Had to skip a week due to... life (and getting back into Sekiro and getting HOOKED. That game is a masterpiece, y'all), but here we are again. Let's turn our eyes from responsibilities and talk some Trails! Though this one is going to be VERY short, since I haven't gone through much and there wasn't much to talk about.

As always, Spoilers! Though there really isn't much in here this week.

Previously in Trails: Que song

Chapter 7 (1/2):

Alright, there isn't much to talk about in terms of the story, but let's scrap together some things to talk about! In this chapter, the heroes go around the Tetracyclic Towers (the towers we've seen near the major cities throughout the game until now). It's basically just a boss rush with short mini-dungeons in between, where we go through the list of Enforcers we've met along the way.

There are... some good things about this format. First of all, we get to focus on the story without having side quest distractions, which I'm starting to get more and more fond of. Second, we get to have a very dense string of combat encounters, and as someone that enjoys the combat in Trails, this is pretty fun in a different way from usual. However, I do feel like this might be a net negative: The focus on the story doesn't do much since all we're doing is running by the Enforcers (who really don't make themselves very interesting), and even with the focus on battles, it's very repetitive (which is why I couldn't get though much this week). It's kind of fun that the game gives us opportunities to use some of the less relevant characters, but it also brings forth the issue that some characters are so much less useful... especially since there is no system that keeps the other characters leveled appropriately.

Anyways, here are some points of interest in this chapter so far:

Ever notice that almost any Japanese game, primarily JRPGs, will pretty much always have this kind of mystery dimension area? The whole "floating fantasy-future platforms in a goopy weird colored alternate dimension" area? Really reminds me of Derris-Kharlan in Tales of Symphonia. It's suggested that the Tetracyclic Towers were built by people attempting to contain the so-called Aureole, so maybe we will be visiting this Aureole thing later, and it will look pretty similar to this?

Also, I had forgotten how Joshua is basically a Deus Machina in terms of explaining whatever is going on, almost to a hilarious degree. Came across a pre-historic data recording device? No worries, Joshua will just clickity-clack for a couple seconds, and voila! you've extracted the relevant information and you know exactly what it is! Oh, Josh, what will we ever do without you. (but no really wtf is the reason he can do literally everything? Just because he was a former Enforcer with assassin training?)

In terms of the fights, the BleuBlanc fight at the end of the first tower had an interesting gimmick. BleuBlanc would summon a bunch of illusory clones that would teleport away every time they get hit with an attack, and the robot minions that got summoned at the beginning of the fight can also be resummoned by BleuBlanc. The fight is a race to find the true BleuBlanc and grind him up before the rest of the enemies get too overwhelming. Pretty cool as a one-off concept! In my case, I got pretty lucky that I used Kloe's Kaempfer craft on him before he summoned his clones, which let me track him down with the debuff icon. Being able to counter the fight's gimmicks like that is another fun factor that makes this more interesting.

And how could we forget? We finally get Zin's moment of glory in the main story! His.... final? moment of glory? The fight itself with Walter was as vanilla as it gets, but the ensuing cutscene/battle sequence of his 1v1 with Zin was pretty cool. There are some aspects in the game system and battle that I have lingering issues with (which I've gone over before), but things like this are perhaps my only gripe with an otherwise superb story. They bring in a canonically "badass" character who should be able to act as a mentor, and who also has a mysterious(?) backstory, but they only focus on him for a grand total of... 30 minutes or so? It's pretty mind boggling. I've heard that Zin doesn't really make an appearance in the games after the Sky trilogy, which just makes things even worse. The saving grace is that the Trails series still seems far from over, and the Calvard Republic (Zin's homeland) is still unexplored territory, which means... maybe we get some games focused on that region? One can hope!

Welp, that's basically all I've got so far! I thought of talking about the Shining Poms, but really all they are is that they're rare enemies that drop insane amounts of EXP and Sepis... the Metal Slimes of the Trails world, if you will. It at least lead to the glorious screenshot below! Well anyways, hopefully I can finish up the chapter soon, and finally start getting some juicy conclusions to this long adventure. We'll see... Bye!

Extra screenshots: