The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel brought the sprawling chronicle of the world of Zemuria to PlayStation Vita and became, for Western players, the most accessible entry point into the Trails series. You play as Rean Schwarzer, a fresh student at the Thors Military Academy, who along with other newcomers is placed into the experimental Class VII. Instead of the usual division by noble birth, this class puts aristocrats' children side by side with ordinary townsfolk, and their field training across the Erebonian Empire gradually reveals just how deep the tension dividing the country runs.

The game's structure mirrors a school year: between missions you spend free days at the academy, deepen relationships with classmates, and complete small tasks, before heading out on a several-day field study in one of the empire's regions. Combat is turn-based with a positional element, since where characters stand matters, area attacks hit everything nearby, and bonus turns appear on the timeline that are worth fighting for. The Orbment system lets you assemble spells from quartz stones, allowing significant customization of each character, and combination attacks tied to relationships reward building up the party. On top of that there's a free-time system where you can only spend it with certain companions at a time, so each playthrough reveals a slightly different part of the class and gives you a reason to come back.

On Vita the game runs noticeably more modestly than on the big consoles, but the handheld version makes perfect sense precisely because of that: the enormous amount of dialogue, text, and side conversations is easy to take in bit by bit, and the game carefully remembers who you've talked to and when. Its strongest point is the world-building — newspapers, small side-character plots, and political background that pays off in the sequels. Critics praised the characterization and the well-thought-out combat system, with complaints aimed at the slower start and the fact that the story ends mid-sentence. Today Cold Steel is a recommended gateway into one of the most sprawling narratives in the whole genre.