The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak kicks off the fourth arc of Falcom’s long-running Trails series. After Reverie aimed to bring the previous arcs to a close, Daybreak at last begins the Calvard arc. Set in this major nation which has been mentioned a ton throughout the series, all in a new engine to boot, Trails through Daybreak aims to push the series through its next steps forward.
The Usual “Where Do I Begin?” Spiel
As per usual, this review aims to keep narrative and character spoilers to a minimum, both for major reveals in this game and for stuff in previous games.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak is the eleventh game in this series chronologically. In some ways, it serves as a welcome soft-reset to the story so far; its story is more self-contained than probably any installment of the series since the first Trails of Cold Steel. Most of its primary cast is rather new.
With that said, a lot has happened in Trails. There are already plenty of established characters from the country this game takes place in. While thankfully the number of returning cast members is much more manageable than in Cold Steel IV or Reverie, don’t be surprised if you find yourself wondering “Should I know this person?” if you haven’t caught up on Trails. There are many conversations in this game that casually name-drop events or characters from previous games without much explanation. I can easily see a newbie getting lost in what’s going on here at least some of the time as a result. Daybreak also has more than its fair share of spoilers from the outset for the events of previous games as well, so fair warning.
As usual, there is a backstory section in the game’s title menu. However, this one is more barebones and thus less helpful than previous games. There’s also not nearly as much in terms of in-game resources, so if you aren’t caught up, you’ll probably have to go with the flow here and there.
Complicated Matters Only
Trails Through Daybreak takes place in Zemuria’s large Republic of Calvard, and stars new protagonist Van Arkride. He runs a company by the name of Arkride Solutions, operating as a “spriggan”, where he takes on some of the more grey-area jobs that people don’t want to bring up to the police or the Bracer Guild (effectively a group of peace-preservers). This puts his position regularly at odds with quite a few people.
The events of the game proper kick off when he takes on the mission of a young girl named Agnès Claudel asking him to help her find out more about a mysterious artifact. Because the artifact carries with it a vague yet ominous prophecy, Agnès gets a part-time job working for Van as the two take on jobs throughout the Republic to learn more. Along the way they join up with several other individuals, forming and expanding the game’s main party. They also frequently deal with a nefarious mafia which recently rose up to become a dominant organization of violence in the nation.
As is standard for Trails (especially the first game of an arc), a lot of the experience is about the people you meet and the little stuff you do along the way as the story builds.
The Main Crew
The main cast of Trails Through Daybreak did a lot of heavy lifting for me narratively speaking. Van himself is one of the most enjoyable protagonists this series has had in a while. This is the first game in the series with an experienced protagonist over 20 since Sky 3rd. Still, he’s quite a character; on the surface he’s a pretty average (if experienced) guy with a penchant for sweets and cars, but he’s also a guy who genuinely does care about those around him. He has some shades of previous protagonists, but he’s very much his own guy and he has a lot of great lines. He fits the role of face of the team well for me.
The rest of Arkride Solutions is generally pretty fun. Agnès serves as sort of the rookie role, meaning that she’s the means through which a lot of new information comes through for the player, but she has her moments and place in the group. I also quite liked the dynamics with Ferida (precocious child soldier naive to the world), Aaron (a playboy who likes street brawls), and Judith (an actress with a double life she is very bad at hiding), all of whom fit as oddballs in this cast. The rest of the cast (Risette, Quatre, and Bergard) are fine for what they do, although I wouldn’t rate them quite as high.
What’s nice is that a good amount of the cast has at least some amount of dynamic with one another, an aspect that was sorely lacking in the Cold Steel titles. Some of the exchanges involving Ferida and her youthful ignorance are just amusing, as is watching the rest of the cast deal with Aaron and his playboy antics. While I would say this game doesn’t quite have a ton of character development and leaves its share of threads, by this point it’s sort of a Trails staple to take their time across multiple games to let that happen anyway, and I like what I’ve seen so far.
