Major Spoilers for the Sky and Crossbell arcs of Trails
Last year I finished Trails to Azure, the fifth game in the Trails series from Falcom and the climactic game of the Crossbell arc. The virtues of Trails are extremely numerous and I'm not interested in going through them all here. I wouldn't have played five 40-80 hour rpg's in one series if I didn't think they were stellar. If you're not initiated into the Falcom cult, don't take any of these criticisms to mean the dumb bad rpgs you like are better than Trails (they're not).
I want to talk about how the Trails series handles mortality. I've generally been very pleased with these games, but in Trails to Azure a lot of little problems with the series came to a head for me. I'm writing this because it's been several months and I still really want to whine about it. (If I make any mistakes or forget something please forgive me, these games are very long and I’ve played them over about five years.)
Nobody dies in Trails in the Sky FC. Fine, it's a prologue game. It's a little weird that a whole-ass coup attempt goes down and there are zero casualties, but whatever.
Trails SC introduces the series' favorite backstory: someone the character liked (usually a woman) died and they're secretly still sad about it. It's never someone the audience knows. We learn the barest details about one character's sister just in time to learn about his all-consuming guilt over her death. The very next chapter, we learn there was a separate woman another character knew, and how he is also consumed by guilt over her death.
This all works, although it's a bit cheap and repetitive, and it has some ugly undertones I've discussed in the past.
At the end of SC, 100+ hours into the Trails journey... a major character, who we know and like and have spent time with, gets killed off!! It's very good and affecting! A loathsome villain beefs it too. It's darkly cathartic, because a character we like kills him, and he doesn't feel great about it.
Trails SC is great. For a lot of reasons, not just that it kills people (but definitely in part because it kills people). SC is the reason I think the Sky trilogy stands toe to toe with genre classics like Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger. It’s just a rad rpg, and it lands even harder because of the prologue game investing us in the world first, and the epilogue game letting us say goodbye in the most loving way possible.
Anyway, I didn't expect this would be the last time anyone died in Trails.
(In the first five games anyway. If Cold Steel contradicts any of this, please allow me to discover that for myself.)
Trails 3rd mostly takes place in an abstract dreamscape straight out of a weird arty rpgmaker game. It's essentially an excuse for a bunch of cute side stories about all the characters from FC and SC. The side stories are very good. The new main character has a strong arc (about two women he knew that died, and how he's sad about it) that ties the game together very nicely. (And from a play perspective, the final dungeon and boss gauntlet is one of the coolest setpieces I've ever played in an RPG.)
Nobody dies in 3rd, although they bring back the dreamscape ghosts of several dead characters so you can feel more feelings about them. It's easy to be cynical about this approach, but I think it works. 3rd's central Dead Woman Backstory is also a lot stronger than the ones in SC, because there's a bunch of flashbacks about her interspersed throughout the game. When we finally learn how she died, it's after getting to know and care about her, and it hurts a whole lot.
Even though no one dies in 3rd, it still reckons with mortality and darkness in a real, honest way. It's a story about untangling the knots of your past, about how hard and necessary it is to say goodbye. It’s my favorite story of any Falcom game.
I think it's telling about Falcom’s priorities that the later Evolution remakes censor 3rd's darkest scene, even though it forms the emotional foundation for the biggest catharsis in Trails from Zero.
No one you like dies in Trails from Zero. Fine, it's a prologue
game. It's a little weird for a murder-cult to take over a whole city in
a violent uprising and no one beefs it, but whatever. The extremely
irredeemable villain dies, and everyone feels really bad about it. It's a
well-done scene. You may think the guy's a huge piece of shit, but you
know Lloyd wants to save him. You feel how much it hurts him when he
fails.
No one dies in Trails to Azure. This is flabbergasting. I could not believe it as I was playing the game. It’s the reason I’m writing this piece. It keeps faking you out too, killing off small side characters who absolutely could die and the series could keep going just fine. Then a few scenes later, the explosive reveal: oh joyous day, they survived!
Azure introduces a character whose whole deal is that she's a craaaaaaazy murderer. She loves blood and death and the screams of the innocent. She uses a gun that's also a chainsaw so that she can shoot people and also carve them in half with a chainsaw. She kills a few nameless extras, mostly off-screen. She seemingly offs a side character, but then it turns out the side character is only injured. But she's permanently injured in ways that will affect her life forever, and there are a few heart-wrenching scenes where you watch her deal with that. Actually nevermind, we find out in the ending she's fully recovered. So the Crazy Murderer actually does not murder or even permanently harm a single named character.
A third into Azure, terrorists attack the capitol building while heads-of-state are there arguing over a treaty. It's a dramatic and exciting setpiece. It's weird that no one dies! Maybe this is just me as an American talking, but it's a little odd to play a game where terrorists attack a skyscraper with aircraft and it's ultimately bloodless. I guess some of the nameless terrorists die, off-screen.
So many violent dramatic things happen in Azure. Buildings gets bombed to the ground (don't worry -- everyone had evacuated beforehand). An entire fortress gets vaporized (don't worry -- someone has A Feeling that everyone in the fortress is actually fine somewhere). You fight an unstoppable juggernaut you have no chance of beating (but she has a code of honor and refuses to actually kill you).
It all starts to feel cheap, because there aren't any lasting consequences. You don't feel the violence of the political uprising or the power of the villains because no one you care about is ever in any danger. The main villain of the game is the worst casualty of this. She impales another villain on a half dozen energy lances and flings him across the room into a wall. He collapses in a pool of his own blood and utters his last words. After you fight, she reveals that the lances she stabbed him with really just put him in a state of "suspended animation", and he's actually fine.
None of the villains die. The ones who aren't redeemed more or less wave goodbye and go "see you again in
Trails of Cold Steel!" It does not inspire much suspense when the main villain does this, considering she couldn't even off a tiny side character without 4kids-censoring herself.
There are a couple more "someone died in the past and I'm sad about it" backstories. It's never characters we know. Death in Crossbell is something that happens in the past, to other people, a trial of the heart to be mulled over and overcome. It doesn't exist in the present.
At the end of
Azure, the heroes reject the easy answers offered by the villains, and the specter of war looms over Crossbell. This is what the story's been building towards for two games. Instead of sacrificing an innocent child for power, they'll face down a terrifying uncertain future.
Then there's a two minute montage of the war. The heroes win. At the end there's a big picture that shows all our heroes happy and alive and well and victorious.
Trails to Azure is full of beautiful, gut wrenching character journeys. (And I have to add: on hard mode, it's an absolutely enthralling and demanding game to play. That did a whole lot to soothe my angsts with the story.) But it feels resistant to meaningful status quo changes in a way that undermines its own drama. Villains can't die or do anything too evil because then they can't be redeemed and join your party in the next game. Main characters can't beef it because then they won't be able to join the 100,000-character cast in Cold Steel. Side characters can't die because... well because they don't want to make you feel bad, okay?
The character arcs in Azure are beautiful, but they don't have the dramatic weight they could because there's next to no stakes. And the Ultimate Feel Good Happy End is odd coming from a developer that very routinely has tragic endings. How many Ys games end with characters you really care about either dying or ascending into goddess-hood where Adol can never see them again? Azure sets you up to expect the same thing -- KeA is the most death-flagged RPG heroine in existence. Think of how much more the surprise happy ending would have landed if the characters had suffered and sacrificed more to get there.
Ys games don't have the cast size or the word count of Trails. I have to wonder if, in the process of making five games and writing millions and millions of words about these characters, the developers fell too in love with them. And they couldn't hurt them in the ways the story so often calls for.
