Sholva Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter Review

No one does it like Falcom, this remake is absolute greatness. As an avid enjoyer of this series for more than a decade, by now, I have witnessed, played and enjoyed so many games that can be considered best in the genre, from this series and, yet, ten years later now in 2026 I keep being surprised by it, by the sheer expertise from Nihon Falcom’s team at crafting this epic tale that we’ve been blessed with, in this medium. Suffice to say, the original Sky SC is a game I remember fondly, it had so many epic moments in the series, as well as set up for future ones and, honestly, they went above and beyond for the remake here: every single moment is here, it feels just as if it was freshly experienced for the first time…it is magical, it is the power of a team with a dream and a solid vision, and the respect they hold for this beloved franchise, both as developers and gamers themselves. Before continuing, a PC review does need some hard data, and the good news is that, just like Sky 1st Chapter, the second remake runs quite flawlessly on my current system, a Ryzen 7 5700X with 32 GB of DDR 4 3600 MTs, and an Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB. In short: the game’s very much playable at 60 FPS and above at 1440p Ultra Settings, with DLAA or, if using some DLSS instead, the framerates will easily go above 100 FPS and it does look fantastic, plays quite smoothly, both with Controller and Mouse and Keyboard, and has no obvious stutters or anything of the sort, it is a very solid port, as expected of Falcom these days. Don’t be deceived by the visual art style, the game is clearly made with modern rendering techniques (except ultra-high end stuff like ray tracing, obviously) and, compared to some of its contemporaries in the genre, from publishers with much bigger budgets, I can confidently say that it is insane how well Nihon Falcom manage to create such fluid animations, nice looking graphics and smooth gameplay: everything feels top quality. In the Soundtrack department, what can we say that we don’t know? It’s the same soundtrack but with a new arrangement, still feels as epic as the original and hits where it needs to, very hard, at the right moments, it is so good. Voice Over, in English (how I played), is absolutely fantastic, very happy to see almost everyone coming back to their respective roles, except the two major changes in two characters, but their replacements did an incredible job, both Leonhardt and Weissmann sounded excellent. Listening to some of the big characters in the whole series, being played by the same actors we have like ten games later, is fantastic and they know their roles so well at this point, they clearly enjoyed it a lot and it shows. I don’t think I need to talk about how good the story is in this game and, for spoiler reasons I won’t but, to me, it is one of the best stories in any game I’ve played, not just JRPGs. Still haven’t woken up from the dream of having played two incredible Trails games in the same year, the latest in the series and now this epic remake but here we are, indeed. I will say, though, the additions this remake contains, compared to the original, in the form of some new quests / bosses and playable characters…absolutely incredible, just as it is the fact that they’ve kept the Dialogue Variations, depending on which characters you bring to those certain moments present in the original…every minute detail has been preserved in remake form, amazing. This, of course, includes voiced lines that vary depending on the characters in the party, for such events, it’s just so much attention to detail. This is the perfect remake and, if that word is not in your vocabulary to describe games, congrats, now you’ve discovered it, because few games will ever come close to this level of detail when we’re talking preserving the original intent and cohesively expanding upon it a bit.