Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter Game Review

Estelle Bright has a big heart and wields a very big stick. She wanted and worked to be a Bracer, a professional do-gooder. So did her gentle, amnesiac, adopted brother, Joshua. On their quest to become senior Bracers, the two traveled across the kingdom of Liberl. They honed their skills, built a group of tight-knit friends, began sorting through a tangle of feelings, and thwarted an attempted coup. Then Joshua was made to remember his forgotten, horrific past, and vanished into the shadows. He made two vows. The first was retribution. The second was that he would not drag Estelle down with him.

Despite her heartbreak, Estelle refuses to let Joshua lose himself to the abyss. Reuniting with her friends, she sets out to find her beloved, pull him back from the brink, and unravel the conspiracy that led him to vanish in the first place.

Estelle Bright has a big heart and wields a very big stick. She wanted and worked to be a Bracer, a professional do-gooder. So did her gentle, amnesiac, adopted brother, Joshua. On their quest to become senior Bracers, the two traveled across the kingdom of Liberl. They honed their skills, built a group of tight-knit friends, began sorting through a tangle of feelings, and thwarted an attempted coup. Then Joshua was made to remember his forgotten, horrific past, and vanished into the shadows. He made two vows. The first was retribution. The second was that he would not drag Estelle down with him.

Despite her heartbreak, Estelle refuses to let Joshua lose himself to the abyss. Reuniting with her friends, she sets out to find her beloved, pull him back from the brink, and unravel the conspiracy that led him to vanish in the first place.

I am a latecomer to the Trails series. I started last year with 2021's Trails Through Daybreak. It got its hooks in me (as a longtime film dweeb, I have to salute any game that sets an extended hunk of its story at a film festival). I have since completed its direct sequels Daybreak II and Beyond the Horizon, and tinkered some with the well-loved Trails from Zero. Late in 2025, I played through Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, that year's remake of the series-launching Trails in the Sky. Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter follows suit, remaking Trails in the Sky SC and completing the series' first story. Like every other Trails that I have had the good fortune to enjoy so far, Sky 2nd is a darn good RPG and a darn good game.

Structurally and mechanically, Sky 2nd is consistent with its immediate predecessor and the Daybreak/Horizon games. It's split into chapters, each of which focuses on a different part of Liberl. In the macro-plot, Estelle and her party travel the kingdom, seeking to unravel a conspiracy and track down Joshua. While they continue their big-picture investigation, Estelle continues to work and advance as a Bracer by helping folks. Estelle's Bracer duties serve as the basis for Sky 2nd's sidequests. These range from classical wandering do-gooder tasks like slaying dangerous monsters to more esoteric assignments like knocking a mediocre gambler off a winning streak before his ballooning ego gets him taken for everything he and his wife have. At certain points in each chapter, the main story will move forward, potentially locking the player out of unfinished sidequests. Time management is not as key a mechanic as it is in, say, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave or a Persona game, but it is something to keep in mind.

While fulfilling Bracer requests and unraveling the conspiracy, Estelle and company will frequently end up in combat. Most of Sky 2nd's battles bounce between simple real-time action and delightfully dense turn-based battles. The real-time sequences offer a chance to soften up tougher foes and bulldoze weaker ones to save time. They're perfectly functional. Walloping a foe to the point of gaining an advantage in the turn-based Command mode is satisfying, but Sky 2nd's real-time combat is by design an appetizer. The real meal is found in the Command mode.

Broadly speaking, Sky 2nd's combat turns on seeking and exploiting advantages and keeping an eye on the flow of combat. Trying to pulverize opponents through sheer power alone is a good way to run into a wall. The better play is to keep track of the hows and whats. If an enemy has an elemental vulnerability, a powerful spell of that element could ruin their day. The question is, will that spell fire before the enemy can move and leave your caster to obliterate nothing? Each member of the party has their own library of unique abilities, and each of those abilities is useful in different situations. Mastering Sky 2nd's battle system means learning that all the pieces matter, from basic attacks to cinematic S-crafts, from randomly assigned turn bonuses to the fight-wide effects of character positioning.

