I'm back after a month long hiatus, slowed down in Trails progress by Sekiro (Good lord it's so good. Top 10 games of all time personally... maybe a review for it will be my next writing project after SC), Monster Hunter World (Alatreon rekindled some MH flames in my heart), and.... a surprisingly boring, and honestly quite bad chapter of TitS SC? A word of warning: this week is FULL of salty complaints and criticisms, so if you don't like seeing that kinda stuff, you should turn back now. I mean salty like the Dead Sea kind of levels of salty.

And as always, this writeup will consist entirely of SPOILERS!

Previously in Trails: "You'll NEVER defeat me! Muahahahaha!"

Chapter 7 (2/2)

So... let's get straight to the point here, since I don't feel like being too nice to this chapter to be quite honest; What a painfully unnecessary chapter. Yes, some of the fights were interesting (and one was VERY much not, more on that later), and yes we got to see at least a tiny bit more about the Enforcers, but.... in the end, it felt like all of this chapter could have been told in a few cutscenes or a lengthy piece of dialogue. Let's go through the chapter and talk about its problems as we face them:

Picking up where we left off, our heroes head to the third "device tower," aka the Sapphirl Tower, to face off against Luciola once again. The party member forced upon the player is Schera this time, which yet again shows how skewed the usefulness of each character is... but that's a topic already covered previously. As was expected since going through half the chapter, the following sequence is dreadfully familiar: Walk through a very uninspired samey looking dungeon (mercifully a very quick single-track hike this time), fight the exact same looking monsters with slight color variations yet again, collect some "data crystals" that contain corrupted voice logs that are too corrupted to even try deciphering before the game does it for you, and finally defeat a boss only to find that you actually haven't defeated him/her. What. A. Drag. I've introduced a bunch of topics I wanted to talk about already, but the first one is definitely the monotony of this sequence. Just the fact that all the dungeons and monsters within look all the same with only a slight color difference very effectively eats away at player motivation, even if it would make sense within the world (as in, why would the four device towers have different minions and aesthetic designs? Though that "plot consistency" argument takes a hit with the gradually rising levels of the monsters). While I don't think this kind of story pacing/chapter structuring hasn't exactly been a strong suit of Falcom, it usually isn't a problem either. This kind of blatant playtime padding is unfortunately common in this genre, but it's still disheartening to see it in a story that has been doing a fairly good job of hiding the playtime padding under some character development and charming writing.

Speaking of "charming writing," let's move on with the chapter and discuss the boss for this tower, Luciola, and the lack of "charming writing." After a fairly uninteresting pre-fight conversation (Schera: "Tell me why you left the circus and me if I can prove myself to you in battle"), Luciola gives a small bit of backstory: She wanted to "look into [her] own darkness" by joining the Society, because she murdered the owner of the circus, Mr. Harvey. I will direct no judgement towards those who found this bit of exposition interesting, but personally, I found it horrendously rote and uninteresting. Perhaps the lack of detail and previous information about Luciola accentuated the issue, but I can't find a reason why the player would care at all about the revelation that a "baddie" aligning themselves with a nefarious secret organization that obviously doesn't write "human rights and morals" anywhere in their company motto has... murdered someone? That we've never met? Perhaps we were supposed to care because Schera told us she was like a sister to her when she was a wee little gal... but let's be honest here; Schera's past hasn't had enough story presence until now for us to care about its intricacies, and just being told to be in shocked disbelief that a character that seemed kind over a decade ago turned out a little murder-y is... in harsh words, a bit lazy. Of course, not everything can be perfect in a game. But this game is Trails. If there was one thing that I would want to be top notch quality in this game, it would be the character writing (well actually the world building, but let's rope characters in there too for convenience). In terms of lack of interest, let's just say even Luciola's story was slightly more interesting than Bleublanc or Walter's. I suppose Bleublanc gets a pass for the memes, but Olivier wasn't even there to complete the humor. Did we even need the Enforcers at each of these towers at all? It's not like the team getting there changed anything...

