Genre – JRPG
Release Date (NA): May 3rd, 2017
Platforms: PSP, PS Vita, PC
Total Gameplay Score: +2 Total Story Score: +15
Summary
Welp, here it is, the final game of the Sky trilogy. Before going into this one, I kept hearing how this is by far the most skippable entry of all the Trails games. It’s usually spoken about as the one with the least plot movement, one of those anime filler episode kind of things. And I was actually joking that since everyone seemed to like it the least, I’d probably end up liking it the most… yeah, I need to listen to my intuition more from now on because that’s exactly what happened. Now, let’s explore what makes this game so divisive with fans and why some like myself are endeared to it the most in the franchise.
First off, music music music. From the opening menu, the music is tops. Chrono-esque mystical music evoking the exotic, the supernatural. Perfect for the setting of this game, which happens to be a pocket dimension of sorts where many returning characters get summoned from their ‘real’ world to solve the mystery of this pocket dimension (Phantasma) together. What is this place and how is it tied to the artifact that the Septian Church unearthed from the aftermath of Sky 2? Let’s make this clear, this story doesn’t impact the greater land of Zemuria that the Trails series focuses on, it’s basically a character-focused story in the vein of Mass Effect 2 and Empire Strikes Back. Oh, there’s still a plot here, it’s just that it’s all in the dream realm of Phantasma, though the way this elseworlds story brings all these characters together and explores their past and mind is wonderful and full of emotion and insight. In fact, it’s arguably the most character-centric entry in the franchise.
I could go on for three more pages about the brilliance of Kevin and Ries’ relationship and how they battle their greatest fears and inner demons (Some serious Luke facing his fear on Dagobah stuff here), or about the cute flashbacks to Tita and her firebrand mother Erika Russell and how well written it is. Or the heart-melting story of the orphanage kids going on an adventure in the mountains and befriending a baby dragon (Some serious Narnia vibes). But suffice it to say, I’ve never connected to characters as much in the entire series as in this game and its door scenes and main plot engagements. The door scenes are, to me, the very best story content in the entire series. They delve deep into the character’s psychology and into background lore regarding Liberl and its behind-the-scenes goings-on we didn’t get to see during the first two games. Of particular note, is Renne’s backstory and how she became one of the most feared, and adorable, agents of the enemy.
And we’re going to need to know as much about the enemy as possible in this game because there’s a lot of them, and some very tough ones at that. This is probably the most difficult game in the trilogy since your toolkit is so vast and the number of playable characters is huge. This wide pool of tools balances with really tough battles because you usually always have some way to progress, you just need to know what you’re doing. Not a lot of grinding in this one, which is great, though the last dungeon is a bit overtuned difficulty-wise, which means going through the optional dungeon is preferable before finishing. There’s just a ton of variety here, so many builds you can do and teams to try out due to the sheer size of the character roster.
All in all, this is a great rpg that deserves to be mentioned more as a great entry in the series, and not as the low point. I personally don’t think it’s skippable for those who just want to get the necessary lore so they can play the latest Cold Steel game or whatever, no; the character backstories are the best this entire series has to offer. The game is necessary if you’re a fan of this series because it’s a highlight of the series. Yes, it’s that good. Go play it.
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Gameplay Positives and Negatives – brackets around pluses and minuses indicate it’s the same as the previous entry in the series.
+ Music is bangin’. Seriously some of my favorite music in the entire Trails series. Right from the menu, I’m greeted with some very intriguing Xenogears-esque music with a Mitsuda vibe to it, which fits the mystical aspect of the game well. There are also more new tracks in Sky 3 than in Sky 2, and they’re all really good. Almost every area has a new track with the distinct Sky 3 vibe. Plenty of older tracks from the previous entries also make an appearance, though it isn’t as recycled as Sky 2’s soundtrack.