Consider, for instance, a boss battle where the boss' minions will buff and heal the boss upon defeat. A powerful wide-area attack might clear away the goons and give the party more control over the flow of combat, but it also runs the risk of leaving the boss better off than they were before the attack. Conversely, a narrowly focused strike that cancels buffs will keep the boss' damage manageable and force them to spend a turn that they could spend attacking, re-applying the buffs, but leave the minions in play, allowing them to whittle down the party scratch by scratch. Sky 2nd calls on players to approach its fights, be they with colorful critters, gargantuan mechanoids, or members of a shady secret society- with a capital S- with flexibility. As run on normal difficulty, Sky 2nd's combat is quite well balanced. The elegant complexity of the battle system creates space to get into a flow state and ride combat like a wave. Meanwhile, making a bad call will hurt, but it will not instantly doom the player. If the player does fall, they'll know the whys and hows. With that said, falling in a long boss battle and having to start from the beginning, potentially quite a ways back, can be wince-inducing. All told though, Sky 2nd's combat is well-explained, fun to explore, and reliably enjoyable.

While Sky 2nd's battle system is excellent, for me it's the worldcraft, character work, and storytelling that make Trails games sing. Liberl is a vibrant setting, familiar from the first game but clearly changed by its events. The players, from Estelle's party, their friends, and foes to a minor NPC who speaking to is completely optional, all have at least a little inner life and dimension. In particular, key characters have the space to be silly and serious in ways that read as different parts of complete people. Take Estelle's fellow bracer Anelace, in the screenshot above. She adores anything and everything cute, to the point of bringing a pile of plushies to a comparatively isolated training outpost. She's also excited to work with Estelle, since they're around the same age, and have different passions and interests while sharing a calling and big-picture outlook. They complement each other well as peers and rivals.

The game's cast is terrific. Early in Sky 2nd, for instance, Estelle has to choose between keeping the gizmo that let her cast spells in Sky 1st (and thus implicitly contains the endgame-tier spells from the end of that game) or picking up a new gizmo that will mean starting over from scratch, but will also allow her to pick up entirely new spells. She chooses the latter, since she knows that she'll need every edge she can get in her coming investigation. It's a neat bit of narrative crafting, one that uses a mechanical choice (requiring the player to learn spells from the ground up since Sky 2nd is a new game) to show that Estelle has become a skilled Bracer who is starting to get a handle on big-picture thinking compared to her rookie status in Sky 1st.

Sky 2nd's creative team deploys that same thoughtfulness throughout the game. The end of Sky 1st had major consequences for Liberl and its people. They grew and changed throughout that game, and that growth continues in Sky 2nd. A gang of ruffians who tried to get stronger in the first game have continued to (sort of) mature in the second. Estelle's friend Kloe grapples openly with challenges she would have kept to herself when they first met. Estelle remains an incredibly endearing lead as she pushes her abilities as a Bracer and seeks Joshua.

Indeed, it's a major credit to Sky 2nd's writing team that Estelle and Joshua's “adopted-siblings-from-age-11-to-realizing-that-they-are-in-love-as-teenagers” romance, which could very, very easily trip into the dreaded realm of “Absolutely Not,” works and works well. It's more Richie and Margot Tanenbaum than Jaime and Cersei Lannister. That is an extremely tricky needle to thread, and it will be a hard no for some folks, but for what it is worth, the creative team nails it. They spin Sky 2nd's main story with care and precision, and bring that same care to the many smaller stories that run simultaneously with it. Even if malignant knuckleheads were not currently trying to get as many suckers all in on reckless gambling, the fearless foolishness of the would-be card sharp Estelle is hired to stop inspires a grimace.

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter is a game of a piece with its predecessor and its later-in-the-timeline cousins. It has a darn good battle system, an excellent musical score, and is packed with lovable, complex characters. It's a game that's worth loving.