Trails Into Reverie serves as an epilogue to both the Trails from Zero to Azure series and the Trails of Cold Steel series, which, whenTrails Into Reverie serves as an epilogue to both the Trails from Zero to Azure series and the Trails of Cold Steel series, which, when combined, make up six games and close to 600 hours of gameplay. Each game features a sizeable cast of characters, all with their own unique set of abilities and individual storyline separate from the overarching story of the series, almost all of whom make an appearance in Reverie with their move-sets intact or even expanded upon. This adds up to a cast of more than fifty playable characters that, in addition to being fun to play, each get a noticeable part to play in the story. This is fantastic, as most games with a heavy amount of fan-service tend to simply have the characters show up and then slip into the background of the plot, forgetting what makes people fans of the characters in the first place.
In addition, the story manages to bring these characters from disparate backgrounds together in a way that feels natural, then gives uses them to give a very cathartic conclusion to one of the longest running tales in video games. Included with the casts of previous games are several new additions that are each highly enjoyable in their own right.
Helping along with a great story are minor but very noticeable and appreciated changes to combat. Untied Fronts turn the AP of previous games, which was only mildly useful at the best of times, into a tool that improves the flow of combat and makes brave orders much more reliable in a pinch, letting the game give harder fights without becoming more frustrating.
All of this comes to a point with a fight against one of the most interesting (and cool) antagonists in the series in one of the Trails series' famous multi-party boss fights, after which, for the first time in many games, there is a true and satisfying ending. As a long-time fan of the Trails series, the lack of a cliffhanger at the end felt somewhat surreal, though not unappreciated. A truly great way to close my favorite series of turn-based RPGs.
Also, there is the namesake of the game, the Reverie Corridor super dungeon, which takes up roughly thirty hours of this game's hundred hour playtime. The Reverie Corridor is an enormous dungeon made up of small, boring, randomly generated hallways which you revisit several times throughout the game and comprises the entirety of the post-game. It is a sequel dungeon to the Reverie Corridor that was the final dungeon of Trails of Cold Steel 2, which was, prior to this game, the dullest and most hated dungeon in the series. I've never spoken to anyone who didn't absolutely despise that dungeon, let alone like it, so the decision to bring it back mostly unaltered leaves me completely baffled.
I almost don't know what to say in criticism about the returned Reverie Corridor. It's prima facie terrible. Running around bland hallways floating in space and killing the same enemies over and over for hours without advancing the plot? In a series whose dungeons are mostly know for being punchy and to the point? Large amounts of grinding in a series that previously had almost none? Obviously that's terrible. I would say the level of fun I was having with the game dropped whenever I went there, but it was less that the fun "dropped" and more that it was simply turned off.
The sole positive of the Reverie Corridor is the return of daydreams, which would be amazing, had one not needed to play through a soul-crushingly monotonous and gratingly long combat hallway. In fact, I find myself resenting the Corridor even more, as some of the best stories cannot be unlocked without ridiculous amount of time wasted, such as Thor's Open House, which contains the wonderful conclusion to Ash's character arc, but cannot be played unless one commits to spending somewhere around 25 hours (!!!) wandering aimlessly through one single dungeon.
Some of this might be forgiven if the Reverie Corridor had any effect on the plot at all, but it does not. Why, then, did the creators of this game feel it necessary to name the game "Trails into Reverie"? Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Trails into Reverie is that its worst aspect could be wholly excised without anything being lost as, without this one segment of the game, one would still have a complete and highly enjoyable experience.
I still recommend Trails into Reverie, as nearly everything outside of the Reverie Corridor is fantastic, and, if you're a Trails fan looking to follow the story as it moves into the second half, playing the game is mandatory anyway, but I find that I consider it the weakest of the ten games out in English so far. My advice is to play the game while avoiding the Corridor as much as possible and to look up the contents of the daydreams on youtube or something, though one should be aware that this constitutes about ten hours total, and these daydreams have much more of a gameplay element than the cutscene heavy ones in Trails in the Sky the Third.… Expand