Trails in the Sky 2 ~ In-Depth Review

Genre – JRPG

Release Date (NA): March 9th, 2009

Platforms: PSP, PS Vita, PC

Total Gameplay Score: +8 Total Story Score: +11

Summary

Back when I reviewed Trails in the Sky 1, I was loving the worldbuilding and depth of the characters as well as the old-school RPG elements. Since then, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the time when I dig through its well-loved sequel. I’ve been hearing some truly great things about the sequel, with many fans claiming it the best entry in the entire franchise. Does Trails in the Sky 2(nd Chapter. I’m calling it 2 from here on :P) live up to its legacy as a JRPG great? Does the brilliant cliffhanger at the end of Sky 1 get followed up in satisfying ways? Read my review of all 97 of my hours through the land of Liberl to find out.

Predictably, the game starts off from Estelle’s perspective as she trains and looks for Joshua. The intro is entertaining and has some humorous bits with Estelle/Analace banter, but it also showcases a wonderful save transfer feature. Not only is your level from Sky 1 carried over, but your abilities, some quartz and items are as well, and characters through the game acknoledge you from past adventures to boot. Sky 2 also carries over the same battle system from Sky 1, though it’s a bit more varied in terms of move set and strategy capabilities. The boss battles in this game are far improved from Sky 1, being some of the most memorable parts of this entry for me. The general control with mouse/keyboard control is still perfect, and the structure of the gameplay is pretty much the same as Sky 1: going from town to town not to train as bracers like the first game, but to find Estelle’s very close partner and brother. Though, since you do revisit all the towns from the first game, you may start to get a little fatiqued of the repeating locations after a while, (and this game’s long length doesn’t particularly help with that.) Though, the scenarios and plot does thankfully proceed at a brisk pace to smooth out the repetitive environments, and this time there’s more on the line than ever than in Sky 1.

When I first saw the finale of Sky 1, I didn’t think the next game would live up to the intrigue and mystery the brilliant ending set up; I was wrong. Sky 2 beautifully weaves a captivating story about conspiracy, war, and finding oneself and one’s friends in the midst of it all. I found Estelle and Joshua’s relationship and character development to be strong, though side character reactions to them maybe a tad bit too strong in an on the nose way. Not that the side characters are bad in themselves, they are one of the highlights of the game, just like Sky 1. You get to catch up with hundreds of characters from Sky 1, and pretty much all their stories and development continues as you interact with them again. The extended bracer characters like Analace and her crew were a delight. Most of the really important side characters will join your team and are playable through some portions of the game (Mostly late game) as well, and they each have their own unique skills and abilities. This extended repertoire really makes the gameplay shine as you begin to finally master the game toward the climactic finale.

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter delivers on all the questions the first game’s cliffhanger left dangling, and then some. There is just such well done resolution at the close of Sky 2 that you almost don’t even need a 3rd game in the Sky series, (but, well, there is a 3rd game!). All in all, this is a great sequel to the beginnings of a saga that continues on to this day. Before I played any of these games I would hear about how Sky 2 is the crown jewel of the entire franchise, the marquis title that serves as a must-play of the entire genre. While don’t disagree after finally finishing it, I can certainly understand the sentiment. While Sky 2 brings along a lot of the less appealing aspects that Sky 1 had like repeated dialogue and clumsy exposition, it also not only brings, but enhances all the things Sky 1 did so well, like character, story, and combat. So, yeah, if you want a to play one of the defining JRPG experiences, start with Sky 1 and then play Sky 2, it’s well worth your time and investment, even if it’s on the longer, and sometimes padded, side. Though, even the padding is quality stuff in this game.

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Gameplay Positives and Negatives

+ The option to import your save data from Trails 1 is done well. It wasn’t since I played the Mass Effect trilogy that I encountered a save import from a prequel game so thorough and meaningful. What transfers is Estelle’s level from the end of Sky 1, which neatly solves the all-too-common dissonance in many rpgs where you’re just supposed to overlook a powerhouse returning hero being level 1 again. Oh yeah, and the whole game manages to scale enemies really well to your level in a good way. You won’t feel overpowered by importing your high level Estelle data, especially since lvl 40 is the max it allows you to import (for obvious difficulty reasons). While you don’t keep all your old quartz and EQ, the game does have an in-lore explanation for that. Though not all your quartz transfers over, some rare quartz does, as well as a bunch of items. Also, keeping your abilities from the first game is such a great thing more rpg sequels should do. Nothing more deflating at the end of a game than finally unlocking the coolest final abilities….that you only get to use for 10 more minutes till the game’s over. It really is great all your abilities transfer over to this game. Probably my favorite import element is the ways in which the various characters recognize your contributions (if you helped some of them or not) from the previous game and even give you rewards upon reuniting with them. Again, this is one of the better rpgs I’ve seen with import features.

