All I have to say is that this game is PEAK PEAK PEAK.

Anyways second Trails game review. I didn't know what I was getting myself into after the cliffhanger of the first game but I definitely needed to play this game for some closure.

I'll actually talk about the gameplay first. Maybe I'm just an idiot but I actually decided to use the food we cook in recipes for this game! Especially the food where you can use it to damage enemies in battle. Also, I'm glad that they finally incorporated actual attack arts for space, I was really annoyed that the first game didn't have any. Most of the gameplay remains the same, but they incorporated Chain Crafts (I think that's what they were called, it's been a while since I played this game). Now coming from someone who completed this game on Nightmare, I didn't really use them (maybe I should've, might've made this game way more forgiving on the hardest difficulty), just never really saw the need to when most of my characters had no CP to use anyways. But EP will always be king in these games.

Like I said in my last review, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, and only continues to get better in this game. The grave importance of the Non-Aggression Pact between Liberl, Erebonia and Calvard made the situation all the more tense. On top of all of that, you had Ouroboros being snakes around the entirety of Liberl and trying to cause chaos, and they're just really weird. And Hamel, that stuff got my blood boiling when I found out about it. I think if a game is truly able to get my blood boiling for fictional content, I may as well just resign myself to the entire series, it's seriously that great.

I love love love the story in this game. Estelle goes on a double mission, to gather intel on Ouroboros, and to find Joshua. Dammit Joshua, why'd you have to leave, you carried me in the previous game. Anyways, I enjoyed going back to each city in different order, as well as being able to use the old squad, but also new characters like Anelace and Kevin. I enjoyed getting to discover the different Enforcers of Ouroboros, with many having relationships with other party members. Ouroboros in a whole is just mysterious, but I think it's better that way, as we aren't really meant to know how they operate. Oh yeah, did I ever mention how much I hate Weissman? Well, I hate him, he sucks. The one part of the game that I disliked was where you had to climb the four Tetracyclic Towers, it felt so repetitive, but I enjoyed each of the boss fights (even if I had to restart on each of them a bunch of times until I figured out a strategy). Now, the endgame was truly when this game became peak. Olivier being royalty, yeah sort of saw that coming, but the Liber Ark and how they essentially just eliminated our orbments for part of the final chapter. Brilliant incorporation of the story into the gameplay, even if it was annoying to deal with. The Liber Ark felt like a true boss rush, fighting some of the strongest members of Ouroboros to stop their Gospel plan. The Joshua and Loewe scene kind of got me near the end there. The final boss, honestly not that memorable, all I remember is Weissman summoning a bunch of ads that just kept deleting my Earth Wall.

Kevin killing Weissman was the cherry on top, and really got me interested in Kevin's character and backstory. I felt that Estelle and Joshua's arc was handled great, and I just love a lot of things about this game. That last part of the game where Joshua and Estelle are about to 'die' didn't have as much of an emotional impact on me, as I knew they would survive due to there being another game after this one, but nonetheless, it still did hit me. And of course, Cassius had to ride in on his dragon and rescue us.

A great game, and a great game to end Estelle and Joshua's story, but only beginning their adventures as senior bracers.

BLORF.

