Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter

Gameplay and characters are wonderful. At times, the writing can be lacking in subtlety in the way that most shonen anime are. Pacing is better than the 1st game, but parts of the game feel a little artificially dragged out because the villains randomly leave or let the mc live for plot reasons. Overall, the game is very fun as long as you can stomach some anime-isms that seem to be a staple of Trails writing.

As someone that adores the original Trilogy, this Remake is everything a true fan would have hoped for. My life truly peaked. There's really no words to express how absolutely outstanding this experience was.

Love the story. Never played the original but the great telling and emotion in the voice actors really pulled me in

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Still one of the best JRPGs and a perfect remake of the original. Amazing

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I cannot speak to its quality as a remake, as I never played the original games. I can simply speak on my experience playing it as its own game. I have an absolute ton of thoughts, and a lot of them are negative. But ultimately, I really enjoyed it, despite the many flaws. No matter the qualms I have with some design decisions, it does one of my favorite things in media. It gives time for a large cast of characters to shine, each one of them having their own personality and purpose, and lets you as the player get attached to all of them. The things the game does very well: The characters carry the game. If you enjoy a cheesy, trope-filled classic JRPG/anime story with a large cast of vibrant and reactive characters, this game will be for you. Every single character has a reason to be in the story, and it's a story about everyone, not just the main protagonists. But Estelle is a perfect protagonist. She has the "never give up" attitude so prevalent in these kinds of stories, but it's done very well. She is simple, but as Terry Pratchett said: "Simple is not the same as stupid." She drives the story forward by taking action, by being opinionated, and by caring about EVERYTHING. The world, the story, other characters, her friends, the villains. She cares, and that drives everything as a core tenet of the story. She's easy to relate to because she cares about so much, that you'll find yourself caring about what she does as well. And yet, despite Estelle being the protagonist, and this ultimately being her story, every single character is woven into it so well that you can frame the story as being about them as well. It's a good thing Estelle cares about all of those around her and brings them together, because the story couldn't happen without all of them. The combat is very fun, and it's a good thing it is because you will do a ton of it. When against more unique fights, it's one of my favorite turn-based combat systems in gaming. If you played the 1st chapter remake, it's more of the same with some very slight upgrades, but overall the same system. Alright, time for the complaints: Lack of new content outside of Story. And reused assets. You can FEEL the money-saving techniques used in this game. I have seen some people say that this game is an extremely faithful remake of the original games, and so this could be a holdover from the older game design, but I can't attest to that. All I can say is, if you played the 1st Chapter remake and were hoping for a lot of new areas to explore or a lot of new enemies to fight, you will find yourself extremely frequently disappointed. As soon as you're out of the prologue, you are dropped back into a city and zone you fully explored in the first game. The exact same exploration, exact same city, exact same routes, exact same monster spawns, just with higher levels. And then you find as you go through the game that 75% of the game is like this. You are exploring the exact same content you fully explored in 1st Chapter. And I do mean exact same. The most generous take I have on this is "It gives you more time to have a deep connection to the Kingdom of Liberl" a la Kirkwall in Dragon Age 2, but it's not what I was feeling when I was playing. I was mostly feeling that my time was being wasted, desperately wanting to get to the next new story beats just to get past the repetitive exploration. There are a few small new areas throughout the majority of the game, mostly as new dungeons added onto the old areas, but they are just as formulaic as the previous content and rarely offer new experiences due to the nature of the game. Almost all of the actual new content is saved for the end of the game, which I will touch on later. Fights in the open world are optional! You can run right past them. However, I don't believe that the proper solution to a badly designed, repetitive world is simply to give an option not to engage with it. Okay, so you explore all of the world against as you go throughout the story, until you complete the entire same world from 1st Chapter a 2nd time. Surely, you'll be rewarded with new content at the end, like I previously touched on. Well, actually, in some sick joke, NOPE! Explore the entire world again, for the third time, except this time there's no fast travel, and a lot of your abilities are locked! And of course we're not going to change any enemies, just increase their levels and move on! This was by far the lowest point of the game for me, even though story-wise it was quite good. The difference between my story experience and gameplay experience was never more stark than this moment, and I was desperately craving something new. What about the new content added? Is it better? Well, yes, it is nice to see new content, but it is ultimately more of the same formula wearing different clothes. *SPOILERS* There is a point at the very end of the game where you reach an absolutely massive tower as the final dungeon. The Tower's layout? A hallway until you reach a bossfight that unlocks an elevator to the next floor...5 times. So, 5 completely identical floors, filled with mostly the same enemies. So even the new content becomes a microcosm of the larger problems with the game. *SPOILERS OVER* A complaint about the combat. There is a mechanic that is far too frequent in this game, in my opinion, and that is some form of "Endure+Rage Boost". Basically, among MANY different kinds of enemies in the game, they have a mechanic that will keep them alive (Endure/Indomitable), resurrect or heal themselves (Auto Thelas/Quick Repair) when you would normally kill them. Then, they immediately get to take a turn, often performing a much stronger attack than normal (Rage Boost). I personally find this okay for boss fights, as there are many ways to optimize your turns to where this doesn't end up a huge problem. But SO MANY normal enemies have these mechanics, where you end up mindlessly grinding your way through basic enemies that you can kill in 1-2 hits, only to have your time wasted by them coming back to life, taking their turn to nuke your party (sometimes with instant death mechanics!) and then you finally get to finish them off, despite being much higher level than the enemies. This mechanic is just so common that it elicits eye rolls every time you fight a new enemy type just to find out it has a new form of this shenanigan. Alright, you may be thinking, "That's a lot of complaining for a game you recommend." You're right. It is. My thoughts on 1st Chapter were "A 7/10 game that I enjoyed like a 9/10" and I feel pretty closely to the same about this one. The lows are much lower in this sequel game, simply because of the sheer repetition of things we have already seen thoroughly, and that wasn't as much of a problem in the first game by nature of it being an introductory game. But the story highs are higher in this one. My favorite games all have a large cast of characters that you get to spend a lot of time with who matter to the story. Things like the Final Fantasy 7 Remakes, Dragon Age: Origins, Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33, Chained Echoes, and so on. And this game delivers on that front, and I just can't help but love that. I was surprised at how attached to the characters I was by the end of this, and sometimes you finish a game and get that feeling of longing that it's over, and you know you loved your time with it. That happened with this one, despite all of the flaws. Estelle made me care too, I guess.