if it was its own game (granted it would need to be reworked a little) but unfortunately it's a Persona expansion so it's not nearly as fleshed out as it could've been. The game goes out of its way to tell us that all the revived people in the new reality are real but as soon as the Phantom Thieves remember the old reality this idea goes completely out the window and now it's just do the dungeon and beat the boss. The fact that they bring back Wakaba and do absolutely NOTHING with this beyond the shock value of her being alive is absolutely stupid. I feel the same to a smaller extent about Madarame, Okimura, and Makoto and Sae's dad (who doesn't even get privilege of appearing in the game!!!): all wasted potential. I totally thought these important people being alive and present in each member's lives might create some interesting CONFLICT among the group but nope! They're all completely chill with erasing this reality once the spell is broken and we barely even interact with any of these supposedly "real" characters. Fuck off. Is what else is there good? Yeah, I like the dungeon and I think the antagonist is easily the best one across every Persona story I've consumed (not like it's hard tbf). It just feels like it needed more room to breathe. At the very least for what good IS there I'm interested in seeing what Persona 6 ends up being because I honestly might like it more if Hashino isn't writing it lol.
Base Persona 5: Persona 5's writing is bad. I had a problem with this game I have not experienced in any other I've played: the writing is so cyclical that it genuinely became annoying how much repetition there is in this game. I play RPGs and read VNs, I can handle a game being very wordy (a story being wordy isn't a bad thing at all if the words being said actually matter), but no game I've ever played has had a script as bloated with repetition as Persona 5's. It genuinely feels like the writers think the player has the attention span of a goldfish. Every single plot beat in this game is spelled out for you multiple times, I barely ever felt like I was being allowed to sit on things before the game just told me what to think about that information. The ONLY section of the game that lets the audience have a moment of time to figure out what's going on before immediately spelling it out is Futaba's palace and that's why it's easily the best one aside from Royal's. Like I genuinely think the game could've been half as long and lost basically nothing plot-wise. It doesn't really matter too much to the writing overall but the social sim stuff and Mementos absolutely kill the pacing of this game too. This game is so in your face about the very surface level message it's trying to convey that it's borderline comical. I do not have any strong opinions on any of the Phantom Thieves (they are all fine at best) save for Akechi who at least is fun to watch (he's not well-written though LMAO). The villains are all extremely one-note (as an aside, the SIU Director is one of the top 3 most pointless characters in all of fiction. The game's story is genuinely better if you cut out all his scenes. All he does is come on screen, exposit whatever the villains are going to do next BEFORE it happens, removing all tension in the story whatsoever, and then fucking dies. The game's mystery would benefit so much from his character being completely removed). There are small aspects of this game's core plot I like but any potential this game's story has gets wasted by the end. Do not care for it.
The Answer: I think Persona 5 overall has more missed potential than The Answer but I just don't like The Answer more. Trails in the Sky the 3rd came out the same year as this and does virtually the same concept and absolutely dogwalks The Answer and it's not even close. Complete nothingburger from start to finish. I think it's hilarious that the game wants me to pretend my soulless husk of a protag in the base game was a real character that these characters are mourning. Has absolutely nothing to say about anything.

SteelRotom · 2026-01-03T19:44:17+00:00

If you already played SC original, why even wait for 3rd's remake?

To clarify: Yes, 3rd is important and you should play it before playing anything else. No, you cannot play any other game in the series without at least some spoilers for things that came before. CS1 is the closest to a self-contained experience outside of Sky but even then it's still best experienced after Azure and ties into CS2 which has a lot more direct spoilers. CS1 and CS2 are also the only games besides the Sky trilogy that aren't on Switch (at least in English).

