There are a ton of other Trails games available on both Switch and PS5, but I am unsure if I want to try any of them before Second Chapter comes out later this year. In the meantime, I’ve got my eye on Ys X Proud Nordics instead. I played through the demo of the original last year, but I did not buy it because I knew that Proud was coming out this year. It is the 10th entry in the series, but I am also aware that these games are not in any sort of chronological order, and the remakes are often not numbered either. There was a release in the Ys Memoirs series released last year and another one coming out this year, but I am totally confused as to where those fit in relation to Nordics.
It would be one thing if this was like Final Fantasy where the order doesn’t really matter since they’re all self-contained anyway, but Ys and Trails both seem to be series with a narrative that progresses across each respective series, with Ys in particular telling the story of Adol. Is X the best entry point for that series? And can other Trails games (like Cold Steel, the one I’ve heard the most about) be played without the Sky trilogy as content, or would they contain ambiguous references/spoilers?
I really wish I’d been aware of Falcom’s existence as a company before last year, but I never owned any platform their games were released on anyway so I suppose it wouldn’t have made a difference.