Hero image: Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter promotional art. Image: Nihon Falcom, via Steam
The original Trails in the Sky SC is the game people reach for whenever somebody claims JRPG sequels are lazy cash-ins, and so the obvious worry about a remake was that the thing which made it work — the patience, the way a hundred small conversations accumulate into something enormous — would be sanded off to fit a modern release schedule. It has not been. Falcom’s version carries over the structure that made the original land, rebuilds it in 3D with the hybrid battle system developed for the first chapter, and lets you import your clear data from that game for a handful of bonuses, which is a small thing but a generous one. The Steam user reviews are emphatic about it: 96 per cent positive across 588 reviews at the time of writing, which is the sort of number that usually only happens to games nobody has heard of.
Image: Nihon Falcom
And then you scroll down the store page, and the mood changes somewhat. There are fourteen pieces of downloadable content attached to this game, and if you add every one of them to your cart the total comes to more than the game itself costs — for a single-player JRPG, in 2026, where none of it changes a line of dialogue or adds an hour of anything. What you get instead is a cheerleader costume set, a glasses set, a second glasses set (Glasses Set B arrives in October, in case Glasses Set A proves insufficient), pom pom heads, hair colours, orbment covers, and a set of consumable item bundles that exist to let you skip the grinding in a game whose entire design philosophy is that the grinding is the point. The whole lot rolls out in three staggered drops across 17 September, 24 September and 1 October, which is a release calendar for cosmetics, and it is hard to decide whether that is funnier or sadder than dumping them all on day one.
There is a version of this complaint that is just snobbery about cosmetics, and that is not the argument here. Falcom is a small studio by any reasonable measure, the Trails localisation pipeline is genuinely expensive, and if some players want to pay a few dollars to put silly glasses on Estelle then good luck to everyone involved. The Season Pass bundles most of it at a discount, the base game is complete without any of it, and nothing here is a progression wall (the item packs are the closest thing, and you would have to actively want them). But there is a difference between selling cosmetics and building a storefront where a fourteen-item list sits directly underneath the buy button of a story about a girl looking for her missing partner, and the second one does something to how the game reads before anyone has played a minute of it.
So the honest position is probably this. The game underneath is very good — possibly the best thing Falcom has shipped in a decade, and the strongest argument yet that these remakes are worth doing rather than just worth selling. If you played 1st Chapter, you already know whether you are buying this, and you should, and you should import your save. If you have never touched the series, this is not the place to start, and the first remake is the door. And if the DLC list bothers you, the good news is that ignoring it costs nothing at all, which is more than can be said for most storefronts that look like this one.
Out now on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2 and PC via Steam. A demo is available on Steam if you want to test it first.
Source: Steam, GungHo Online Entertainment America