In Trails From Zero, The City Is The Main Character

12 June 2024

What's the purpose of the spaces we go through in games?

The rundown

The Trails series has a very strong initial pitch: an RPG series in a single continent where you explore all the different countries set in it as different characters, with the hook being that every character from every game is still alive and doing something before or after the player sees it.

Each sub-series of games then is set in a unique environment from the other. The player gets to experience the whole continent of Zemuria through the eyes of different people who've lived different lives and they slowly unravel the story behind the world through different perspectives.

Trails from Zero is the fourth game in this series, starting a new subseries after its trilogy predecessor: Trails in the Sky. It's a game about the struggle for national identity, the inherent contradiction in the police system, the strength of found familial bonds and how systemic powers get utilized for the benefit of the elites.

It's also a game about how the places we live in inform us, what we want to protect and what we value in our lives.

Let's talk about it a bit.

The city, a person

Rather than the game spanning across a gigantic kingdom with multiple cities and towns like its predecessor, Trails from Zero is set in Crossbell, a single big city with a handful of areas surrounding it. In the story, Crossbell is framed as a buffer state between the two superpowers of the continent: the Empire and the Republic. As a result, Crossbell grew in size and became a hub for all the latest technologies and engineering projects. You, as the player, control a newly established police squad whose purpose is to attend to civilian needs and requests, familiarizing yourself with the city, its people and its history.

Crossbell itself is large, with distinct districts and unique environments throughout. You get to learn the lay of the land by accepting citizen and governmental requests, from finding lost items, investigating crime reports to monster extermination requests. As you complete these quests, you learn of Crossbell's history, its people and its geography. The once big and imposing city slowly opens its heart to the player, and the player gets to interact with Crossbell as more than a city, but as its own character.

The process of learning how Crossbell's small, unique idiosyncrasies make its character whole was what made me fall in love with it. Learning how each section interacts with the other, how to get from one place to the next, how to access its different shops and roads and how the different forms of diegetic fast travel interact with one another made it feel grounded and special. Through the course of the 45-ish hours it took me to beat it, the city embedded itself in my heart. Its realness made it memorable to me, it made me want to be in it.

The space, a moment

I have a hard time really picturing spaces in games as "real." It's really easy to generalize the abstraction of "space" in your head as a quirk of the game and never really feel it out as something familiar or real.

RPGs in particular have this funny relationship with space. Because the games are designed to be these large-spanning adventures through multiple environments, where you run through fields and mountains and cities and towns, learning about the world and its characters and the things that surround them, you grow extremely intimate with the elements that constitute a certain "realness" of space in your mind.

I grew attached to these places as time passed.

In talking about Trails from Zero with friends and while writing this very post, my mind wandered about all the other RPGs I'd played before where I felt that element come to life. This relationship with space we share as we play is something that sounds easy to replicate but requires a grounded sense of culture and history that's larger than the player can ever experience.

I think what makes a lot of these games work is that closeness to the worlds they create. If you're able to think about a city as a city, with all its intricacies and annoying elements intact, that space is cemented in your head as elemental to you in the act of play itself. It never leaves you because it becomes a part of your play.

Games that manage to capture this are fundamental to me in the RPG space. Creating this sense of realness, of "space" as a tactile element to the setting enhances the experience more. You learn to love it, you learn to get annoyed by it, but by the end of the game, it lingers. You become a part of the city, and the city becomes a part of you.