I was blown away by how much I enjoyed The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak. The Cold Steel games had burnt me out despite winning me over at the very end, and I had kind of accepted that maybe Falcom’s games weren’t for me anymore. Everything after Trails into Reverie has just continued to impress me, and Daybreak ended up becoming one of my favorite games they’ve ever made. There was a gravitas to it I hadn’t seen from Falcom in years, and it was only the beginning to kicking off a new Era for the company. I wasn’t entirely surprised by a sequel being ready a year later, but I was curious about where you could go.
Months after the events of Trails Through Daybreak, Van is asked by his bracer friend Elaine to investigate a series of killings happening across Calvard. It isn’t long into the prologue before you come face to face with the perpetrator, a Crimson Grendel. Both Van and Elaine are killed, until time is somehow reverted by some of the Genesi from the previous game. From here, Arkryde Solutions needs to use this power to survive this new threat and clear up the lingering mysteries from the previous year’s events.
If you started your Trails journey with Daybreak, you might not realize that this is a pretty standard iterative sequel from a gameplay perspective. Most of the maps from the previous games are back, but new areas, towns, and dungeons have been introduced to make your revisit to Calvard not feel so repetitive. New party members like Elaine, Shizuna, Celis, and Leon from Daybreak join now fully developed and playable characters. Fan favorites Nadia and Swin from Reverie are also here, with their movesets iterated on in the new engine.
What seemed to be the biggest mix-up in the formula is the new flowchart system, branching your story off based on your actions. This allows the writers to introduce some really shocking scenarios to fill out a large variety of bad endings, building on the many parts of society that were criticized in the previous game. I’ll always appreciate a good time travel story, but I think this needed to be a bit more experimental.
It’s a good framing device, but it lacks the needed player agency that comes from making your choices feel important. These bad ends are almost always mandatory, just to revert you back to make a different choice you couldn’t have made the first time. I think it’s important to go in knowing this flowchart progression system exists as a new way to tell the usual Trails plot, but I do hope they return to this in the future to make a truly branching Trails plot.
If you enjoyed Daybreak’s combat, you’ll likely enjoy the improvements and rebalancing. A lot of small changes have been made under the hood to make battles feel a bit more responsive. The biggest actual changes I think I noticed were the ability to quick cast arts while in the real-time mode, and a limit on S-Breaks for a set amount of time after casting one. You also have new S-Breaks and refined craft animations for returning characters.
Daybreak II was a surprisingly challenging game, which is always something that’s fun to see Falcom dabble in with these sort of sequels. This seems to have been done to encourage players to delve into the new Marchen Garten virtual reality dungeon. Inspired by the Reverie Corridor, you’ll climb a series of floors to accomplish a limited variety of objectives. This can be breaking an amount of objects, or defeating a certain number of enemies. This mode is also how you can expand on your character’s movesets even outside of this VR space.
What I was pleasantly surprised to see was new gameplay modes out on the field, like adding Fishing back or introducing tailing missions and Shard searching. If there was one thing I felt Daybreak was missing, it was gameplay that truly leaned into Van’s nature as a private eye. I don’t think either of these are really innovative, but I like these deviations you’ll find mostly in side missions. I felt rewarded for wanting to engage with these quests more than I did in the previous game, even if I felt they were a bit simplistic.
This sequel is built on a really strong foundation, so overall, I think the gameplay is a fun time. A lot of these improvements aren’t able to land adequately, though, thanks to a pretty iffy Nintendo Switch port. The original Daybreak was decent on the portable hybrid console, but it’s clear just looking at other versions of the sequel that they tried to improve the engine. These improvements seem to have taken a toll on the port this time around, even with it being developed in-house at Falcom. I found the game to be a downgrade from the previous port, with cutbacks that would often hurt my enjoyment in spots where Daybreak II probably shone brighter on other platforms.
You’re looking at a choppy resolution with limited anti-aliasing and a noticeable drop in texture quality. Running around some of the same spots in both games, it seems like this took a step back. Performance was also pretty inconsistent, seeming to jump around 20-30 frames per second in busy or large environments. You can get the performance a lot more stable when playing on Nintendo Switch 2, but it doesn’t fix the visual cutbacks. On either platform, you should also expect some frame pacing issues as well. If this is your only way to play the game, I think it’s ultimately OK. Not impressive, better elsewhere, but ultimately gives you the whole game experience with expected compromises. Knowing that the upcoming Trails in the Sky remake is really impressive on both Switch versions, though, it does leave me wanting more.
The big questions you might have if you haven’t played it yet are how does the story compare to the previous games? This is certainly a weird one. If you’re here for a game that pushes the story forward substantially in the same vein as Second Chapter, Azure, of Cold Steel II, you’re going to be disappointed. To say there’s no plot progression would be dishonest, but the focus of this game is mainly dedicated to characters and lore. Everything here clearly is building up to something, but the extent of that won’t truly be felt until the highly anticipated Trails Beyond The Horizon.
Where this game excels is in giving characters time to explore their relationships with another, or by just exploring backstories we weren’t aware of. Everyone in the supporting cast gets a moment to shine, which is more than welcome after the original Daybreak’s conclusion was so focused on Van. Quatre’s past is finally revealed, making him one of the strongest characters in Trails. Shizuna being given time to hang out and be normal is appreciated, and I was especially appreciative that Celis and Leon got time to break out of their “I hate Van” bit and feel more like real characters. I even liked that Feri got more to work with, which is a character I felt kind of dropped off of the original narrative. Everything comes together really well with the development of the main cast, especially with the new material for Swin and Nadia.
By joining into the series’ large complicated web of plot, I do think it bogs itself down in the details. There’s a lot of exposition obviously needed to catch up new players, since this is much less self-contained now. That might lead to some pretty interesting reveals of the series’ lore, but the pacing suffers. I think you could trim about 20 hours of the 80-hour game I played and have a much tighter, leaner Trails experience that would easily have been in my top 3 for the series.
What hurts the pacing more is a certain plot device used to temporarily turn allies into enemies, which dominates the third act of the game and really bloats the time. After two incredible acts to set up this new story, most of the endgame meanders much longer than I think necessary. It manages to recover at the very end, but I think more time than necessary is spent in spots that didn’t always need it. I was able to keep going solely because of how much I enjoyed the main cast, but I really wish the game had been shorter overall.
Besides that, I think Daybreak II goes a long way to reinforce the themes of the original. It’s just as strongly opposed to racism and nationalism as the original, and many of the setting’s anxieties feel prevalent in our world. The side quests and main quests show support for marginalized groups, blending these ideas with the complicated politics of Calvard and the threat of Ouroboros. This has some of the highest highs of this new arc, but with frequent middling lows.
This is a pretty interesting Trails game that I think is really for a certain type of Daybreak fan. I had heard it was divisive, and I definitely get why. Its mistakes are disappointing, but I think overall the successes outweigh them. This is the kind of game I think I needed before moving into the conclusion games of the arc, cementing Calvard as one of the most fleshed out countries in such a massive series. This cast is lovely, and the ongoing mysteries left from this game have me excited to see how this ends up. I’d probably recommend checking this one out on any platform but the Nintendo Switch if you have the option, but I’m eager to see how Trails Beyond The Horizon will feel with a native Nintendo Switch 2 version.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by NIS America
