The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter

• It's pretty much the same as FC in most regards. There are a few hidden sidequests you'll probably miss without a guide, there's a series of books to collect from npcs to trade for an ultimate weapon, etc.

• Two things I can think that are worth mentioning are that shining poms now have a certain chance of spawning as part of set encounters, so it's really easy to farm them just by getting into a fight with the enemy they have chance of spawning with, then running and getting back into the fight until they shown up.

• Also when you can choose to have Agate or Schera join you, Agate is basically easy mode.

• Oh yeah don't play on hard or above. They're designed for NG+ and SC is already quite a bit more challenging then FC

• Unlike getting Junior Bracer: Rank 1 in Trails SC, Senior Bracer: Rank A has about a two-point margin of error. Just raise a middle finger at the idea and shoot for B+ if you're not gonna use a guide.

• In Chapter 1 while in Ruan you'll notice that a better fishing rod and a Gambler Jack volume are available as prizes in the Casino. You may also notice that they cost the same Medals used to play the various casino games rather than their own prize tokens. Trade Mira for Medals and just buy them both.

• Alternatively, you can simply gamble for them, since the Poker mini-game is absurdly player-friendly. The way it works is that a winning hand nets you a multiplier to your bet based on how you won. A pair is worth x2 and two pair is worth x3, all the way up to a royal flush (x500). When you win, you have the option of doubling down and continuing to wager your winnings. Sequential wins will apply multipliers to each other (so pair, pair, two pair = x2 x2 x3 = x12). With a 75% chance of getting a winning hand every round even with the simplest strategy means you can hit at least 10000 medals in 10% of games, more than enough to buy everything in the casino. Savescumming will net you these prizes in short order.

• Cooking is how you should be spending most of your money. When you have a decent stock of Mira early on, go torch it at the nearest Greengrocers or General store on every cheap ingredient they have, and buy every new meal you can when you visit a town.

• The Golden Risotto Recipe learned from Kirsche's Bar in Bose is one of the best ways to heal your party - it's made entirely from store-bought ingredients and only uses two of each per serve.

• In Chapter 4, there's a job called "Nostalgic Recipe". Take the time to complete it and you'll get the recipe for Pepper Pottage, which heals 4,000hp and revives from KO.

• Battle Food sound very silly, but are obscenely broken. Most hit for 3-5,000HP and you can snap some of the tougher fights clean over your knee just by lobbing meatballs and cookies at enemies.

• In Chapter 5 you'll get a job called "The Rarest Flavour" where you need to deliver a bunch of ingredients to Gwen at the Anterose Restaurant. Go to the south entrance of the Bose Market and you'll find Orvid hanging out there (he's the guy who sent you off to gather the Firefly Fungus and wandered off onto the Krone Pass on his own in Trails FC, and this might need those done first). Talk to him and he'll go chat with Gwen, netting you half the ingedients crossed off in the process. Come back in Chapter 8 and Orvid will sell you any monster-dropped ingredient for 400 mira per unit.

• Avoid using Defense quartz on physical attackers, especially the higher tier ones (and that goes double for higher difficulties). The penalty to STR from Defense quartz hurts your physical damage output tremendously as enemy DEF grows in the late game. This even applies to Zin - he's far more effective if you leave one of his Earth slots vacant and build him around offense with an Attack quartz. His naturally high stat growth in DEF means he's still plenty tough anyway. (This also applies to Trails in the Sky the Third as well.)

• Fishing can get you some very strong accessories early on if you have the patience, and ideally, a detailed guide so you know what to look for. Bait only drops from monsters though, and it is a fairly uncommon drop unless you got the Luck quartz in the prologue, as the reward for getting maximum BP in Trails in the Sky First Chapter. If you don't have a Luck quartz, getting a supply of bait is probably not worth the time it takes.