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.
