I played the original trails in the sky trilogy, should I play this? Is it largely the same story?

Same story, different localisation, so minimal differences.

You get modern graphics and QoL changes and stuff.

The one review I read said it's kinda worth it:

I even picked up on things I hadn’t realized would become more important later on through this playthrough, such as the Reinford Company name-dropping or the references to Crossbell’s political situation at this narrative juncture. Replaying the story was a great refresher for me, too! It allowed me to appreciate just how much detail Falcom poured into the overall Trails narrative.

Can you enjoy this remake if you’ve already played through SC? I can wholeheartedly say yes, as replaying the story again illuminated some plot points for me in ways I hadn’t expected. From a storytelling standpoint, even the remake’s 3D graphics and voice acting help present key story reveals, shedding additional light on things.

Source: https://www.rpgfan.com/review/trails-in-the-sky-2nd-chapter/

Tho for my part, I struggle to say I'd want to spend dozens of hours replaying most story-focused JRPGs. I could imagine considering it only with my handful of favorites.

Me, I’m gonna skip, not because I expect they did a bad job; the cinematic direction of the first game’s ending was definitely well achieved. I just recognize there’s a lot to play right now, and the time investment for a large JRPG doesn’t fit in my busy world.

I may end up watching reaction videos of the remakes of key emotional scenes though. A part of me is always going to be nitpicking preferences of the original, perhaps unfairly.

I'm playing thr first one right now.

It does not fuck around. This really surprised me, given how cutesy/wholesome it is.

I've noticed it's a good method for Japanese writing. They acclimate you to silly, bashful moments, so that when the writing flexes over to the serious side, it's a big contrast. Yakuza does a lot of that too.

Comparatively, sometimes when I try series like The Last of Us, or even Nier Automata, I sometimes have a hard time buying into the emotions because it's been solely despair for a lot of the runtime.

That said, as I've gotten used to my own creative writing, I see Sky as having tremendous up-moments that give characters some really star moments, but also quite a lot of narmy, amateurish teenage writing especially with the fights, so it gets to be hit and miss.

To be clear, I'm fine with the wholesomeness, it was what I was in the mood for. I was more referring to the difficulty having crazy spikes, especially in the beginning. You'd expect a game like this to trend easy-ish. Never thought a cute catlike furball intro boss that is eating a farmer's crops would be a near insurmountable wall.

Funny enough, even after playing the original, I felt that point was a difficulty spike too - and it encouraged me to write a guide that helps people figure out their strategy.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3572418853

Might be worth a look to cover some basics. In spite of Japanese trends, the game isn’t actually that grind-heavy, and the series has a lot of fans that play on max difficulty, Nightmare, for pure challenge.