The big bad is so cool, he decides to offer a truce and invites us on an all-paid for vacation at his island, no strings attached. Guess he's fabulously rich too. Time to put the plot on hold and go have some fun.
Not too sure if we should trust a guy who is called "The Thousand Oathbreaker", but apparently our hotel rooms didn't explode when we dropped our luggage off which was the best opportunity to kill us, so he's probably being honest.
Lots of people get invites. S-Rank hero bracers, the prince and princess from a Middle-Eastern country, Fortune 500 Company executives, a professor developing prosthetic limbs, etc.
Time to enjoy the activities. First up is a boys vs girls water gun fight.
Everybody is having a jolly good time.
Even the robots.
A couple more supervillains are here, but it's okay because they decide it's their day off and they'll just not tell their organizations. They are on law enforcerment's most wanted list but eh, guess we'll arrest them another day. Guess we'll just not tell our organizations too. Our little secret.
Time to play volleyball with a villain.
A famous actress is here too.
Parasailing.
You get to drive a car around, which was fun with the car going over bumpy terrain and the Mona plush hanging from the mirror jostling around. Wish you could go faster than 50 MPH. I was worried negotiating the narrow cliff on the far side of the island. I saw the car leaning pretty far over, was afraid I was going to fall off. I crashed the car once and heard glass break so I reloaded. Would be cool if you could drive cars around the rest of Zemuria, though I suppose the maps are too small.
Whale watching
Elaine starts breaking the spirit of the truce and tries to press one of the villains to explain what is going on in the plot. Senior hero Zin has to tell her to knock if off. Lady, this is a Trails game. You know it how it goes. Each chapter, villains wreck havoc for no reason, you fight and then they teleport away and you learned nothing, rinse repeat for 100+ hours. We are barely 40 hours into this game. We aren't finding anything out for 60+ more hours. Get with the program and just enjoy the fact that we aren't exhausting ourselves running around for nothing as usual. We'll be getting back to doing that soon enough.
Motorbike race.
Getting mixed signals from Quatre again. We still don't have an answer yet as to why Quatre was too embarassed to get into the hot springs with Van in the first game, and now maybe Quatre wishes "he" (actually a she?) had a figure like Risette. Am I going to have to wait another 100 hours to get an answer what's going on here? My theory is that this is a girl pretending to be a boy situation like from Swiss Family Robinson/The King's Affection, as opposed to modern trannyism.
Uh oh. Church assassins, private security mercs, and more supervillains arrive. They aren't here to vacation. They are here to kill the resort's owner.
Unfortunately for them, the big bad isn't around right now, so they're gonna have to wait till morning. Ordinally everybody hates each other, but right now they are all united in their desire to kill
that guy right now, so everything is fine for a while. Heroes, evildoers, and oblivious civilians mingle in the hotel.
Van decides to barge into the actresses' room to drink and watch movies.
Time to leave.
Going downstairs to drink more alcohol.
Snooze. We wake up early the next morning to find that the owner has arrived, so we go to meet and greet.
Unfortunately the other guests at the hotel saw us, and soon enough everyone is here ready to kill him before we finished asking him about the plot. Looks like the truce is over.
Unfortunately, the group of novice arms dealers don't take the big bad's threat seriously and get gassed.
Everybody dies.
By the power of time travel savescumming, we go back earlier in the morning. To get a lead on everyone else and hopefully not get killed by idiots and gas, we use a boat and instead of running on land.
Apparently he has been ejected from Ouroboros (the franchise's league of big bads), so now he's all in on the resort business and wants us to test his new tour idea. We are under NDA and if we say anything, he gasses the whole island. Also, everyone else at the hotel saw us sailing off to go meet him without telling anybody, so now everyone thinks we are in league with the big bad and is out to get us too.
Should have thought about that before accepting the vacation invite.
Muhahaha, now we get to be the villains who show up to fight heroes who are pursuing us and be vague about our intentions and pointlessly fight people and waltz off, leaving others kneeling on the ground baffled as to what is going on.
That was a hard fight.
We beat them up, but it's all water under the bridge.
The Chinese mob catch up to us next.
The villain from chapter 1 - one of Harwood's henchman - shows up to help us now that we are allies with Harwood, and surprisingly is a guest party member during battle.
I like how the fights continue to remain challenging. My first party got wiped out and my second party had to carry on to beat Cao and Gao, and the guest party member pulled his weight too. Typically the difficulty in Trails games is frontloaded and they stop being hard after the first two or three chapters.
After we beat Cao and Gao, they get up again and Gao is about to strike when Cao blocks him, and then reveals that Gao is his long lost brother. I can't even nitpick. I burst out laughing. Trite soap opera shenagains for a C list character, and the (Japanese) voice acting is so sincere.
