There are few video games as long lived as The Legend of Heroes. Telling a continuous story for the past 20 years in over a dozen games, an anime, various manga, and other transmedia, the franchise has followed young heroes who fight for others by uncovering the tide of oppressive political forces shaping national borders. It’s the most — verbose and lighthearted, conflicts solved through both the power of friendship and international trade treaties.
Trails through Daybreak’s particular ensemble of heroes, though, stands out. Gig workers, orphans, queers, and ethnic minorities come together as a found family in their French locale to fight villains who have allied themselves with capitalists stoking racial tensions in a multicultural nation. They call out and fight back against the white supremacy of their opponents anti-immigrant rhetoric, the cover for economic power grabs.
Much of that was reduced down to one conversation between Van Arkride, the game’s spiky haired, autophile protagonist asking a new party member, Quatre, his pronouns. It’s a fair question since Quatre wears thigh high boots and short shorts along with a tie, his long silver hair not communicating a clear gender expression at all. Something left out of that single frame of dialogue is how other characters respond to the question. Quatre is himself surprised, while other party members — notably teens compared to Van’s decrepit 24 — are offended he would say that. It’s not exactly a pronoun circle, but a reasonable translation of trying to figure out politely what someone’s ambiguous gender presentation is.
And while it was a relative flash in the pan as far as gaming controversies go, I was reassured — impressed, even — by how unphased actual fans of the The Legend of Heroes were themselves to the inclusion of a queer character. Not that it should be surprising to someone who has played a Trails game.
A fraught history of inclusion
From the beginning of The Legend of Heroes’ Trails series, Nihon Falcom was interested in the racial and ethnic diversity of its setting. Its RPG world features fictional counterparts to real world countries and cultures having a home on the map with different names, clothes, governments, and architecture. Trails in the Sky is set in a UK styled kingdom, complete with an old, benevolent queen. Travelers from nearby countries, along with word spread by trade and paper, establish the broader horizons of the world still being explored today.
Queerness was present from the start too, even in the series’ very first party. The blond bard Olivier was an alcoholic, hypersexual traveler who couldn’t stop himself from flirting with the trilogies teen deuteragonists, Estelle and Joshua. Throughout the Sky trilogy, Olivier is a primary source of comedic relief, which arises from his drinking and advances suggesting his interest in characters of all genders (and ages).
A lot has changed in the past 10 years …
Still, the Sky trilogy portrays queerness in more thoughtful ways. The game’s obligatory crossdressing scene doesn’t rest on the supposed humor of transmisogyny (a la the Honeybee Inn) and instead on how much prettier Joshua looks in a dress than every girl in the play he’s a part of. An optional side story in Trails in the Sky the 3rd all but says two recurring side characters, mayor Mabelle and her maid Lila, are devoted to each other in a totally heterosexual way. More importantly, from comments the player character Anelace makes to them, it’s clear queer people exist and aren’t deviant to an upstanding heroine.
Trails from Zero would further normalize the presence of queer people in Zemuria. Set in a neighboring city-state, Crossbell, the series would begin to lean into archetypal shonen characters and tropes, introducing a number ambiguously bi characters that mostly come across as idiosyncratic rather than complex. But it would also introduce a slender androgynous boy with long green hair and a cropped top: Wazy Hemisphere.
Wazy is introduced as a gang leader, but one who is mostly giving guys without a place in the big city a purpose while they genuinely run a bar that is not actually a front. Zero and its sequel, Trails to Azure, finds humor in Wazy’s juxtaposition to the protagonist, Lloyd. One is a host who has experience and connections that betray his youth and position, the other an upstanding, naive, do-good police officer who could not be a more generic protagonist if his brother wasn’t dead. And while it’s not capital-R representation, it’s pretty funny to watch Wazy pull Lloyd’s strings in front of a harem of jealous girls. It works because Wazy is unquestionably a heroic and sympathetic figure to root for, just in his own way. He has a spoiler-filled life of his own beneath the surface of his gender expression.
And then there’s Angelica. The Trails of Cold Steel tetralogy would take players through an entire war in over it’s 300 some hours of story and reincorporate much of the main cast of past games somewhere in the journey. Following the students of an imperial academy who must rise to action during an international-turned-civil conflict, its incredibly large cast of classmates and students relies on archetypes to keep up. One of the more infamous of these characters is Angelica Rogner, a leering hentai constantly making inappropriate passes on her classmates — but it’s funny ‘cause she’s a woman too!
