[00:00] What's going on everybody, Mordom here, this time bringing you my review after 100% Four Trails in the Sky second chapter, a little over a week past its initial launch.
[00:17] Now that should tell you in and of itself that I did not get a review key, just so everybody is aware. But that said, the reviews after 100% are a pretty regular thing around here. There's a video down below covering everything I go over, and my Steam profile is publicly linked below as well.
[00:32] Otherwise, the main thing I want to mention here at the top of the video is that this is a direct sequel to the first game, First Chapter. As such, it is very difficult to talk about this game without spoiling the previous game.
[00:44] So, First Chapter is definitely getting spoiled. I'm going to try to keep the spoilers for this one to a minimum, but, you know, if you're, like, super looking forward to playing it for yourself, there might be some contextual stuff in here that maybe you just want to listen instead and skip the story section, etc.
[00:58] I trust that you can figure out what you want to do about it for yourself, but consider yourself properly warned. Otherwise, let's get into this thing. So, after having played the remake of First Chapter last year, I was pretty excited to dive into this one, because while I didn't love the start of First Chapter over the course of the game, that really pulled me into it.
[01:16] I was pretty invested by the end, and that worked out because they were already actively remaking this one, the second chapter, and having looked into it a little bit, I learned pretty quickly that some people consider the second one the best in the entire series, and I can certainly see why.
[01:30] It is great as a continuation to that first game, especially the story. In some ways, while this original few games is actually a trilogy, I could definitely see, like, the proper story arc ending right here at the second one.
[01:43] Now, the flip side of that is that a lot of the systems don't really change or evolve too much from the first game. You're actually running through the exact same areas, which comes as a sort of cost-benefit of being able to explore and really dig into the narrative of things, which is why this game does really, really well.
[01:59] But on the gameplay side, yeah, if you've played the first one, you've definitely experienced this one. It changes very little. However, I would also say what it does change isn't necessarily going to be everybody's cup of tea. Something I notice a lot more with enemies in this one is that, especially at the higher levels, a lot of what they do is try to disable your party and then give themselves just tons and tons of turns through their abilities.
[02:21] And if you get lucky with some RNG, like I've had a couple fights where on the very first turn my entire party got disabled and then I was just systematically wiped out before I could do literally anything. And then, of course, the response to that is always to drop back, adjust your equipment, try to make yourself immune or resistant to the status effects they're throwing out, etc.
[02:39] the rest, so it's not like there aren't ways around it, but stuff like that, I don't love personally. But again, as a continuation to that first title, honestly, fantastic work, and I can see why people enjoy this one so much. And so, let's dive into the rest of it.
[02:53] Starting first with the technical state. How is this game running? And the answer there is, very well. I did not personally have any issues. This was an extremely smooth experience for me, which, honestly, given the way that it's
[03:05] not uncommon for a lot of games to have problems at launch these days, was certainly welcome. But obviously my experience might not necessarily be yours, so if somebody does experience a problem, by all means, drop it down below. And let's keep it moving.
[03:17] So next up, I want to talk about difficulty in New Game Plus. So this game does feature several different difficulty modes, starting with very easy and taking that all the way up to Nightmare. Now, some important things to know right away.
[03:30] On every difficulty besides Hard and Nightmare, you can actually retry fights with reduced enemy strength, meaning that not only can you just start from the beginning of the fight, but it'll also reduce the stats of the enemy and make those fights easier as a result
[03:43] if you happen to be struggling with one fight or another. Now, it's important to note, however, that Hard and Nightmare do not let you do that. You do have to just retry it normally. The nice thing, however, is that just like the original game,
[03:55] there is actually a relatively easy way to do Nightmare difficulty, which there is an achievement for, and the answer is New Game+. Once you beat the game the first time, you have the option to do New Game+, which will let you carry over the vast majority of your progress, which makes doing things like some of the optional reward system stuff, as well as some of the collection achievements, very, very easy, because your progress gets saved from one playthrough to the next.
