Game Review: Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC
2017-Nov-26, Sunday 14:57![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Last year, I played through Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. It was amazing, the best JRPG that I've played in over a decade, with a cliffhanger ending that demanded an immediate resolution. And then I...didn’t start the second game until September of this year because I got sidetracked. You know how it goes. I wanted to play more Zelda games before Breath of the Wild came out, and then I was a little intimidated by the commitment than Trails SC would required, since I tend to only play one game at a time.
Seventy-seven hours later, my verdict is that I should have played this back in February and March instead of Wasteland 2. I could have moved on to Trails in the Sky the 3rd by now and finished up the first trilogy rather than spending my time shooting robots with assault rifles, the true post-apocalyptic überweapon. And in Trails SC I even got to shoot some robots with gattling guns, so it would have been the best of both worlds. Long as they were, those seventy-seven hours were an excellent use of my time.
Warning before I start: this review contains spoilers for Trails in the Sky FC. The games are so tightly connected it’s impossible for me to discuss the characters or plot in any real detail without them.
Not the secret final boss.
Trails SC picks up immediately after Trails FC ends, as Estelle wakes up in Grancel Castle to find Joshua gone and her father back. After a month in a secret bracer training facility, honing her skills as a senior bracer, she returns to Liberl and joins Agate and Scherazard in a mission to root out the agents of Ouroboros. They know Ouroboros exists after the events of Trails FC, and they know that Ouroboros are seeking the Aureole, the Shining Ring (輝く輪オーリ・オール), but they don't know what the Shining Ring is, why Ouroboros wants it, or even what Ouroboros really is. So after choosing either Agate or Scherazard to partner up with, Estelle heads out to find more information about this society and stop their plans.
That's just the hook, though. Estelle's main mission is to find out out what happened to Joshua, and the real point of the game, at least for me, was to walk the length and breadth of Liberl and visit all the locations again from the first game. The dialogue is the star, with almost all characters having completely new lines after every major event. My playtime was probably 70% dialogue or running to talk to people, but much of this was because I'm a completionist and really wanted to read everything that everyone had to say. Speedrunning the critical path would take less than half of the playtime I put in, but I think it would be missing the point. Without Mayor Maybelle and her maid Lila, without the treasure hunter Jimmy looking for a man's romance, without Duke Dunan's butler Phillip, without Claire the wondergirl reporter, without all the people I met in the first game and again in the second, this would just be another JRPG about secret societies and sinister plots.
Good old "Ul-tra-vi-o-lence" Estelle.
In my review of the first game, I praised the plot for its grounded, political context. Colonel Richard wasn't an evil mastermind seeking to conquer the world for the forces of JRPG nihilism, he was a patriot who thought that Queen Alicia was naive and, through her naivety, setting Liberl up to be conquered in a future war. And as the events of Trails SC show, his concerns weren't baseless. As Crusader Kings II has taught me, a small country like Liberl on the border of two much larger countries is extremely vulnerable.
But, as my talk of plots and Ouroboros might have already revealed, Trails SC's plot is not nearly so focused on political intrigue and realpolitik-based motivations. If I had started with this game, I probably wouldn't have thought that Legend of Heroes was particularly special. Oh good, another JRPG where the villains are a secret society filled with warriors who each have a special fighting style and weird quirks by which they can be recognized, who seek to manipulate the world from the shadows for their own mysterious ends. A nihilist mastermind. You've seen it all before, and without the context provided by Estelle's long travels through Liberl it's just be more of the same.
It might seem like I'm focusing excessively on the character interactions, but they are where both Trails FC and SC excel. Each of the mastermind's shitennō--of course there are four of them--have ties to the playable characters, and bringing the proper character to each fight will open up special dialogue. This holds true at other places in the game, too. By midgame I always had to spend quite a while picking out my team, wondering who to bring for each particular chapter. Tita for Zeiss, of course, and Scherazard for Rolent...maybe Olivier for Bose? Do I go back and swap halfway through and see if anything changes? Why can't I just bring everyone so I can hear what they have to say?
That's the mark of compelling characters.
