In case it wasn’t clear, The Last of Us made it obvious: at their very best, big-budget video games should be comparable to prestige television, so much so that adapting one for HBO is a relatively straightforward affair. This bar-setting exercise is further exemplified by other PlayStation franchises marching toward adaptation: Ghost of Tsushima is set to be a film and anime, God of War has Prime Video aspirations, and Horizon Zero Dawn, previously on its way to becoming a Netflix series, is now being adapted for cinemas. It’s not an accident: games at this scale are a high-risk affair, too expensive to just be games.
Some developers, however, make it look easy by taking the exact opposite approach. Japanese developer Nihon Falcom, an early trailblazer in the RPG space, has steadily built out one of the grandest stories in video games with its Trails series. Thirteen games deep, the Trails games span the continent of Zemuria and the nations within it, juggling personal relationships with a wider interest in the march of history and how cultures and governments respond to the destabilizing advance of modernity. What Falcom has done here is astonishing and unparalleled for a single studio of its size — which, according to Bloomberg, sits at 68 employees — and it did so by resisting the mainstream gaming impulse to equate lavish expense with quality.
If most big-budget games are chasing the sensibilities of prestige TV, Falcom’s games are comparable to the soap opera: affordable, modest affairs that are not as widely acclaimed as their peers but passionately followed by a small but growing audience. (Sales of the Trails series sit at 8.8 million copies.) What they lack in visual flair and technical prowess (which is a lot) they make up for in narrative complexity and long, rewarding character arcs (which is astounding). The pleasures of the Trails series lie in watching small-stakes hangouts curdle into gut-wrenching conflicts as characters’ individual struggles get subsumed by political machinations and ideologues who seek to hijack technological progress for their own bigoted ends.
Under company president Toshihiro Kondo’s leadership, Falcom has been working to grow its audience slowly, narrowing the gap between Trails games’ Japanese releases and their worldwide localizations, partnering with other studios to bring its older titles to modern platforms, and, in its most confident step of all, releasing a new ground-up remake of the first game to give the curious the perfect on-ramp. That remake, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, is more than just a reworking of a cult favorite. It’s a document of Falcom’s progress — the studio’s technologically crudest game remade with the gloss of its most recently localized installment, 2022’s Trails Through Daybreak II.
The result is spectacular. 1st Chapter takes a clunky, patient turn-based RPG and transforms it into a slick and modern experience, incorporating 21 years of Falcom’s growth alongside innovations cribbed from other games, like Persona 5. Systems are thoughtfully layered to combine both action- and turn-based RPG mechanics with pizzazz; players that enter a fight with a clear strategy will be able to execute it while hardly feeling like they’re in a turn-based encounter at all. Those who like to take things slow can also kick it old-school, like nothing ever changed.
Of course, such an effective remake will then make things a bit awkward for those who want to continue on. 1st Chapter is the first half of a two-part story about Estelle and Joshua Bright, adoptive siblings who join an outfit of civic-minded mercenaries and discover a grand conspiracy in the kingdom of Liberl. A remake of the sequel seems to be underway, but after that, there are nearly a dozen more games across multiple sub-series, each set in a different region. Each sub-series has its own central plot and advances the wider Trails story, each presages future titles and references back to previous ones, and each is available on different platforms and has its own design quirks and difficulties. Playing them all can be a real headache.
Yet people still seek Trails out, still want to embark on this strange journey through Zemuria. Part of the appeal isn’t just the story being told, it’s talking about the story that’s told. The unique structure of these games allows people to talk to each other across the fictional time and space of its setting. Talking to someone who is a sub-series or two ahead of you, or playing out of order, is like corresponding with someone in another country: Things are a little different here, but a lot of what you love is also present. Let me tell you about it.
Everything about this is deliberate. In a 2019 interview with Eurogamer, Kondo stated that the studio’s founder, Masayuki Kato, made the express decision to focus on writing while others chased graphics. “As time progressed, other companies began putting a lot more manpower into graphics. We realised we’d need well over 100 people solely focused on that,” Kondo said. “But our founder [Kato] realised if we can get a writer who knows how to write good stories, and is able to build up their knowledge as a writer, that’s something we can make a sales point going forward.”
It’s not limited to Falcom, either. Other studios have found success this way. RGG Studio’s sprawling Like a Dragon saga continually wrings new flavors of gangster melodrama out of the same locations and characters, carefully expanding its scope to include new game mechanics and locales, finding new fans along the way. Similarly, Atlus built its massive Shin Megami Tensei franchise on grueling dungeon crawlers that weren’t afraid to be quite similar, applying the designs of Kazuma Kaneko in new contexts, widening the franchise’s appeal by shifting genres and tones until striking it big with the most recent Persona games.
This recycling of design work used to be frowned upon by video game fans and some press, who demanded some kind of graphical novelty accompany every release. All sorts of dirty words would be attributed to this process, from “asset flipping” to the more broadly popular accusation of “lazy devs.” Indulging in this attitude has led to the current graphical arms race, with its skyrocketing costs and widening gaps between new game releases. But there is another way. It’s a very old way, one that is reminiscent of the 8- and 16-bit eras, where technological progress was prized but not so ruthlessly pursued, because their visual fidelity had not yet put them in spitting distance of Hollywood.
Video games are not film or television, but they all can connect with people in ways indifferent to the money spent to produce them. For Falcom and Trails, it’s about building the most singularly sprawling story in video games, which the studio achieved by putting its resources where fans care most, and getting around to the rest when it was possible. And what’s incredible is that in spite of these games’ uneven visual quality, their niche anime appeal, the lack of a massive staff, and a frankly daunting number of installments totalling many hours of gameplay — the team just might pull it off.
Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter launches September 19th on Steam, the PS5, and the Nintendo Switch / Switch 2.
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