Spring, once the video game industry’s dumping ground, has of late become the landing ground of holiday blockbusters that couldn’t be finished in time for the Christmas shopping season. But, amid this transformed treasure trove, one old tradition remains: the Spring Sleeper. The official Spring Sleeper of 2011, “The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky,” fits the format to a T. It’s a Japanese role-playing game chock-full of charming characters; it has a long, two-part name (last year’s Spring Sleeper was the perfectly titled “Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon”); it creates “fantasy” words by taking ordinary words and changing them slightly, giving us the Liberl Kingdom, a young boy named Radford, and something called the Orbal Revolution; and most importantly, it flies under the radar despite being the perfect game to snuggle up to on a rainy day.
When not exploring quaint towns and gleaming airships, “Trails” tasks you with fighting various monsters on 17-by-17 grids. The battles are kind of like chess, except instead of a ordering nameless, faceless bands of rooks and pawns, you command a group of people you come to care about, with well-realized, intertwining personal histories involving everything from romance to betrayal. And unlike chess pieces, whose abilities are static, your characters improve over time as you customize their attacks, help them craft new magic spells, and even collect recipes to cook special items to aid you in battle.
