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• Accidental Innuendo: The guy you talk to before entering the martial arts tournament in FC asks you if you're prepared for "a day of hot, hot action".
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was the Lord of Phantasma really trying to merge Phantasma with the real world, or was it trying to be a Stealth Mentor to the party to make them learn to face reality and to prevent them from making the same mistakes as Liberl's predecessors?
• Angst? What Angst?: Joshua and Estelle don't seem very put out by the impending coup d'etat by the Intelligence Division in the final chapter of FC.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Loewe used to be this in the first build of SC, but after Falcom released a patch to upgrade him, he's universally considered to be even harder than the Final Boss.
  • The Final Boss of The 3rd is basically a preemptive strike for the party, meaning they'll have enough turns to cast their buffs before the boss can even act. Alternatively, it's a perfect time to wail on it before it has time to set up its barrier pillars.
• Author's Saving Throw: One done by the localization team, rather than Falcom. the turbo feature imported from the Cold Steel PC ports does a lot to improve the pacing of FC's early chapters. With the gameplay going at a much faster clip, the prologue and first chapter is a story-heavy romp that builds up to the fan favorite chapter 2.
• Award-Bait Song: I Swear.... from SC.
• Awesome Music: Metric tons of it.
• Base-Breaking Character: See here.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Every Enforcer battle is cool given how badly both the player and the party want to take them down a peg, but the fights with Renne are particularly intense. She's been hyped up throughout the game as one of the most powerful of the group, and when it's finally time, she backs it up with a powerful S-Break and efficient tactics that'll have the player staring at the continue screen in shock. And in The 3rd, you get to fight three Enforcers at once! All while the awesome arranged version of their boss theme plays.
  • Loewe's boss fight in SC. One of the most iconic themes mixed together with one of the most memorable bosses in the franchise's history. Being That One Boss just made beating him on Nightmare without any retry offsets is practically an achievement by itself. Lampshaded in The 3rd where there is an achievement for doing just that.
  • The Third also has Cassius, despite, or perhaps because of the sheer difficulty. Given how much this character is hyped in-universe, this could have easily been an Anticlimax Boss. But no, he's just as strong as as his reputation suggests. Unlike every other boss in his area, he's not a Flunky Boss. He puts up that much of a fight alone, even 4 against 1. And you actually manage to beat him, while he's not holding back! The Silver Will arrangement playing during the fight also helps.
• Bizarro Episode: In The 3rd, Moon Door 5 qualifies. Unlike the other Moon Doors, it doesn't star a major character, instead focusing on Mary, one of Matron Theresa's orphans, as she looks for a birthday present for Theresa. Things take a turn for the strange when she gets lost looking for her friend Polly and ends up befriending a baby dragon who gives her a wish-granting stone. Then it turns out to have been All Just a Dream... maybe. It's given an easily missed Continuity Nod in Cold Steel II but we don't know what significance it has to the series as a whole, if any.
• Cargo Ship: Ries X Food is a popular ship for Ries.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The Final Boss of SC is such a Hate Sink that it's almost therapeutic to beat on all three of his forms despite (or because of) the sheer HP count of the last two,especially if you're having Joshua spam Dual Strike.
  • The 3rd might as well be called "Catharsis: The Game". There's something undeniably satisfying about having access to almost every single playable character throughout the whole trilogy, giving all of them proper closure from the events of SC, and getting to fight characters who have been built up in the previous two games as being supreme badasses, like Kilika and Cassius. And then there's getting to use Richard and Renne, and yes, they are just as overpowered as they were when you fought them as bosses in FC and SC respectively.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • All the way from the first game for bosses:

    1) Clock Up EX + Earth Wall and/or Grail Sphere if Kevin is in the party. Maintain buffs at all times.

    2) Cast arts and drop the occasional S-Craft on the Critical, STR+10% or STR+50% turn bonuses. (FC and SC has physical attacks hitting like a wet noodle compared to arts unless it's an S-Craft.)

    3) Repeat until enemy is dead.

  • Kloe is such a useful party member most players will reflexively keep her in the party in SC whenever possible. While her S-Craft doesn't do any damage, it can revive everyone on the field from KO, give an extremely high amount of HP to anyone who's standing, and temporarily gives an additional 50% Defense at 200 CP. What's more, she comes with all her Orbment Slots on one Line. In theory, this is balanced by the fact that a whopping 3 Slots are Water-exclusive, but her ATS are the highest in FC and SC, making her surprisingly strong with the Arts you can teach her. The cherry on top is her Kaempfer Craft, a debuff that cuts an enemy's Strength by 30% and Defense at 20% (it used to be 50% to both stats in FC), giving her incredible versatility. If there is any downside to her, it would be her low HP even with a HP Quartz equipped on one of her Water-exclusive slots, meaning that she often gets defeated in one hit especially on Nightmare difficulty with the enemy AI having a tendency to target her to cripple your support. Most players choose her and Olivier for the final dungeon of FC (the latter also being one of the best Arts casters in the game), and the only thing preventing the same for the final dungeon of SC is competition from another solid Medic character in Kevin.
  • Speaking of which, Kevin is another party member players tend to never drop. Not only is he an extremely useful healer and Arts caster while being surprisingly bulky, but his S-Craft Grail Sphere grants Earth Guard to the party at 100 CP and a two layers of Earth Guard at 200 CP, which nothing else in the game can provide. Slap Gladiator accessories on him and he can keep these up near constantly, which is so useful that fighting the late-game bosses on the higher difficulties without him might as well be a Self-Imposed Challenge. His only downside is that he spends a lot of time away from the party, but when he is usable, he's almost always being used. And in The 3rd, he's the main character.
