Coming back to this with context from the later games only makes me view this already masterful game in an even better light. Perfectly wrapping up existing arcs and storylines coming out of SC and setting up new conflicts, concepts, and storylines that carry on 5 games later, all while telling its own beautifully tragic story about a man stricken with grief and hellbent on punishing himself. I'd say Sky the 3rd, while not being my favorite game in the series, stands as the true testament to the genius of Falcom.

"My Estelle...you shine like the sun"

JRPG is my favorite videogame genre, but the big thing that gets me down about them in general is that:

Most of them present the mechanics and almost everything that you will see during the game in terms of gameplay in the first hours, and proceed to abuse everything to the limit, presenting few new elements.

And most of all, they lack consistency. I'm not even talking about pace, but that often the best passages are given in the first hours or halfway through, and the quality declines as the game progresses. And this is something even more serious when it's a genre where you can easily find games with more than 50 hours of main story alone.

Fortunately, Trails in the Sky SC goes against the grain of these things, being not only one of the most consistent I've played but having perhaps the best second half I've experienced in any game.

The plot improves with each passage of the game, the characters' arcs are all closed in a satisfactory way, the bosses and events of the final stretch are very memorable and the elements of customizing your party and combat progressively evolve over time. It really fails to use the exact same map as the previous game, which is kind of bland and diminishes the potential of what could have been the experience.

Truly a great game and an example of how to make a direct sequel.

Man, it'd probably be more reasonable to let my opinion settle before making a bold statement, but this series hasn't consumed my mind over the past several months for nothing. I spent a good 90 hours on Trails in the Sky SC only to come out thinking "yeah, this is one of the best games I ever played."

I've barely scratched the surface of this series yet and I'm both amazed at how I simultaneously feel like I've already found an absolute peak story and that there's still so much more to uncover in this series' lore. The world feels incredibly fleshed out thanks to the abundance of flavor text and dialogue but it never feels like every answer is just given to you as there are always hints of bigger, more sinister events taking place behind the scenes. Even though Trails is often seen as a slow burn, I never found myself bored with the story as I found it interesting to let my mind wander and guess where the story will go and I can't say I've experienced many games that strike such a rich balance.

The stakes of the story in SC are much higher than that of the first game and that game's set of already established characters are all given time to shine in some of their most emotional and badass moments yet. It definitely helped that most of the characters were likeable from the get-go but now they feel far more fleshed out with backstories being explored and development taking place throughout the story. I don't want to give too many details for the sake of spoilers but I'll let you know that this game left me speechless more than once. And that doesn't even get into Estelle and Joshua's relationship which was a huge emotional Rollercoaster throughout the game and led to some of the absolute peak of JRPG writing if I've ever seen it.

I am slightly disappointed that they mainly reused locations from the first chapter as I liked the new location the game starts out in, but I never found this to be a major hindrance as the aforementioned world-building gives each location enough depth to feel like fully realized settings and the new dungeons revealed in these previous locations contributes to the sense of mystery in this world. The combat similarly went through little change though I found it significantly more addicting this time around, but maybe that's because I actually made stuff resembling character builds and liked playing with the new arts/orbments. I'm almost inclined to do a second playthrough to experiment with more combinations, which rarely happens with RPGs for me.

Either way, I have no clue why it took me so long to try the Trails series. It doesn't really revolutionize the genre but the concepts, mechanics and storytelling are so well executed that I find it hard to call this game anything less than a masterpiece.

An idea, a feeling and a parasite... what are their differences?

Putting ourselves in the shoes of flawed people who commit heinous acts, Higurashi seeks to elucidate their motives and justifications so that we build sympathy towards these characters, which shows us that the most difficult person to trust and forgive is ourselves.

A perfect world doesn't exist and shouldn't, living without sin is a sin in itself. So how can we seek forgiveness for our mistakes? What would guarantee us that? A miracle? A God? The time? No, but our own efforts.

We don't seek help for fear of getting hurt, because we think it's useless or because we think we need to deal with our difficulties alone, without depending on others or because we think we're a burden to someone. However, remember that asking for help is already an action in itself.

Thank you for everything and goodbye, Hinamizawa.