Just be normal
A lot can change over twenty years though. People grow, norms progress, the cultural backlash follows. No one has tracked those changes at Falcom like Leona Renee, who was working with XSeed Games when the third party publisher wanted to localize Trails in the Sky in 2014. Renee would contribute to the translation of almost every Trails game over the next decade, following the series to publisher NIS America as a contractor.
Renee admits she liked Angelica initially, though her direction was disappointing. Translating a harmful stereotype was her job, however: “Some of her lines I didn’t agree with, but it’s not my job to take that away from the character,” Renee tells Digital Trends.
Asked about the change in direction from Falcom in Daybreak, Renee argued that among developer intentions to create a tonally mature story in contrast to Cold Steel, the world has changed.
“Cold Steel was over 10 years ago,” Renee notes of the game’s development. “A lot has changed in the past 10 years, even in real life in terms of how people publicly perceive queer culture, or queer characters, or queer people.”
Renee would lead the localization of Trails through Daybreak for its 2024 release, including casting the characters’ English voices. “We were fully aware of what goes on in the next game,” Renee says of Quatre’s identity (Daybreak 2 released in Japan in 2022). They cast agender actor John Patneaude as Quatre.
It was clear from the start that Falcom was queer coding the character with some basic trans masculine tropes, and what make’s Quatre a compelling queer character is not that people talk about his pronouns — it’s how he actually moves through the world differently.
Most notably, he binds with bandages that conceal his chest (or possibly the scars of a top surgery). In the game’s many onsen scenes, Quatre avoids the party or slips away to a private room, afraid to reveal the bandages. In Daybreak 2, the character’s identity is made more explicitly intersex as he himself explores what it means to choose to be a boy in the body he was born into. He also questions his sexuality.
Moreover, Daybreak normalizes and empathizes with queer characters across Zemuria. There are allies like Bermotti, a flamboyant bartender with all the underground intel. In his introduction, Bermotti playfully teases Daybreak’s cool protagonist, leaving the wrong impression on others that they’re dating. Van doesn’t recoil, and neither do the other party members, as men often do to reassert their masculinity through homophobic violence.
There are also inconsequential side stories in the game that explore the blackmail of someone in the closet and a queer love triangle. Daybreak’s penultimate boss, a hulking mafioso and cultist, and the game’s antepenultimate boss, a twinkish assassin who seduces men into his machinations, even have a thing for each other. Queer people are no longer idiosyncratic the way they were in the best and worst of characters in the series’ past. They just are.
Asked if Falcom’s writers have come to view their characters differently, Renee answers, “I think so.”
Daybreak and Daybreak 2 are not trying to be high minded art by any means. Even as Falcom includes a diverse cast of marginalized people fighting against the oppressive forces of imperialism and white supremacy, its writing is on par with the maturity and tone of many light novels. But worldbuilding always remains curious and critical. So, even as I tire of recycled conflicts, the latest entries do manage to offer something fresh by emphasizing the heroes and villains amid the previously hidden underbelly of its world. Strip clubs and sex workers can be found throughout its new setting while the game spells out the political forces pushing and pulling on the governments of the nations we’ve grown familiar with. Heroes call out the prejudice they experience as ethnic minorities in a cosmopolitan nation, others call old-moneyed monarchists white supremacists (a direct translation “equally as charged in Japanese,” Renee asserts). And there’s still all the cringey romances and slapstick humor, because that’s what the series has always been.
It’s still a job for them, but Renee does admit that working in localization, “We enjoy working on character’s that we feel are more nuanced, that express themselves in a more mature manner.”
Beginning with the localization of Daybreak 2, NIS America has begun using an internal localization team, so Renee’s decade with the series is over. Over twenty years of development, The Legend of Heroes has changed as much as Falcom has — but Zemuria hasn’t. So much of what was initially established in 2004 is what players are only just arriving at. This world building is what drives me back to the series. It’s not about new locales, but the people from them. And it is a reminder that it does not take particularly high minded art to depict the world as it is: big, diverse, with sympathetic heroes fighting wealthy racists pulling the strings without taking the fall.