Which brings me to my next topic, the aspects about this chapter that go from "disappointing" to "straight up bad," the first one being the Renne fight. After the Luciola fight and seemingly important dialogue being interrupted by something AGAIN, the heroes head to the Amberl Tower to face Renne, where the format is the exact same YET AGAIN (actually the dungeon part was unnecessarily complicated so I suppose it was worse?). But that's just the same as before. I'll even say that the story development around Renne manages to slip into the territory of "mildly interesting if not slightly cheaply melodramatic." What REALLY grinds my gears about this segment is the fight itself. Get a load of this: It starts with your party being ambushed, meaning they're surrounded and most of them won't get a turn until the whole enemy roster, and Renne automatically starts the fight with her S-Craft THAT HAS 1-SHOT POTENTIAL. And I don't mean "it does enough damage to 1-shot" 1-shot; I mean the status effect 1-shot. In my case, literally my whole team wiped on the first go. Who... who thought this was a good idea?! I'll admit there were "hints" in that you pick up an anti-1-shot charm right before, but I think it's fair to say that not many people would expect that attack to be crammed into the beginning of the fight against your whole team. Maybe this would be a somewhat interesting setup if you could avoid the attack by min-maxing a character for speed and applying status ailments on Renne.... but of course, as she is a boss, she's immune to all status ailments other than stat lowering. By the way, the fight itself (given that you survive the S-craft or get lucky and it misses, and survive the followup attacks from her minions) is fairly easy; As long as Kloe was alive with 100+CP, she could S-craft everyone back to life, and Renne and her minions really aren't too powerful. But honestly, I don't think that makes me feel any better about the fight. It's not that it wastes that much time, since you'd presumably save the game right before the fight (if you didn't.... yikes), but it just feels BAD, for particularly no purpose. It honestly soured the experience of this entire chapter even further, and I'm not even done complaining about it yet.

And now we come to my final point, which is a nitpick about the writing. This chapter ends with the Aureole being set free, appearing in the skies of Liberl and shutting down all Orbments in the country, starting to set the stage for the final rush towards the end of the game (presumably). That's all fine, but what bugged me is how the characters acted throughout this chapter leading up to this conclusion, and how they reacted to it. Refer to the screenshot to of Joshua to the right; His line reads something like "So the 'towers' going back to normal was part of your plan?!" .... Excuse my language, but NO SHIT JOSHUA. I'm not going to spend the time to go back and check, but I think one of the characters (probably Dr. Russel) expressly predicted that the towers' "alternate dimension" fields were there to try to fight intruders and protect the towers' functionality (which was also not hard to guess that they were keeping the Aureole from activating, considering the events of FC, which I won't get into). But even without that prediction or very blatantly obvious foreshadowing, the Enforcers that guarded each tower should have made it so glaringly obvious that the hero team didn't achieve anything at each tower; The moment the Gospel replicas did their thing, they all said some variant of "my job here is done" and left the scene.... when the heroes had done absolutely nothing to the towers themselves. Throughout the chapter, the team and the supporting characters speak as if they were achieving something by just going to each tower and... watching it shut itself off? With no sense of urgency? I know the towers getting shut off and Aureole getting released is necessary to move the story forward, but jesus christ. Making the smart characters suddenly incompetent for the sake of convenience is bad writing! I kind of feared this kind of thing would happen at some point when I saw that the writers kept using Joshua as the sort of tell-all solution for explaining plot points, but it still really sucks seeing it happen.

Again, no game is perfect, and I assume this chapter fell into an awkward spot of having to fill in time to nudge the story forward while giving the villains a little more time in the spotlight before facing off for the final time. But my god, this was just. so. bad. Each individual component wasn't anything too major by itself: the dungeons being boring, the story being modular and one-note, having a couple bad fights, having some sloppy writing in the details... But that's a lot of points, and when all of these come together on a chapter that really didn't accomplish anything more than what could have been shown in a cutscene (Essentially, that last cutscene with the Aureole appearing in the sky could have been the entire chapter. Just add a cut of all the Tetracyclic Towers "shutting off" at the beginning), it manifests into a painful waste of time. And this is with a chapter that had no side quests to distract from it! Maybe the bar had been set too high with the past couple of chapters.... Anyways, my enthusiasm for the game definitely took a nosedive with this chapter, but I'm still curious where the overall plot will lead to. Hopefully, they're done with all the play time padding they needed to put in to make the FC/SC split feel worth it? I would imagine they have to be, since the biggest mystery of the story just materialized right above their heads. Only time will tell I suppose. On to the next chapter! Extra screenshots below.