The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II (PS5)

by
Thomas Froehlicher
, posted 46 minutes ago / 156 Views

The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak was a great step up for Falcom three years ago. I could sense the publisher’s efforts to build an ambitious world and deliver a compelling JRPG. But now comes the complicated part: retaining and building on the same assets without dampening the momentum. Trails of Cold Steel suffered in this respect by ending up being far too long and inconsistent – symptoms that are, sadly, starting to appear in The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II.

The funny thing about the original Trails Through Daybreak is that it ended a perfectly consistent story with a clear conclusion; it didn’t really call for a sequel, but we have one now regardless. Because of this, it’s not easy to understand what’s really at stake in Trails Through Daybreak II. The sequel nevertheless opens with a spectacularly intense introduction that reveals the core mechanic of the new narrative: time travel.

In certain dire circumstances, the game will rewind time and send you a couple of days or hours backwards in time. The party has to then start over and find out how to overcome the fate that blocked the team’s path the first time. It would have been a magnificent idea, had it not been extremely poorly executed. My issue with it is that the player isn’t in control of anything; the game decides when you jump back in time, and it tells you directly where to go and what to do to advance the story.

This is far too linear. Your choices mean nothing, because you know you’ll be directed to the dead end first. The obvious way of making it interesting would be to let players look for themselves and take revenge against fate without being given the solution automatically. I know Falcom doesn’t want players to get lost and frustrated, but an optional help feature would ensure a good balance between freedom and complexity. I felt like a passive bystander of this new progression system and that was disappointing.

The narrative left me with very mixed feelings too. In short, Van, the protagonist, is facing a dark copy of Grendel, the creature he has the power to turn into. At the same time, Van’s comrades are being progressively brainwashed by a mysterious force, but this is a trope that’s reused so many times throughout the whole narrative that it eventually loses the initial impact it had. After several dozen hours, all of this feels very flat and predictable. Some chapters also make little sense, and bear little-to-no connection to the rest of the story. Even now I really wonder what the power struggle in Langport was all about.

There’s no progression to the story; things just ‘happen’, without conveying any gradual understanding of the scenario. You find out some truths very late in the final stages of the adventure, but barely anything connects the prologue to these final fights. If you removed 60% of the story, while retaining only the prologue, the final two chapters, and a few key story beats, I’m sure it would have actually made more sense. Trails Through Daybreak II feels like an unreasonably lengthy extension of the first game, and I would have appreciated it more had it indeed been marketed as such and had a shorter play time, because there are some quite enjoyable aspects hidden in the bloat.

Take the battle system, for example. It’s mostly inherited from Trails Through Daybreak, but the developer hardly needed to change much about something that works so well. Falcom’s mix of action-RPG and turn-based RPG is still extremely fun to play, even towards the end of the lengthy campaign. It was such a good concept that Atlus applied the same principle in the superb Metaphor Re:Fantazio. For those who are unfamiliar: by default it plays as an action-RPG, or field battle as it’s officially named, with simple real-time combos and dodging, and can shift to turn-based mode, or command battle, at any time. Field battle does save a lot of time and makes exploration in dungeons smoother, which is very much appreciated in a game that took me 90 hours to beat. 

There are two interesting additions to battles in this sequel: Firstly there are Ex Chains, which have two characters perform a simultaneous skill when the enemy is stunned, giving you huge leverage in terms of damage. Secondly, field battle receives a relay system called Cross Charge, where you can change your playable character while immediately launching a charge attack. This makes field battle more engaging. And, more than ever, the battle animations for skills and magic are gorgeously crafted to make combat spectacular.

While the combat in general is good, fighting bosses is even better. Of course that was already the case in Trails Through Daybreak, but I experienced even more epic boss confrontations this time around. My favourite involved beating both boss enemies with one last single strike, or else it was game over. I was pleased to encounter lots of completely new and challenging antagonists, even though the difficulty is more erratic on this sequel; it’s generally fine in normal, but boss battles sometimes go from being a piece of cake to excruciatingly hard, necessitating countless annoying retries. Abnormal statuses are abusively stacked against you, even if you equip the relevant protections. I can’t count the number of turns skipped because my team couldn’t act at all. 

The final boss, an exasperating monstrosity with five distinct phases, was also an unpleasant surprise because this fight forces you to use certain characters, regardless of whether you’ve built and properly equipped them or not. I remember bringing this up in a Sword Art Online review before: it is not acceptable to force characters into the party at the end that the player might never have used, especially in harsh fights like this. 

In terms of passive skills and equipment, Trails Through Daybreak II directly inherits the fascinating quartz system from the first game, so I’ll stress again how much depth and enjoyment optimizing the various quartz pieces and subsequent passive skills adds to the game.

On the big plus side, this sequel offers a permanent dungeon, much like the one in Trails into Reverie, which is called Marchen Garden. This permanent dungeon is particularly relevant if you want to make the most out of your characters. It’s divided into ten floors, and you can use any playable character you’ve met in the game, so it’s worth mentioning that Trails Through Daybreak II has significantly more available allies than the first game. The widely popular Shizuna and Elaine aren’t just guest characters anymore; they join you very frequently. Nadia, Swim, and Renne have become playable for the first time in the Daybreak universe, with renewed – and gorgeous – new visuals and attack moves. Fie and Zin are also added in post-game content. The cast of Trails Through Daybreak was already great, now in Trails Through Daybreak II it enters the realm of excellence. 

This sequel is great for its mini-games too. There are nearly a dozen of them in the story, most of which I found to be fun, from basketball and fishing to a difficult quiz that’s also amusing. Mare, the virtual fairy that nests in Van’s phone, gets two mini-games of her own: one in which you have to lead her out of a digital maze in order to hack locks, and another tied to Marchen Garden which is basically a lottery where you can gain quartz, music tracks, accessories, and new costumes for all of your characters. On that note, Trails Through Daybreak II is very generous in terms of costumes, with most of them being on the disc, though some of the DLC outfits that were sold when the game released in Japan were more than worth the investment (for those who like that kind of thing).

I started Trails Through Daybreak II in 2022 when it released in Japan and didn’t finish it until recently, mainly because I played Ys X Nordics in the middle of it. When I later returned to it, I was stunned by how much more ambitious it was than Ys X in general, despite the latter coming to the market one year later. There’s a lot more content, including eight times more playable characters. There are also some solid side quests (although there are still far too many dispensable ones) and genuinely brilliant character quests. The visuals are significantly better too, notably in terms of locations (nature, dungeons, and cities), but also artwork, menus, and cut scenes. That’s because Falcom has finally reached a high level in anime-style graphics and can now deliver impressive cutscenes; in this respect the developer has never been closer to the best in the field. The soundtrack is still superb too, boasting very enjoyable battle and dungeon themes. Even some of the mini-games feature great music.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II is strikingly similar to Trails into Reverie, in that it comes with a seriously uneven narrative and yet rock-solid overall content. Even if the story, pacing, and game progression could have been much better in my view, there’s still a lot to enjoy in this sequel: an amazingly great cast of characters, epic turn-based combat, engaging music, surprisingly hooking mini-games, and great visuals. Falcom just needs to focus on what it does best, sharpen the narrative, and trim the game length, then it will release a game to rival the very best RPG experiences out there.

During the day, Thomas is a normal account manager. But at night he becomes Ryuzaki57, an extreme otaku gamer hungry for Japanese games (preferably with pretty girls in the main role). He spends a lot of time on F2P RPGs, but never misses the latest interesting releases. Feel free to contact on twitter at @Ryuz4ki57

This review is based on a retail copy of The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II for the PS5

More Articles