  • In The 3rd, it's easy to end up sticking to the same party members for most of the game, especially those listed in Game-Breaker, at least until the final dungeon makes the player use all of them.
• Complete Monster: Georg Weissmann, the primary villain of both FC and SC, masquerades as a seemingly-helpful archaeologist named Professor Alba before revealing himself as a high-ranking member of the secret organization of Ouroboros and the architect of the game's plot. Taking advantage of the Curse of Ishmelga, Weissmann would manipulate nobles influenced by the curse to trigger the Hundred Days War by massacring the village of Hamel, before brainwashing Joshua into becoming a ruthless used to assassinate rivals standing in Weissmann's way. After failing to assassinate Estelle's father Cassius, Weissmann attempted to have Joshua himself killed for his failure. At the end of FC, Weissmann restores Joshua's lost memories just to gleefully observe Joshua going through an emotional trauma. Towards the end of SC, Weissmann seeks the ancient city of Liberl Ark, intending on gaining the godlike power of the Sept-Terrion of Space within to reshape humanity as he sees fit. Manipulating Joshua's mind once again, Weissmann attempts to have him execute Estelle so that he can enjoy seeing Joshua break emotionally.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Photon Judges in FC. They have high HP and defense, can interrupt your arts, spam an attack that can hit multiple characters, are immune to every status effect, and have no elemental weaknesses. These things are probably harder to defeat than some of the bosses you fight shortly before they first show up, and they come in groups of three alongside several other enemies to boot.
  • Cryon Bits... but only during the Ravens' Star Door chapter in The 3rd. Their speed is insane compared to the Ravens so they'll often get multiple attacks in a row, sometimes as many as 4 turns to your 1. Their attacks can freeze, and you only get two Lighters for the whole chapter. They're immune to Defense Down, so Shakedown won't help you. And the worst part is their size and color makes them very hard to see on the field, making it very easy to run into them accidentally while you're heavily weakened. Better get to Save Scumming!
• Development Heaven: XSEED Games's willingness to localize a trilogy of games with such ginormous amounts of text, which no other localizer showed signs of having plans to work on. One person metaphorically stated the entire script was worth of ten novels.
• Development Hell: To counter development heaven mentioned above: as mentioned under Troubled Production, the localization team was not prepared for what awaited them when they took on SC. The project suffered multiple schedule slips and was stuck in development hell for a few years, before all the hard work put in by XSEED finally freed the game. The chest with the message from the localizers pleading for help? It was put there as a memorial to remind everyone how difficult it was to actually localize the game!
• Die for Our Ship: Surprisingly averted. While this series has Ship Tease for most of the cast (even the Ho Yay and Les Yay variants), the Ship-to-Ship Combat is mostly civil and near to nonexistent. This naturally leads to Ship Mates, as explained below.
• Difficulty Spike: FC has two notable ones near the end. Lorence has lethal party-wide attacks that are far more devastating than anyone before him, and mandates the use of status resist accessories in order to beat him (though you can continue the story if you lose). The final boss is a three part battle that can take around an hour to beat, with the last phase being a continuous Mook Maker with extremely damaging attacks far beyond anything else the game throws at you. The kicker? While the rest of the game averts Contractual Boss Immunity to varying extents, it's in full effect in the last two phases, meaning some of the tactics that got a player through the rest of the game no longer work.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Liber Ark, to an extent. Filled with several mini dungeons that are a bit too maze-like for their own good, tedious key and password sections that pad out its short length with Backtracking, a retread of The Glorious with the least helpful party member in the franchise required to come with you, and mooks that are more obnoxious than difficult blocking the way. What saves it from being a complete slump is the intriguing lore. Fortunately, the Central Axis Pillar is very straightforward, features rematches with the Enforcers, and a suitably climactic endgame.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Aerial is at least a downplayed version. It's the first multi-target attack spell you get, it's cheap to cast, and the center point of its area of effect can be set to any square, not just where an enemy is. White Gehenna is similar, but it's Non-Elemental, costs 1.5x as much to cast, and has a chance of inflicting Faint, though it's not available as early. Hell Gate on the other hand is only somewhat weaker and locks on to an enemy automatically, it's also cheap to cast and is very easy to install on every party member.
  • In The 3rd, Slime Lumps are an interesting take on the Metal Slime trope. They don't give much exp, but they drop a lot of Sepith, especially of the valuable Time element. The real nuke though, is that they drop random attack food, which includes Bloody Meatballs, a recipe that's viable for damage even late-game. In Chapter 1 or 2, this attack food will out-damage S-Crafts, sometimes many times over, and trivialize early bosses.
• Epileptic Trees: One's worthy of noting outside the WMG page, with the speculation that this game may take place in the future of the world Ys is set in. Of course, this crops up with other Falcom games and is usually scoffed at... but then Alternative Saga came out and the shaking trees caught fire. The Word of God hasn't explicitly clamped down on this or confirmed it... yet. Another popular option is that it takes place in the far, far future of the same world as the Gagharv trilogy.
  • The idea that the Trails world is the future of Ys seems exclusive to the English-speaking (and non-Japanese-reading) fandom; the game itself says the characters were drawn from different worlds (the setting is also largely derived from Xanadu Next but nobody seems to think that it's the same world as the Ys or Trails games) and it's pretty clear from the lack of reaction to Chester and Loewe and Lloyd not recognizing Renne or the Brights in The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero that the events of the game didn't 'really' happen. The connections to Gagharv are much more solid, mostly centered around the Doll Knight novels from Cagesong of the Ocean.