[04:19] And in fact, on my personal side of things, I missed like two chests in my first playthrough, so on my second I had to go back and get those, which I felt very silly about, because they were in a super obvious place I just accidentally walked right by.
[04:31] And then your Bracer rank, which is the guild you're in, there's an achievement for getting out to the maximum, and you have very, very little wiggle room there. You can miss like two points, and that's it. But New Game Plus will help you get all of that stuff.
[04:44] However, another thing that New Game Plus does is allows you, if you want to, to increase the levels of the enemies. So you can give them basically a 75 level boost so they stay in line with you, and your level goes up as a result of this,
[04:57] and you can continue playing progress-wise through New Game Plus. However, what you can also do is get to a really high level, like, for instance, go through it twice, hit, like, level 175-ish, and then do another run through Nightmare and just be way higher level than the enemies, and that absolutely counts.
[05:14] So like many a JRPG there are ways to get through the game simply by grinding it out if you don necessarily want to bother with trying to do it the hard way But personally I do enjoy the way these games have done U Game Plus thus far It does make wrapping up anything you missed especially quick given that there is some more time stuff as well as collections etc and being able to carry forth all of your
[05:35] progress on those through multiple playthroughs just makes it a lot easier. Next up, let's talk about the story setup and my thoughts on it. So again, just a spoiler warning here towards the beginning of this section. You might not want to listen to it. I'm not going to go super in-depth
[05:49] on the story, but there are definitely a few things I want to talk about in relation to the first game, and a couple things about this one as well. But if you don't want to spoil this, I will just simply say I thought the story was great. It's the strongest part of this game,
[06:01] and in my opinion, it's probably the main reason you would be playing it, and it's definitely worth your time in that regard. But moving right along, the story of this one takes place initially right after the events of the first game, and there's a small bit of a time jump right afterwards.
[06:16] However, I do love the way they start this story. So the first game ends with you saving the day, and then Joshua, your companion to Estelle, runs off because he's being mind-controlled by a group called Ouroboros
[06:29] who has resurfaced as of the end of the first game, and he doesn't want to be a danger to anybody else, so he tries to go solve that on his own. Estelle, the other main character from the first game, obviously wants to track him down.
[06:41] However, he is very good at disappearing, and as your father, Cassius, elegantly tells you, There's not a lot you can do besides, you know, look up leads, basically. And so after some back and forth and Estelle's unwillingness to come to terms with what just happened,
[06:54] they eventually decide to send Estelle off on her senior bracer training, while everyone else looks for leads about Joshua and Ouroboros. Now, Estelle and Joshua are members of the Bracers Guild,
[07:06] a league of mercenaries, more or less, who take on jobs to protect the populace from various things like monster threats, etc. You were a junior bracer in the original game, but you trained to become a senior bracer in this one, and your ranks reset as a result.
[07:21] But once you get through that training, you get to the dirty work of trying to track down Ouroboros and see what's going on. And so you start going from region to region, the same regions from the first game initially, in order to investigate these things.
[07:33] And then, of course, all of those strange occurrences come together to lead you to the game's grand finale, if you will. But the thing I really want to hone in on here is what a great job of it they do in, like, expanding on every little detail, wrapping up stuff from the first game, giving you callbacks, and, you know, kind of showing how characters have done from one instance to the next, because you're going through the same areas, you're talking to mostly the same people.
[07:56] And there's just so many, like, little touches in how they carry that stuff forward, like references in quests, conversations you can have, and it's really, really well done. It was very enjoyable. And that is on top of everything they have to do in order to introduce new characters and keep the plot moving.
[08:13] Like one of the big characters here is Kevin Graham, who, from what I understand, plays a very large role in the third game. But here, he honestly serves as kind of a plot device and shows up basically whenever you need something to move the plot along.
