Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is designed to be a remake of the first game in the Trails series built to be closer to the modern games of the series. There’s a lot you can do in this game, and while it’s been made more approachable, I thought I’d write up a series of tips and suggestions for anyone who might be interested. This guide has some general suggestions for exploration, combat, and tips for filling out your lists of collectable information (such as Books, Enemies, Cooking/Recipes). Happy Trails!
General Tips
Always keep an eye out for optional sub-events and sidequests, which are noted by the blue and green ! event markers. Trails in the Sky FC (the original game) was infamous for keeping a lot of things hidden where you’d need to walk around and talk to NPCs (or look up a guide from someone who already did it) to find them, but this remake makes them a lot more readily visible. Even if an event or quest doesn’t have an indicator on the minimap, they may show up if you pull up the region map.
Any time you enter a new town in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, you’re often gonna wanna go into the more brightly colored buildings as they commonly unlock fast travel points. Red = Bracer Guild, Orange = Orbal Upgrade Shop, Green = General Shop, Purple = Church, and Indigo Blue = Hotel.
I suggest going into the Rewards tab in the menu often. The bonuses you get are quite helpful on your journey and you get a lot of them just by making progress through the game.
If you’re really hurting for money, selling droplets can fetch you a decent chunk of money early in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter if you don’t want to sell your elemental sepith (always sell your sepith masses first). If you prefer to use the droplets for stat boosts, they’re typically best used on Estelle and Joshua, given they’re in your party more than anyone.
Equipment and Orbments
Quite early on in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, the +200HP from the Silver Earrings accessory in particular can be pretty handy, and you can equip two at once. You can also upgrade many accessories, which improves their stat bonuses and general potency and allows them to be useful later into the game. Accessories that grant additional craft points are pretty potent all throughout.
You have six slots on your orbments to insert quartz, with each quartz granting a perk (usually stats or conditional bonuses) as well as several points in their “elemental value”. Each art (the game’s spells) in the game requires you to reach a certain amount of elemental value on at least one art line in order for that character to be able to use that art. Thankfully, you can just press a button to see how much you need to line up your quartz in order to get the elemental value needed to use a certain art.
Every character has a different orbment layout; Joshua for example has two lines (see screenshot above), one with four additional slots and one with a single additional slot. Each character besides Estelle has two slots that are element-locked, which can be a bit of a pain to work around and I often try to slot in quartz with elemental value in multiple elements in these slots. For characters with multiple art lines (like Joshua), I tend to use the shorter line(s) for the stat bonuses of the individual quartz (e.g. attack up) rather than the elemental value provided, though it really comes down to what arts and stats you want on a given character.
The center quartz connects to all lines and is thus generally the most valuable for most characters, meaning it’s usually the slot you should put quartz with the most elemental value. The more elemental lines a character has, the harder it is to get the arts that demand higher elemental value. If their stats didn’t demonstrate this enough, this generally means characters like Agate and Zin are ill-suited to magic, while Olivier and Kloe are very well suited towards it as they have a single art line.
Combat
During Quick Battles, using crafts gives you a lot of invulnerability frames to power through enemy attacks. Quick Battles are also fairly quick to replenish your craft points with if you don’t wanna bother (or can’t) quickly traveling to a hotel to replenish CP.
During Command Battles, many skills you have (including certain S-Crafts) can steal enemy random bonuses, including upcoming critical hits. Speaking of critical hits, casting an art in this game while you have a guaranteed crit turn will preserve the crit until the Art is actually cast rather than the turn you initiate the casting, so you don’t need to worry about timing your arts in the turn order anymore. You won’t need to worry too much about stealing the HP+ turn buffs on enemies this time, as the amount they heal is generally reduced from previous games. Don’t hesitate to use crafts when at max CP either, as the bonuses provided by having more than 100CP scale rather than being all-or-nothing as they were in the original Trails in the Sky FC (e.g. having 160CP causes a 30% bonus as opposed to it being the same as if you only had 100CP like the original).
Damaging Arts are usually pretty potent in this game. While crafts have their purpose, EP is a more expendable resource and Arts are more flexible while also hitting enemies for elemental weaknesses.
