My Journey with the Trails series: Part 2 — Nuts and Bolts

If you missed Part 1 of this blog series, you can read it here.

In my first blog post about the Trails series, I focused on my own personal journey getting into the series, and I’m excited to delve into the elements that series fans love. Before we get to that, however, we need to build some foundation. I have to assume that some people reading this series of posts have not played a Trails game in their life, but after the first post, have developed a curiosity for what it holds.

To that end, I’d like to spend this post bringing prospective new players into the fold with this entry, focusing on the series’ gameplay, and why it’s an RPG series that stands apart from its contemporaries.

I solemnly promise to the series vets reading this that I will touch on lore and characters in the next post. You are welcome to brandish your pitchforks and torches and march in my direction if I do not make good on that promise.

While its characters and ongoing story are huge appeals to veteran fans of the franchise, there’s no question that for the average player looking to get into the series, the core gameplay is likely to be the most important part.

We’re going to be getting into the weeds a little with this one, so if you’re the type who is more interested in story and lore, you might want to wait for the next part of this blog series. However, if you’re like me, and love getting into the machinery of an RPG battle system, then you’re in the right place. Let’s get started.

Arts and Crafts

While Falcom honed their action RPG chops with its long-running Ys series, The Legend of Heroes, and by proxy, Trails, has been Falcom’s turn-based jewel. And while the story is a strong draw for a lot of the fanbase, it’s Falcom’s years of experience crafting engaging, yet complex RPG combat that elevates its identity for some.

Trails’ combat shares a lot of similarities with more popular JRPGs. Characters and enemies take turns in battle, using spectacular magical abilities and weapons to fell their foes. Across the entire series, Trails has stayed consistent in the tools that characters have at their disposal during battle.

In Trails, each character has a few different attack options in any given combat encounter: Attack, Crafts, Arts, and S-Crafts.

Randy can take care of himself, but he runs with a posse anyway.

The Attack command is, as you might have guessed, your tried-and-true normal attack against enemies. It costs nothing except your turn to execute, and does a small amount of damage. Unlike some JRPGs, regular attacks remain useful in combat, even at the end of each game.

Arts are your character’s “spells”. While, canonically, Arts are not actually magic, but energy manipulation with the aid of Orbal technology, it’s best for newcomers to think of Arts just like spells in other RPGs. Arts include everything from attack spells to buffing and healing spells. Much like spells in other RPGs, Arts in Trails use a mana-like resource calling EP. EP can be replenished either by leveling up, resting at a spa or inn, or by using specific consumable items. Which Arts your characters have is determined by their equipped quartz, which we’ll touch on later on.

Crafts, on the other hand, are closer to what other games would call “Skills”. Crafts are unique to that character, and cannot be used by any other character. Characters usually start with a small selection of Crafts when they first join the party, and will gain new ones, or gain upgrades to existing ones. Crafts are usually damage dealing abilities, though some characters do have Crafts that buff stats, and even heal allies. Crafts use CP, which can be replenished with items, but is more commonly regained via battle. Hitting enemies, and in turn being hit, replenishes CP a little at a time. In dungeons, destroying vases and crates can also replenish CP, along with other resources.

Finally, S-Crafts are Trails’ version of Limit Breaks. Each character gets a unique S-Craft, and while most of them deal devastating amounts of damage, a few of them are actually restorative, or provide the team with massive buffs. S-Crafts also cost CP, requiring a minimum of 100, exactly half of a character’s maximum 200.

Whenever characters initiate S-Crafts, they make a big show of it.

How this shakes out is rather interesting: while a character’s crafts define their identity in a party as the developers intended, player agency enters the equation when defining which arts that character will use. Through the arts the player chooses, players are able to build a character, and through that, a party that feels wholly their own. As we delve deeper into the game’s quartz system, we’ll talk more about character customization.

Like Final Fantasy, characters use a combination of spells and skills to vanquish their foes. Like Persona, each enemy has resistances and weaknesses to different elements. Like Grandia, Trails offers a visible turn order chart in battle to plan ahead, and the ability to kick enemies down the list.

Trails’ combat secret sauce is in the weight the game puts on unit positioning. Positioning, and sometimes the direction a unit is facing, are important strategic components in an SRPG like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre. It’s not common, however, for positioning to be so important in a turn-based RPG.

Move Like a Butterfly

While Falcom has iterated on the movement and positioning mechanics in the Trails games in each successive title, much of the strategic implications and game design ethos has remained the same since the beginning.