+ Music is really good across the board, mostly due to the music that was kept over from the first. Most towns have their own unique theme to them, Ruan being perhaps my favorite town theme in the entire series (yeah, it’s in the first game).  Music is varied enough and of high quality.  Music gets one plus instead of the two the first game received due to lots of (good!) repeated tracks and not a ton of new tracks. The new tracks that were in the game are phenomenal though, but it’s a lot of the same music, which again, is not a bad thing, but it didn’t impact me as much as the first time I heard it in the first game.

[++] Great UI/integration with mouse and keyboard, and Menus. This game is very well suited for mouse only or keyboard only, or mouse and keyboard, and both these playstyles fit the game like a glove. Most actions like canceling out of a window or checking equipment take a single mouse click. On the menu most options you click bring up a menu box that conveniently highlights just what you want to know and boxes your cursor in to mitigate excessive menu traversal, getting you clicking exactly what you want in a quick and convenient way that doesn’t hamper choice. The menus are really clean and uncluttered while being colorful and thematic. UI during battles are incredibly convenient and fast-paced as well. The auto cursor on next enemy in a queue, as well as the auto click to the furthest tile space is a godsend to speed up gameplay and automate elements that most all players will want automated. Thankfully, if there are players that want no automation you can just move the cursor where you want to go yourself. I didn’t find myself miss-clicking or meandering in menus much, and battle UI greatly helped speed up the game and helped the overall visual enjoyment of the game.

[+] Art from character and monsters to towns and fields are detailed and animated well. Characters have a pseudo FF Tactics look to them, and it’s actually fairly well done and charming. The monsters look surprisingly detailed and have an interesting design unique to this game, which made fighting them more enjoyable than it otherwise would be. As regards to the towns, the camera panning allows for 3 dimensional perspective to each town, and the artists put this to good use, filling in details like trash cans and secret nook and cranny areas with their own level of detail to them. The diorama look lends itself well to the overhead camera in general. The lighting when there’s a sunset at particular plot points looks really good and shows good contrast between time of day.

[+] Orbment system allows for lots of customization in playstyle and moveset. Orbments pretty much operate similarly to materia in FF7. You can customize your orbmet slot to choose what stats and moves you want, and the customization is pretty fun. You can pretty much create your own ‘class’ by choosing time magic, fire, magic, earth magic, etc., or using all forms, but sacrificing higher tier magics in just one form, or you can focus on min/maxing stats instead of magic; it’s all up to you how to customize materi…I mean, orbments.

[+] Battle system is a fun combination of traditional turn based and grid based strategy. It’s not fully a strategy game, but it rather melds straight-up turned based with strategy, and it does it pretty well. As previously mentioned, the mouse controls and UI are extremely convenient and automate your cursor to the enemy next in line and to the furthest grid, which goes a long way making the battle system fluid. The turn meter is visible and really helps keep track of the battle in a way that many rpgs don’t (It’s surprising just how many rpgs don’t have a visible turn order bar). Orbment customization makes battles fun to try out new attacks and techniques, and the animations themselves during battle are fun to look at. The special limit attacks can’t be abused too much, but offer enough opportunities to use to be very useful and well designed. One of my only complaints are how ineffective and useless directional attacks tend to be. I thought it would be like Chrono Trigger where slashing through two or three lined up enemies would be a very useful technique that would get milage, but directional slash attacks have such a small window and area that there are rarely more than one enemy in line of sight for it to be a useful attack. Area attacks on the other hand are well balanced; they aren’t powerfully broken because enemies move around a lot and the skill point and magic needed for large dps attacks are a lot, but are very useful anyways to push enemies back or wallop lots of damage at once when the time is right.