  • Then there's the painting of Gagharv found in The Third's prologue. One could guess whether the painting is just from the painter's imagination or not.
  • The Gagharv references could be justified with the knowledge that the Trails staff are huge Gagharv trilogy fans.
• Even Better Sequel: While the backstory and setting of FC is sweeping in scope, the combat is fun, and the characters likable, FC ultimately plays a fair number of tropes relatively straight at least up until its very last act and even comes across as a little cliche at times, and really serves as more of a setting-establishment piece. It was SC that completely blew the lid off of player expectations (and a whole mess of tropes) across the board, gave large quantities of Character Development to the whole cast, and delved into many mature themes without losing its charm, cementing Trails' place in history and the Japanese gaming zeitgeist. (Given what initial reactions to SC's announcement were, there's a level on which this is intensely amusing.)
• Evil Is Sexy: Luciola.
• Fan Nickname:
  • In the Spanish-speaking fandom, Ries got the nickname of Rias Gremory, due to her looks and similar name. Also, Lorence is nicknamed Sephiroth for similar reasons.
  • English-speaking players affectionately refer to the series heroine as "Bestelle", both because of her character growth and to say that she's best girl in the trilogy.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: The Lord of Phantasma, anyone?
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • The first game ends with the party and Richard seemingly outmatched by the Ring Guardian, only for Cassius to suddenly leap in out of nowhere and cripple the mechanical beast, leading to either him or the party finishing it off, depending on how well you did. This kicked off the much-maligned trend that the series would become notorious for of having the party beat a boss in a battle, only for it to suddenly overwhelm them in the subsequent cutscene to allow for an NPC saviour to leap in and hog all the glory.
  • The Sky trilogy also started the trend of forgiving villains who had committed terrible crimes and allowing them to atone for their pasts. In this case, it was Estelle's willingness to forgive Joshua and Renne for their actions as Enforcers of Ouroboros. However, the Erebonia arc was widely criticized for the same thing regarding Class VII's leniency towards Crow, who was the leader of a terrorist organization whose actions started a civil war in Erebonia. However, fans have also noted that a huge difference between them is the fact that Joshua and Renne were much younger than Crow when they got involved with Ouroboros, and thus not emotionally mature enough to understand the weight of their actions. Estelle even admits to Renne that if she were older and still involved with Ouroboros, she wouldn't be as forgiving. The differences in their backstories have caused fans to see Crow as Unintentionally Unsympathetic in comparison to Joshua and Renne.
    • It's important to remember, however, that such cases happens in every arc of the franchise. In the case of the next arc, Lloyd and the others were very quick to forgive and/or respect Mariabell, who mentally tortured KeA to some extent, and Ian, who killed Lloyd's brother - and both of them are full grown adults. This last example is less known because of complications with localization.
• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment: Through Xseed's localization, empty chests have its own different hilarious quips since FC and SC is now back at it again. look at this gallery and see it again after reading an article put in "Troubled Production" trope below...
• Game-Breaker: Due to having so many examples, most of them are moved here.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Estelle Bright is often seen as the definitive Trails protagonist in the West, while in Japan she is eclipsed by Rean in popularity. A big part of this is her dialogue going through a heavy dose of Woolseyism in XSeed's script, with many of her unique Deadpan Snarker lines being a simple Flat "What" in the Japanese script. She's also seen as refreshingly original for a JRPG protagonist, being a Rare Female Example of a Stock Shōnen Hero who undergoes a lot of Break the Cutie and Character Development while still maintaining her optimism, along with her relationship with Joshua being a very rare example of an Official Couple that is near-universally loved by the fandom. Future main characters Lloyd and Rean are much more typical male JRPG protagonists with Dating Sim elements, and are much more divisive in the west.
• Goddamned Bats: The enemies from SC final dungeon aren't hard, but have annoying attacks. One of them is a floating orb that can inflict special status ailments (that cannot be prevented with accessories, nor healed) forcing you to end the battle quickly or await until the effect wear off, other is a floating coin that can drain everyone's CP.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Chapter 1 ends with a fight against three monsters that can and will spam a Life Drain attack on you. They were annoying enough when fought one at a time as sub-bosses in the dungeon leading up to that point.
  • Surprisingly, the second battle against Lt. Lorence counts. He has lower STR this time around and his attacks are easier to survive, but he makes up for it by spamming Tearal and Earth Guard EX (both of which have very quick casting time and low cooldown) a lot in an attempt to outlast your resources. Not to mention that his skillset covers confusion, faint, and mute, meaning anyone who doesn't have a Grail Locket will have to be tended to for at least one ailment. And you're stuck with a party of 3 rather than 4, one of whom doesn't have a damaging S Craft.
  • Halfway though the Prologue of SC, you fight the Jaeger Woman. She isn't particularly strong, but she loves run outside your melee range and shoot you from afar. Estelle has Comet, but Anelace has no long-range Crafts at all, and the boss can cancel your Arts. This leaves Anelace useless for a lot of the fight.
  • The end boss of Chapter 1 of SC, the Storm Bringer. It on its own isn't too bad, apart from two things. First, it summons Puppet Fraggers, which can inflict Faint with their basic attacks and buff the Strength and Speed of everything on the field when they die. This forces a Sadistic Choice of leaving them alive and risking getting overwhelmed, or killing them off but making the boss more dangerous. Second is its Curse Blade, which is a strong AoE attack that inflicts a random debuff. What makes this annoying is that one of the possibly debuffs is Delay, which often results in the boss getting to move again immediately. Curse Blade's damage can be healed off on its own, but Curse Blade plus another AoE attack right after... not so much.
