空の軌跡 // Trails in the Sky ⚔ Story Club・Week 18

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Week 18 04th November 2024
Last Week Week 17
Next week Week 19
Home Thread 空の軌跡

Finish Chapter One. Save when it prompts on the chapter end screen, and leave the opening of Chapter Two for next week.

Side Quests

Nothing this week.

Screenshot

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Vocabulary

Vocab Sheet , thank you to everyone who has been helping with this.

We also have an arts sheet if you’re struggling with the in-game version. I added a characters tab, so far all that’s there is name, age, occupation, but feel free to add any notes you think are relevant or you might want to remember.

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:

Example

This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.

The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.

This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

Posting Advice

  • When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.

  • Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

If necessary, include an explanation of any discrepancies in the Ebook page numbers from physical page numbers. If there is an easy shortcut for some ebook versions to relate back to physical page numbers, it would be worth it to include it as a third bullet here, or if you want to use chapter page numbers instead of volume page numbers, as is the case with some manga. For example:
Example

For the Kindle version of this manga, the page numbers and the location number are always 3 apart. If you subtract 3 from the location, this will give you the accurate page number!

OR

Please use the chapter page numbers, instead of the volume page numbers. These are located in between the panels!

Discussion Questions

  1. What sentence/passage gave you the most difficulty? Feel free to request some help, or if you figured it out on your own break it down for the rest of us!

  2. What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?

  3. Was there any passage that you found particularly intriguing? Did it resonate with you (either positively or negatively)? Was it surprising? Offer any insight or new perspective? Was it just beautifully written?

  4. How do you feel about the army showing up and stealing the arrest?

  5. What do you make of the letter and object Estelle was given ?

  6. Any opinions on Schera and Olivier leaving the party?

Participation

Will you be playing along with us this week?

  • I’m playing along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still playing the game but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I’m playing this game after the club has finished
  • I’m no longer playing the game
0 voters

If you’ve already played this game but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have finished this part.”

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!

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With the first chapter complete, I wanted to check in on how people are finding the pacing?

At the moment we’ve spent 9 weeks each on the Prologue and Chapter One, and I’ve been aiming for about 5k characters per week. That good or do people want to go faster/slower.

(I’m permanently behind either way, slowing down will not catch me up, I know how my brain works by now.)

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Personally I find the pace pleasant, I’m in no rush to complete the story and I can get through a week’s worth of content in a couple of hours which is pretty chill.

I wish the gameplay/story balance was a bit more consistent (last week was pretty good for that I thought, quite a bit of dialogue but also some dungeon crawling, this week is pretty much full dialogue I think?) but of course there’s not really any way around that.

That’s actually one of the reasons I was a bit skeptical for this club at first, Trails is so story-dense at times that it’s quite a challenge, especially for complete beginners. It’s not so much that the text is super difficult, but you need endurance to push through the story moments. Something like a Final Fantasy would probably have been significantly easier.

As such I’m not too surprised that we haven’t managed to attract complete newbies to play along with us. It would be too frustrating for someone not already used to this level of language.

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I’d be fine with faster – I probably read close to 20k characters most days when reading my VNs and stuff, so for me the weeks that are heavier on story than gameplay go quicker. If this pace works for people, I’m always balancing a bunch of things so it’s not really a problem for me to keep it the same and read other stuff in the meantime, though I’m not sure how long the whole game is? The time to finish would be the only thing on my mind.

I’d definitely like to continue with the series if there’s interest, and with so many games at least by then it might be good to talk about getting through them a little quicker, but that could be handled by that time and we’re all hopefully only going to be getting faster and better at this.

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Honestly I’d like to go faster. I was much slower to keep up when contributing to the vocab sheet but I fell behind on that after having a few busy weeks in September. I’ve been wondering if it’s worth the time to go back to it since we haven’t had any new people join in. @RebBlue have you been making use of it yourself, or do you want to keep filling it in for potential newcomers?

Keeping the current pace is also ok with me though! There are always other things to read in the meantime.

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I have been finding the vocab sheet very useful, but don’t worry about maintaining it if you’re busy. I’ll add to it when I get to the point where you stopped.

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As I said I’m fine with the current pace but if everybody else wants to ramp up that’s fine by me. Maybe 1.5x or something like that?

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Cool, so I think going forward I’ll aim for 7.5k characters per week (though it will fluctuate like it already does)

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Just realised I never addressed this.

Game Structure

We’ve got two more chapters and then the Finale chapter. Even taking into account the Finale is going to be longer than the chapters have been so far, I think the first game will be finished within 52 weeks.

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Gotcha, thanks for the response! Knowing that, I think the speed-up is even more appreciated since going potentially close to a full year for a game is already a bit long. By default I’m good to keep pushing the speed if people get comfortable and the inclination comes up again, but we’ll see how this goes for now. Appreciate all your work here!

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Chapter complete :partying_face:

Spoilers

You know, there are a lot of things people consider “quality of life” with more modern RPGs that I think are sanding down meaningful areas of friction, but one thing I like is how games very frequently don’t make you backtrack out of dungeons anymore, contriving a way to work around it or just auto-teleport you out. This one wasn’t SO long to really be a problem and I like how there are a few last minute bandit fights – nothing really difficult but a bit of real character building for the pirates as a group. Still.

The army’s timing is suspicious to me, they solved it based on their “analysis” from information gathering I guess. I mean our party was somewhat honing in on the features of the place they took as a hideout so it doesn’t sound impossible, but they’re always conveniently showing up… my conspiracy theory without real evidence outside of vibes is still based on doubting the ostensibly friendly 大佐. That guy is in league with the boat people, who planned to intentionally throw the pirates to the military once they were done with whatever their real goal was here. With the state the leader was in, I imagine he doesn’t have much useful information to cough up.

I think we have soft confirmation with the letter and parcel on the ship that Cassius probably didn’t know about the plot there happening? I can’t come up with too many ideas for what suspicious unknown machine is for, but it feels to me more like something actually did conveniently call Cassius away.

Wasn’t expecting to lose our party members (for now?); that’s a shame. Scheherazade returning home is pretty logical though… I wish Olivier was coming with us, that wouldn’t have been unreasonable. Presumably we’re finding new people for now, soon? I’m excited to move on to a new town. Good thing I put the most effort, when messing with arts setups, into Joshua and Estelle, haha.

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Summary

I expected Shera to leave us but I thought Olivier would tag along. I liked it though, makes room for new people! I’m happy I didn’t buy a more expensive weapon for Shera though…

What I found odd is that the party didn’t tell the army about the spy in their ranks. I guess they don’t really know who to trust but surely that old general is probably not a traitor?

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Chapter 2!