Well after listening to quite a bit of the music from Falcom, I feel I can say a few things about the matter. Now granted I'll point out the established issue of music being subjective, and further point out that it's difficult to appreciate a soundtrack piece without context. Overall, its not bad, but definitely not my thing. I can definitely tell you two love high octane upbeat music cause that was like 98% of what I listened to, which is probably why only a few tracks really stood out to me when they subverted that expectation. I bet you two love Metal music don't you?

What follow is a critique of why I don't personally care for the music, it has nothing to do with looking down on the music itself or people's taste cause "different strokes for different folks" and all that. So don't take any of this personal.

The soundtracks are way too homogeneous for my taste and I kept getting more and more disappointed the further I went in listening as they started to sound way too familiar, not helped by the music teams heavy preference for electric guitars, violins, and piano. I would be curious to see them try to build a soundtrack that restricted them from using these three instruments. Most disappointing for me was how often they would start a track that I'm guessing is either the penultimate boss fight or some major story battle which would start with a cool choral piece and then quickly segue into a thrash metal guitar piece. It was cool the first couple times I heard a track do it, but it really feels like most of their music does this to some degree with the only changes being whether the driving instrument was a guitar, piano or violin.

The Trails games have a very heavy anime style to their music pieces as well, very reminiscent to Yuki Kaijuro's style in some places as I was really getting a .hack/Xenosaga vibe from the soundtracks. Another issue I had was that I do feel a lot of the music is a bit overproduced. This became really apparent when I got to some of the non-Trails/Ys OSTs that were still stuck in their original sound format. I kind of liked those tracks better despite the fact I could tell the melodies and instrumentation followed the same patterns as more modern tracks, they just felt a bit better because the main melody didn't get lost in the production value of the later pieces that really have a "be epic or don't bother" mentality to them.

The one element that did a lot of damage for me personally with my thoughts on the pieces presented was realizing how many of these tracks would work well in a supernatural anime series where the scene kind of goes like this:

Bad Guy: You foolish heroes, you never stood a chance against us!
Lead Female: Sepai watch out! Kyaaa! (group gets blasted by energy beam, Sepai stands up)
Senpai: I won't let the Dolemite Empire win!"
Bad Guy: Do you really feel that your Grubular Engine Power can stand equal to mine and the mighty Dolemite Empire!? (Charges up and blast hero down) Now I'll finish off your friends and be done with this.
(music swells, Senpai gets up with glowing power)
Bad Guy: Nani?! How can you still be standing? (Music hits the main driving track) Has your Grubular Engine Power obtained Infinitus Maximus? But that's impossible!
(Senpai proceeds to be thrash the villains as they become a physical god in a glorious beat down fans have been waiting all seasons, the rest of the heroes look on in awe. Senpai lays the smackdown on Bad Guy. The main chunkc of the battle theme plays here)
Bad Guy: But how?!
Senpai: Friendship is my power! (takes out villain before collapsing from the use of the power, the track finally comes to a close)

As soon as I started playing that generic scenario in my head for each track, and realized how absolutely fitting it was for most of them, it killed a abit of my ability to listen to the tracks objectively. I will personally laugh if a lot of them actually do play in some variation of the scene I just described.

The works are not bad, and you can tell the team designing it knows what it wants and what fans like. Yet the tracks are just not my thing. I need way more variety in my soundtracks to appreciate them and even jumping into the full OSTs posted, I'm not hearing as much as I would like. Not helping things here is that I tend to have a strong aversion to battle themes in RPGs, and that seems to be Falcom's specialty. You can tell Falcom has a very arcade style root with their music, and that is not a bad thing cause people know I love me some classic Capcom and Konami pieces which all fall into the same vein of musical styling as these. I just don't know if I could go a whole RPG listening to this type of music, but that comes down to my personal preferences. Then again, I could see myself changing my mind with a few of these tracks if I had context to the scenes in which they play, so that is a factor. I'm still not against checking out Ys or the Trails series outside of knowing its going to be a huge investment, but I can also say that I don't feel the OSTs are going to be the standout part of the games for me.