It's night, and Estelle is waiting for her father. Apparently, there's no mother. Suddenly, he appears with a gift for her - a boy. This boy was found on a mission, and when he wakes up, he's mostly worried about the safety of this family, saying that he should be left behind to die.
Fast forward some time, and these three are living like a family, but a "different" one - a soldier, Estelle's father Cassius Bright; no mother; an adopted scholar son, now named Joshua; and our main character herself, a charming young girl who's very bad at school and wants nothing else than to swing her staff.
This is the premise of Trails in the Sky. It was pretty interesting to me at first glance, mainly because I know that this will turn out to be a huge series, and it's always nice to see the "humble beginnings." With the benefit of foresight (because objectively I'm from the future), I can start catching the clues that will lead to this game turning out to be a political war drama.
What an interesting perspective it is to know that if this wasn't a game from my backlog from basically 10 years ago, meaning, if I didn't know that there would be 14 games after this one, I could have thought that this "humble beginning" might just be another PC or portable JRPG where I would end up saving the world from another cosmic force in 40 hours of gameplay.
So, generally, I feel that there's a lot of extra weight in knowing what this game will turn out to be. To be honest, I started this backlog quest afraid that not having a specific experience when I was younger would somehow detract from my overall enjoyment. But it's quite the opposite; knowing this, I'm thrilled to see how these simple events will turn out to be part of such a big story chaos. And there's more: knowing myself just a little as I do, I'm almost sure that I would have given up on this game back in 2004, so I'm glad to give it a shot just now.