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# Screw It, I'm Starting A Bracer Guild
- URL: https://aftermath.site/trails-in-the-sky-second-bracer/
- Published: 2026-09-17T16:04:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-17T16:04:57.000Z
- Description: The Trails in the Sky series has always understood that the big heroics aren’t the only thing that make a hero.
- Author: Harper Jay MacIntyre
- Tags: Video Games, Feature, Freelance, trails in the sky 2nd chapter, trails in the sky first chapter, trails in the sky

Picture this: There’s some kind of argument in your neighborhood. Maybe a couple is in a shouting match in their apartment and you’re worried. Maybe someone thinks they’ve been swindled at the store. You put out the call to your local Bracer Guild, and a friendly adventurer shows up, does some mediation, and everything ends peacefully. Wouldn’t that be nice?

That’s the reality in certain parts of Zemuria, the continent where the long-running *Trails* series of role-playing games is set. These games kicked off in 2004 with *Trails in the Sky*, a story that focuses on young teens Estelle and Joshua Bright. They had just become bracers, handy adventurers who are a mix between monster hunters and community service workers. Bracers do anything from fighting evil villains and dealing with dangerous beasts all the way to delivering packages or teaching Sunday school. They’re not cops, but they still patrol around and help people with any job, no matter how small. It’s a deeply community-minded adventure style.

In the *Trails* games, players spend a lot of their time going on odd jobs and slowly unraveling a larger story. In-universe, about a decade has passed from *Trails in the Sky* to 2024’s *Trails Beyond the Horizon*. The draw of the series, beyond the decades of world-building, is both the relaxed adventuring and how it gives way to big anime action beats. Bracers are a major cornerstone of the setting, as Estelle and Joshua travel around their home country of Liberl doing all kinds of jobs. The joy of *Trails* comes from the wandering and the satisfaction of learning local customs and meeting new people. It’s a great time.

These games can be daunting to get into, so a pair of recent remakes of the first two (the latest, *Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter*, releases on September 17th) are meant to help people get into the plot. [Playing the newest remake](https://kotaku.com/trails-in-the-sky-2nd-chapter-the-kotaku-review-2000734716?ref=aftermath.site), I was struck by how appealing the bracer life is. In real life, where police department budgets spike and communities have needed to band together to deal with immigration agents seizing neighbors, it’s easy to want a new kind of community servant. People who can approach a situation confidently and give the care that’s needed. No escalation.

Of course, we’ve been trying this here and there for a while now. We’ve not established Bracer Guilds, but [some](https://www.vice.com/en/article/these-cities-replaced-cops-with-social-workers-medics-and-people-without-guns/?ref=aftermath.site) [cities](https://www.a2gov.org/news/posts/ann-arbor-city-council-approves-two-crisis-response-programs-to-improve-public-safety-and-connect-people-with-services/?ref=aftermath.site) and [counties](https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2025/11/19/police-social-workers/?ref=aftermath.site) in the United States are trying to rethink how to respond to community crises. In Eugene, Oregon, some amount of lower-risk mental health issues and homelessness situations have been tended to by crisis teams since 1989\. In Austin, Texas it is possible to use 911 to specifically ask for mental health services over police. Bracers aren’t exactly the same as social workers or mobile crisis workers, but the ethos exists in our world.

Beyond this, we’ve seen communities come together to form civilian organizations and ad hoc teams. Most visibly, citizens in [Minneapolis](https://aftermath.site/podcasts/aftermath-hours-podcast-ice-minnesota-minnmax/) built a wider network of legal observers and watchmen laser focused to help protect vulnerable families from DHS immigration enforcement operations. They’ve [risked](https://theintercept.com/2026/02/09/ice-minneapolis-legal-observers-abduction/?ref=aftermath.site) [their](https://19thnews.org/2026/01/alex-pretti-minneapolis-ice-shooting/?ref=aftermath.site) [safety](https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/us/renee-nicole-good-minneapolis-ice-shooting-hnk?ref=aftermath.site) for their neighbors.

We’ve known that there’s better paths to protecting our communities for a long time. Sending social workers to work alongside police [lowers arrest rates](https://libjournals.unca.edu/ncur/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/3355-Droubie-Trisha-CFINAL.pdf?ref=aftermath.site), and in many cases there’s no need to include the police at all when [trained mediators are sent](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/25/police-mental-health-alternative-911?ref=aftermath.site) to handle neighborhood issues or mental health crises. It costs less money and [literally lowers the crime rates](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9176742/?ref=aftermath.site) of certain crimes if you send specialized care to meet specific incidents, and repeat offenses drop. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/2026/09/sora_2nd_2026-09-04_19-14-04_52--1-.png)

While playing *Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter*, I kept thinking about what it means to send truly caring people to help with a local problem. I kept remembering late nights during the protests in 2020; on one march through Brooklyn we were cut off by police, and it went about as well as you might expect. I remember this girl who was with me and the panic attack she had after watching trained officers march on protestors. That’s one of many memories I have: people in the middle of grief, and cops who came and handcuffed them.

