Trails in the Sky SC
Just got to the final chapter. Still greatly enjoying it so far. I've a few potential complaints I've mentioned elsewhere, but we'll see about them. And hey, at least now I know why there was a giant underground lair of robots in FC. Always nice to get an explanation for these things.
It's kinda hard to talk about, though, since the most interesting things are the plotty things which usually require not just knowing FC, but SC too! Instead I'll talk about an element I liked about First Chapter and how it changes a little bit. So, something FC does that I really respect is get across a feeling of -scale- much better than most RPGs. Your quest is spending two months walking around every nook & cranny of a small country, learning its ways, meeting people, making friends, and so on. People sometimes look at you weird when you say you're walking! And while for sanity's sake everything is ludicrously sped up, it's pretty easy to tell from context that a 3 minute (skipping encounters) stroll from the city to an outlying village or farm is really more like 3 hours, when it's occasionally relevant how long it takes to rush from one to the other and you see it's nighttime when you arrive. At the border gates between provinces, there's little inns for travelers, and it seems mostly merchants carrying heavy cargo are the ones who frequent the land routes - too annoying to ship big stuff by sea, I suppose. I guess it's probably a day or two travel between most cities. There is no warp or exit spell. You get to walk everywhere and appreciate everything. No, you can't go back to the first town, that'd be ludicrous and take a long time. As a result, I really feel like I got to know Liberl deeply. (I guess maybe Final Fantasy X does something similar, for another example of this done right; they restrict the airship from you until very late in that game, so you get to appreciate the pilgrimage. Although as usual it's weird you never really get to visit Bevelle due to evil budget constraints. Oh well.)
(very minor spoilers for SC)
In SC, you know the country now, so it's time to get to business. You're even required to take airship rides between regions now, as you're in a bit more of a hurry and it's an excuse for some nice party chat & character beats anyway. None of this slow stroll stuff. This also works; it's nice to see people on the airline and get a feel for more standard transit, and it helps push in the you're-a-grownup-now vibe. However... you actually can visit every region again toward the end of the game, and there's even 2 sidequests that kind of encourage you to return to areas you were at before. Now, for the most part, I like this! It's an excuse to see how everyone is doing, marvel at the huge amount of text they wrote with a ton of events still going on in each city, etc. On the downside, it does kind of lend itself to the old RPGWorlditis problems, which is something Trails magnificently avoided before. This puts a bit more focus on how you can run around the entire country in 10 minutes, which even if amped up to 10 hours in off-screen hiking, is still a bit small. It makes Liberl feel a little less like, say, Belgium, and more like, I dunno, some metro area with 5 cities that kinda grew into each other. Yeah, yeah, this is an EXCEEDINGLY minor complaint, but. Just sayin'! It does lose a little something.
Let me yabber a bit more about something in FC and how it changed in SC, although not really to the better. A more pertinent SPOILERS warning here.
FC, for all that it has a quite low body count (basically zero, if we ignore backstory deaths!) has some scenes of... how to put it... deadly peril. Not common, but they're there. And the characters even react to this appropriately, and remember this as such! Mayor Dalmore being about 3 seconds away from point-blank shooting Joshua with a gun, for example, or the Black-Clad Soldiers on top of Carnelia Tower. Your opponent in that game is a person of culture; he doesn't want to break things, so he wants to keep needless deaths to a minimum, but his forces won't hesitate to try to kill people who really are getting in their way (Agate, or even just blasting Gilbert in the leg & threatening the lighthouse keeper.) Sure, it doesn't work, but it doesn't become so overused that I became skeptical , and characters remembering and talking about their traumatic brush with death helps sell the threat as real.
SC... well. I mentioned already that the villainy is more of the "wanky anime dude with superpowers" school. Anyway, the script has the balancing act of not wanting to immediately cause a mass crisis, but having considerably more bloodthirsty villains than FC had. And the game addresses this head-on, to its credit. It's as simple as this: one of the senior leaders of the bad guys is explicitly ordering them not to kill anyone, even over their whining about how killing is totally awesome and fun. Great! This is a lot better than the villainy being inexplicably hapless a la Silver Age comic book villains or something. Said villain himself also quite obviously intentionally spares or lays off Our Heroes several times (including one time that was PURE BULLSHIT. No, you can't wreck a plane and expect everyone to safely survive the crash, I'm sorry, nobody is THAT good.). Okay, fine, I get it, he doesn't really want us killed, and possibly even wants us to stop his organization's plans via some very oblique deep game. Still... while I certainly prefer this narrative angle to many other options, it gives up that sense of peril. After being at the enemy's mercy several times and not been slaughtered, I start feeling a little too safe. Hey, sure, let's go invade the enemy base, it's not like they'll actually kill us or anything for doing this. Either crank down the number of scenes of being let off by the bad guys, or figure out some other way to have tension in them... for example, a WA4 Jeremy equivalent of the 'loose cannon who chafes against the rules' or the like to add a bit more danger & spice back into the mix. While such characters are hardly favorites and often kinda lame, they are at least unpredictable.
To be 100% clear, we're talking about marking an "A" down to an "B+" here (even if I'm not scared for my characters' personal safety, I am concerned about other bad consequences, at least?) with yon average video game's sense of authentic danger/consequences being at like a C-, but so it goes.
--
Anyway, in more important news, I have recovered ancient Zemurian recipies. All will quake at the power of my superfood.