  • The Abyss Worms in SC aren't particularly dangerous while at full health. Other than the fact that there's a lot of them, they only attack with a simple basic attack that does moderate damage to a single character. However, the moment one takes even a single point of damage, they stop using their basic attack and begin using Earth Shaker, a much more powerful attack that hits all characters on the field. They spawn in large numbers, so the average player's instinct will be to use AoE attacks, but doing so is virtually guaranteed to result in a complete party wipe. Actually beating them demands that you painstakingly whittle them down one at a time while healing the damage the rest of them do with their basic attacks.
  • The Divine Penguin is only difficult for two reasons: the first is that it gets an automatic preemptive strike and can easily kill the NPC you have to protect before you get a chance to move. The second is that it has an AoE Confusion skill, and you only have access to one Confuse-proof accessory at this point.
  • Ragnard in Chapter 5, in an unusual way. The fight is actually pretty easy, but it's made occasionally annoying by Ragnard's sheer size blocking your view of most of the battlefield, making it hard to tell where your characters are positioned.
• Good Bad Bugs: Zin's Thunder God Kick craft in SC is bugged in certain Steam releases: instead of hitting each enemy in the area of effect once, it hits each one once per enemy in the AoE (so if it hits 4 enemies, each gets hit 4 times). This causes ludicrous amounts of damage to tightly-grouped enemies, more than S Crafts. Yet most fans don't mind it as it's fairly situational, takes some setup, and Zin is a fairly mediocre party member otherwise. Unfortunately this was corrected in The 3rd.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Star Door "Return to the Empire" in The Third is already ominous on its own, but it's even worse if you've completed Trails of Cold Steel II. Essentially, everything you did in that game helped all Osborne's plans come true.
• Ho Yay:
  • Olivier is really close to Mueller, who unfortunately has to put up with all of his shenanigans, even flirting with the guy.
  • Maybelle and Lila. They're both so Ambiguously Gay towards each other that it's barely ambiguous. Maybelle outright says Lila is the most precious person in her life, during a sidequest. They spend all their time by each other's side, and in spite of being the mayor of Bose, shows no signs of wanting a husband.
  • Luciola and Scherazard. They're childhood friends, Schera looked up to her so much that part of her drive to become a Bracer was to prove to her mentor that she could be someone worth her pride, neither can bring themselves to hate one another, and in spite of feeling no regret over killing Mr Harvey, someone Luci explicitly loved, she never could forgive herself for leaving Schera knowing that she'd lost a father figure and her adopted sister at the same time.
    • On a minor note, when Estelle and the group are interviewing citizens of Rolent who may have seen the Bewitching Bell, when asking Elissa she admits that she thought Luciola in her black dress was "kinda hot".
  • Estelle and Kloe become rather close as best friends, particularly during SC. Especially on Kloe's end, it can seem as if she's passed some of her admiration from Joshua to Estelle. She also is close with her roommate Jill who was the one to give her that nickname in the first place, and the only one other than Hans and the Dean she trusted with her secret.
• It Was His Sled:
  • It's kind of hard to protect the fact that Renne is a major character, let alone the reveal that she's an Enforcer since SC's been out for a decade in Japan. Alternative Saga practically references it wholesale, she reappears in Zero and never mind all the videos and whatnot spread all over the Internet.
  • Thanks to Cold Steel, Olivier's true identity isn't a secret anymore.
  • Richard and Renne are Promoted to Playable in The 3rd. Given that every other character you get from a Sealing Stone was a party member from the previous games, the inclusion of these two was probably intended as a surprise. Now it's one of the main things people talk about regarding The 3rd, especially due to both characters' reputations as Purposefully Overpowered.
  • Speaking of Renne, Star Door 15 is one of the most talked about scenes in The 3rd due to how surprisingly dark and mortifying it is.
• Love to Hate: Georg Weissmann is one of the series most popular antagonists among its fans, entirely because of how utterly despicable he is. Every scene he's in, starting with his first post-reveal, only heightens the player's desire to beat his face in, and the game finally delivers at the end. They even found a way to work in a fight with him in The 3rd despite his death in SC, with you fighting a replica of him born from Kevin's memories in a replica of what is essentially hell!
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • In FC, the second fight with Lorence is winnable... provided he doesn't spam Earth Guard EX and Tearal too much. If his AI decides to use both spells too frequently, you might as well give up.
  • The Divine Penguin sidequest boss in SC begins with a preemptive strike for the enemy... and you have an NPC to protect. If all the enemies decide to attack him, you'll get a Game Over before your party had a chance to act.
  • In SC, Loewe as boss will summon powerful clones that cannot be inflicted with any stat down effects, which he'll decide to do with a random frequency. If he summons only one clone, he's fairly easy to tank with Earth Wall spam, but if he summons more, he'll easily rip the player's defenses apart.
  • The Save the Miners hidden sidequest in Chapter VIII of SC. It's basically a bunch of battles which place a civilian in your battle between you and the monsters. If the monsters gets to go first and they gang up on the civilian...
  • The Battle to save Josette on the ark to during the Finale. Again, like Save the Miners above, you better pray that the monsters don't get first dibs and gang up on Josette.
