REVIEW: ‘Trails In The Sky 2nd Chapter’ Is A Warm, Welcome Return To Librerl

The Trails in the Sky remakes are one of the best things happening in the role-playing genre right now. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter proved that developer Nihon Falcom could rebuild a two-decade-old classic in full 3D without sanding off what made it special. Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, a remake of 2006’s The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC, picks up right where 1st Chapter’s cliffhanger left off. Falcom’s approach is simple: keep what worked and polish the rest. It pays off in one of the best RPGs in recent memory.

Estelle Bright (Stephanie Sheh) is a mess when Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter opens, and she has every reason to be. Her adoptive brother and partner, Joshua Bright (Johnny Yong Bosch), confessed his past as a trained assassin at the end of 1st Chapter. Then he gives her a goodbye kiss and walks out of her life.

Now a senior bracer in the Kingdom of Liberl, Estelle sets out to find him. That search puts her on a collision course with Ouroboros, the secret society Joshua once served and the one pulling strings across the continent of Zemuria. Where 1st Chapter played like a road trip, Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter is a conspiracy thriller, and each region pulls another thread loose on what Ouroboros has planned for Liberl.

Stephanie Sheh gives Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter’s best voice performance as Estelle Bright.

The game lets Estelle stay the headstrong optimist players fell for in 1st Chapter, at least for a while. Then it starts methodically chipping away at that exterior. The script makes her pay for every step forward, and by the credits, she’s grown more than most RPG protagonists do across an entire trilogy.

The supporting cast is loaded. Kevin Graham (Ray Chase), a Septian Church priest who plays the fool a little too well, is the best new addition. Tita Russell (Brianna Knickerbocker) and Agate Crosner (Ben Pronsky) get a relationship with real teeth this time around. Scherazard Harvey (Michelle Ruff) and Olivier Lenheim (Matthew Mercer) are back too, and every one of them earns a spot in the party.

Sheh gives the best performance in the game and one of the best I’ve heard in an RPG in years. The loud, dramatic scenes are the ones people will clip and share, but Sheh is just as good when the game goes quiet. Her softest work, like a dream sequence built around the harmonica Joshua left behind, stuck with me longer than any of the shouting matches.

The back half of Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter hands her some genuinely heavy material to work with. I won’t spoil any of it, but veterans of the original Sky SC know which scenes are coming. The original English release only had voice clips in combat, so those moments lived in text boxes. Sheh gives them a voice, and they hit much harder for it.

Chase has a blast with Kevin’s goofy priest act, and he’s even better when the mask slips. Knickerbocker’s Tita carries one sequence opposite Agate that is one of the toughest scenes in the game to sit through. Voice director Marc Hawes keeps a massive ensemble sounding like it belongs in the same world, which matters in a game this talky.

The one knock is that voicing is still only partial in some scenes. One character will speak out loud while the person they’re talking to stays silent in a text box. The Trails series has done this for years, and it’s still jarring every time.

Falcom took an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to combat, and it was the right call.

Cutscene direction, though, is a massive leap forward. Falcom clearly spent its biggest resources on the scenes that matter most, and the camera work in the major story beats would’ve been unthinkable in the sprite-based original. It helps make the story’s best moments land with the intended impact.

Falcom took an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to combat, and it was the right call. The hybrid system from 1st Chapter returns mostly untouched. Quick Battles let you slash through weaker enemies in real time on the field, while Command Battles shift to a turn-based grid for bosses and tougher packs.

Everything new is a small tweak aimed at a specific problem. The Brave Rush ability lets the party unleash a team strike during field combat, giving aggressive players a way to thin out a pack of enemies fast. Each character also picks up new arts and crafts that open up more options in Command Battles.

The improved map and quest tracker make side quests much easier to keep up with.

Outside of combat, the fishing minigame got a full rebuild and now has players match bait and rods to specific spots across Liberl. Better yet, the improved map and quest tracker make Bracer Guild side quests much harder to miss. Anyone who has lost a time-limited Trails side quest to a story trigger will appreciate that.

Dungeons and backtracking are where Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter stumbles. Some dungeons drag on far too long, a bit of dated design the remake never fully sheds. A lot of the map is also recycled straight from 1st Chapter, so you spend long stretches walking the same caves and roads you already cleared in the first game.

A late-game event finally shakes things up with environmental changes and tougher enemies, but it takes a while to get there. High-Speed Mode definitely helps. It’s still a band-aid on a structural problem, and those two issues are the only things keeping Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter from a perfect score.

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter is the payoff 1st Chapter was building toward.

Falcom’s in-house Sound Team jdk has been one of the best music teams in the business for decades, and its reorchestrated score here is outstanding. Exploration tracks give every region its own identity, and the battle themes stay energetic across dozens of hours without ever turning grating.

Where the music really takes over is in the big story moments. It locks in with the voice cast and does as much emotional heavy lifting as any line of dialogue. I kept switching back and forth between the original and reorchestrated scores, and they all hold up quite well. There is no “right” one to choose, so I’d recommend trying all three and seeing what they have to offer.

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter is the payoff 1st Chapter was building toward. Falcom polished nearly everything about the original while keeping the warmth that made fans fall for Liberl in the first place, and Sheh’s Estelle is the heart of all of it. The dungeons and backtracking keep it just short of perfect, but the storytelling and presentation are as good as RPGs get right now.

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter is available on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.