空の軌跡SC // Trails in the Sky SC ⚔ Story Club・Week 34

Week 34 27th April 2026
Last Week Week 33
Next Week Week 35
Home Threads 空の軌跡 // SC

This week’s stopping point is after the first boss fight.

Side Quests and Missable Content

Data crystals:
There are four in this dungeon. The first one is a mandatory scene, so you won’t be able to miss it. But you can skip the others. You’re not expected to be able to decode the broken messages yet but you won’t be able to decode them later if you don’t collect them now. To be clear, these are optional.

Boss fight help:

He is immune to everything except stat debuffs. He has an AoE attack that will always cause seal or mute. The minions immune to all status ailments. They have an attack that absorbs CP and has a chance to inflict seal, mute, and/or confuse.

Screenshot

Vocabulary

Vocab Sheet, thank you to everyone who helps with this.

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. Who’s upset about Olivier’s leaving?

  5. How’s the dungeon?

  6. Boss?

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.”

Party Members Poll
  • アガット
  • アネラス
  • エステル
  • オリビエ
  • クローゼ
  • ケビン
  • シェラザード
  • ジン
  • ティータ
  • ユリア
  • ヨシュア
0 voters

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

Fists of Fury (1972)

:slightly_smiling_face:

This week I did something crazy. I’ve seen a couple different references online to people enjoying using Jinn in battle a lot, so I decided ok, now that my favorite character is becoming our enemy, I’ll give Jinn a real shot.

There was a bit of lost ground to make up for, lol. I thought this XP gain difference was particularly amusing. I do like how quickly you can catch people up thanks to this! By the end of the dungeon (before the boss) these numbers rose to 70, still 75, 69, and 66. Jinn caught up 12 levels by basically just fighting what was in front of me for a single trip through here. The boss bumped Jinn all the way to 71.

Often progression in levels in RPGs is kind of invisible so I can tell you from this experience that a single level seems to raise the numbers quite a bit! Jinn went from weaker than Kloe, to finally doing a bit more… to Kloe finding a weapon in a treasure chest and now her physical attacks remain much stronger than his lol. I get that he’s at least half a tank, but he’s not hitting for much, still. Disappointing but I won’t give up just yet. I have no alternative weapon for him at all so that’s his problem, but he didn’t get any here (future treasure spoiler) I did one tiny lookup because his viability feels like it hinges on me not missing one treasure and it’s apparently the next tower when he’ll get a new weapon, I think.

We still don’t know the plan but it looks like they’re summoning the world eater demon. That feels out of place in this series but at the same time we did have a dragon suddenly appear so who knows. This guy says we’re stronger than he thought and is about to get serious but then he has to leave. This is a JRPG trope thing that happens all the time so I’m very used to it, but if this pattern continues for the next towers, that will be 8 times that it happens in this game, at least. Maybe not the best way to write!

Snark aside though I had fun again this week! I was dreading having to go into the towers again so I was enormously relieved when the portal thing appeared. The dungeon was fun enough, I think the other dimension aesthetics carried it; I always enjoy that stuff. Broadly I do think they improved dungeon design in SC.

The boss was really fun. What keeps me interested more than anything is that I think the possibility space opened enough to make SC feel way nicer to play than FC. I think it’s falling into the pattern JRPGs often do where only the bosses are really engaging, but it also makes random fights so easily avoidable and the XP curve means I’m free to do so so I don’t fight that many anyway. Not necessarily the optimal balance but it saves a lot of tedium. But yeah, the boss was super fun and relatively tense. Jinn was a good tank for most of it until he took over 8000 damage to the coffin thing and instantly died, but bringing him back with a revive + 200 craft item let him use an S-break to finish the thief off.