In earlier Trails series titles, battlefields were split into a square grid, with each enemy and player taking up a single space, with larger enemies taking up multiple spaces. Units can aim long range attacks in lines or AOE (Area of Effect) circles, and all units within the indicated space will be affected. Meanwhile, units that attack in melee must move in the field towards their target in order for the action to hit. Players also have a choice to move a unit to a new position without taking any other action, but that too consumes an entire turn.

There’s something comforting about the discreet grid-based movement of older Trails titles.

The series’ Area of Effect rules stay consistent in regards to healing as well. This means that while AOE healing is quite powerful, the player has to be mindful of where their characters are in order to take full advantage. Has one of your units moved far infield to attack a group of monsters? They might now be too far away to reap the benefits of a teammate’s group-wide defensive buff. Want to cure a party member of a nasty status ailment using an item? Time to walk on over to them and administer that medication!

When it came time for Trails of Cold Steel and the series’ move to 3D, Falcom took the opportunity to iterate on the formula, getting rid of the square grid, and making movement more free-form. AOEs and Line AOEs in the previous games had never respected the lines of the grid, so the change certainly made sense.

The biggest change came with Trails Through Daybreak. Falcom got rid of the move command entirely, instead giving more freedom to the player on their turn. Party members can now freely move during their turn, within reason, and can use an action as well. This ends up being a must needed shot in the arm for the game’s battle system. Instead of being a consequence of action choice that must be compensated for, movement becomes and active part of strategy, whether it’s to space out your party to avoid being AOE’d into oblivion by a boss, or to carefully place a team-wide defensive buff.

This ability to fine tune positioning without giving up an action also gave Falcom the opportunity to add positioning bonuses to Crafts. If the Craft is cast from the indicated position relative to their target (usually from flank or behind), that Craft would either have additional effects, or would do considerably more damage.

Trails Through Daybreak’s main character, Van Arkride, even gets the ability to place enemy attention squarely on himself, giving players a new reason to move him away from teammates during his turn. With the ability to manipulate enemy aggression, Daybreak combat starts to mimic the MMORPG mainstay of the “holy trinity”, where a tank takes damage while damage dealers attack the enemy with impunity from behind, and healers keep the tank breathing.

Daybreak offers more freedom of movement, but the distance you can travel is still limited, denoted by the white circle.

As Falcom has continued to iterate on movement in Trails’ combat, the series has continued to retain the core tenets of its combat identity, while still forging a new path and trying new avenues for pushing the turn-based RPGs. This has in turn also added layers of complexity onto the battle system, while still making it rather approachable for neophytes to the genre or the series.

Break Dancing

In Trails of Cold Steel 3, Falcom added the break system, similar to the stagger mechanic in recent Final Fantasy games. Separate from the health bar, enemies also have a break bar that can be depleted via attacks. Breaking an enemy is advantageous, as it does the following to the afflicted enemy:

• Enemy suffers a massive AT delay, kicking them down the turn order list, forcing them to act later.
• Enemy loses all positive statistical buffs
• Enemies that do drop items upon death will drop an additional item when broken.
• Enemies enter the break state, increasing incoming damage by 10%, and guaranteed to unbalance (a mechanic where teammates can follow up with an additional attack at no cost).

Breaking an enemy doesn’t just give the player a huge advantage in a contentious battle, but it can often mean your big chance to finally crack open an otherwise heavily armored boss.

Breaking a foe is an important tool in your repertoire, especially in boss fights.

The Trails series also balances Crafts such that each one has both a Power rating, and a Break rating. Otherwise powerful crafts might be terrible at breaking a foe, making their CP cost a total waste in the early minutes of a boss fight. Rather than throwing your biggest, baddest arts and crafts at a boss to end a fight as quickly as possible, players are encouraged instead to capitalize on the break bar, depleting it slowly while mitigating any incoming damage, and then piling on the damage once the target is broken.

In addition to this, bosses will often have special behavior in regards to Break. Usually around 50% HP, bosses trigger a state known as Enhanced. This mechanic does a fantastic job of shaking up the fight right as players have settled into their strategy, and asks them to think on their feet. When Enhanced, bosses get a number of buffs:

• The Boss’ break bar is fully replenished.
• The Boss loses all negative status effects.
• The Boss might receive a stack of beneficial statistical buffs.
• The Boss will start using new attacks, including their own S-Crafts.
• The Boss takes 50% less damage.
• The Boss takes triple the break damage.