  • Sun Door 2 in The 3rd, especially part 3. Take the trilogy's already finicky fishing mechanics and combine it with a minigame where you have to get the most points by catching bigger fish than your opponents. In part 3 of the minigame you basically have to hope that your opponent fails more often than you, especially since he can sometimes catch the larger fish without having caught the necessary fish to use as bait first. You basically have to hope the RNG works in your favor for him to fail to catch fish as well.
• Memetic Loser:
  • People not remembering Grant's name is a running gag in the fandom due to him being something of a Generic Guy.
  • As of later games in the series, Zin Vathek has become this. While every other character in the Sky arc has had either a playable or major NPC appearance in a later game, Zin only gets a few mentions in the Cold Steel games and The Cameo in the ending. Kilika, an NPC in these games, has had a bigger role in later arcs than he has. He also got cut out of Trails in the Sky's anime adaptation, and doesn't appear in the intro for the Evo remake.
• Memetic Mutation: See here.
• Moe: Estelle is very lovable and can definitely qualify, despite being the protagonist. Tita's Adorkable moments qualify as well, it helps being the second youngest characters in the cast (she's even this in-universe). Renne, when she's not a source of Nightmare Fuel.
• Moral Event Horizon: Weissman crosses this when he reveals that not only did he mind control Joshua and turn him into a puppet but also indirectly caused the attack on Joshua's village that led to Joshua's sister's death and made Joshua and Loewe's lives a living hell.
• Narm: The reveal that Weissmann directed jaegers to attack Hamel is often accused of cheapening the game's most infamous event just for the sake of making the villain even more of a Hate Sink. It makes the attack seem less like a believable war crime and more like convoluted comic book villainy.
• Narm Charm:
  • For what it's worth, almost all of the characters in the game (even minor and background characters) fall so hard into character archetypes that it almost seems clichéd (Estelle as the upbeat but Book Dumb Genki Girl, Joshua as the melancholic Teen Genius with Dark and Troubled Past issues, just to name two examples), but uncharacteristically this makes them not the least less enjoyable, especially since the game goes out of its way to explore their personalities from an objective standpoint. Olivier in particular is essentially Narm Charm on two legs.
  • Cassius Bright's Qilingong craft is one of the most dramatic self-buffs in the series, to the point where it resembles a powerup sequence from Dragon Ball. It still does a good job of establishing his strength and experience in a World of Badass, and that your party has a long way to go despite being over level 100.
• One True Pairing: Estelle and Joshua is so beloved that you'll almost never seen fan works pairing either with anyone else. At most, they'll go the OT3 route below. Even the pseudo-incest doesn't bother fans, as the plot makes clear they first met after puberty and never though of eachother as blood related. Part of why later games going the "harem" route is so controversial is that many agree Falcom absolutely nailed the writing of an Official Couple in the Sky trilogy and would rather see later games play to that strength.
• One True Threesome: It's not unheard of for some fans to ship the Official Couple of Estelle and Joshua with Kloe, since she already had a crush on Joshua to begin with and develops a close friendship with Estelle.
• Player Punch:
  • The ending of FC will hit you hard if you got attached to Joshua, or his relationship with Estelle.
  • Chapter 3 in the second game has you spend a lot of time with Renne, all to make the reveal of her true nature at the end of the chapter a huge punch to the gut.
• Portmanteau Series Nickname: With the English version, the game's initials are "TiTS". Whether this is a bad thing or not is best left to the viewer.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In battle, you can't reposition characters and then perform a non-move action, unless you want to use up more turns. While using "Attack" will move the character, you can't control where they will move, possibly resulting in inconvenient positions for the entire party. This can make certain attacks (like Joshua's Flicker) harder to use if the character isn't lined up perfectly.
  • NPCs on any difficulty above Normal, especially in SC. At some points you're accompanied by an NPC, who causes an instant Game Over if they die. On Hard or Nightmare, their stats don't scale with the enemies', which means that, especially in SC, almost everything you encounter oneshots them. This can result in battles being lost before you get a chance to move if you get unlucky with the enemy A.I. Roulette and they move first and attack the NPC. It also near requires you to waste an Earth Guard on them.
  • There are multiple points across the first two games where a character temporarily leaves the party and takes all their Quartz with them, with no indication. This can be frustrating if they had any strong, rare Quartz that would be useful to have on other characters. The worst instance of this is one point in SC where several characters leave the party right before Estelle is forced into a moderately-tough solo dungeon, which contains an optional boss who's very hard to defeat without high-level Quartz on Estelle. If the members who left had all your best Action and Cast Quartz, this can be a problem. The Cold Steel games fixed this by automatically removing rare Quartz from characters who leave your party.
  • The Fishing Minigame. While it's mostly unnecessary, there are several sidequests and achievements tied to it. Not only is figuring out which bait attracts which fish a Guide Dang It!, but for a minigame as simple as one button press when the "!" indicator appears, the timing is disgustingly tight, the bigger fish practically requiring you to be psychic and press the button before the "!" appears, somehow.
  • The ZFG mechanic in Chapter 8 of SC. Every character in your party has to choose between either giving up an accessory slot for a ZFG or not using arts at all. Worse, the number of ZFGs available decreases as the chapter goes on, to the point where you only have one for the final part of the chapter. This has the effect of putting a hard limit on the number of arts users in your party (hope you didn't like using more than one!), hamstringing your party's effectiveness (especially since you'll eventually only have one person who can heal and/or buff without items), and it also tends to make battles quite boring, since the only thing non-ZFG characters can do is attack or use crafts.
  • The way the Boss Rush at the end of The 3rd is set up makes it so that you can't change any party's configuration once the rush begins. If you messed up one of the parties, you'll have to reload and do several portions of the final dungeon over again.