A substantial improvement over FC but still can't help over how disappointing it was in so many areas.
The Plot is not very well-paced. The first half of the game is filled with repetition and backtracking and is often predictable just like the first game. Even when it does pick up it's not all that impressive, as most of the moments don't leave a huge impact on me. But there are some big highlights, Leowe attacking Weissman and breaking that barrier, and Kevin killing Weissman in cold blood were some of them.
Most of the Characters this time have their full-fledged arcs, while most of them stood between either meh or okay.
Agate's arc was very well done and gives justice to his character, and Leowe playing an important role in it makes it even more interesting. But I think it'd been better without Tita being in it.
Zin and Scherazard's arcs were fine. It's how most JRPG arcs go. Kloe and Olivier's arcs were more like shoehorned in the plot and didn't really matter honestly as the whole political tension. Tita is just there and no one cares about her and they did not even bother to give her her own arc.
Leowe was by far the most interesting character and I was hooked to the screen whenever he made his appearance, he was well-written and executed really well as an antagonist compared to Weissman who was one of the most JRPG of all-time final bosses. Leowe's dynamic with each character was very interesting to see as well, especially with Estelle, Joshua, Renne, and Agate.
Speaking of Joshua, he is the most disappointing character in the whole game, while having a rich backstory and strong impressions by the end of FC, his role was little to none in the first half, and by the time he comes back into the party, he's back to being how he was before leaving. Even his return feels rushed and more to the point where writers just talk no jutsud him back in the party. His struggles were very little addressed in the beach scene and Estelle just tells him and he agrees.
All there's left is Estelle, well she was the main character so she must be the most well-written one right? WRONG. While I do not have a problem with Positive characters, they lose their charm real quick if there's nothing interesting about them. Estelle falls into that category, there were moments where it showed a potential development for her, but they all went to shambles by the end as all she ended up being was the "sun that guides everyone". receiving no development, and her motivations hardly getting questioned.
Also, I hate whenever a character starts talking about Cassius, he's the Ultimate Plot Convenience this game pulls, and has all the godly feats possible that even the legendary Dragon knows him. He is only available when the plot demands it, the rest of the time he is unavailable. Honestly, it would have been better to have killed him in the plot if they weren't going to properly utilize the trope.
Other than this I am also not a fan of how this game handles romance, or more like relationships in general. Estelle and Joshua started out as siblings but throughout the FC everyone around them shipped them and Estelle developed feelings for Joshua over that. This feels so wrong because their relationship actually felt sibling-like and they just changed it halfway through the game. I find it hard to understand how people call their romance well-written after this.
Agate and Tita have a similar case, Tita was supposed to be a Mischa-like presence in his life, and the way other party members ship them in Chapter 6 felt really uncomfortable considering Tita is a Minor and Agate is 24 years old.
I am not going to talk about the gameplay, the music, or the worldbuilding as they are just better than what was already good in the first game (And I am not in much of a mood to praise this game).
Trails in the Sky SC turned out to be a really disappointing experience as the prologue was very promising. Hopefully the last game in the Liberl Arc will redeem itself.

They are lying to you, this game is not peak, but it is good. I do admire how ambitious this, and FC are, you can tell they tried to make a great game here with a minuscule budget. How they tried to stretch this budget out though made it worse. Trails SC suffers from some of the worst pacing I may have ever seen in a video game story. Chapter 8 has all this crazy shit happen and then they make you do a round trip around the city's you've been too. It's some of the most boring nothing content. In this game there's about 30-35% of a great game, and the rest of it is horrible. So much could've been cut out. I also dislike the character arcs for Agate and the rest of the side characters. The whole point of the first game was to make us invested in these characters, it should've been done in the first, not here. It really sucks too, because the first game was relatively down to earth, the stakes weren't too high, and a lot of it was spent establishing the world. SC devolves into THE most predictable and awful anime drivel, but it does retain its strong character writing. The villains suck ass and do the Vegeta thing that happens all the time in anime where they end up being good at the end. The first time Estelle meets Weissman on the ship, he is quite literally playing a giant organ. Like, it is straight up comical at times. The game also does not handle heavy topics well. The explanation of what happened to Joshua as a kid is not adequate enough to make me feel anything or really understand the repercussions this had. I think Estelles development to being more mature is cool, but when the game starts saying she's like the sun and she bring everyone together, it feels like it minimalizes her development. The start of SC is spent with Estelle learning to be strong on her own, and then the game just forgets that part and just says she is bright like the sun. It also infuriates me how formulaic the game is. Like 5 of the chapters is doing boring shit to meet an ouroboros member, who then kicks your ass then leaves. It never occurs to the main party that they need to get stronger to beat them and then they somehow do at the end??? It's more of an issue too, because the game has this thing where how strong you are in game is roughly how strong that character is in the story. For example, when Zane joins the party. he is obviously higher level than everyone else, because Zane would beat the dogshit out of Estelle or Schera. But Schera is also higher level than Estelle but not more than Zane. When Joshua joins, he is the highest level so far because he used to be part of ouroboros. When the bandit girl joins your party, she is lower level and doesn't even have a s-craft. I could keep going on to prove this point. There's no in-story explanation of how they got stronger, it's through gameplay, but it's confusing story wise because a lot of players won't even notice this fact.