If you were reading carefully, you might notice that that last line item isn’t to the boss’ advantage. When bosses enhance themselves, they suddenly get a burst of advantageous boons all at once, including the full replenishment of their break bar, likely reversing all of your hard work up to this point, but at the cost of making them a brittle paper craft. Once a boss is Enhanced, they must wait a number of turns before they’re able to act, but when they do, you can be reasonably sure that it’s going to be a powerful attack, and it’s going to hit your team hard.

This should put any player on alert, because they now have a very serious problem, only a few turns to solve it in, and a small set of solutions.

No part of being hit by this is fun.

The first thought might be to grin and bear it. Heap on the defensive buffs, heal your team, and hunker down. This is definitely a viable strategy for a turn or two, especially if you’re waiting for CP to recharge. Unfortunately, once a boss is Enhanced, they won’t leave that state without the player’s intervention. Enhanced bosses will continue to hammer the party until they do something about it, or they die.

The other option is to bomb the boss: use every single high power ranked Art, Craft and S-Craft in your arsenal to kill the boss before they kill your team. A real hail mary, but depending on your team’s makeup, resources and current level, might not be such a crazy idea.

The last option is to focus directly on that last line item in the above list. This is what I like to call the “break race”. The player chooses to rely on their team’s ability to drain the boss’ break bar as quickly as possible using Crafts, S-Crafts and Arts that capitalize on their weaknesses. This might not necessarily mean doing a lot of damage in the near future, but if your team manages to break the boss again before they’re annihilated, you’ve likely survived the hardest phase of the fight.

Gearing Up

While the player has plenty of options in the heat of battle, victory starts with preparation, and customization. In Trails, this comes in the form of equipment, and quartz.

It may not look like much, but when you have to equip and arm 25 characters, you’ll be thankful.

Outside of their raw statistical implications, equipment in the Trails series holds little importance in the overall mechanics of combat. Characters can only use a single weapon type unique to them, and there are only two gear slots for upper body and lower body. These two gear slots only confer statistical upgrades, and don’t offer any additional passives to synergize with player choices. Each new piece of equipment you purchase in a new region tends to be altogether better than what your party donned before.

On top of purchasing better weaponry, players can also upgrade their weapons to more powerful versions using a very simple crafting system that consumes a material called “U-Material”, which players will find in dungeon chests or by completing side quests. This system ends up being rather questionable in execution in earlier Trails titles, as there’s no reason not to upgrade a weapon if you have the materials, and any reasonably exploration-savvy player will have more U-materials than they know what to do with. This was thankfully addressed in Trails Through Daybreak, by creating more ways to use U-materials, and forcing players to use higher grade varieties of U-materials (which are far more rare) as they get farther into the game.

In contrast to weaponry and equipment, Trails entrusts the burden of customization to each character’s accessory slots. In addition to the single weapon slot and two equipment slots that each character has, each character gets two accessory slots. Most accessories early in any of the games will offer immunity to a single status ailment, while late game accessories can confer all manner of bonuses, from statistical increases to multiple status immunities.

It’s not the most robust customization system in the world, but it does offer some level of player agency, allowing them to shore up character weaknesses, or invalidate annoying status ailments that could render a character useless in a crucial combat turn.

All That Glitters

The true core of Trails’ customization comes in the form of the quartz system. Similar to Final Fantasy VII’s materia system, the quartz system gives each character an “orbment” (the tool with which characters cast Arts) with a limited number of slots assigned to them, and quartz to fill them. The quartz come in a number of colors and provide a number of different stat buffs, spells, and passive bonuses.

Your orbment is where players spend most of their character customization time.

Each Trails game changes how the quartz system works, but for simplicity, I wanted to deep dive specifically into how quartz customization works in Trails of Cold Steel 3, and in Trails Through Daybreak. You’ll see strong similarities in the other Trails games, but details might differ.

Early in a game, players will first choose a master quartz; a powerful quartz that both gives the chosen character a suite of passive bonuses, but also a set of Arts tied to the master quartz’s elemental alignment. Both the passive bonuses and the Arts tied to the master quartz will increase in number as the player fights more battles, and the quartz levels up.

Master quartz tend to set the tone for that character’s role in the party, but the player is free to change out the master quartz if they desire. Some master quartz will increase damage done to enemies once broken, while others will replenish EP when the character successfully attacks or uses Crafts. Some master quartz are worth using purely for the passive bonuses, while others are most powerful because of the list of Arts they bestow upon their user.

Once the master quartz has been set, the player has the opportunity to fill the rest of the slots with quartz to further build out their character.

