LogFAQs > #964679225

Huge Trails fan here.

The answer is technically yes - it will reference prior games in the series, but the story doesn't depend on you having played them (the party is not the same as the Trails in the Sky or Trails to Zero/Azure parties and it's set in a different part of the continent than those two), so it's still perfectly possible to play them without knowing anything from the prior games. That said, the game will spoil some wonderful plot twists from earlier games in the series, so I still always recommend that people play the first three games (Trails in the Sky FC, SC, and Third) before they jump into Cold Steel. They're older games now, but still excellent JRPGs.

The Crossbell duology (Trails to Zero/Trails of Azure, which are being properly localized as we speak but which have had a high-quality fan translation available for a year or two now) is set at the same time as Cold Steel, so does not need to be played first (and, in fact, I recommend playing it AFTER the first two Cold Steel games - both spoil points from the other, but Crossbell spoils some of ToCS's best twists, while Cold Steel largely doesn't touch on the bigger twists from Crossbell, with one notable exception).

That said, by the time you hit Cold Steel 3, the game will start calling on more and more parts of the previous games and Cold Steel 4 will be difficult to follow unless you have played everything that came prior.

So yeah, if you *really* want to, start with ToCS, but Sky FC is the better entry point for the series. Ideal play order, in my opinion, is:

Trails in the Sky FC --> Trails in the Sky SC --> Trails in the Sky the Third --> Trails of Cold Steel --> Trails of Cold Steel 2 --> Trails to Zero --> Trails to Azure --> Trails of Cold Steel 3 --> Trails of Cold Steel 4

Also, while there are games in the "The Legend of Heroes" series that came before Sky FC, they are effectively unconnected from a story perspective and don't need to be played at all (it's debatable whether they even take place in the same universe and nothing in the current storyline references them; in fact, Falcom has largely dropped the "Legend of Heroes" series name, because it's no longer relevant to the current "Kiseki/Trails of" series).