Why are the Trails scripts so big?

The numbers first, since they are documented rather than rumoured. Trails in the Sky FC contains roughly 1.5 million Japanese characters of text. Its sequel SC runs to over three million Japanese characters; the finished English script, per its editor Jessica Chavez, is 716,401 words, for scale, longer than The Lord of the Rings at 455,125 words and War and Peace at 587,287. A decade later the habit had not shrunk: Falcom president Kondo noted that even Trails into Reverie, nominally an epilogue, carries a main scenario of about 80% of Cold Steel IV's text volume.

The cause is a design rule, not bloat. In most RPGs, townspeople repeat a line forever. In Trails, nearly every NPC has a name, a household, a job and a small continuing life, and their dialogue is rewritten after virtually every story event, in every town, in every game, players who check in on a Rolent shopkeeper's family across the Sky trilogy watch a marriage, a pregnancy and a birth play out in ambient text. Multiply that discipline by thirteen games of main scenario, side quests, book-length in-game novels, newspapers that print each chapter's events, and item descriptions, and the word counts stop looking like excess. They are the series' actual content: Zemuria is the protagonist, and Zemuria is made of text. The human cost of moving that text into English is recorded on the localisation page.