+ Carrying on the reputation of good boss battles in the Sky series, Sky 3 has some truly exceptional ones. While Sky 3 isn’t quite the leap in boss design from 1 to 2, the bosses still continue to impress with new strategic depth and expanded arsenal (to deal with the huge expanded party in 3).
[+] Art from characters 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. And though Sky 3 doesn’t feature explorable towns to the degree the previous games do, they do remain explorable to a degree here and are just as detailed. 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.
[+] Pretty good UI/integration with mouse and keyboard, and Menus. This game is 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 is convenient and fast-paced. The auto cursor on the 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 almost 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.
Sky 3 doesn’t get the 2 positives every other Sky game received due to the cursor snap in battle being glitched. Many, many times in combat, I simply couldn’t turbo the game while autocursoring battle commands. I could only turbo while manually moving the mouse to click a command, or have no turbo and auto snap to commands. This glitch continued to happen even after troubleshooting several times and never once happened to the other Sky games. It inconvenienced my playthrough enough to warrant a separate negative or no plusses to ui at all, but because the game already gets a separate crash/glitch negative, that’ll suffice.
[+] 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. Battle system gets an added plus due to the sheer party size of Sky 3, which increases the player’s choice of team composition and abilities by quite a big margin. The amount of strategy you can play around with is so cool. This is the accumulation of the Sky trilogy, and it shows, as you fully control and fight with dozens of characters from the series.
– – Game crashed several times at key moments. Also, the presence of slight lag and an odd turbo cursor snap inconsistency earn a negative the rest of the Sky games managed to avoid. Game also frequently minimizes out to desktop. 45 hours into the game and these issues persist despite a high-end PC and numerous attempts to troubleshoot the issues, earning an added negative.
– Backtracking is bad in the 6th area. Not only do you have to return back to the hub to bring Kloe all the way back to the first door every time you complete a ‘mini-dungeon’, but there are 4 doors to travel to in between the annoying scenic route, which happens to have annoying and very quick enemy encounters. Clumsily designed area and an absolute chore to backtrack through.
– An aggregate negative goes to a boss difficulty cliff that comes out of nowhere. Chapter 6 has one of the most difficult bosses in the entire series, not just according to me, but the community as well. Not only is this not the end game yet, but it’s placed in the most annoying area navigation-wise, even if it’s semi-optional, it’s still bad. The other half to this negative is a cutscene trigger that occurs only when entering and exiting a particular door in a two-door building. The game will not advance if you enter and exit the building through the back door. This a coding mistake and one that had many players searching for hours what to do. Very frustrating.
– The Abyss endgame dungeon is literally dozens of identically repeated floors and with no teleport spots in between to swap party members and return to and from the hub. It’s a little bit lazy in dungeon design and easily one of the worst I’ve played in the series. It may be optional, but it’s needed to get the last couple doors, which let’s be honest, are the highlights of the game.
+7 -5
Total Gameplay Score: +2
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Story Positives and Negatives – Slight story spoilers
+ Music fits the environments and tone exceptionally well. The atmosphere and dreamscape of Phantasma are perfectly matched with the phenomenal music, and it’s consistently good.
++ Door scenes are tremendous; truly some of the most impressive storytelling across the entire Trails series. Characters are written the best during these scenes and the scenarios are amusing in their own right, even when the scenes are just detours from the overall story. There’s just not as much empty text as in the rest of the games, and simple lines like Estelle’s baffled, “The heck?” exemplify the improved and more natural dialogue found in the door scenes. Many doors also feature unique ‘Princess Peach sections’ that explore a wide variety of character perspectives, all of which are very well presented and worthwhile.
+ Tita’s first door scene is incredibly entertaining and charming in its writing, humor, and insight.
+ Schera’s door scene provides the best insight into the character by far. The dynamic between the rich Aina and poor Schera is brilliant in its contrasts and themes of stereotypes, which is a theme consistent within the series as a whole. Schera’s backstory is well written, as is the entire section.
