Trails in the Sky SC: the second chapter, documented

Trails in the Sky SC (Second Chapter) was released in Japan for PC in 2006 and PSP in 2007, picking up the morning after the first game's cliffhanger: Joshua gone, Estelle setting out to find him and to confront the society of Ouroboros directly. Falcom had written the two games as one story and split it for size; SC is where the series' full architecture first becomes visible, the Enforcers, the Aureole, and the seeds of every later arc.

Its English release is the stuff of industry legend, told in full in Jason Schreier's Kotaku account "The Curse of Kiseki." The Japanese script runs to over three million characters; the finished English script, edited by Jessica Chavez, came to 716,401 words, longer than The Lord of the Rings (455,125 words) and War and Peace (587,287). XSEED, a small publisher, took help from Carpe Fulgur; that studio's Andrew Dice later wrote publicly about the depression that stalled his share of the work, which XSEED finished in-house. Chavez re-formatted months of mis-delivered files by hand and edited through documented burnout. The game finally shipped in English on October 29, 2015, nine years after its Japanese release, on PSP download and PC, and XSEED staff have said plainly that had every game demanded what SC demanded, the economics would have ended the company. The English version's beloved signature survived the ordeal intact: re-open an already-emptied treasure chest and the game answers with a rotating cast of wry one-liners, a localisation flourish fans still quote.