[+] Difficulty curve and experience curve is very well designed. The whole game is mostly designed to set up dungeons with enemies on screen that you can avoid and which aren’t too hard, with the bosses of the game being the real challenge and unavoidable. The bosses are challenging in a good way, they aren’t designed to make you grind levels, they’re there to test and challenge your skill and strategy and gear setup. You can pretty much go through the whole game without grinding and do fine granted you know what you’re doing and understand the systems well. Regular enemies aren’t designed to take long, but are still fun to experiment your skills, strategy, and gears against and prepare you for the real challenge that is the bosses. The only reservation with difficulty curve is the end of the game, which is admittedly very challenging. There is quite the boss rush at the end. I didn’t need to grind, but did have to experiment a lot and redo the fights to triumph. This is a pretty difficult game and this difficulty is a lot more manageable with the superb experience ratio. Exp ratio is very similar to Paper Mario. You get more experience if you win a fight underleveled, and get less exp if you win a fight overleveled. This helps let the player know where they’re at in terms of power at any point in the game. I was able to understand when to skip fights on the field because I was getting very little exp. This also makes the difficulty more manageable since you know if you are underleveled when it comes to a boss or not and just need to change your orbments or strategy. I would give two pluses because of the great exp curve helping with the generally well designed difficulty curve, but the final sections of the game are brutal and the boss rush hampers things a bit.

++ Boss fights. Fantastic second boss fight against the Jaeger woman at the start of the game, which introduces the player to new strategies and a more intense, though largely the same, battle system pacing. The opening Jaeger fight is long range in nature, she neutralizes arts, which encouraged careful timing and resource management, and required a different strategy than anything in the first game. The Dragon boss fight was also well balanced, maintaining tension and requiring strategy without being overtly irritating, (which some fights tend to be in turn based games.)
Chapter 7 tower boss fights are all unique, fun, and well balanced. Very impressive boss designs all around, even moreso than the first game, earning two pluses for taking the already solid boss systems of the first game and making them even better.

+ Global shutdown phenomenon impacting gameplay through limited arts, environmental details like mechanical doors not working and Kaldia tunnel going dark, and what numerous NPCs say about it, is phenomenal. The sudden severe change and handicap for the setting reminded me heavily of world of ruin in FF6. Thematic gleanings from this event on just how overly reliant the Liberlan people have been on orbal energy give great insight into the culture and current state of things on a bigger scale.

– – Backtracking occurs often and is often boring. You go through the same roads for quests and story often and it just takes too long. You revisit all 5 of the same areas as the first game and do the same kinds of monster quests with tons of backtracking. Septum vein quest doubles the backtracking in Zeiss. Backtracking feels more annoying and sloggy in this game than the first game due to the many repeated areas and cities you’re constantly walking through (from both games), and you just end up getting tired of seeing the same scenery for 100s of hours across the games, which is why this issue of backtracking got exacerbated and earns 2 negatives instead of the 1 from the first game. That being said, don’t be too put off by these backtracking negatives, I’ve seen much worse, and all things considered, it’s not even close to a deal breaker regarding the gameplay. The overall gameplay score speaks for itself.

– Negative for process of elimination adventure gameplay (quest at the end of chapter 1. Finding little girl in chapter 3 with no hints given). This is also a carryover negative from the first game’s lack of proper direction with certain quests.

+11 -3

Net Gameplay Score: +8

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Story Positives and Negatives – Story Spoilers

[+] Localization is great

+ The humor in this game isn’t particularly overt, but when it is there, it is well done and has a gameplay integration with the treasure chests. Examining treasure chests after gaining their contents the first time will prompt a witty remark or joke from the chest itself. This is often fourth wall breaking, and there are over 50 unique chest lines of dialogue for this action. Again, humor in general from the characters isn’t the main tone of the game, but it made me chuckle on more than one occasion, even if a bit on the anime side of things. Estelle and Anelace in the prologue of the game got some laughs out of me, and were a charismatic duo. The implications of Anelace asking to be in a relationship right after Joshua departing are thematic and humorous. Plenty of humorous moments and dialogue without being too over the top.

+ Intro is good and continues from 1st game in logical and smooth ways. The final training mission was a good twist, while being totally predictable because of the logic behind it. The deductive reasoning choices you have to choose from invest the player even more than usual.

[+] A truly large number of side characters in the game who each have individual lives and stories. Each time the plot moves forward each NPC has something new to say, which makes this feel like a living, breathing world, and helps flesh out background lore and characterization.

+ Many side quests are noteworthy for their fleshing out of characterization, lore, and providing humor or other entertainment. Estelle teaching Sunday school, fixing old man’s lighthouse, Lila’s back story through the photograph quest, etc. Trails 2 has even better than one’s on the first game. Note that this is a plus to the story aspect of quests, not gameplay.

