The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie

The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie has a great story with an engaging turn-based battle system. While it does have issues with a bloated cast of characters, impeccable pacing makes every interaction manageable.

Trails into Reverie is a fine epilogue for Crossbell and Cold Steel arcs, offering necessary closure and clear hints about the series' future.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie is not your average game; near decades of world-building, character arcs, and detailed lore have led to this culmination. The franchise isn’t perfect, but this series is wholly one-of-a-kind. It is a monolith that should be recognized alongside icons like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, and Persona. The details of the continent of Zemuria are unlike anything else I have experienced in gaming, and its cast now has several of my favorite characters in the medium. Reverie has the intimidating task of closing the page on three arcs that expanded across almost twenty years of characters and storytelling. Even if the narrative in this chapter falls short compared to past entries, it still stands above most other games in the genre. If Trails into Reverie is the last time we see most of these beloved characters, it serves as a terrific send-off.

Trails into Reverie is an all-star excursion that feels like one big franchise festival; your more traditional Trails campaign being the spine of what can be a brilliantly robust RPG, complete with more than enough gameplay depth to keep even the most hardcore players happy. As an epilogue to the Crossbell and Cold Steel games, it can seem a little tired in terms of creativity, but its faults are easily overlooked when you're back in the saddle with all of your favourite heroes.

Capping off the Crossbell and Cold Steel arcs with a nice little bow, The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie hits some high highs – such as with C and the True Reverie Corridor – and when it does, it's an RPG fan's paradise. But as an overall package, it feels like an easy excuse to get a huge number of characters together rather than do something meaningful with them. It's far from the series' best, but fans will find a lot to love here, even if we'd recommend seeking it out on another platform for the best experience, or waiting for a patch.

While Trails into Reverie does serve as a strong epilogue to multiple in-game story arcs, it also spends a significant amount of time spinning its wheels.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie is a solid addition to the series, serving as an excellent epilogue to the Crossbell and Erebonian arcs.

A feature-rich (at times astonishingly so) package of content - major, minor and entirely optional alike - Nihon Falcom have proven once again with Trails into Reverie why they remain one of the best and most renowned RPG developers still going.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie ties a neat ribbon on the much-prolonged and at times rough arcs of Zero/Azure and Cold Steel. It has plenty of issues of its own, including a relatively weak main plot, gradually declining soundtrack quality, and combat that reeks of excess by this point through feature creep. However, it uses everything the series has built up thus far to make for an experience that is dense with fun things to do. There’s a lot here I was hoping to see more of with the previous Cold Steel games, so better late than never on that front. Trails into Reverie is a hard sell if you aren’t already a fan of the series and haven’t played a good amount thus far (even the much more turbulent Cold Steel IV), which hurts it more than many games in the series. But it does quite well to make sure that the people who have kept up thus far feel sufficiently rewarded. It’s not the highest mark of this series by any stretch, but I found it to have still been probably the highest one Trails has had since Azure.

Landed on our markets three years later than the land of the Rising Sun, from a technical point of view The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie is a cross-gen title that is not exactly avant-garde.