[08:25] They also introduce some characters from the previous game that eventually become companions in this one over the course of the entire thing. Technically, Kevin does, too. And all of that, narratively, is just handled extremely well, to the point of it being, again, the strongest point of the game.
[08:39] And that's before you get into all of the things that this game is culminating to, the in-game sequence stuff, which I don't want to spoil. Answering, again, a lot of the questions that were made from the first game about what are these strange artifacts you found, and what do they relate to, etc.
[08:53] You get answers to all that stuff, and it is just great. There's also the inevitable JRPG dragon in this one, and that guy is awesome as well. Now we're going to move on to progression. So progression, like a lot of the actual gameplay systems, is incredibly similar to the first game. So I'm going to breeze through some of this. I've already talked about them in the review for the first game, but I'll try to give some brief explanations.
[09:15] So as you would expect, you're going to be leveling up. Leveling up increases your stats. As you participate in combat, you'll also be doing things like raising your character's support level, which gives them access to our little passive abilities that occur automatically.
[09:28] We will also be finding and upgrading gears, so weapons for each character, your armors, as well as accessories. All of those can be upgraded. There are ultimate weapons in the game. If you can find and collect all of the books, you'll get access to some special ore that in the late game,
[09:44] That is to say, the very last act, you can turn into the game's ultimate weapons, which can then be upgraded one more time. And then there are your orbments, the really big part of progression. So, they made some small tweaks to how this works, but basically you're going to have a sort of a special tactical magic piece that allows you to equip quartz in order to utilize the magic contained within.
[10:04] You will arrange the type of quartz along lines within your orbments, and this determines your abilities that you get from them, which is mostly spells that you can cast alongside passive abilities, and occasionally quartz will also do some unique stuff as well.
[10:18] Now, what has changed here is that they have added tons of new ones. So, in order to reset progression from the first game to this next one, they require you to review your orbments, basically saying that the technology has advanced and the new orbments are better, but the quartz is no longer compatible between the old one and this one, so you have to start your quartz collection over.
[10:39] But eventually, it will get stronger. And not just that you can also eventually upgrade the slots of your quartz allowing you to put in better and better types alongside just different and stronger ones more generally So in the long run you become stronger after that sort of progress reset from the initial game That is the bulk of the progression
[10:59] However, there are a few other things as well, like the bracer rank, as I mentioned. Your margin for error there is extremely slim. If you want to get the max rank, you also get rewards for increasing your rank. There is a fishing game that you can find a bunch of different rods for. That's kind
[11:13] of a little bit of its own progression as well. But all in all, again, progression is slightly different, but mostly the same, with the big thing being that you just get some extra options now, and of course more characters and the like, which brings us to the gameplay and world section. So,
[11:28] important to understand a few things right away. We are still in the same region as the last game, which means we are literally traveling to the same regions for most of the game. There's some new areas towards the very end. In chapter 8, you will actually be able to move through most of the
[11:43] game at will for a while. After Chapter 8, you get locked back into the ending sequence, but while you make your way to Chapter 8, there's still plenty of stuff that if you don't do it before then, it just won't be available, like time requests, that kind of thing, like do them before
[11:57] a certain amount of story progress has passed, or you fail, and they are no longer available. So, those are important things to keep in mind, and that's why it's easy to miss things like the Bracer Rank. But for the first five chapters of the game, you're going to each region, exploring
[12:11] and getting to the bottom of a mystery before, of course, dealing with that mystery and how it relates to the bigger part of the plot before moving on to the next region. Just like in the first game, each of these areas has a few things for you to do,
[12:25] and that is defeat all the monsters, complete all the bracer side quests, the main story, of course, and also a couple of side activities like cooking and fishing. So fishing is the new thing in this one, but it's also, you know, a basic fishing minigame,
[12:38] so it doesn't bear much explanation, and cooking is the same as it was last time. You make a bunch of meals, get a bunch of bonuses, except sometimes you can use food as combat items. A couple of those are actually really good, just as a heads up.
