The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC

Quick(ish) Review Trails in the Sky Second Chapter (SC) is the continuing story of Estelle Bright and her adventure as a Bracer. This picks up directly after the events of the previous game, First Chapter (FC). Now, the mystery group of Ouruborus threatens the Kingdom of Liberl while Estelle herself seeks out her missing love interest, Joshua. This may be one of the best JRPG story wise I’ve played. It’s well paced, the majority of the cast is enjoyable and well written with layers, the plot twists and surprises are done well and many, many fascinating, dramatic and intriguing plot moments throughout. This all culminates in a finale worth experiencing. The visuals are the same style as FC, with use of 2d sprites on 3d world. These visuals pack a lot of details with a lot of work put into animations despite the age and time of the game engine. Music is also done well and obviously reuses a lot from FC while adding in many more new tracks. The gameplay itself is a marginal improvement from FC, still using the turn based, grid system. While it’s still the most archaic gameplay of the Trails series, the overall balance of stats and resources is better than FC. I played on the Normal difficultly and found the gameplay relatively tough, but fair. There are additional difficulties for those seeking easier or more challenging modes. Some nice quality of life features carrying over from FC are the liberal allowance of saves (lots of slots, and you can save generally anywhere) and the Turbo Mode (a god send for speeding things up and more games should have this). As negatives, as much as I did enjoy the story, I do feel game borders on being a bit long. Admittedly game time is relative to the player, but if going for a completionist play-through, like I did, expect to spend over a 100 hours with this. Easily missible content and items is still very much an issue as it was in FC, so get ready to have a walkthrough on hand. The game also has porting issues with regards to widescreen resolutions where skyboxes can be visually cut off at the edges and sprites pre-loading into locations that shouldn’t be seen by the player. I’ve come across a few rendering bugs as well with missing or misplaced sprites in scenes. All in all, this was a great experience to play and I would consider it a ‘Must Play’ of the JRPG genre. I highly recommend it and give a very solid 8/10. Now about that SC Remake...