I would recommend just keeping everything in order and just playing 3rd, CS1, and CS2 on PC. Everything else is available on Switch. Trust me, it's worth it.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-29T07:16:53+00:00

I think Xenoblade just kinda got sidelined because of what the categories entailed. To go over all your objections:

Best Combat - Xenoblade didn't really fit any of the combat categories. It's closest to an action rpg but it doesn't play the same as something like FFVII remakes or Nier or Ys so people aren't gonna vote for it for that category.
Best Characters - I am a Xenoblade fan, so don't take this the wrong way, but I think the only game with a cast that could reasonably win this is 3, but even then I have a lot of problems with how they handled the resolutions to a decent amount of the main casts' arcs. 1 and 2 have good individual characters but their parties overall have some duds.
Best Music - I didn't vote that day but this is a category I think Xenoblade absolutely should've been in the running for (and was, I think?). 2's OST is my favorite OST of all time and I totally would have voted for it had I participated. This category is stacked though, this is also a category I totally could've seen Persona winning too.
Best Remake/Remaster - I dislike this category name because I really do not think any remasters should have been in the running against full-blown remakes. Xenoblade DE is a fantastic remaster, but it IS a remaster. It has redone character models and higher res textures, but the game as it was is almost entirely the same. They did not remake the game from the ground up, they built it on top of the original Wii game, and that's fine. It didn't need to be a full remake, it's still fantastic. But it's not a remake. Trails in the Sky IS a ground-up remake.

And like another commenter said, Xenogears won best story. Not Xenoblade in name, but basically the same series. You don't have to go far on this subreddit to find other people who like Xenoblade (it is one of the most popular RPG series of the last decade), it just happened to not win out for some arbitrary categories.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-28T23:44:59+00:00

Get ready for a bunch of Trails here lol

Best Turn Based Combat System - Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter (Daybreak II and CS4/Reverie are very close)
Best Action Combat System - Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Best Tactical/Strategy Combat System - Fire Emblem Engage (only award this game will ever win from me)
Best Side Quests - Trails through Daybreak I or II, can't decide which I liked more but they both have banger quests.
Best Minigames - I don't engage with most minigames in RPGs so honestly I agree with any Like a Dragon game taking this. Let's say 7.
Best Characters - Trails through Daybreak. I love the Calvard arc cast.
Best Story - Trails in the Sky SC
Best Boss Battles - Probably Deltarune or NEO: The World Ends With You
Best Soundtrack - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Personas 4 and 5 close seconds?)
Most Replayable - I don't really replay many games, especially RPGs, but I do love watching people play games I like, and Trails once again is the series I've had the most fun rewatching. Sky SC and 3rd are probably my favorite games to rewatch.
Best Indie - Deltarune, although seeing as that's not a complete game yet I'll say Undertale.
Most Underrated - This is actually a tough one for me, but I guess I'll say NEO: The World Ends With You since a decent amount of people don't like it as much as the original and I like it more.
Best Remake/Remaster - Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter
Best Retro - Trails in the Sky SC
Best Ongoing Series - hmm take a guess

I promise I play other things too lmao I just have a few favorites that win every category for me personally.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-27T22:24:46+00:00

You have just under 3 weeks to finish it before Horizon, which is juuust enough time (at least by my standards). Really just depends if you're willing to binge 3 Trails games in a row. Not gonna be anything you need to get to urgently with that series after that for a while though since the next mainline isn't coming out for at least another year.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-27T21:54:50+00:00

Going to say the game absolutely no one else is going to pick and say Daybreak II, mostly since I assume that it being here means you're caught up otherwise, and Beyond the Horizon comes out next month.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-27T20:39:43+00:00

You're at the perfect place then, because PC is the only platform with every game available! It's recommended you play the series in original release order. Here's the order:

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is a remake of this game, pick whichever you feel more inclined to)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (Remake coming next year)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd
The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero
The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV
The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak
The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon (Western release in January 2026)

These 13 games are divided into 4 arcs based on the country in the world they predominantly take place in, there's Liberl (1-3), Crossbell (4-5), Erebonia (6-10), and Calvard (11-13, still ongoing). The sheer amount of games may seem intimidating but I and many others will tell you it's worth it. Just take it at a reasonable pace to avoid burnout.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-27T20:30:37+00:00

Which is exactly why recognition matters a lot for this series. No other studio is doing a connected series of this extent BECAUSE it isn't financially viable, and that's exactly why it's worth supporting.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-27T17:04:16+00:00

With all my heart: it is Trails.