[12:50] Now, all along the way of doing all of those things, you're going to be fighting off enemies and picking up companions as you go. Now, I did talk a little bit about, in my first impressions video, I believe,
[13:03] that I was curious how this game would handle the companion side of things, and that's because the first game had rotating companions. Estelle and Joshua were always there, but every act you would get different companions who would rotate in and out. This is a bit different than that, actually.
[13:16] So there are a couple of companions that come and go. However, early in the game you get a choice between one of two, Sherezard or Agate, and that will have some minor effects like dialogue and a few scenes, etc.
[13:28] However, for the most part, once you actually start picking up companions and they fully join your party, you just have them, and you can go back to places like the Bracer's Guild to swap them out, outside of the characters you are required to have.
[13:40] So for your party of four, you might, on occasion, actually get to swap out and change, like, two of them and adjust your strategies a little bit. Ultimately, at the very end of the game, not through most of it, but eventually, there are a total of twelve to choose from,
[13:54] each of which has some unique things that makes them interesting in their own way. I will say a couple of those companions only join you for, like, the very last act, and even then, not that entire act either. But even this felt like a bit of an expansion of the game's original concept,
[14:08] so, you know, there's that. But otherwise, gameplay and world, that's kind of what you're looking at. You just explore the regions you are in, mostly pretty freely, as long as you're not advancing the story, do side quests, single-side activities, explore, find rewards, etc.
[14:21] Then we've got the combat sections. So, as I mentioned, combat made a few changes, just like everything else, but the core of it is, of course, the same. It's a turn-based system. Every turn, you can potentially get bonuses based on whose turn it is when, and your attacks can absolutely interrupt, adjust, or steal the bonuses of your enemies, and playing around with that becomes a pretty important part of combat, especially for later fights where you don't want to get just destroyed by the action economy.
[14:50] When it is your turn, you basically have your choice between arts, crafts, items, defending, etc. Now, your arts and crafts are basically magic and an individual character's skills. Crafts are, honestly, in my opinion, kind of magical, but they are basically like the innate skills of the character you are using, and you get access to them as you level up.
[15:07] Arts are the magic that you have access to based on the quartz that you have equipped in your orbment. Using items and defending is pretty self-explanatory, and then, just like the original game as well,
[15:19] You have access to things like craft points as well as your, like, mana, basically, and then increasing your craft points actually gives you access to the ability to use those crafts, and from 100 to 200 points, you can actually use your S-break, which is like your super special craft that will deal more damage or provide some special extra effects, and it's usually worth it to build up for those.
[15:40] Each character is a little bit different, but that's kind of the gist of it. Now, the other side of this is the, of course, action combat. So before you actually start the turn-based battles, you have the option of attacking most enemies, not all, but most,
[15:54] in an action system where you can just kind of hit them before the game enters turn-based mode, and what this will allow you to do is potentially kill weaker enemies outright, or stun them, which is a great way to lead into turn-based combat, because that provides you with an advantage.
[16:08] In particular, it lets you do a burst attack immediately. Burst attacks allow you to use a resource filled up when you mostly perform follow up attacks with other characters defeat enemies etc But as you increase these little increments you can do extra attacks This happens when you do things like stun enemies from action combat and then go into turn
[16:29] or critically strike, or just do really big hits to enemies, you'll get an opportunity to do a burst attack. These can be chain attacks, just kind of attacking with another character, or they can be burst or full burst, which kind of increases as the game goes along.
[16:42] but the idea with the burst is that your entire party attacks. Now, these are really great because a lot of the burst attacks will actually clear status effects on your characters, which is obviously very convenient. On top of that, there's also overdrive.
[16:55] So, usually, like, every few turns, you can turn on the overdrive mode for that character, which will also clear their status effects and give them, like, extra damage and stuff. And so, what you can kind of do, if you can pull it off anyway, is save your really big hits for your overdrive to activate
[17:09] while you try to just, of course, decimate the enemy in the meantime. But as I said at the very beginning, one of the things they've done with enemies here is to try to make them a little more threatening, I would imagine, and they largely do that by locking your characters down.
