If you enjoyed the Trails in the Sky games, you will probably like this one a lot. The background characters with their own stories are back. There are several cameos, including Oliver, Bleublanc and Anton (along with Ricky). There are lots of references to things that have happened during the other games (like the big thing in SC, or Cassius's work in Erebonia). The main story revolves around the main characters, all of which are very fleshed out, just like in Trails in the Sky. You can see that the developers drew inspiration from Persona games; for instance, there is relationship building, a dungeon expanding every night... there is less day-to-day stuff, you only actually control you character several days a month, but they are quite packed with content and there is little repetition. The fighting system is a little streamlined -- for example, if you are overleveled (say, you went to a dungeon you have been to three chapters past), monsters run away from you and you can kill them without going into combat (if you so choose). There is a minor gripe: the arts system is a bit too streamlined for my tastes. In the Sky series the quartz you chose could have huge impact on combat, now it seems that status-effect quartz rule (you can stack them, unlike the Sky series), and you don't really need to use arts at all, except for some boss battles (this is normal difficulty, chapter 4). The port is very nicely done. They made a lot of graphical enhancements, added extra voiceover, and my favourite: they added a turbo mode. In the old Trails games, I would use cheatengine to skip past the more tedious parts (travelling between locations, fighting boring battles, replaying parts of the game) or just plain speed up. I was worried it would not work with a more advanced game, and I was very pleasantly surprised that it was already built in. There are minor quirks (like telling me to press square when I have no gamepad or anything with a square on it), but nothing major.
