Trails in the Sky #5 Dammit, I Can’t Keep Covering For You, Woman!

RECAP: Facepalms, All the Facepalms

Sounds like my kinda lady

The gang arrives at the mayor’s manner only to be informed by her butler that she has gone to church with her handmaid. At the church, they spot the mayor’s handmaid, Lila, but not the mayor herself. Lila then tells the group that the mayor doesn’t like praying and went to the market instead. Needless to say, Estelle is a bit miffed, but the gang and Lila go to the market where they finally rendezvous with mayor Maybelle. After eating some absurdly expensive restaurant cuisine, Maybelle asks the group to continue their investigation by asking General Morgan for information at Haken Gate. In order to circumvent his disdain for bracers, she advises the group to exercise discretion, hide their Bracer badges, and simply hand him a letter stamped with her seal. The group then pick up some requests from the guild and leave Bose.

I only all NPCs could be so grossly incandescent...

The journey is surprisingly brief and uneventful though they are stopped by a few checkpoint guards and reminded to dispense of their badges.  After arriving at the gate they are told to wait at the bar/inn next to the gate until the General returns. At the bar, they meet the most self-aware NPC in RPG history and Olivier, a flamboyant travelling bard who is more than a little bisexual. He annoys the living hell out of the gang, so they storm outside to see if the General is in. He is, and the group storms into his room.

They give the general the letter and he explains that so far the military hasn’t found any information about where the Linde disappeared to. However, he also says that the Capua family has claimed credit for the disappearance and is holding a ransom for the hostages. Upon hearing this information Estelle blurts out that they had dealt with the Capua family in Rolent, giving away the gang’s identities. Morgan consequently has the group thrown out of his office and an argument ensues. Just as things are about to turn violent, Olivier appears and starts playing a blatantly terrible song.

Unsure of how to respond to Olivier’s…piece, everyone resolves to leave as quickly as possible, unfortunately leaving Estelle and co, stuck with Olivier. Fortunately, Olivier explains that he is visiting Liberl for the first time and needs a guide to reach Bose. Schera offers the group’s assistance (much to Estelle’s chagrin) with the justification that escorting others is part of a bracer’s duty. In the party menu, we see that Olivier is a certified badass and is clearly lying about a few things. This is then confirmed when they reach town and he seems to know far too much about Bose for a first time visitor. Regardless, they part ways with the strange man and think it would be a good idea to report their information to Lugran…but they also have a few urgent requests to deal with, so the group heads to the surrounding highroads, clears out some giant monsters, runs one town over to Ravenue Village where they kill another giant monster, and THEN after putting all of their ducks in a row they go back to Bose to report to Lugran.

If you call knowing the barkeep on a first name basis
after one night "something," then yes.

He thinks that there is no way the Capua family is actually holding everyone hostage, but isn’t sure why they would lie about it. So with one more mystery to add to their list, the group heads over to the Mayor’s house where they see Nial and Dorothy being forcefully turned away by Lila. The reporters naturally, leave empty handed (probably to go to the bar and drink away their sorrows). The gang then enters the manse and tells Maybelle all that they learned. She is pleased by their success and then asks the bracers to continue their investigation by digging up info on the Capua family. Estelle then determines that it would probably best to ask the two journalists for some more info, so the group sets out to find wherever Nial wandered off to.

Quartz Talk Numero Uno

Which is why starting today, all militaries will be staffed
by androgynous teenagers with spiky hair. If they can kill god,
then they can probably stop a handful of cat burglars 

Well, the RECAP kind of says it all. Maybelle is surprisingly competent, Morgan is a dick, Olivier is weird, but amusing, and it doesn’t seem like we are going to find Cassius anytime soon.  Not much more interesting happened, so let’s talk about the quartz system you’ve probably been wondering about.

First off, enemies do not drop gold in this game (hooray for logic!!), but a specific amount of septium that comes in one (or usually several) of seven colors: Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Black, White, and Gold. These septium can either be exchanged for cash or refined into a quartz of the same color. Each color of septium thus also corresponds to a specific element of quartz: Red->Fire, Blue->Water, Green->Wind, Yellow->Earth, Black->Time, White->Space, Gold->Mirage. Every enemy either resists or is weak to the first four elements, Time is the game’s neutral element that no one resists, and the last two only govern stat buffs and spell variations for the other elements.

Quartz are more or less a combination of Materia from Final Fantasy VII and Djinn from Golden Sun. To use a quartz, a character has to place the quartz into an orbal slot inside of an orbal watch, one of the devices every bracer and much of the technology of the world is equipped with. Each Orbal watch has its own arrangement of orbal slots arranged in a unique set of linked lines, and cannot be traded between characters making them all unique Each quartz placed on a line will combine its effects to allow the wielder to use different types of spells. The longer an orbal line, the more powerful spells a character will be able to cast, so physical attackers will tend to have numerous short lines of quartz, while magic attackers will tend to have a single long one. And to further individuate each character, some orbal slots are also tied to a specific type of quartz, limiting the amount of combinations any character can utilize.

Not even if my life depended on it, Mercutio

This is also why I called Olivier a badass earlier. In addition to joining several levels higher than everyone else, he also has a gun (which can attack from long range) and a single orbal slot with only one required element which happened to be mirage (something required for all advanced spells). Functionally, he doesn’t actually have a limitation to his magical capabilities and has a very useful means of attacking physically. So, as clownish as he is personality wise, from a gameplay perspective he’s a fricking monster.

Each character’s orbal watch will have some slots locked when you first acquire them, so over the course of the game you can pay an orbalist in the form of the four elemental septium to unlock the rest. And each time you unlock a slot, the character’s mana pool (in this game, EP) increases proportionally to the unlock cost.

The quartz themselves come in two varieties as well: stats and passives. The stat quartz, naturally, alter a character’s statistics (Atk, Def, HP, Casting Speed, etc.), usually in increments of 5% per rank while the passive quartz grant side effects to the character’s commands. At this point in time, I have only seen status effects, though there may be others.

So in summation, when determining which quartz to give a character, one has to consider what magic they would like the character to possess as well as how they would like the character’s stats augmented. It sounds a bit daunting to consider, but due to the incremental nature of quartz and orbal slot unlocks, the complexity naturally builds over the course of the game. Knowing which combinations of quartz will yield what abilities is thankfully answered by the game in the bracer’s journal, so unlike in FFVII and Golden Sun, Trails in The Sky players actually have all of the information necessary to experiment effectively, instead of randomly arranging quartz or buying a strategy guide. And this long slightly confusing explanation was alllll completely necessary to point out that Trails is better than many other RPGs from mechanical perspective as well as a narrative one (thus far). 

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