[17:23] A lot of enemies in this game have some sort of ability that is going to basically take your character's turns away. Now, of course, the way around all that stuff is to fall back, especially if you have a problem with it,
[17:35] and then adjust your accessories, figure out what you need to be immune or resistant to, that kind of stuff. So between that and, of course, just grinding and over-leveling for it, or the reduced strength of enemies when you restart on anything below hard, etc.,
[17:50] there's plenty of ways through a situation, and you're unlikely to get stuck for that long unless you're just trying to beat the game on the hardest manner possible, which is certainly a possibility, I suppose. But for the most part, it's the combat from the first game with some minor tweaks
[18:03] allowing you to do a few extra things, especially with the new quartz that was added. And also being able to use the food items that are considered throwables, I guess you should say, this time around. For the most part, pretty enjoyable for what the game is.
[18:16] I doubt it would blow anybody's mind, though. Next up, we've got the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine. Unsurprisingly, these both run very well there. I'm sure you could probably tell that just by looking at the game, but it's not exactly a graphically intensive title,
[18:29] and so it is, of course, verified on both the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine, in case that happens to be a concern for you. But otherwise, let's move on to positives and negatives and then wrap this thing up. So on the positive side of things,
[18:41] mostly I would say the story and the world building more than anything. I think they just did such a fantastic job of really kind of getting into the nitty-gritty of all the different plot points, carrying forward the world, kind of literally making it advanced both technology and story-wise,
[18:56] like getting to see all of the characters you interacted with previously and how they're doing now. The main story itself is quite good. There's some fantastic stuff with individual characters that they did really well. There's genuinely great side quests.
[19:09] And it's no surprise to me, after having played this one, that this is a lot of people's favorite. But we do have, I would say, just a couple minor nitpicks for the negatives, which are a few things about combat that I don't love. I don't really love the approach of just, like, enemies locking down your entire party immediately,
[19:24] even if it is down to stuff like RNG in some cases. It just kind of feels bad, even if you can overcome it. And at least speaking for myself, I was hoping for more new areas to explore. So because you're running through a lot of the exact same areas, most of the dungeons themselves haven't changed.
[19:41] There's a couple of new spots, and most of those come near the end of the game, but I do find myself a little disappointed with how much genuinely new stuff there was to run through, even if they do a really great job of showcasing, again, advancing individual areas and plots, etc.
[19:57] I don't think it ruins the game or anything, but just something of note. Which then brings me to my conclusion. So, Trails in the Sky Second Chapter is $60 US, which is what I paid for it.
[20:09] They are also selling a more expensive version with a bunch of cosmetic stuff you don't really need. But for $60, I think you're getting a fantastic story and a pretty fun game to play overall. And so, I would certainly recommend you play the first game first, because that's how you'll get the most out of this one.
[20:24] This was great. I had a ton of fun with it. and we will see what happens with the third chapter. There are talks that they might want to remake that one, but I haven't heard anything. The third chapter is, of course, the end to this trilogy,
[20:38] but it is also very different from the other two. From what I understand, most of what it does is actually set up events that happen later in the entire series, as the trilogy is really itself just the beginning of all of the other games.
[20:50] So I might wait a little while to see what happens with all that before I go too much farther, but between one and two, I think you get a really well-told epic of a story that is well worth your time. And that is naturally where I'm going to wrap up this particular video,
[21:05] and so I will happily turn it over to you guys. I'd love to know what you think about this one down in the comment section below. It seems to be doing pretty well reception-wise since its initial release a little over a week ago, but do let me know what you think,
[21:17] which naturally means like, comment, subscribe, all that YouTube jazz, but regardless of any of that, truly, just thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. May you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day.