The video game industry as it stands is experiencing an over saturation of open world games. The open world genre has essentially become what was the FPS genre of the previous generation. They are the de facto method for game developers to create a "living, breathing" world that players can truly "immerse" themselves in. I use quotation marks because these are terms frequently used to describe open world games and I rarely agree with them.
This is not to say that I haven't enjoyed any open world games, though. The Witcher 3 sported jaw dropping graphics and a compelling story that lent the adventure a sense of grandeur. Xenoblade Chronicles X embraced the spirit of exploration by organically expanding what is already there and rewarding players for seeking out those unknowns. Final Fantasy XV gave us probably the closest representation of what our own world would be like with fantastical elements, and I loved it for that. All of these games and others were genuinely enjoyable for varying reasons, but going as far as to call them "living, breathing" worlds is something that I cannot do. When I turn off these games I can't imagine how the world keeps on turning behind the screen. I don't mean this in the sense of time related activities, such as growing crops, but on a more fundamental level. These games give me little to no reason to believe that life goes on with no input from myself, the player. That is what it means to me for a game world to feel alive.
This brings me to the series I want to talk about today; The Legend of Heroes: Trails..., or just the Trails series for short. The Trails franchise is a long running fantasy RPG series with its first installment, Trails in the Sky, debuting in 2004 for Windows PC in Japan. Since then the Trails series has grown to be seven games strong, with an eighth game on the horizon, all of which take place on the same fantasy continent of Zemuria in the same relative time period. That said, only four of those seven games have actually been released outside of Japan and thus playable for myself, last year's Trails of Cold Steel II being the most recent. None of the Trails games are open worlds, some of them being quite the opposite and actually fairly linear. Yet these four games alone have created a more compelling, charming, and enchanting world than any of these AAA open world games even came close to.
There are many aspects of the Trails games that make them memorable but I'm going to focus on just one: the NPC's (non-playable characters). In most JRPG's, speaking to an NPC will result in a line or two of basic dialogue ranging from "Welcome to Town X" to "Recently there's been Monster Y on Highway Z". Talking to NPC's in WRPG's brings up dialogue trees that often result in stiff and unnatural conversation. You normally only speak to these NPC's because the little objective marker in the corner of the screen tells you to do so to advance the main story or current side quest. The motivation to speak to Trails NPC's is nothing so extrinsic. From the moment you boot up Trails in the Sky and speak to your first shopkeeper to the finale of Trails in the Sky Second Chapter (and Trails of Cold Steel as well), each and every NPC has an individual life you can follow from beginning to end. When tragedy strikes a town, you rush to a nearby house not because the game told you to but because you know the family of a friend character is there and you want to make sure they are safe. When a city is under military occupation, you go and talk to Old Man Abbot because you know he has depression issues but also gives pragmatic facts about the situation. You know about these people and what they're like because you've been talking and interacting with them of your own accord the entire game.
I'll use the aforementioned shopkeeper from Trails in the Sky to further illustrate this fact. When protagonists Estelle and Joshua first set foot in the town of Rolent to pick up a newspaper, you can choose to talk to Rinon the General Store shopkeep. From this conversation you learn that Rinon has been manning the shop for some years now, is quite content with his life, and also provides Estelle with the latest model of Strega sneakers the moment they arrive. Go to the second floor of the shop and you'll find Rinon's mother who is worried that her son will never find a nice woman to settle down with if he just stays cooped up in the shop. At this point in the game we now know more about Rinon than we even do about the protagonists themselves, but it doesn't stop there.
Progress further into the game and you'll find Rinon's mother doing some shopping in the grand marker of the neighboring city of Bose after deciding she needed some time away from the stuffy old general store back home. While there she meets the shopkeeper of the accessory store, Kitty, and immediately hits it off with her over each others' passion for jewelry. Fast forward a bit more into the game, and you bump into the mother and Kitty on an airship back to Rolent. Rinon's mother thought to introduce Kitty to her son to which Kitty agreed upon after leaving the shop to her sister. At first, interactions between Rinon and Kitty were awkward at best and unbearable at worst. Rinon was, understandably, embarrassed beyond belief by his mother's audacity to bring a stranger home and Kitty was upwardly shy and could do little more than help out with the shop to cope with it. As time went on, however, Rinon begins to notice how earnest and genuine Kitty was as she worked and found it easier to talk to her. Eventually the walls of awkwardness becomes smaller and smaller as the couple become closer and closer. Finally, at the very end of Trails in the Sky SC, you can watch as Kitty happens to catch the bride's bouquet at a wedding ceremony, to the joy of everyone in town who knows her. The rest is history.
To emphasize, all of these story beats are entirely missable. You don't have to speak to Rinon in the beginning of the game. You could have just stumbled upon the wedding at the very end of the game with no idea who was involved. But do you get any experience points from following this story? No. Do you get any special items or recruitable part members? Of course not. Yet you do all this anyway because you grow invested in these characters' stories that you as the player really had no part in. You checked in on Rinon and Kitty periodically because watching their bond grow and become happy made you happy as well, not because there was some extrinsic reward in it for yourself at the end.
While Rinon and Kitty's story is one of the more involved ones in the series, the fact is that each and every NPC in the games has their own lives such as this you can follow. The actual couple involved in the wedding was another story line in and of itself, for instance. Each character has something new to say almost every time you talk to them and react to world events unique to their personalities and circumstances. This is what I mean by being able to see the world continue on after I turn off the power button. The world doesn't revolve around the protagonists and people will still go about their lives whether you were a part of it or not. It is largely for this reason that the world of Trails truly feels like a "living, breathing" world that I can "immerse" myself in.
(Disclaimer: Images and screenshots not taken by myself)
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