Trails in the Sky SC: Finished this a week or so ago (as might be obvious from me posting a stat topic on it). I really liked it! As usual it's hard to talk about too much. Gameplay wise, I very much like the slight amount of movement & positioning on top of a mostly standard RPG battle system, along with "good times to act" that you can see coming and try & juggle the turn order to favor you. Hard difficulty was about perfect I felt, with mostly challenging boss battles that weren't pure BS, with the obvious exception of the Prologue which is very much "okay just lose these fights and click the "replay on a lower difficulty level" button."
Plot-wise, it did a lot of things I really liked. It's the usual Trails thing of having a very large cast of other characters that all have their own personalities, plots, etc. that you get to interact with. There's interesting and threatening situations that arise, and it's quite enjoyable seeing how they deal with them, usually. Some random comments:
* Yes, it's "anime", but it's the good crack, not the bad crack.
* It's a little weird seeing the army portrayed so positively in this game, after they were basically the villains in FC. They're in pretty much full-on redemption mode. Now, there's a good & proper reason for all this, so fine, but still strange, and a little bit too bad, I wish more games acknowledged that over-powerful armies can be their own interesting threat to their own societies.
* As usual, the game does a good job of not immediately upping the stakes to "save the world" but still making things interesting. For example, people are preparing for an international conference where there's a treaty that's going to be signed in Chapter 3, but someone has sent threatening letters off warning of disaster if this terrible treaty is signed. Except, when you talk to people... the treaty is not a big deal. An ambassador outright tells you she thinks it's stupid but harmless. The letters are weird precisely BECAUSE, well, who would be against a vague feel-good treaty? What is there even to get upset about? Who indeed...
* There's one very notable bit of interaction between two characters that makes just NO goddamn sense. The years don't add up. Oh well!
* The game - or at least the English localization - does a fine job at handling some of the stranger plot points simply by owning them. In Game A, the character does something crazy & stupid, and everyone else acts like they're a genius? Bleh. In Game B, a character does something seemingly crazy & stupid, and everybody else goes 'what? DOes he know something we don't? Was that crazy or does he have some secret plan?", and suddenly it's totally fine. (See: G2 Ryudo, SH2 Yuri.) I like how the party explicitly asks some of the villains "Uhhh why are you going along with this exactly??"
* So, FC had a bit o' mind control & memory manipulation going on in the shadows, which was used as an excuse to set up some antagonists who could still be portrayed somewhat positively. I'm pleased to report that this is much less common in SC, basically only being used once for some dumb easy boss battles. There is one key unresolved mind control concern from FC that people who played it will know about, and SC handles that reasonably well I thought.
Anyway, there's a saying that someone / something's greatest weakness can be its greatest strength pushed too far, and I think that applies to Trails SC as far as negative things to say about its plot. Trails' greatest strength is tons of detailed characters whom obviously received a lot of love & thought from the writers. This is, 98% of the time, great. The love, unfortunately, carries a bit too far in parts, most notably the villains. The writers think the villains they wrote are cool too, which means they're very nervous about having them lose, or die permanently, or be entirely foiled. When it works, this is great, because it feels like both the Heroes & Villains get to both act rationally and do cool things and come to some sort of draw; but other times, it feels like letting the villains off the hook too much. They are *villains* after all, it's okay to have them lose! I think that it may have been a mistake to make several of the Ouroboros members bloodthirsty kill-kill-kill types if the dictates of the plot structure - and the fact that the writers love all the other characters - mean they can't actually do much killing, nor can they easily be killed. Rewrite 'em a bit more nobly and the fact that they spare people and Our Heroes spare them makes more sense.
Still, this is mostly minor quibbling, I can imagine far worse criticism of other games' villains, and at least the Trails villains show up and have slowly unfolding backstories etc., unlike some Western RPGs which go too far the other direction of having the villain show up at the end and have 3 lines. Still a 9.5/10 game overall. Play it! (Or FC if you haven't played that yet.)