    • This also applies to the Nightmare Battle Arena as well. Miscalculate one move and your entire party gets wiped? You have to redo the whole difficulty segment all over again.
  • Many Arts target an area instead of an individual monster or individual monsters. Meaning that often you just have to cast based on you where you think the monster or monsters are going to be and hope.
• Ship Mates:
  • Joshua/Estelle shippers tend to support Agate/Tita and Olivier/Schera as well.
  • As sequels popped out, they add these ships in their list: Zane/Kirika, Loewe/Karin, Lechter/Kloe and Kevin/Ries.
  • Those who ships Olivier/Mueller pairs Schera with Aina or Lucciola and Julia with Kloe.
• Shocking Moments: Loewe vs Joshua. Multiple people have called the fight, without irony, even more epic than the entire climax sequence of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Made even more impressive by the fact that it's all done with sprites and it still manages to be an emotional climax to their arc and completely awesome.
• Slow-Paced Beginning:
  • FC itself can feel like this to some, especially players coming into the series late. The majority of the game feels like a Random Events Plot with cliched characters and Arc Villains with almost comically mundane motives, that mostly serves to set up the plot of the sequel. Also, if you're coming in late, you're probably only here for the Wham Episode cliffhanger ending, making everything up until then feel dragged-out, and Late Arrival Spoilers (especially knowing Ouroboros exists) ruin a lot of the mysteries. Starting in Chapter 3, it gets much better though.
  • SC even more so. Despite it starting of after The cliffhanger in FC It takes until the end of chapter 3 to get interesting. While FC slow start could be excused as setting up SC, SC's slow start had no excuse.
• Strangled by the Red String: From a friendship perspective, Tita claims that Renne is her best friend and that she's always motivated to help her out. But other than a few scenes in chapter 3 of SC where they're implied to be hanging together, they barely form a bond strong enough that one could say that they're best friends. While they have plenty in common as young, precocious tech geeks, both Tita and Renne have far more development related to Estelle than with each other. Renne's boss dialogue has nothing to say to Tita even if you bring her. It doesn't help that their "best friend" relationship carries over in the Cold Steel arc where Tita is a lot closer with new Class VII compared to her scenes with Renne.
• Surprise Difficulty: Newcomers to SC might be shocked to find that the game is Nintendo Hard on anything above Normal, to the point where Hard is recommended for New Game Plus runs, and that's not even getting into Nightmare. This is partly due to a Sequel Difficulty Spike from FC, meaning that SC Normal is roughly equal to FC Hard.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
• That One Achievement: Several in the Steam releases.
  • While FC has a manageable margin of error to achieve the highest rank, SC isn't as generous. The requirement to obtain A rank is obtaining 378 BP while the total obtainable BP in the game is 380 BP, leaving you with only a 2 BP breathing room. Unless you follow a very detailed guide from start to finish, you can kiss that A rank goodbye.
  • In all three games, the Achievement for getting every chest in the game. There are a lot of locations you only visit once, so it's easy to miss out on a few. This includes monster chests, and the final dungeons have some pretty nasty ones. Also, the Achievement requires you to not only open each chest, but examine them again for their "chest phrase". It's easy to forget to do this. Additionally, whereas latter games have a quartz that allows you make chests become visible on your map, only The 3rd does here. (And even then, it won't help you in areas with no minimap, and it doesn't distinguish between opened and unopened chests)
    • It's also noted that in SC until a patch was implemented, there's a Game-Breaking Bug that shorts out the counter for some chests, meaning even if you really did open every chest and read their messages, the achievement is still unattainable by accident.
  • FC has "Preemptive Powerhouse", which requires you to defeat 2nd Lieutenant Lorence in your second encounter with him, a fight the game doesn't expect you to win. Even with the right setup, it's still a heavily luck-based fight, for reasons detailed under Goddamned Boss. Defeating Lorence is also required for getting maximum BP in that story mission, meaning that if you're going for all sidequests, you still need to win the fight for the "In Justice We Trust" Achievement.
  • SC has "Breakfast Safari", for being a total Guide Dang It!. The description says to find "Bacon", "Eggs" and "Golden Toast". It fails to inform you that they're pigeons, some of which can be permanently missed. And all pigeons look identical, and fly away if you run near them.
  • "Odyssey of Anton", also from SC, requires you to find and talk to one specific NPC at multiple points through the story, all of which are Permanently Missable. And some of Anton's appearances require long backtracks to obscure areas, and sometimes he changes his dialogue within a short span of time.
  • "Ramblin' Gambler" in SC. It first requires you to get all 14 Gambler Jack books, most of which are Permanently Missable Content. But on top of that, you also have to get a 21 in Blackjack (not too difficult) and a 4 of a kind in Poker (very difficult, that's a less than 1/1000 hand). There are reports of players spending as long as 11 hours trying to get this. The kicker? Players found out that getting hands like Straight Flushes and Royal Straight Flushes, which are better and even more rare than a 4 of a kind don't count.
