Hi all. I'm sure we're all very familiar with the frustratons of telling a friend about how awesome Trails is, only for them to not play it, because immediately adding 13 JRPGs (and counting) to the backlog, many of which are 10-20 years old, doesn't seem very enticing. I mean, the new games look fun, but I have to play these old antiquitated JRPGs with weird graphics to even get there, and apparently I HAVE to play them in order, and that's stupid! Well, that's what many people that I sold the series to have thought, and more recently I sold the series to other friends in a different way, a way that worked miles better. The key to getting your friends to hop on Trails is to

Sell Trails in the Sky FC as an individual game, instead of talking about the series as a whole

Recently I just decided to tell a friend not about this amazing long-running several thousand hour long journey, instead, I told him about Trails in the Sky specifically, how it's a kickass JRPG from 2004 that aged super well (both graphically and gameplay-wise), is on Steam, has a very strong story-focus with incredible chaacters and if he liked what he played, there's even more where that came from with a whole Trilogy and some games outside of that. And guess what... he picked up the game. It works :)

Also when it comes to starting with other games: idk I'm only on Azure myself (almost done though) and so far the only good starting point has been Sky FC. I hear Cold Steel is pretty good also but I'll be the judge of that once I get there (Having said that I mostly hear that if you start with Cold Steel, you should still go back and revisit Sky/Crossbell before Cold Steel 2, and that's a lot harder to sell than just going "there's this awesome trilogy for you to play").