+ Kevin and Ries and their relationship with each other. These two are the stars of the game, like them or not. If Sky 2 left players scratching their heads as to who this Kevin guy is, well, this game will answer that for you, and more. His backstory is fleshed out and has emotional weight behind it. Ries and Kevin have banter and ups and downs throughout the game that make one wonder how the relationship will fair by the end of the game. Well done characterization for both characters and interactions between them.
+ Tita’s mother is wonderfully written and one of the most entertaining characters I’ve seen in a while. She can be a tad in the exaggerated anime side, but I didn’t find it shoehorned or forced. She’s a blast in every interaction she has and provided a humorous element that brought some levity to the seriousness of Kevin and Ries’ backstory.
+ Kloe’s characterization in the door scenes and to a lesser extent, main story, are really good and shed light and perspective on her polite and shy personality. What’s really praise-worthy about her characterization in this game is that I didn’t find her interesting at all in the previous Sky games. She seemed too much like your stereotypical shy, over-polite, aloof princess to really show too much authenticity or depth. But this game really shows her reasons and mindset behind the way she behaves, and I felt sorry for her and proud of her in equal measure by the end of it. I might have teared up during some sections of hers as well, which is a total rarity for the Trails series. Bravo for flipping a character I didn’t care much for and making me feel and root for her in this game.
+ Kloe’s moon door scene is extremely entertaining and well written. A better representation of school life than plenty of full visual novels. In fact, I regard this door section as one of the best examples of how to write an anime school story. It’s deeply personal, yet reflects the wider political and plot details of the setting. The themes of Trails as a whole shine so well here through Kloe’s growth out of dependency and into self-actualization, and the need to find a place she fits in without feeling forced. This section combines numerous Trails themes and coalesces them into one thread that feels very poignant.
+ Plot revelation of Kevin’s real past and the identity of the lord of phantasma are excellent. Yes, I was able to predict who the lord of phantasma was by the time it was revealed, but the tie-in with Kevin was developed in a narratively satisfying way, and there weren’t many obvious hints or randomness to it.
+ Final moon door is simply my favorite scene in the entire series to date. Besides hitting my love of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia perfectly, there’s an undeniable charm and poignancy going through Mary’s journey. This is told through a well-done ‘princess peach’ section that showcases some impressive mode7 animations and unique sprite designs too. The writing is astonishingly good on both a micro and macro level, and characterization is phenomenal for the kids who I have come to really love (thanks to this single door!). The 4th wall joke about forgettable characters like Black, eh I mean Grant, are presented in-character and humorous in their own right. It’s not just a little detour slice of life side story either, since we get some brief but juicy lore tidbits about dragons, (and who doesn’t find Mary hugging the dragon precious and adorable).
+ Renne star door is really well written and perhaps the best example of show don’t tell storytelling in the series.
+ Ending/epilogue parting scenes have a lot of meat to them in terms of character interaction and tying together themes, and closing the Sky trilogy as a whole. While a bit melodramatic and sappy, the scenes are heartfelt and well done, even if I don’t like to admit it.
+ Sky 3 does a remarkable thing in that it accumulates all the themes of all the Trails games prior and future into one package. It can have this unity in diversity because of the dimensional nexus that the plot allows for. Multiple characters all grouping together in one place allows for a huge breadth of backstory exploration and setting expansion. Since this game’s plot isn’t set in any particular point in the timeline or isn’t about this or that conflict or war (it’s basically an else-worlds ‘dreamlike’ episode) the game can show many aspects from across the series. This breadth allows the shared themes between character stories and conflicts to converge and highlight the series as a whole. While there might be some debate as to whether Trails 3’s plot is too tangential and inconsequential to the series, there is no question it gave us some of the very best characterization and worldbuilding in the entire series.
[+] Localization is great, as per usual for the series.
+15 -0
Total Story Score: +15
Overall Score: +17
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