You fell in love with a game and it’s characters, sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into it. It became a comforting, immensely satisfying part of your daily life. Then you heard a sequel was coming and got really hyped but when it came out it was utter rubbish…
Which game(s) was that for you?
The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero.
In a lot of respects it’s a good game, its fans even love it as a part of this big ongoing series. But it repeated a few tropes and trends that really started to get to me; wherein so many villains are introduced in a Dragonball style of escalating power rather than character definition.
The first two games introduced one supremely powerful hero, but invented mature and elaborate reasons as to why he couldn’t save the world alone - why evil or influential forces need cooperation of everyone to defeat, not a single showy swordsman. Then, later games try to impress you by showing villains that could easily beat this hero; without character definition to make such claims worth it.
They also really sold into the anime gender tropes - where every woman makes shy/teasing comments about the male lead, most girls are lesbian only for the sake of sexual harassment rather than true connection, etc.
Oh man, the moment I clicked on this thread, Trails came into mind. Now, I myself haven’t played it, but my mother is close to finishing Kevin’s game, and we were peeking at the the next few games and the most recent one to be released. And man, I don’t even know if I wanna play this series anymore.
The anime tropes we saw and read about from people’s reviews are killing us, and me and my mom fucking love anime. Hell, she’s a shonen-anime lover through and through. But the way the older characters like Agate get yassified into looking like generic anime guy #1 with red hair and Zin into slightly less generic anime guy #2 kills me, these dudes should not look like college kids 😭
The shitty romance that they’re hinting between Agate and Tita is 🤢. I really wish they had kept them as a sibling dynamic, and I thought Tita’s mom was freaking out because she thought he was a pervert, not that he actually liked her…
Also found out about the adopted siblings from TS:CS that seem to like each other, which is creepier than Estelle x Joshua because this pair was raised together since they were literal toddlers unlike the original two… God Japan’s not-by-blood adopt a son to marry thing kills me. The adopt a son to marry is fine if the girl wasn’t raised with him or like, they’re 20 years old. But this, “we literally were raised like siblings” thing kills me sometimes.
But yeah the egregious fan service, flanderization, and overall lack of seriousness that we saw from some of the newer games made me be like “maybe I won’t pick this game up,” which is a shame. I’m really disappointed to hear about the anime gender tropes stuff…