If there's a problem, it's that the characters are still extremely reliant on tropes and that Trails SC offloads much of the foundation for character development onto Trails FC. There's a chest note from examining one of the chests after opening it that says:
I mentioned the tropes in my previous review, like how Estelle and Joshua are textbook examples of red oni blue oni, and that remains true in Trails SC. What's more, further character development is also also reliant on well-worn tropes. Most characters have a single defining event in their past that, once understood, provides the key to their entire personality. The romance between Estelle and Joshua is predicated on one of the most divisive of anime romance tropes--the man who decides that his presence is dangerous to his beloved, so he removes himself from her presence in order to protect her. Without consulting her. But he did it out of love, so of course it's a good motivation, right?
Estelle doesn't think so, and is willing to say it. That's part of why I like the story so much, because even though it's everything you've seen before, it's well-written and well-executed. But I know there are people who break out in hives at the merest sight of the words "anime" and "tropes" in the same paragraph, and those people won't like Trails SC regardless of its execution.
Killing glares
The systems are almost completely the same as the first game, with orbments, battle arts, and S-Crafts all playing out on a battle grid. The major addition is combo attacks, where multiple characters can combine to simultaneously attack. The guide I was following kept mentioning these, but I basically never used them and beat the game just fine without them. They require CP from each character to activate, the enemy has to be in range of all cooperating characters, and I found it much more trouble than just having everyone attack as normal on their turn.
The increased level cap meant that I used orbal arts (read "magic") far more than I did in Trails FC, though. The high costs on most of the good spells meant that it was possible to use an AoE spell once, maybe twice, before running out of EP for the majority of the game. Since Trails SC starts at a higher level and contains more powerful quartz that reduce the cost of spells even further, it was much more practical to have dedicated casters than it was in Trails FC. About two-thirds of the way through the game, I turned Kloe into a dedicated wizard, throwing off healing spells and buffs at my party and casting AoE Space-element attacks at the enemies. It's not something I had the resources to do until the very end of the first game, and I really liked the ability to have dedicated casters for a greater portion of the sequel.
That said, the battles still aren't challenging on Normal. I only lost a handful of times, and mostly on a battle where there was some trick that I had to learn in order to avoid horrific death. Like the monster hunt against Abyss Worms, who spam Earth Shaker the moment they drop below 100% health. I beat all the shitennō and the final boss every time they appeared, and while the Retry option from the first game reappears, I never made use of it. But it's there, and there's no penalty for its use, The Retry Offset from the first game also returns, and if activated, retrying a battle makes it slightly easier. Losing again and retrying makes it even easier, so it's like Horii Yūji's ideal RPG--eventually, you will win, as long as you keep trying. And it's worth it to keep trying.
There is one final improvement added to all three Trails in the Sky games in the time between when I played FC and SC--a double-speed button. Those 77 hours in-game are only 64 hours by Steam's clock. I didn't speed up the dialogue, but I appreciated the ability to run faster from place to place and to speed up battle animations.
I mean.
At the end of the last review, I mentioned that I was tempted to go out and buy the sequel right away, and indeed I bought it a week and a half after I posted that review. I'm doing the same thing once again, because while I was writing this review I took advantage of the Thanksgiving sale to buy Trails in the Sky the 3rd. XSEED isn't a large company, and I want to support JRPGs of this quality being brought over to an American audience. I'd be able to play it in Japanese, albeit slowly--those 64 hours would probably be over a hundred if I had to play with a dictionary in one hand--but not everyone has that option.
I 100%ed the game. That's not something I can say very often, because usually I just don't care.
In summary, Trails SC is a perfect sequel to the first game and, like the first one, blends well-executed tropes with a compelling story and characters. As much as I preferred the politics of Trails FC, I liked the way Trails SC raised the stakes after building on the connections I made with the characters during the first game. I was much more motivated to deal with secret societies and overpowered martial artists when I knew that they were threatening people I'd come to feel fond of in a way that I'm not used to happening in JRPGs. I'm glad I read that article about the Legend of Heroes series last year, and I'm looking forward to more stops along this train ride.
Or, perhaps I should say airship route?
