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 the main cast 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.