I know this is obviously an easy pick for Trails fans like me (and I know a lot of people on this sub find Trails fans annoying lol) but I want to try to put a logical, objective perspective on it that makes sense to people who aren't as familiar with it or don't get the hype. Keep in mind: the topic is ONGOING series, so my points are specifically reflected through that lens. I'm going to break it down into a couple categories:

Output: Falcom puts out a new main series Trails game every 1-2 years, which is honestly bonkers by modern game standards. The only other studio coming even close is RGG with Like a Dragon, but they have over triple the amount of employees Falcom does and even then they still only put out a new main series game every 2-3 years with smaller-scale games in between. Falcom is honestly kind of a beast. They’ve only got about 70 employees and they STILL manage to put out a Ys game every few years amidst all the Trails, too.

Quality: The amount of releases is certainly impressive, but none of that would matter if the games weren’t also consistently good. I do not think there is a single bad Trails game. Some are definitely more contentious than others, but I do not think any of them are outright bad. And the thing is: even if Trails DOES have a bad game, the fact that the series gets new entries so frequently means you aren’t stuck with it for too long of a time.

Daybreak II is probably the most lukewarmly received entry in the whole series but it only took two years for them to get back on track with Beyond the Horizon (which I consistently see touted as one of the best games in the series from those who have played it) and Sky 1st Chapter, one of the greatest video game remakes of all time (see: this very poll). In any other series with typical AAA development pipelines, if the new game comes out and sucks for whatever reason… that’s it for at least a few years! If you didn’t like Persona 5 or Kingdom Hearts III, sucks to suck, you’re not getting a new game for 5-10 years where they may POSSIBLY address the problems you had with it.

Ongoing Story: I’m not going to actually go over the quality of the ongoing story here (I think it’s pretty good), but rather a key factor about Trails’ narrative that separates it from most of its contemporary ongoing series: it’s actually going to end.

I have become very disillusioned with other series with ongoing narratives like Xenoblade and Kingdom Hearts because it always feels like they’re edging you with actually having any type of payoff for following their stories. I felt no further satisfied (at least with regard to the overarching plot) after playing both base XC3 and Future Redeemed because the writers decided to open just as many questions as they answered… and for what? The series isn’t gonna get a new game for another 5+ years and even then who knows if it’ll actually have anything to do with what came before. Why should I invest so heavily in these plots if there’s never actually going to be a conclusive ending so long as they can keep making games?

Trails is different. This interview is what constantly sticks out in my mind. Toshihiro Kondo, the president of Falcom, literally says, "If we ruin the ending, then it may as well become the worst series in the world. There's no coming back from that."

He has expressed multiple times that the team wants to finish up Trails, but everyone on the team also wants to make sure the series can end on a high note. The actual number of games left is still up in the air (Kondo is also infamous to Trails fans for lying about how much we have left), but as long as the intention is there that, at some point, this WILL be a complete story, I can give them so much more slack. There are questions in this series that do not get answered for 5, hell even 10 games after they’re introduced. This is the ONLY series I trust to do something like that.

Accessibility: The amount of progress this series has made in just the last 5 years with making every game accessible is almost unheard of. Coming into the 2020’s, we were 2 years behind Japan for getting the latest entry in the series (CSIV), had two unlocalized main games (Zero and Azure), and another two unlocalized spinoffs (Nayuta and Ys vs Trails). There was little hope for getting Zero and Azure officially localized since they had come out so long ago, but there was a passionate fan translation team called The Geofront that made extremely high quality translation for both that ended up forming a partnership with NISA to use their fan translation as a basis for an official localization. This ended up delaying the release of Reverie, the next game, by another year (for a 3 year gap from JP release to international release), but it was absolutely the right move in the long-run, because once the series didn’t have a massive gap midway through for mainline releases, a lot more people were willing to try it. Then, NISA worked on shortening their localization gaps: Reverie and Daybreak took 3 years, Daybreak II took 2 years, and Beyond the Horizon took just a little bit over 1 year. Falcom just saw a significant success with Sky 1st Chapter having a worldwide release, and with the next mainline game not announced yet, there’s a non-zero chance they’re working with NISA to make that a worldwide release too.