Gameplay wise, it is identical EXCEPT for the new addition of chains. Chains are fucking terrible, and I have no clue why you would ever use these dog shit moves. It ruins your turn order, barely does more damage than if everyone involved just attacked normally, and costs craft points from everyone. They are awful and the only new addition sucks ass. Combat is mostly fine though. The boss fights are fun with a few exceptions, and the random encounters are ass. It takes too long for fights to finish for it to be structured like a SRPG. Luckily, you don't really need to grind. I do wish it did the FF13 and made every party members level the same. The late game boss fights are fucking awful though. The 2nd Renne fight, she hit her super immediately and crit and insta killed my whole party before I could even realize what happened. Loewe's fight is ass, and luckily you can just skip it for some reason??? A lot of the late game fights just have you spamming earth wall and aoe magic attacks. Also, Estelle is like the shittiest character. Her stats are fucking awful, and I could never make here as good as any other party member.

Overall, though, it is just the first game, but the story is worst. The game could not meet up to expectations and its writing is better when it isn't trying to make some secret organization kingdom hearts storyline. Its wasted so much of its time on backtracking and character arcs that should've happened in the first. The payoff is not worth 100 hours of gameplay. To put it in perspective, I have almost the same time in these two games as Persona 5. I am going to play the future entries though and I hope they improve on the formula established here.

Trails in the Sky SC starts very quickly after Trails in the Sky FC left off, with Joshua having skipped out following the revelation that the antagonist group of Ouroboros knows he used to be one of their number, and after confessing his feelings to Estelle. This game in turn picks up with Estelle going on further training as a Bracer, before picking up Joshua’s trail, tracking him down while also attempting to thwart the various elements of Ouroboros’ plan – because Estelle always gets her man, and dammit, Joshua is her man. (Cue awkward anime blushing). This in turn takes you through a lot of the previous environments from the earlier games, where you get to chat with a lot of the characters who you’d met before, see how the world has developed over a time-skip of a few months, and level up further and develop new abilities, as you learn more about the setting.

On the one hand, this could make the game feel cheap – you’re re-using a lot of environments, including some dungeon maps, from the first game, along with some character portraits. However, where the game clearly saves in production design, it makes up for it in the writing. This is a clear case of the game showing that using a serialized narrative structure between games, with game-assets being consciously and deliberately re-used with intent, can actually make for a richer world.

To put it another way, you don’t think Friends is being cheap for having the characters hang out at Central Perk, you think that’s a logical place for the characters to hang out, and maintaining that environment while introducing characters to it – as customers, as employees – enriches the world. The same applies here. It does also mean that when we go into entirely new areas – like a floating, Castle In The Sky-esque city in the game’s final chapter – those moves have considerably more impact, because we’re stepping outside of our narrative comfort zone, and the writing reflects it with the characters reactions.

Oh, and those reactions are still solid – the character portraits are great, and Estelle continues to have great reaction faces (to the point that I submitted one to the Axe of the Blood God Discord as an emote). The romance aspect of the story is generally handled well. They do a good job of using the development of Joshua’s backstory as a previous agent of Ouroboros who had been freed by Cassius Bright to try and make the idea that a romance between Joshua and Estelle, as adoptive siblings, less squicky. It kinda works – they basically set up that they were actually older than was initially implied when Joshua was adopted, and Joshua had a considerable amount of life experiences (including some very traumatic life experiences) before meeting Cassius. This isn’t going to fly with everyone, but it works well enough here to carry the rest of the story, and the Estelle/Joshua relationship.

The gameplay is generally unchanged from First Chapter – the biggest addition to the game is the ability to upgrade slots in your Orbments, allowing for more powerful Sepiths to be equipped and with that additional effects on your characters’ stats, and more powerful spells. It does change up how your character builds work, combined with the inclusion of more spells that will buff damage and defense. It does a good job of striking a balance of making sure that all the knowledge of how to develop your characters and how to manage combat from FC is still useful, while providing new wrinkles to keep players engaged beyond the story. It’s a good way of handling the Final Fantasy situation with the PS1 games: “These games need to recognizably play like a Final Fantasy game, while not being mechanically identical to the last game that came out,” while also dealing with the fact that they’re also maintaining continuity of setting between games, and some of the mechanics are inherently tied to the setting.

If you played Trails in the Sky FC, and enjoyed it, really you need to pick up SC because the story in FC isn’t actually finished, but you can be confident that it will come to a satisfying conclusion in SC. If you haven’t played FC yet – jumping in at SC will just confuse you. It does a decent job at reiterating some of the important plot points from the last game, but it’s done in the context of “That last game was over 80 hours, this game is also about that length, you’re going to need a reminder,” not “If you’re new to the series, here’s what you need to know.”