Spoilers for the end of everyone's chapter 2 and a bit of C's chapter 3 after the jump
I was a little sour on everything but C's stuff so far so was really surprised when I had an absolute blast with the shared chapter 2 closing and a pretty fine time with the solo chapter close as well. Trails into Reverie is very good at looping in the right characters and weaving economic situations that serve the three perspective character thing in a way that I really doubted the Trails team had the chops to do anymore. There's so much of 20+ characters lining up to say one line in the last two Cold Steel games that it is shaking me to my core to see the same characters arranged any other way.
Chapter 2 leads to C's, the Code Geass self-announced terrorist guy, and Rean Cold Steel being in the same place tracking a clandestine nationalist remnant group. The dungeon crawl is a little dull in the way the dungeons have been since Cold Steel but it culminates in repeated alternating perspective boss fights where you're fighting one side to bring the other down to a specific amount of health, swapping to the other side to repeat against the party you were just playing as, and then doing a pseudo-chase before doing it again.
Mrs. Rean Coldsteel's Wife shows up back from assisting with guerilla warfare in one of the universe's third world countries and ends up making C give up his identity way earlier than I thought he would which is the actual guy whom the guy who re-occupied the Crossbell city-state has assumed the identity of. I was spoiled on this years ago and was ready to groan at how long the game belabored this reveal, so I was really happy that this is just out in the open and being discussed already.
I think it's really bold to have made this coda to 15 years of fantasy be lead by this not very important side character, two web novel originals, and an entirely new character. There's a practicality and urgency to having characters that are only going to get one game to shine that doesn't really happen ever in these games other than Sky the Third
Lloyd's chapter end was not very exciting as very obvious narrative threads were simply made explicit. Cool to go back to the Ancient Battlefield and glad our cop dog great-spirit-or-whatever-they're-called is back.
More importantly, Renne is and she's being a sicko little girl with Nadia. Shit rules.