Is it not like FF7 because you don’t think the series is good enough to be mentioned alongside it? Or because it’s not about eco-terrorists and fascist corporations destroying the planet?

I’d even say the interconnectedness is often more of a handicap.

There’s one character in Sky whose arc is postponed into Azure. It…doesn’t fit with that larger narrative. Then, the biggest criticism of some of those later games is how there’s too many characters around. Most were enjoyed when first introduced, but then there’s way too many. In a lot of ways it suffers the same ways later Marvel movies do; banking on audience members shouting “I know what that is!!”

Supposedly some more recent games refocus on smaller groups but are still very much about “building a larger narrative”. I can’t claim I’ve played all of them to get a larger opinion, but Kingdom Hearts did a lot of that, and we saw its failed payoff in Kingdom Hearts 3 (actually something like KH8). I still enjoy the first two games in the series - the duology this one is remaking - but I’m pretty sick of the obsession with lore.

A video I watched even discussed how early Star Trek movies had blatant plotholes with earlier establishment, but that was fine because it was better to focus on the narrative the director wanted.

There might be some fringe impacts Trails has had on the industry here and there, but the only big influence it has had is on Honkai: Star Rail’s combat system. And at this point, HSR is so much larger than the Trails series as a whole that it’s going to look like Meucci’s contribution to telephone technology when all is said and done. Expedition 33 already took some of its UI design from HSR.

Even the impact of Trails’s hybrid action/turn-based system is debatable because Trails through Daybreak was in development at the same time as Metaphor: ReFantazio, which uses the same system. Ultimately, the series serves a very specific, small niche within a niche, and it’s never going to be a major trailblazer for the same reason much of Baldur’s Gate 3’s story design won’t be: that kind of narrative structure is not an efficient way to make money. You have to be an auteur or a major risk taker to do software engineering that way.

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII’s impacts on the entire industry, let alone the genre, are too numerous to list. The two series are not remotely comparable. OP’s neck-deep in atomistic fallacy here.

You’re missing why Trails matters.

This isn’t about “a lot of games.” It’s about building something no other JRPG studio has ever pulled off—a single, continuous saga that’s been unfolding since Trails in the Sky in 2004.

No resets, no reboots, no discarded lore. Every event, faction, and character connects across a dozen titles. That kind of long-form narrative discipline doesn’t exist anywhere else in the genre.

And don’t minimize how hard that is. Most JRPG studios can barely keep one trilogy coherent. Falcom has been weaving one uninterrupted storyline for over twenty years—through console generations and shifting hardware.

Holding a narrative together across decades isn’t just impressive, it’s almost impossible. Doing this wasn’t just because of luck. It’s taken discipline, patience, and vision on a scale no other studio has matched.

Influence is easy to trace. XSEED’s Trails in the Sky localization raised the bar for how seriously Western publishers approach text-heavy JRPGs. At the time, bringing over a game with hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue was considered unworkable. They did it, and it set a precedent for the kind of effort fans now expect from localizations.

Falcom also helped legitimize PC as a JRPG platform in the West—back when most people dismissed the genre as “console only.”

And if you look at modern RPGs built around serialized storytelling and grounded politics—Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, even the way Persona 5 structures its arcs—you can see Falcom’s fingerprints everywhere.

Critics agree. RPG Site flat out said this about the remake of Trails in the Sky FC:

If you’re here strictly for the magical number, here it is: Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter remake is a 10/10. What’s more, it’s the easiest 10/10 I’ve ever given.”

https://rpgsite.net/review/18452-trails-in-the-sky-1st-chapter-review

And the numbers back it up. Trails in the Sky sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 93% approval rating from thousands of reviews. Recent reviews are even better—96% positive.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/251150/The/_Legend/_of/_Heroes/_Trails/_in/_the/_Sky/

Rather than burning energy on outrage, put that time into actually playing more games. You’ll get more out of them—and you’re better than just dismissing something this significant.

/Games generally has a content problem; it’s okay for people to bring up other discussions.

If you want to argue there are more interesting things to be on the front page than reviews gushing about a new game, even if using overblown wording, then please, post this other content and let the lesser stuff drift to the bottom! Entering the comment thread and telling people to fuck off isn’t a useful way to go about it though.

Not that you’ll see this, but I mean that you’re being incredibly rude, argumentative and a bully towards them. You can disagree with someone without being a dick about it. This Lemmy instance is becoming more like the reddit game subreddit by the day, I swear.

It’s a really good analogy imo. In that neither VU nor TitS are anywhere as impactful or important to the zeitgeist as the Beatles or FFVII, respectively.

I’d go as far as to say that their analogy actually contradicts and corrects their original claim that FFVII and TitS are in any way equivalent.

Auto-correct changed “glam” to “glamour”, and now lemmy.world won’t let me make the edit.

Anyway, here’s my further opportunity to say that The Beatles changed the world by being everywhere. The Velvet Underground changed the world by changing the people who mattered next.

And if this motivates you to go listen to the Velvet Underground, then I’m jealous—because I wish I could hear the VU for the first time all over again.

Oh boy I’m glad you said that because I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. I’m 40yo and I have no idea who the VU are, nor does comparing them to the Beatles make me excited to look them up.

And you just made my point for me. 🙂

The Velvet Underground are the most important band you’ve never heard about. In many ways, bigger than the Beatles.

Because the Velvet Underground were the precursors to glamour, prog, punk, new wave, noise, alternative, and grunge.

Without the VU, there’d be no David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Ramones, Sex Pistols, or Nirvana.

And the VU were making that kind of music in the ‘60s. Commercial flop, but almost everyone who heard of them started a band.

If you haven’t heard of the VU, you should watch that Apple Music documentary about them. Of course, after you play Trails in the Sky.

Question wasn’t rhetorical. I really don’t understand the purpose of deluxe editions nor their importance.

I always just assumed people spend the money because they like spending it.