The Legend of Heroes 空の軌跡 FC エヴォリューション

Yes and no. The best part about Trails is the long-term worldbuilding and storytelling, which you can't really get the scope of in just the first game. There will still be tropey characters and dumb plot twists though, a lot of us either suffer through it for lore or embrace how silly it is (I revel in the absurdity of the scary fire guy in Cold Steel being named "McBurn", not everyone can). But, Sky 1 is probably the weakest in the series aside from a couple Cold Steel games. Sky 2 and 3 are great, the Crossbell games are great, Cold Steel 3 is great. And the combat does get better, the quartz system becomes pretty dope as the games go forward.