I did go ahead and look at the tips here – they make status effects hugely impactful but also entirely counterable by accessories and I think it’s just kind of… not significant at that point? The accessory slots don’t feel so important I’m making a big sacrifice or would ever consider going without the protection because statuses hurt so badly, so on a truly blind play it feels like just making you restart every fight once when you see which effects there are this time. That’s not a huge barrier to enjoyment but it’s just kinda… there. I like this more than status effects that don’t assert themselves enough to mean anything but it’s still not quite all the way developed, I guess.

Looks like I trained Jinn up just in time for next week! Kevin is looking tempting in the party list, but I just redid the orbments for this exact party with Jinn and Kloe so I’m sticking with it…

Lighter on the words but there’s lots of dungeon

If this game is cooking a Star Ocean 3-tier plot twist, I’ll take all my criticism of the story back.

w34

Oooh, those towers are finally doing something! Now that’s cool.

This game is so allergic to resolving conflict that we don’t even get a confrontation between Olivier and Joshua, just a brief allusion to it and we move on.

I’m not wrong, Olivier is from the same Empire that genocided Joshua’s village, right? And is clearly highly connected within the Empire itself. Honestly this cop-out annoys me more than the many others we’ve had so far because I think it would be very interesting to see Olivier have to reckon with something truly grave and somber and not be able to hide behind his bumbling fool facade.

And shouldn’t Estelle herself want some clarifications?

Guess not.

Oh, did not expect the fancy THE ANOTHER SPACE OF THE TOWER

It’s very JRPG. Not much else to say about it. It’s fine. I liked the various paths going over other paths, it felt more 3D than usual.

I don’t know what to think of the boss fight. Damage-sponge enemies that can respawn always feels frustrating to me, but I guess it is challenging too?

I say that for every boss fight I think, but you must be really masochistic to play this game in hard mode.

The special attack was pretty cool, although he triggered it twice in my fight and the 2nd time it was a bit annoying to sit through such a long cutscene:

I lost my best mage and @Daisoujou got in my head in next week’s thread so I picked Jin one week early. Absolutely useless. Complete trash. At least I got to level him up a bit, he may be able to deal a non 0 amount of damage next week.

But hey, my boy *teleports behind u* Joshua is back, so at least there’s that.

This has been a peeve of mine since the beginning. You can’t reequip gear mid-fight and you can’t even reequip if you die and retry.

The element-aligned trinkets are the worst for that since they make your attack and defense elemental, which is either great or terrible depending on enemy affinities. I remember in FC I had an earth-aligned thingy on Estelle before I opened a trapped chest in a tower with an earth elemental in it, it made the fight so annoying… I didn’t have a nearby save so I had to push through somehow and it took me like 30 minutes. That was the last time I equipped one of those.

At this point I have enough AoE healing (including status healing) to deal with most ailments anyway. And since Jin is absolutely useless I had him use items instead.

I expected to be given the full message as soon as I collected the 4 fragments. Can’t you really not reconstitute the full message by taking the letters of the fragments to fill the squares? I couldn’t be bothered to try.

I guess I thought it was 4 fragments of the same messages, but judging by what ラッセル博士 says afterwards I guess it’s fragments of multiple messages.

https://youtu.be/umDr0mPuyQc

Is there a way to upgrade orbments? I obviously never did it for Jin and that makes him even uselesser.

Yes, at any of the orbment factories, the top スロット option. Increases your EP based on how far away from the central slot it is, so characters with one long line have a higher max EP than characters with lots of shorter lines. Can also equip higher level quartz into the upgraded slots.

This is not a priority for characters who aren’t casters. Basing this off their stat formulae:

Good Casters
オリビエ・クローゼ (1.2)
ケビン (1.12)
ヨシュア・シェラ (1.1)
エステル・ティータ (1.0)
アガット (0.8)
ジン (0.6)
Bad Casters

(Does anyone want the info for the stat formulae for each character?)

Oh I knew that, I just couldn’t find anybody letting me do it in the Aruseyu, but I finally stumbled upon it just before I saw your message. I missed a room last time I explored it…