Trails from Zero: Chest Messages and more

I’m a fan of many RPG series and the “The Legend of Heroes” series (also known as the Trails series because all games start with “Trails” in the title) is something special for me. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that, in addition to extremely good storytelling, the games contain many interesting dialogues and have an immense scope. Furthermore, a coherent story is told here on a continent (Zemuria) and each arc (sub-series) takes place in a different country of this continent (comparable to the Elders Scrolls series). So far this has resulted in…

• “Trails in the Sky” (1-3) ➔ Liberl Arc
• “Trails from Zero” & “Trails to Azure” ➔ Crossbell Arc
• “Trails of Cold Steel” (1-4) ➔ Erebonia Arc
• “Trails into Reverie” ➔ Final Arc Liberl + Crossbell + Erebonia
• “Trails in the Dark” (1-2) ➔ Calvard Arc

There have also been other RPG series like Shadow Hearts or Star Ocean where the individual parts play on the same world (in the same universe), but only the Trails series really pulls it off across multiple games and only ever manages to do so revealing a small part in an arc (like the members of the “Society”) so that there is always more story for the other parts and many characters appear again. Personally, I first came across the Trails games through the Ys series. Both series of games come from Falcom, use the same graphics engines and already have around 10 titles. The Ys games are just more action-adventure games while the Trails games are pure J-RPGs. You might think they’re set in the same universe, but they’re different worlds… and there are just little easter eggs pointing to the other series.

One problem with the Trails series, however, is that the parts tend to be jumbled up and thrown out in the wrong order in English. On the one hand, this is due to the different publishers, but also to the immense amount of dialog texts that hardly any company wants to translate, which is why even fan translations were taken over or, better said, bought. So the Sky Arc came out quite late in English with large gaps, but the Crossbell Arc and the Erebonia Arc were skipped. Only now is the crossbell arc made up for and “Trails from Zero”, the part this post is about, is one of those parts.

Even if the translation of the first games was a bit messy, it also had something good: the western translators were able to come up with an Easter egg, which can also only be found in the English variants of the first 5 Trails parts: chest messages!

These are actually pretty funny. I took some screenshots on the Nintendo Switch and would like to show the best texts from the treasure chests here.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5