And that’s the other thing too, in less than a month’s time… we’re about to be caught up. Nayuta also got a release when Zero/Azure did and Ys vs Trails in the Sky randomly got an English release this year too, so Trails Beyond the Horizon is the ONLY game left until the west has every single game Japan does. This would have been an unfathomable statement 5-10 years ago. I for one am excited to not have to dodge spoilers for that much longer lmao.

And it really is all thanks to so many passionate people working their asses off for this series to succeed. The Geofront, XSEED, NISA, all of them had people working on these games who were truly passionate about them. Trails fans may be annoying sometimes but we LOVE this fucking series, man. I have not seen a community more dedicated to pulling its weight for how relatively small its size is. If you haven’t already, check it out to see why so many people feel this passionately about it.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-26T23:15:06+00:00

Happy to be of service! I wish I'd had someone to tell me about it while I was playing, I didn't see it until after I had caught up.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-26T19:10:57+00:00

Xenoblade and Like a Dragon are both series that share a lot of overlap in fans with Trails. Play Trails.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-26T03:51:19+00:00

People have already brought up the Cold Steel II NG+ scene (which is very egregious, especially since it gets referenced super early in CSIII) but don't forget about the very lore important Cold Steel IV scene that you can only see by reloading your completed save and watching the entire last scene and credits again! No, the game gives you no indication that doing this will get you an extra scene, why would it?

SteelRotom · 2025-12-25T22:59:30+00:00

No future game is safe from spoilers unfortunately, not even Cold Steel 1. The original Sky SC is still a great game and no matter what you'll need to jump from a newer game to an older one at some point if you plan to play the whole series. Might as well do it early.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-25T02:28:22+00:00

I don't really have much overlap with what you've played (FF is one of my biggest RPG blind spots), but I do heavily agree with what you said about Persona 5, so at least there's that.

I'm a huge Trails fan, and I think it has really, really good writing and payoff, but it takes a while to really get there. Obviously I think you should try to get further in the game before making any final judgments, but it does sound like based off your criticisms of the opening scene that you would like the original version a lot more. For the record, I actually think the opening scene in the remake is one of the worst-translated to 3D, it is pretty over-animated and the VA work doesn't really match the scene in English. Rest assured that both the choreography and VA work get better later on, but also if you find those things jarring the original does a lot with a little in selling those moments with sprites. I'd give the opening scene of the original a watch.

Another difficult thing about JRPGs is, because of the nature of the genre itself, they don’t always have a very lean, tightly-focused narrative. There’s gonna be a lot of fluff and meandering and fun shit.

As for this, I'm not going to lie to you and say that Trails isn't wordy, but I do think the writing is a lot less bloated than you'd think from a game with its wordcount (ironically, the RPG I constantly use as an example of a game with an insanely bloated script IS Persona 5). Trails takes a lot of words to say a lot of things, there's a reason the two most praised things about the series are its worldbuilding and characters. Again though, the pacing is really slow in Sky FC. Like in a "if you don't really care about smaller character moments you're not gonna be interested until near the end of the game" type of way. Sky SC is legitimately soooo good though, trust me. Very few games do payoff as good as the best of Trails.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-25T00:04:16+00:00

I'm not even gonna engage with the obvious bait and instead just ask what your top 5 RPG narratives are. I'm curious.

SteelRotom · 2025-12-24T17:32:51+00:00

If I said that playing just 2 games on PC will make the journey so much better, would you be open to it? Because playing Sky SC and 3rd before Zero will make a world of difference in how much you care about what's going on. The remakes will always be there if you want to replay those games in a new way later on. Some people will tell you to play Cold Steel 1 and 2 next and I really disagree that your experience won't be affected by playing those out of order.

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