Part 1: The story so far

-Disappearing Star-



The first two Trails in the Sky games focus on two young adventurers: Estelle and Joshua Bright. JRPGs are required to have either a spunky tomboy protagonist, or a dour emo-kid protagonist. Falcom made waves in the industry by forgoing the choice and including both.

First Chapter begins at the home Estelle shares with her father: Cassius Bright, legendary hero and all-around super guy of the Liberl Kingdom. Cassius returns home from a long business trip one night, carrying a badly-injured mysterious boy in his arms.















Fast forward five years or so, after the boy, Joshua, has accepted his place in the Bright household. He and Estelle are now getting ready to follow in Cassius's footsteps as junior members of the Bracer Guild. The Guild is kind of like a rotary club, only with swords and artillery, and Cassius is one of its most honored members.







While Estelle and Joshua finish up their basic training, Cassius is called away from home on some kind of urgent guild business and promptly vanishes without trace. In the absence of better options, his daughter and adopted son resolve to continue their training while looking for any sign of his whereabouts. They march their way across the length and breadth of the kingdom, slaying monsters, righting wrongs, and meeting all manner of strange, rad people. They also face down the oncoming freight train of puberty, while literally everybody they know teases them nonstop about how they're not actually flesh & blood.





Now that's kind of sketchy, but Estelle and Joshua's relationship is really just the boilerplate childhood-friends spiel except they're also flatmates. That part of the story works...probably about as well as that sort of thing ever could work, partly because it's all just as weird and awkward for the two of them, and mostly because Estelle and Joshua are just genuinely awesome together.

Anyway, in the midst of all that, they uncover a plot to depose the Queen of Liberl and seize the kingdom by force. At its heart: Colonel Richard, commander of the Royal Army Intelligence Division...



Captain Amalthea, his second-in-command...



and Lieutenant Lorence, mercenary leader of the I.D.'s special ops troops.



Richard's plan, in a nutshell:

1) Smear the Royal Guards so that the Intelligence Division can take over Grancel Castle and hold Queen Alicia prisoner. Force her to name her idiot nephew, Duke Dunan, heir to the throne. Pack off the queen's granddaughter, Princess Klaudia, to an arranged marriage with some foreign rando.
2) Manipulate King Dunan to remake Liberl as a militaristic state. Keep the rest of the Royal Army high command in line through blackmail, and threats against their families.
3) Meanwhile, excavate the castle's robot-infested catacombs and search for a legendary ancient relic: the Aureole.
4) ...
5) Glory and prosperity for Liberl.

Long story short, Estelle, Joshua, and their fellow bracers kick IntDiv ass up and down the kingdom, finally storming the castle, confronting Richard, and foiling all his schemes. They then learn that Richard himself was deceived--tricked by Lieutenant Lorence into entering the sealed ruins and activating the ancient devices inside. The Aureole was never there, and the colonel's last-ditch attempts to summon it only wake a giant mechanical monster. Realizing he's been played, Richard tries to help stop the thing, but it still comes close to killing everybody before Cassius Bright shows up out of nowhere to wreck it at the very last second.

Colonel Richard is now in custody and just about everyone thinks the kingdom is safe. Unfortunately they've forgotten all about Joshua's mysterious past. Just when the happily-ever-after is in sight, the real villain turns up to greet Joshua while Estelle is off somewhere, and completely shits on everything.

And that's where we begin our story.