  • The 3rd has Fierce Fighter and Flighty Fighter. The former requires you to have won at least 300 battles and never fled from a single battle. The latter requires you to run from at least 300 battles. As if those restrictions weren't bad enough, there are several more: you can only get ONE of these achievements per playthrough, only get them near the end of the game (making Fierce Fighter more of a pain), you have to win 400 battles to open one of the Star Doors (escaped fights do not count) if you want 100% completion (making Flighty Fighter more of a pain), and to top it all off, the spot you need to examine to get either of these achievements is not all that obvious, meaning players without a guide might just miss it entirely. Fierce Fighter in particular is made even more difficult due to the dark rooms in Grimsel Fortress during Chapter 4. If you encounter an enemy but no one has the Night Goggles accessory equipped, then every action except Flee becomes disabled. The problem comes from the fact that players can't get access to a copy of the Night Goggles accessory before the dark rooms, but instead must traverse two dark rooms without encountering any monsters before they come across the room that contains the chest for the Night Goggles.
• That One Attack:
  • The final boss of FC has Death Rage. It's not actually a One-Hit Kill, but it does ridiculously high damage (as in, around 1900, when even 700 or 800 would be considered high for other attacks encountered around the same time in the game), so unless you are overleveled/have invested heavily in high-tier defense and HP quartz/are at full or near-full HP (and aren't Tita)/all of the above, it might as well be one. Though you can still No-Sell it with Earth Guard or Earth Wall. On Hard or above, it's even worse, doing around 2700, which practically is a One-Hit Kill.
  • The Shadow Spear art, for its 20% chance of instant death. If you don't have Deathblow-resistant accessories, prepare to hold your breath every time someone gets hit by one. Losing a crucial member's CP due to the instant death casting at the worst time can cause things to quickly spiral out of control. That said, it's surprisingly useful for quickly bringing down preempted Shining Poms, since Deathblow is the only "status" effect they're not immune to.
  • Feather Shower from Flame Velgrs, which hits a huge area (i.e. almost guaranteed to hit your whole party unless you're in a very awkward formation) for a not-insignificant amount of damage (a little over 1000 on Hard in SC, at a point where your party has 3000-4000 HP max). Alone it isn't bad, but Flame Velgrs tend to show up in groups and love to all spam Feather Shower at once, resulting in unavoidable massive party damage.
  • Pretty much any attack with a high chance of inflicting status effects (bonus points if it's Faint, Petrify, or Freeze) might qualify.
  • Delay Cannon from R-II Gespenst is an AT Delay AOE, which can allow it to double-turn the party if their SPD is too low and if they're too bunched together. The boss of Chapter 1 has something similar, made more frustrating by the Delay effect being random.
  • Speaking of AOE Delay, Cassius's Rend Armor in The Third. After the boss buffs himself, Rend Armor is practically a guaranteed Total Party Kill if you don't have Earth Wall up, as he'll almost always follow it up with Lightning Flash to finish everyone off.
  • The final boss of SC, Angel Weissman has Ruined World Noaba. Small violet circles will appear around the party and you have one turn before they go off. That's your single chance to run like hell, because if they're in its range when his turn comes up, that character will be permanently Vanished for the rest of the battle. There's no way to revive them and they're out of commission for the final fight when you need them most. If it's Joshua, you're screwed. And if your characters are trapped either due to the playfield being destroyed ^note which is a gimmick in this battle- the Alpha-Omegas that Weissman summons destroy the playfield little by little if left on their own or by being surrounded by enemies, welp, you're done.
• That One Boss: See here.
• That One Level:
  • SC's Prologue is often regarded as one of the most difficult segments in the entire series on the higher difficulties. You're restricted to a few small areas without much chance to grind (there are Shining Poms, but good luck killing them this early in the game), so you're mostly limited to the resources you find in chests. And it ends with a brutal boss fight. On a Nightmare, Non NG+ run, it's possible to render the Prologue Unwinnable by using up your resources too early.
  • Chapter 8 in SC. With the story rapidly approaching its climax, Ouroboros succeeds in disabling the tetracylic towers. A gigantic flying city appears over Liberl and the Orbal Shutdown Phenomenon spreads outwards from it, knocking out all orbments in the entire country. But do you get to go board the city for the final showdown with Weissmann? NoooOOOoooo, you're stuck playing delivery-girl, running around the entire country ON FOOT to turn the phones back on. Worse, for the entire chapter you have a limited number of ZFGs, items that take up an accessory slot and must be used if the wielder wants to use any arts whatsoever. Aside from the very end of the chapter, nothing of any real story substance happens during this chapter and the game could pretty much jump from the end of Chapter 7 to the start of the attack on Grancel and not miss anything of importance.
• That One Sidequest:
  • A sidequest has you take on Abyss Worms in SC during Chapter 8. You know, the chapter where you probably only have two ZFG by the time you get to them? To make matters worse, there are 8 of them. You have to either risk earthquakes, or tediously kill them one at a time. If you choose to skip them, you can kiss your dreams of obtaining A rank goodbye.
  • Some of the doors in the 3rd will involve flashback battles, where you're stuck with limited arts, items, and equipment. In some cases, you don't even get to use arts. Oh, if the fight is a single boss battle, you don't get to retry after you lose, forcing you to rewatch the whole door just to reach the battle again. A standout example is Star Door 5, where you use Anelace to fight Richard alone. Winning that fight would give her the Jinu.
  • Star Door 6 ("Training - Agate-style") stands out in particular, as you're using three Joke Characters with weak stats, no Arts and a heavy reliance on CP, have very limited healing items and have to take on a full dungeon rather than a single fight.