Seventy-seven hours later, my verdict is that I should have played this back in February and March instead of Wasteland 2. I could have moved on to Trails in the Sky the 3rd by now and finished up the first trilogy rather than spending my time shooting robots with assault rifles, the true post-apocalyptic überweapon. And in Trails SC I even got to shoot some robots with gattling guns, so it would have been the best of both worlds. Long as they were, those seventy-seven hours were an excellent use of my time.
Warning before I start: this review contains spoilers for Trails in the Sky FC. The games are so tightly connected it’s impossible for me to discuss the characters or plot in any real detail without them.
Not the secret final boss.
Trails SC picks up immediately after Trails FC ends, as Estelle wakes up in Grancel Castle to find Joshua gone and her father back. After a month in a secret bracer training facility, honing her skills as a senior bracer, she returns to Liberl and joins Agate and Scherazard in a mission to root out the agents of Ouroboros. They know Ouroboros exists after the events of Trails FC, and they know that Ouroboros are seeking the Aureole, the Shining Ring (輝く輪オーリ・オール), but they don't know what the Shining Ring is, why Ouroboros wants it, or even what Ouroboros really is. So after choosing either Agate or Scherazard to partner up with, Estelle heads out to find more information about this society and stop their plans.
That's just the hook, though. Estelle's main mission is to find out out what happened to Joshua, and the real point of the game, at least for me, was to walk the length and breadth of Liberl and visit all the locations again from the first game. The dialogue is the star, with almost all characters having completely new lines after every major event. My playtime was probably 70% dialogue or running to talk to people, but much of this was because I'm a completionist and really wanted to read everything that everyone had to say. Speedrunning the critical path would take less than half of the playtime I put in, but I think it would be missing the point. Without Mayor Maybelle and her maid Lila, without the treasure hunter Jimmy looking for a man's romance, without Duke Dunan's butler Phillip, without Claire the wondergirl reporter, without all the people I met in the first game and again in the second, this would just be another JRPG about secret societies and sinister plots.
Good old "Ul-tra-vi-o-lence" Estelle.
In my review of the first game, I praised the plot for its grounded, political context. Colonel Richard wasn't an evil mastermind seeking to conquer the world for the forces of JRPG nihilism, he was a patriot who thought that Queen Alicia was naive and, through her naivety, setting Liberl up to be conquered in a future war. And as the events of Trails SC show, his concerns weren't baseless. As Crusader Kings II has taught me, a small country like Liberl on the border of two much larger countries is extremely vulnerable.
But, as my talk of plots and Ouroboros might have already revealed, Trails SC's plot is not nearly so focused on political intrigue and realpolitik-based motivations. If I had started with this game, I probably wouldn't have thought that Legend of Heroes was particularly special. Oh good, another JRPG where the villains are a secret society filled with warriors who each have a special fighting style and weird quirks by which they can be recognized, who seek to manipulate the world from the shadows for their own mysterious ends. A nihilist mastermind. You've seen it all before, and without the context provided by Estelle's long travels through Liberl it's just be more of the same.
It might seem like I'm focusing excessively on the character interactions, but they are where both Trails FC and SC excel. Each of the mastermind's shitennō--of course there are four of them--have ties to the playable characters, and bringing the proper character to each fight will open up special dialogue. This holds true at other places in the game, too. By midgame I always had to spend quite a while picking out my team, wondering who to bring for each particular chapter. Tita for Zeiss, of course, and Scherazard for Rolent...maybe Olivier for Bose? Do I go back and swap halfway through and see if anything changes? Why can't I just bring everyone so I can hear what they have to say?
That's the mark of compelling characters.
If there's a problem, it's that the characters are still extremely reliant on tropes and that Trails SC offloads much of the foundation for character development onto Trails FC. There's a chest note from examining one of the chests after opening it that says:
Somewhere out there is a person who started playing Trails in the Sky Second Chapter before the first game. I bet they're very confused.I bet they are. Trails SC is absolutely not meant to be played before Trails FC, and there's no attempt to re-introduce already-known characters or explain the developments of the first game. If you don't remember that Zin and Kilika know each other, for example, much of the context for their interactions is lost. This is also true of many of the minor characters, but Estelle generally has a one-sentence reminder of their interaction from the first game and remembering who Estelle gave the Carnelia book series to isn't as important as remembering that Agate has a younger sister named Mischa.
