The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC is the seventh game in the long running The Legend of Heroes series. It is the second in the Trails in the Sky trilogy, the SC stands for “Second Chapter”. It was originally released for the PC in 2006. Due to delays in its translation of the huge amount of text in the game, the English release got delayed until 2015. However, it still got a digital PSP release.
It is highly recommended that you have played the
first Trails in the Sky game as this is a direct sequel. The game begins straight after the previous game where Estelle and Joshua has split up. Estelle then continues her Bracer training, all the while investigating the mysterious organization known as Ouroboros. The story takes a long detour, as JRPGs often do.
Upon starting the game and moving the character for the first time, you will find that the default movement uses the mouse in a really awkward way. It is recommended to change this straight away. Using a controller is very natural too, even without remapping any of the controls. The game is in a top down view but the camera can be rotated in certain areas while fixed in others. The graphics are okay. Environmental textures and sprites can be a bit blurry at times while the text, character portraits, and towns are sharp when rendered at 1080p.
The battle system is turn based and there are a lot of facets to it. The left side has the battle turn order to help you plan ahead. With a maximum party size of four, characters can move on the battlefield in order to get into and out of attack range. In addition to physical attacks, there are Arts which is similar to magic but takes one turn to cast and one turn to activate. Crafts are the physical equivalent to Arts but launches immediately. Chain Crafts allow you to team up with up to three other characters to execute a more powerful attack. Chain Crafts are the only new addition compared to the first game.
Furthermore, dealing and taking damage will increase a bar for each character. Once the bar hits 100, this will allow the character to disrupt the turn order at any time of your choosing and launch their ultimate move, called S-Crafts. While each character can equip the typical combination of weaponry, armor and accessories, they can also equip Orbments. Orbments play into the fictional orbal energy used in the game to power everything. These will adjust your stats, usually with a net positive increase. They also dictate the types of Arts that you can use, and whether you have access to the more powerful versions.
There is a large cast of playable characters. It takes a while before you have full access so you’re forced to play with a smaller party instead during the earlier sections. Once you get the full party size, the full strategic elements of the battle system comes into play as each character is proficient and deficient in certain areas. Experience points are scaled so you can quickly level up your other characters if need be. Therefore, you are never discouraged from trying out other characters since it’ll only take 2-3 battles before the underleveled characters catch up 10+ levels. The game will make certain characters mandatory at certain points for story purposes too.
While Trails in the Sky SC begins as a more personal story, by the time you’ve finished one-third of the game, there are a lot more politics involving the precarious situation that the fictional country Liberl is in. Continuing on from the first game, Liberl is pursuing peace between the neighboring Calvard and Erebonia. It is a well done story and coupled with the amazing music, you will be completely engrossed with how everything pans out.
What the game keeps hammering on is how Ouroboros is such a overpowered enemy. All their members, or Enforcers as they are known, easily dispatches our protagonists. Their motives remain mysterious and it can feel frustrating when you are stopping on a small part of their plan without knowing what they are trying to build towards.
Estelle remains charming as a character and she is jointed by most of the familiar faces from the first game, as well as several new characters. The characters are truly the game’s strengths, while the story is meaty and very easy to get involved in. The character development doesn’t shine until you’re three quarters of the way through the game and then all the backstories start coming out. As the motivations for each character are revealed, it dawns on you how much you care about these characters, and Liberl as a whole. The scenes where Estelle and Joshua’s paths intersect were fantastic; it emphasizes their feelings and the messiness of their situation really well.
So while you could say that the game has a slow start, and really, it has a slow first three-quarters, the final two chapters were crazy in terms of plot development. It hooks you in and refused to let go. It is dramatic event after dramatic event. The situation continues to escalate and gets worse, with tensions surrounding Liberl against Erebonia and Ouroboros. Who knew sprites could be so expressive, or be able to deliver such exciting action sequences.
As the story is such a huge focus, the story to gameplay ratio heavily skews to the story at times. There are 20 to 30 minutes of solid text cutscenes at the end of every chapter. As a result, the game takes around 50-70 hours to complete but what a journey it would have been. The time investment is totally worth it. SC completes the story of Estelle and Joshua since Trails in the Sky the 3rd has different protagonists. The ending was epic and while it doesn’t answer all the questions you had, it answered a lot of them and provided closure to many of each characters’ subplots. The fate of the antagonist was a tad bit disappointing. No matter what you thought of the earlier sections, the ending completely made the game. It was just astounding at how it wraps things up.
As you near the end of the game, you kind of want to approach it slow because you don’t want to say goodbye to the world of Liberl and the characters. That’s how powerful the impact that the game has on the player. Despite all the positives of the game, it has its fair share of flaws. There are plenty of optional sidequests that tie into the fact that Estelle is a Bracer, and she can climb up through the ranks by completing them. Most of them are little more than fetch quests or hunt quests. They make you trek through the same environments too many times. Tying into this is that due to the game being a sequel, it reuses a huge chunk of the same environments and dungeons as the first game.
Dungeons have no maps and are designed to make the player get easily lost in them. It is also inconsistent with how some dungeons will warp you out automatically once you have reached the end, while with others, you have to backtrack. It is especially annoying in the longer optional dungeons since the monsters re-spawn as well.
The PC release includes a Turbo Mode where you can speed up the gameplay at the press of a button. You can set the speed from 1.5x to 6x and is a separate rate for during exploration and during battles. Turbo Mode is very handy as the battle animations in particular do seem to take a bit longer than one would hope. This also makes backtracking easier to stomach. It can still be grating, especially if you are going for 100% completion or the achievements where you wished that they could have implemented a fast travel system. Using Turbo Mode can cause minor glitches such as not being able to exit the map. These glitches are easily overcome by getting out of Turbo Mode and then going through the exit.
Overall, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC is a wonderful game that clearly shows how much effort was put into it. The amount of content is staggering and while it can be frustrating at times due to how much content is missable without a walkthrough, and the backtracking if you want to 100% the game, it is hard to fault considering how good it is. When the credits finish and “Fin” shows up, you feel sad to say your goodbyes to the characters that you have spent almost 100 hours with over the course of the two games. Trails in the Sky SC is highly recommended and is a fine JRPG that has aged remarkably well over the years.
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