- Genre: JRPG
- Platform: PS5
- Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Steam
I played the original release of this game on PSP but admittedly it’s been long enough that I don’t really have much of a consistent memory of the experience. I do know I enjoyed my time with it, but I feel vaguely not enjoying the grind of leveling. Going into this I was a bit suspicious of whether that would happen again. Luckily what I found was a game that felt like a heavily modernized JRPG in terms of how it respects the player time, but this is definitely not a game without problems.
The thing that increasingly makes JRPGs live and die for me is combat, but not necessarily how good it is. It’s more often than not how much I need to engage in combat at this point. In particular, how much I need to engage in useless combat. I hate combat for the sake of combat because it feels like wasted time to me. The remake of Trails 1st really does a lot of good things to reduce that.
Similar to PSP, enemies are visible in the overworld, which on its own does a lot to reduce my need to engage in combat. However, there’s a number of things that reduce my need to be in combat. For one, there’s XP scaling based on level. At a surface level this allowed me to simply avoid combat with enemies that are lower level than me by knowing that the rewards are no longer relevant. On the opposite side though, this meant that I could effectively power level by engaging in combat with things higher level than me. What this really meant is that I was always in a level band that was relevant to the gameplay of the story around me. As a balance point it reduced my need to be in combat to just when it was important or worthwhile.
This is combined with the fact that you can do some basic real-time combat in the overworld, allowing me to mow through weak enemies simply to get rewards without being in the slower turn-based combat. If I needed specific items for cooking or Sepith, I could quickly dispatch a bunch of weak enemies and get them. This change also meant that running past enemies allowed me to simply run past them because the game no longer has the JRPG mechanic of battle starting immediately on first contact. It’s a small mechanical change with huge implications to the flow of the game.
Once in combat, there’s then a highly enjoyable system in place. It’s the same type of combat on PSP where the player has a mix of skills and magic. However, it leans into two things that I don’t think are seen as much as I would prefer – positioning and turn order.
The player has a wide variety of shapes of attacks from AOE circles to lines to cones, as well as bonuses for some attacks from the side or back. All of this allows the player to enforce positioning as a benefit. There were many times where I would knowingly drag some of my own units into different areas in an attempt to pull mobs into the line of fire and increase total damage output. The flip side of this is that defensively it’s also important to pay attention to where magic attacks from enemies will be so that you don’t leave your own party in range of attacks.
The reason this is important is that turn order is not static and magic attacks are not always immediate. Under normal circumstances magic attacks require a turn to start and a turn to execute. While that is happening, it’s obvious where the attack will go due to targeters on the ground. This gets into turn order manipulation. Some attacks can delay turns or reduce player “speed” that leads to determining turn order. Attacks can be cancelled by executing some moves that impede the target. Stuns can cancel a target’s turn if timed correctly. Basically, combat becomes a balance of getting damage out while also attempting to delay or cancel the enemy’s turn as much as possible, allowing the player to get through any battle with as little damage taken as possible.
Generally speaking, this all works great – right up until it doesn’t. That gets into my one big problem with the game. The boss fights in the game are just not tuned well, and it all comes down to the rage mechanic. Pretty much every boss in the game has some rage trigger where they gain a ton of basically every stat in the game. They gain speed to attack more often, typically several turns in a row. They gain attack and defense to be tankier and hit harder. They gain healing buffs to get their HP back up. It’s a good idea to make boss fights more dynamic. The issue comes in with the fact that the rage mechanics are universally able to send the player’s party from 100% to dead without the player even getting a turn to mitigate the situation.
It’s incredibly frustrating to be 5+ minutes into the fight, feeling like you’re in control, then having a rage turn kick in and send the party to its death. If it was generally avoidable that would be one thing, but a lot of them simply happen because of health drop. What ended up being my go-to was to just save all of my big attacks up until I had nearly stunned the boss, then dump them all at once. In a typical boss fight, I could get the boss to around 50% health, let it have a turn, then just absolutely nuke it with every attack I had – full 200 combat point attacks, party combo attack, etc – and get it to 0. That would generally avoid the rage mechanic, whether it was health based or due to killing off one of the enemy’s party members. However it was slow to grind out to the point where I felt comfortable doing that attack dump and when it didn’t work and I would be sent from 100 to 0 with no ability to do anything to prevent it, it was infuriating.
The nice thing is that unlike the original release, I could immediately retry the fight with lowered enemy strength. Boy did I take advantage of that option to just get through fights without the time spent on it again.
So I suppose at the end of the day this is a really good and generally fun JRPG that feels tuned to inherently screw over the player specifically during boss fights. I don’t remember that of the original, but I suspect that’s just a consequence of time since I played it. It’s so close to being a great game if a little more care was put into the tuning of boss fights. They can be difficult normally and still allow the player to actively avoid being nuked. It’s a thing I hope they look at before 2nd chapter comes out because it felt like the one thing heavily holding this game back.