I mentioned the tropes in my previous review, like how Estelle and Joshua are textbook examples of red oni blue oni, and that remains true in Trails SC. What's more, further character development is also also reliant on well-worn tropes. Most characters have a single defining event in their past that, once understood, provides the key to their entire personality. The romance between Estelle and Joshua is predicated on one of the most divisive of anime romance tropes--the man who decides that his presence is dangerous to his beloved, so he removes himself from her presence in order to protect her. Without consulting her. But he did it out of love, so of course it's a good motivation, right?
Estelle doesn't think so, and is willing to say it. That's part of why I like the story so much, because even though it's everything you've seen before, it's well-written and well-executed. But I know there are people who break out in hives at the merest sight of the words "anime" and "tropes" in the same paragraph, and those people won't like Trails SC regardless of its execution.
Killing glares
The systems are almost completely the same as the first game, with orbments, battle arts, and S-Crafts all playing out on a battle grid. The major addition is combo attacks, where multiple characters can combine to simultaneously attack. The guide I was following kept mentioning these, but I basically never used them and beat the game just fine without them. They require CP from each character to activate, the enemy has to be in range of all cooperating characters, and I found it much more trouble than just having everyone attack as normal on their turn.
The increased level cap meant that I used orbal arts (read "magic") far more than I did in Trails FC, though. The high costs on most of the good spells meant that it was possible to use an AoE spell once, maybe twice, before running out of EP for the majority of the game. Since Trails SC starts at a higher level and contains more powerful quartz that reduce the cost of spells even further, it was much more practical to have dedicated casters than it was in Trails FC. About two-thirds of the way through the game, I turned Kloe into a dedicated wizard, throwing off healing spells and buffs at my party and casting AoE Space-element attacks at the enemies. It's not something I had the resources to do until the very end of the first game, and I really liked the ability to have dedicated casters for a greater portion of the sequel.
That said, the battles still aren't challenging on Normal. I only lost a handful of times, and mostly on a battle where there was some trick that I had to learn in order to avoid horrific death. Like the monster hunt against Abyss Worms, who spam Earth Shaker the moment they drop below 100% health. I beat all the shitennō and the final boss every time they appeared, and while the Retry option from the first game reappears, I never made use of it. But it's there, and there's no penalty for its use, The Retry Offset from the first game also returns, and if activated, retrying a battle makes it slightly easier. Losing again and retrying makes it even easier, so it's like Horii Yūji's ideal RPG--eventually, you will win, as long as you keep trying. And it's worth it to keep trying.
There is one final improvement added to all three Trails in the Sky games in the time between when I played FC and SC--a double-speed button. Those 77 hours in-game are only 64 hours by Steam's clock. I didn't speed up the dialogue, but I appreciated the ability to run faster from place to place and to speed up battle animations.
I mean.
At the end of the last review, I mentioned that I was tempted to go out and buy the sequel right away, and indeed I bought it a week and a half after I posted that review. I'm doing the same thing once again, because while I was writing this review I took advantage of the Thanksgiving sale to buy Trails in the Sky the 3rd. XSEED isn't a large company, and I want to support JRPGs of this quality being brought over to an American audience. I'd be able to play it in Japanese, albeit slowly--those 64 hours would probably be over a hundred if I had to play with a dictionary in one hand--but not everyone has that option.
I 100%ed the game. That's not something I can say very often, because usually I just don't care.
In summary, Trails SC is a perfect sequel to the first game and, like the first one, blends well-executed tropes with a compelling story and characters. As much as I preferred the politics of Trails FC, I liked the way Trails SC raised the stakes after building on the connections I made with the characters during the first game. I was much more motivated to deal with secret societies and overpowered martial artists when I knew that they were threatening people I'd come to feel fond of in a way that I'm not used to happening in JRPGs. I'm glad I read that article about the Legend of Heroes series last year, and I'm looking forward to more stops along this train ride.
Or, perhaps I should say airship route?