+ Agate and general Morgan coming to terms with each other and their antagonism toward their opposing groups was intertwined well with characters and lore, and resolved satisfyingly. Also, Agate’s backstory and relationship with Tita as his surrogate sister was well done. Only reason this doesn’t get 2 plusses is Morgan’s reason for not trusting bracers boils down to, “he’s an old timer” and nothing more.

+ Estelle and Joshua characterization remains a core highlight of the game. With the caveat that in the beginning, Estelle understood Oroboros and how the agent fit into the plot surprisingly quick. She wasn’t that smart in the previous game to piece things like that together fast. But I give the game a pass since she’s supposed to be maturing through her adventures. Her journey is self discovery and feelings for Joshua are generally fleshed out well in Sky 2.

+ Estelle and Joshua scene when reunited. Her figuring out his motive for leaving (fear of inability to protect her) and being excited that she finally understands him.

+ Chapter 7 has wonderful character backstories and interactions between the bracers and Oroboros. The slow revelation of what the tower’s function are (collecting the data shards) with the army battles on land, and the climactic unleashing of the aureaole was tense, interesting, and well executed.

+ Enforcers infiltrating the capital made good use of Richard and a good excuse to use the rest of the intelligence division and Kanone  (they use hand to hand combat and don’t rely on orbals). Dunan and the butler had a good scene and redeemed themselves.

+ Klaudia filling in for her mother and negotiating with Vander was a good  scene establishing more of Erebonia and Kloe’s development. Olivert’s reveal as prince and candidate of marriage to Kloe, wow, great twist and wrinkle on past events with these characters.

+ Global shutdown phenomenon impacting story through environmental details like mechanical doors not working and Kaldia tunnel going dark, and what numerous NPCs say about it, is phenomenal. The sudden severe change and handicap for the setting reminded me heavily of world of ruin in FF6. Thematic gleanings from this event on just how overly reliant the Liberlan people have been on orbal energy give great insight into the culture and current state of things on a bigger scale.

+ Liber Ark section had lots of lore relevant to the core of the series, great music matching the theme of futurism, and a good/cool looking hub/transport system to connect the 4 areas. Some of my favorite music in the series is in this final chapter of the game, with the city theme echoing Shevat’s Theme from Xenogears and Nakano’s techno rhythmic music from Threads of Fate.

+ Liber Ark and Weissman’s story and Weissman’s motivations have depth and are philosophically interesting. “Either physical or mental annihilation awaits.” Is the quote that sums up his overall philosophy pretty well.

[+] Overall plot construction and pacing was rock solid and of good quality. From the very beginning there are subtle hints regarding later revelations and the mystery and intrigue is built up well. Almost all loose threads are concluded in a satisfying manner and the ones that aren’t leave the player excited to play the sequel. Knowing the revelations at the end of the game allows for a new perspective when starting the game again from the beginning. The themes of identity, teamwork, loyalty, patriotism, and family were well expressed and consistent throughout. The plot twists all seemed natural without anything too extraneous, and it was possible to guess half or so of the twists because of the foreshadowing done in earlier chapters. Overall, really good plot construction across the areas of theme, pacing, and conclusion.

– Everyone being concerned for Estelle on behalf of Joshua’s disappearance seems on-the-nose and dramatized in an artificial way. Estelle’s growing realization of her love was subtle and only realized at the end of Sky 1. Here, everyone acts like it was always obvious and overt. I understand that a counterpoint to this criticism could be that they’re all worried for Estelle not because of her lovey dovey tender feelings for Joshua, but because of her status as sister to Joshua. Still gets a negative for being absolutely on the nose about the whole thing and treating the player like they don’t get it. Basically a repeating exposition and plot point problem that much of the game tends to struggle with, speaking of…

[–]-  Information and plot points are often repeated too much in dialog. Tutorial info and story points the player received early on are hammered down and repeated as a mantra by the characters in way that bogs down the dialog and annoys the player. There are also occasions where characters are saying nothing noteworthy at all and merely reiterating things known. There’s numerous instances of the dreaded ‘as you know writing, and it’s just about as prevalent as the first game. For example, to prompt the tutorial for team-based attacks, Analace says “You mean the team-based attacks we got special training for, right? “There are several instances of this kind of stilted, clumsy exposition that attempts to get across what characters think of certain factions and whatnot, and it just falls flat on its face as ‘as you know’ writing, and very obvious, dull, repetitive writing in general. The repeated empty text writing gets 3 negatives because this game had the same problem Sky 1 had but  just lasted longer, amplifying the 2 negatives the first game got for it to 3.

+14 -3

Net Story Score: +11

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Overall Score: +19