A heartfelt and captivating musical adaptation of a JRPG – Trails of Cold Steel: Premium 3D Musical

While playing a long Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), have you ever thought to yourself, “man, this game REALLY needs a live musical adaptation?” Well, I haven’t. But that’s something someone did and so here we are, watching The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel: Premium 3D Musical.

After that mouthful of a title, it is time for some general background. Trails of Cold Steel is part of Nihon Falcom’s long-running RPG series “Kiseki” (localised as Trails) and is the first part of the third arc in the series focusing on the Erebonian Empire. The main character is Rean Schwarzer (Matsumura Ryunosuke in the play), part of the newly established Class VII in Thors Military Academy, which is essentially a high school. Together with his classmates throughout the year, face personal issues, visit cities around the country as field trips and help with mundane and not so mundane tasks with a bigger plot unfolding in the background. Said plot involves political scheming, terrorism, and numerous mysteries.

[Yes, Rean, I know that (painfully) too well. In the (Cold Steel) games, Rean is talked about constantly. And I do mean constantly.]

I must preface this also by saying that Trails is notorious for terrible pacing lasting up to 100 hours while only a small part of it has any sense of progression. It’s also very focused on Rean Schwarzer, who is supposed to be a self-insert type of character. Also, to me, the overarching plot and characters fell off a cliff in quality with Cold Steel. With these in mind, I can’t say I had high expectations from a musical of all things.

Moving on to the musical itself. Not so surprisingly, the musical leaves out several characters, including Crow Armbrust, who I’d consider essential, and includes the story up to the halfway point of the game or so. It basically features several key scenes up until that point together with some gags like Class VII’s teacher Sara Valenstein (Yoshikawa Asami) acting drunk and Rean getting nervous because of her behaviour. That said, despite condensing the story, the musical gives far more screentime to characters whose name isn’t Rean Schwarzer and that alone is a great improvement. Well, poor Gaius Worzel (Kishimoto Takuya) was pretty much without anything to do during the musical outside the singing and dancing bits. But that’s just par for the course, as he’s pretty much irrelevant in the games from the very beginning. In the games, he doesn’t have any character conflict or anything, just babbles on about “the Wind” and exists, so it’s a bit of a missed opportunity to let him be ignored here as well.

For the music, the musical includes both music from the game itself and some original songs of its own. Overall, it’s there, I guess. Trails as a series is full of great music pieces, but the musical doesn’t really get the best of the in-game music from Cold Steel. The original songs for the musical didn’t do much for me on their own either. However, once the dancing kicks in together with the music it’s amazing. My favourite scene in the musical was when Class VII had been beaten by the bone dragon, the final boss of the musical, they’d evoke the Power of Friendship trope through a song. One by one they stand up, sing, bust some dance moves and empower each other. There was just something so bizarre about seeing characters doing this in what is essentially a battle scene that I couldn’t help but laugh and cry.

Battles against monsters are done through utilising the animated background and actors swinging at thin air with special effects appearing on the screen along with hit sounds. The musical also includes duels against other actors and the choreography is, well, not that amazing but it’s enjoyable. If you’ve ever watched Kamen Rider or similar tokusatsu (genre heavily utilising special effects e.g., the western adaptation of Super Sentai: Power Rangers) in general, you pretty much know what to expect. Minus everything exploding. On that note, the whole feel of everything in this musical is reminiscent of something from a budget tokusatsu and maybe it’s also one of the reasons why I enjoyed it.

Going in, I was afraid that I’d be having a bad time and physically wincing over some moments with how serious the games try to be with their, arguably very shoddy writing. Thankfully, the musical proved me very wrong by taking a more comical tone to the story rather than playing it dead serious. The actors seemed to have a really great time with the musical both on and off-stage (based on the extra material). I’d say that it was all this heart and soul that elevated it to such a great experience. In short, it is, in all its meaning, fun.

I heartily recommend the musical to anyone who has played the game and cautiously recommend it as a curiosity to those who haven’t, mostly because of the story skipping and some story parts not making sense if you haven’t played the game. At the very least, the music and dance numbers are worth watching for those curious.

Producer: Okumura Sennosuke
Director: Oku Shutaro
Scriptwriter: Inoue Mio
Music: Falcom Sound Team JDK / Jindo Yukihiro / Shibazaki Ayako / Hifumi Kyo
Original musical location and date(s): Zepp Blue Theater Roppongi – January 8th to 15th 2017
(Limited, Japanese only) DVD release: Trails of Cold Steel: Premium 3D Musical
English subtitler: Chuji Suika (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2ayezCTesWPzHlY7PjNybw)
DVD-upload on YouTube (with subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jORn1nwy2X0
Images: Screenshots from the DVD-uploaded musical by Chuji Suika above
Length: ~2 hours (+37 minutes extra)

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