I wasn’t playing the game and having flashbacks or writing a leftist pamphlet, but I did look at Estelle and the other bracers and think, “Damn, wouldn’t that be nice?” I don’t know if I’d want monsters on the road between towns, but trained professionals who truly cared about their communities? Yeah, that seemed pretty damn good to me.

In pretty much every *Trails* game, most of your time is spent on side-questing and really getting to know everyone you meet. Dialogue for NPCs updates constantly and their own personal storylines are trackable. When it comes to quests, you might help a couple find a lost wedding ring, and then a few hours later—if you happen to stop by the church—you can see their wedding and hang around to watch the bouquet get tossed. These are games about learning every street corner; every hustler, salary man, school kid, and farmer has a story that you can learn. Take a few bracer jobs and you really start to *know* the community.

The Bracer Guild’s schtick is so effective that in the next story arc after the *Trails in the Sky* games, told in *Trails from Zero* and *Trails to Azure* and which take place in the metropolitan state of Crossbell, the police establish a department to follow the format. The new protagonist is Detective Lloyd Bannings. As a member of the Special Support Section, he and his comrades adopt a new brand of police work. The result, alongside their ability to unravel a secret cultist plot, is a police department that’s able to really respond to what people need. Sometimes, the SSS is conducting proper criminal investigations or helping with event security. In other instances, Lloyd and his team are filling in for mascot performers at the local theme park or helping to rebuild some storefronts in the ramshackle downtown district. There might be a lost kitten to find or a charity event to help manage. Traditional police work is mixed with community service. Through their combined community outreach and highly personal problem solving, they help transform Crossbell for the better.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/2026/09/IMG_1261.jpg)

I’ve spent basically a decade working in games, either writing about them as a journalist or working at a studio. I do my best to take games very seriously, but they are “just” games. I’m not going to walk into a local budget board meeting with the Bracer Guild charter and convince anyone to start a radical new first responder initiative. No one who disagrees with my position that police agencies should be defunded will see my side if I load up a copy of *Trails to Azure*. That’s not how the world has ever worked.

That doesn’t mean art, including games, can’t inspire and provide models to follow. These days, it can be difficult to think anything you might do for others “matters” when the forces turning the world to shit are so powerful. Playing *Trails in the Sky*, you might look at Estelle defeating grand foes and participating in the plot’s larger events and think “I wish I could do that.” Who doesn’t want to save the mind-controlled dragon or defeat the seemingly undefeatable shadow society behind the world’s troubles? Maybe we can’t do that, but we still *can* be like Estelle.

You can be a bracer if you want. The one thing you have control over in this life is what you do for the people around you. Your family, your neighborhood, your town or city. There are gardens to help maintain, there are people to feed. There’s probably a library that needs someone to help with a book fair, or a class you can take to learn how to be an ICE observer. That’s bracer work! The *Trails* series has always understood that the big heroics aren’t the only thing that make a hero a hero. These are games where that portion of the plot sometimes doesn’t kick off for 50 to 60 hours or more. About 90 percent of *Trails in the Sky* is spent being a bracer and going town to town. The plot doesn’t fully arrive until literally the very last moment of the game.

History usually doesn’t resolve in one clean day of heroics. It’s a sequence, a progression. You plant the garden so that people can be fed, and that itself has contributed to the tyrant’s fall. So while video games don’t change the world, they’re not just idle flights of fancy either. Sometimes, a story is the thing that makes you realize that the world can be better.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/2026/09/sora_2nd_2026-09-06_17-47-52_66--1-.png)

It matters that Estelle Bright is a bracer. It will matter to Crossbell that Lloyd Bannings and the SSS take up a new kind of police work. If seeing that in a story, if spending 70 hours wandering Liberl on odd jobs gives you the good sense to volunteer somewhere or head off to a protest, that’s more than enough. You gotta get your inspiration somewhere.

Close the police departments. Open up some Bracer Guilds! We can’t have the clean magickal energy and the cool treasure hunting priests, but we could probably lift the guilds from Zemuria. If anything else, it’s nice to imagine a version of things that is more personal, even-handed, and really focused on community needs. If that’s not doable on a “real” level, then we can at least do it on a personal one. Games don’t change the world. But! Estelle Brights can change the world, and the good news is that you can easily become the next Estelle Bright if you really want.