Quartz come in one of seven colors: the four basic elements (earth, wind, fire, and water), and the three higher elements (space, mirage, and time). A gem’s color governs what it’s able to do, and which slots it will fit in. Gems themselves can be a single art (eg. Venom Flame, a fire quartz, allows the character to cast the attack spell Venom Flame), a set of Arts (Heal, a water quartz, allows the character to cast both Tear and Teara), a statistical buff (Evade 2, a wind quartz, gives the character EVA+10%), or a combination of two or more.

Players can create or find quartz in a number of different ways. Quartz can be earned from treasure chests located in the open world or in a dungeon, or can be given as a reward for completing a side quest.

The most common method by which players will obtain quartz is by making them. At the end of combat, players earn Sepith, crystalline shards that come in the seven elemental colors. Stacks of sepith can also be found in treasure chests, or from completing side quests. Aesthetically, this matrix of different gems and numbers can be a little intimidating, but it’s far less complex in practice than how it first appears.

This part of the Battle Results can be a little intimidating when you first dive into Trails.

Once players have enough sepith, they can visit designated shops and use the crafting materials to forge quartz to add to your orbment.

Given that sepith is also used to unlock slots in a character’s orbment, and sepith is shared across the entire party, the player will often be faced with some difficult decisions when upgrading during downtimes.

While characters will have multiple slots that are quartz agnostic, allowing the player to choose whichever quartz they like, some are color-coded, forcing the player to choose a quartz from that color family to fit into that slot. Characters usually have an intended “class fantasy” built around them, and that usually informs which colored slots they have.

A melee character might have two green slots and a blue slot. This could mean that they’re built around evading enemy attacks, and striking back with status ailments, since Evade is a wind gem, and Mute, Spirit Breaker and Freeze are all water gems that allow the character to debilitate foes with status ailments by striking them. On the other hand, this combination of colors could also make them a powerful group healer, as single target restorative spells are water gems, while party-wide restorative spells are wind gems.

Even within the confines of the color-coded slots, the build expression in the quartz system is remarkably robust. Players in the Trails community have even found ways of stacking quartz to make characters damn near invincible in even the hardest battles.

While Falcom has been iterating on the quartz system throughout the life of the Trails series, the development team redesigned almost entirely for Trails Through Daybreak.

Instead of the 6–8 quartz slots per orbment in the previous titles, Daybreak increased the number of slots to a maximum of 12, and split them into four lines of four slots. Depending on the character, some lines have only three slots instead of four.

Daybreak’s quartz system looks very different from previous titles.

Each line has a set of possible passive bonuses that can be activated by based on the quartz slotted in. For example, Attack 1 is worth 2 Fire points, which automatically activates Flare Impact, a passive bonus that has a chance of adding Fire damage to attacks. In late game, these passive bonuses start to pile up, and if you’ve planned correctly, each of your party members will start battles with multiple statistical buffs and passive bonuses, making each of them a powerhouse on their own.

Quartz themselves have also been changed. Arts have been removed from quartz entirely, meaning that slotting quartz can now only offer statistical and passive bonuses. Instead, Arts are now governed by a different section of the orbment.

Called “Drivers”, these replacements for master quartz now wholly govern the Arts a character can use. Unlike master quartz, however, drivers are not aligned to a single element, and the Arts attached to them instead fit a theme. Storm is largely dominated by wind elemental Arts, but also comes with Chrono Drive, an Art that gives a speed buff to your party, to round out utility. Melt has a combination of Water and Fire elemental Arts. In addition to this, drivers also come with empty slots that players can fill with individual Arts they may have purchased at a designated shop.

Daybreak’s Driver system allows you to set your Arts irrespective of your quartz.

This shake-up to the Trails’ quartz system was met with some consternation, with some unhappy that they could no longer build their characters the way they had in previous titles. Others felt this added new dimension to the quartz system. The truth is that the quartz system in Daybreak is just as powerful, if not moreso, than previous titles, but requires approaching it from a different angle. There’s still plenty of build expression to be had (arguably much more than before), like any well-designed game mechanic, can be the source of some very difficult decisions when planning a character.

There’s surely so much more that goes into combat in the Trails’ games, and there are even more caveats and systems to explore in each individual title that we didn’t touch on. The point is fairly clear, though: the Trails games that offer plenty of options in and out of combat to customize the characters as you see fit, while also offering some guidance and some preset options for players who just want to hop into battle and smash something.

In the next blog post, I’ll be focusing on story, lore, and the people that populate the world of Zemuria.

I hope you’ll join me.