Most buff spells (Forte, Crest) are single-target this time, though they do more individually than they did in previous games. Clock Up EX has a lot of gamebreaking potential due to its ability to manipulate the turn sequence and skipping a character’s delay entirely. Sylphen Wing is incredibly potent both for the increased evasion and for the buff it provides to your ATS (magic stat), especially since it’s one of the few that hits your entire party. There’s also a decent amount of quality buffs among your crafts (e.g. Estelle’s Morale), and the support bonuses your characters have regularly give them potent buffs. In all, buffs are pretty solid, especially late game, though don’t get too caught up in trying to keep them up to where you neglect making progress against your opponents. As for debuffs, a lot of bosses resist stat-reduction, so the most useful one you’ll have access to is Anti-Sept which casts All-Cancel (nulls all their stat bonuses) and has a decent chance of muting them (even against bosses), preventing them from casting Arts for the next turn.
Shining Poms are this game’s “Metal Slime” equivalent. They appear kinda randomly in a few places and love to run away. Don’t hesitate to S-Craft these guys to try to take ‘em out. They give quite a bit of sepith and EXP. Worth noting that EXP scales to where you get a reduced amount the higher your level is, so there’s a limit to how much you can use them to level grind.
Overdrive breaks you out of status effects (as long as they don’t skip your turn, e.g. Seal, Burn, and Mute) and stat-reducing debuffs. While Overdrive can be useful for offense to guarantee Brave Attacks, it can also be quite useful to conserve for defensive utility when you’re in a pinch as well.
Books
A lot of the blue sub-event icons that you come across in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter give you various “books”. There are 33 in total to find throughout the game. One of them isn’t available until after the final boss.
There is an NPC in Jenis in Chapter 2 who will ask you for all the Ruan economics textbooks, as well as one in Grancel in the Final Chapter who will ask you for all your copies of Carnelia in exchange for a pair of really strong weapons. You can give these away; these books and their text will remain in your Book List if you want to read them, and they still count as you having them for the purpose of the achievement/reward.
If you read through the Book titled “Tomorrow’s Cooking” in your Books tab (obtainable in Chapter 3 via sub-event), you get a recipe for Portable Bouillabaisse.
Quests and BP
Generally speaking, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter will note any opportunities for quests or additional BP with green or blue ! icons on the map, so check the map often and do those as soon as you can since some of them have a pretty short availability window. Any dialogue options with a chance for bonus BP will be colored red and have a (BP) icon on them.
I wrote a separate guide for all the BP options, as well as some general tips on certain potentially pesky quests. This also includes a bit on how to beat the game’s hardest optional boss, which you fight just before the final dungeon and which grants bonus BP and an achievement.
Enemy List
To complete the Enemy List, with each new area you go to, make sure to defeat at least one of each new monster you see. If you find any strange gaps in the book marked by “???” and you think you fought everything in a given area, it’s likely you either haven’t beaten a Shining Pom (each region has a separate entry for these) or you missed a Monster Chest.
There is one section late in Chapter 3 that requires you to not get caught by some guards in order to get bonus BP. If you get caught, you will have to fight the guards. They are not in the Enemy List, so you don’t need to fight them for completion.
Cooking/Recipes
Along your journey, look for any new shops; shops with new items will have their icons colored red on the minimap instead of blue, and many general stores will sell new food items. Consuming a food item is how you get its recipe, allowing you to cook it for yourself. There are 68 total recipes in the game. One of them as mentioned earlier is found in one of the books. Anything you have in your recipe book will be marked with a green checkmark while shopping, so always check for food that does not have the checkmark and has a 0 in the “owned” column.
If you’re going for the rewards, you will need to make a Successful and a Peculiar version of each dish. I recommend making recipes as soon as the game allows you to. Make sure you’re plenty stocked on monster ingredients as those get scarce later in the game, especially going into the Final Chapter. You can check the Enemy List for what monster ingredients each enemy drops in each region. There are also 10 specialty recipes in the “Customized” tab of your recipe book, which are obtained by cooking a recipe for the first time with a character who has a glowing pink smile next to their icon rather than the standard yellow one. Don’t hesitate to save and reload a file to avoid wasting scarce ingredients if you’re just trying to make everything just once for completion.
If you hit the final dungeon in Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter and haven’t cooked everything you want to, you can sometimes find ingredients randomly in breakable objects which can be reset by going up and down the floors. This is quite tedious however and mainly a last resort tactic for completion.
Review: Click Here
Bonus BP Guide and Quest Tips: Click Here
If you’d like to check out the previous games in the series, here are our reviews for Nihon Falcom titles. If you are looking for another JRPG, you should check out our review of Tales of Graces f Remastered.
Thanks to GungHo Entertainment for providing a PC review code for Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