  • The fishing minigame door is dreaded by many for the difficult timing mechanics, the bad RNG that can screw you out of a fish even if you get the timing right, and the AI opponent's luck in getting larger fish.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Tita and Renne develop a friendship in SC's third chapter. Even after The Reveal, Renne still wants to be friends with her. In The 3rd, Tita's motivation for working on the Orbal Gear is to help Renne, even if it means making an archaism that can stand up to Pater-Mater. When they finally meet her, she's confrontational and it seriously looks like Ries is going to pick a fight with Renne, only for the situation to be quickly defused. At this point, Tita's unlocked her Orbal Gear Craft, which would've made for a great rival battle. Even then, their aforementioned bond is hardly referenced after that point, both of Renne's final scenes in SC and The 3rd lack any dialogue with Tita, even if you bring her along in the former.
  • On a similar note, Estelle and Anelace being rivals. It's teased in their hilarious goodbye scene in the first chapter of SC, but other than a few very brief moments throughout the rest of the trilogy, Estelle and Anelace hardly interact despite their obvious chemistry.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy: Josette is a Low Tier example. In both the second and third games, she has crappy stats, no noteworthy crafts, and an S-craft that requires the player to unlock it (by rescuing her brothers in SC, and in The 3rd winning a mini game and a boss fight to unlock its upgraded version. She also happens to be a Required Party Member for a moderately tricky dungeon at the end of the second game, which doesn't exactly endear people to her given her lacklustre stats.
• Too Cool to Live: Master Swordsman with a Golden Sword? Rides on a black metal dragon? Silver-haired purple-eyed Aloof Big Brother for the male lead? Has the most awesome Leitmotif? Voiced by Hikaru Midorikawa, named Leonhardt and known as The Bladelord? Admit it, it was the only way for the Sora no Kiseki world to not to be frozen by Loewe's epic coolness.
  • Although his subsequent appearance in 3rd (albeit as a copy) and his apparent resurrection in Alternative Saga suggest that Falcom might consider him Too Cool To Die.
• Toy Ship:
  • Harry and Mina in Bose city. Somewhat hard to notice as they're non-essential NPCs that the player has to talk to on their own initiative.
  • Renne and Tita. They did have a pretty cute time as friends during chapter 3, and it's strongly implied it wasn't all an act on her part.

• Unexpected Character: While widely known nowadays, at the time, who could've expected that in ''the 3rd Richard and Renne of all people would become party members?
• The Un-Twist: The Black Knight's identity is so obvious, even the characters weren't surprised when they saw his true face, and in case you haven't figured it out it's Loewe.
• Useless Useful Spell: Did anyone ever actually use Sylphen Wing during the game? The speed buffs, Clock Up and Clock Up EX, are a case of taking a long time to become useful: in FC they only really become worth using toward the end of the game, when they actually last a decent time (and by then, there is little point in ever casting the lower-tier buff since you likely have enough quartz to use the upgraded one), while in SC they and companion spell Clock Down become near-mandatory for any serious fight once you can cast them. Status effect spells for the most part subvert it: a surprising number of bosses in FC are vulnerable to Chaos Brand, which inflicts confusion, and almost all of them in SC are vulnerable to Clock Down. You can easily cast Chaos Brand on, say, the Special Ops Guards or the opposing teams during the Martial Arts Competition and watch them beat each other up.
• Values Dissonance: The relationship between Tita and Agate. While most players enjoy the older brother/younger sister dynamic between the two and the Heartwarming Moments it provides, Western fans are a lot less receptive to the strong Ship Tease on Tita's part. The age gap between them is a whopping 15 years, and Tita doesn't graduate past 13 by the end of the trilogy. Such gaps aren't unheard of in Japanese media, and have a higher chance of being better received there, but to western fans it can come across as more uncomfortable than cute. Indeed, practically the entire cast of The 3rd are enthusiastic about the idea. What keeps it from being completely unliked by most fans is the lack of any romantic affection on Agate's part, and by the time of Cold Steel some fans have warmed up slightly, if only because Tita's now reached the age of majority consent, making the pairing a little less unbalanced.
• Vindicated by History:
  • On release, and for a long time after, Sky FC was regarded as a 30-50 hour long Slow-Paced Beginning and Prolonged Prologue to the real action in SC. As the series progressed many fans have come to look back on it in a more favourable light, with its top-notch Worldbuilding and Character Development, and its grounded, low-stakes, borderline Slice of Life story is considered a breath of fresh air compared to how crazy later arcs in the series became, or indeed JRPGs in general.
  • After the epic climaxe of SC and hype for Crossbell at the time, 3rd had a lot to live up to, and had a somewhat mixed response from fans. Despite its many breaks from the series formula, the game is often praised for its unique strengths in hindsight as a self-contained title, from the Doors offering unique character-focused vignettes, plentiful foreshadowing for future titles, and the much quicker pace of storytelling. Kevin has become an extremely popular character in his own right, thanks to a uniquely depressing and well-told backstory and interesting character flaws. Sister Ries is also a fan favorite. It's not uncommon these days to see 3rd praised as often as it is disliked as the best in the series. This is a far cry from its release, when many a fan decried it as a filler Mission-Pack Sequel that took focus away from Estelle and Joshua with little to offer outside of cool What If? scenarios.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The first game, aside from the frequent adult jokes, has a lighthearted atmosphere reminiscent of Miyazaki that makes it easy to treat as a family friendly game until the infamous cliffhanger. The second game delves more into heavier themes like trauma and PTSD, but its general tone is on par with popular shonen anime. The third game, however, falls right into Darker and Edgier territory, with Star Door 15 taking this to an extreme as its contents are potentially triggering even for adults (so much so that Falcom censored it in every rerelease past the original PC version, though the English localization used the uncensored version), on top of some horrifying imagery in Kevin's backstory.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/TheLegendOfHeroesTrailsInTheSky

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