The Rest
There are quite a few supporting cast members in this game as per usual, though many are familiar faces to series vets. I won’t get too into those given they depend more on past context and some of the returning characters can be considered a spoiler, but I can say there are some here who haven’t been seen in quite some time that I was pleasantly surprised by.
Of the (relative) newcomers, by far the one I enjoyed the most was Elaine. The specific and complicated nature of her relationship with Van is one of the most captivating character dynamics I’ve seen in this series in a while. Beyond her, however, I honestly found this game to have a pretty average supporting cast. There are a couple of neat quests and scenes here and there involving the likes of the co-tenants of Van’s office building for example, but a lot of the others were comparatively forgettable.
This game does have a share of sub-events you can view as well which work similarly to those of the bonding events of Azure and Cold Steel. However, these are more tertiary, nice little cutscenes and events to periodically spend time with the game’s main and supporting cast. They don’t add a ton, but they’re generally more of a nice bonus, and thankfully they didn’t make them out to be the quasi-social links that Trails of Cold Steel did with them. While the feature feels somewhat vestigial, it’s nice that it’s there if you want it rather than feeling like a major piece of characterization.
Help Wanted
As is Trails tradition, you’re given a pretty decent amount of side missions to do throughout your journey to increase your rank and get rewards. Unlike previous Trails games, the “grey area” nature of the spriggan job Van occupies leads to him taking on jobs with a more nebulous morality. As such, the game has something of an alignment system, with quests falling under law/grey/chaos. In addition, many quests give you a decision to make at the end between multiple options which will affect your affinity.
In concept, this is a nice shake-up to the sidequest system, and seeing the different ways quests can play out is cool. In practice, this is somewhat minimal in effect; few of these results have long-term consequences. Whatever choices you make really don’t do much to change Van’s reputation, nor Arkride Solutions’ role in the main story, and does little to really sell me on its impact in terms of narrative.
By far the biggest impact your alignment has is on Chapter 5, where you’re given a key decision and your options depend on how many points you’ve accrued. In practice, this doesn’t change too much about the main story, merely the order of a few bosses and a couple of options during the chapter (some of which felt like they should have had more long-term consequences, but that’s more of an issue with the game’s main story). There are also a few additional bosses and perks to high alignment stats, but it’s ultimately somewhat shallow of a system. I think this system was overall a neat addition, but not one that really provided as much of a boon to the experience as I might have hoped.
It’s also worth mentioning that they’ve pretty much done away with hidden sidequests altogether in Daybreak, to the delight of completionists tired of worrying about missing them.
La République
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak takes you across the country of Calvard, one of the big players in the world’s events and politics. Alas, compared to previous Trails titles, I didn’t really get as invested in the different locations I went to or the day-to-day affairs of Calvardians. It’s unfortunate too because the game takes place during what feels like a watershed moment for the politics of its country, only to really lack any of the interesting internal politics that helped make previous games feel more captivating and immersive. On top of this, there really is a lack of little fun things to do on the side to get engrossed in. Previous titles had their own little card games, fishing, books, and other little fun stuff that went a long way in adding just a bit of extra life to the games. Daybreak on the other hand has very few collectible books and few side excursions beyond watching movies (which at the very least yielded some amusing cutscenes admittedly).
One of the biggest distinguishing factors about Calvard in the franchise is that it’s a very multicultural country, which informs its place in the world at several points in previous arcs as well as the diversity of the cast. However, as often as subjects like racism and anti-immigration are brought up within the game, they’re often in incredibly shallow ways. Very little of it actually manifests in noticeable, meaningful scenes, instead often being spoken about as something of a background problem. These subjects inform a few aspects of the plot in important ways but are almost entirely spoken of and very rarely shown, let alone in a convincing way. It feels like a game that wants to bring these important issues up but does extremely little to tackle them despite having its share of chances to do so via the myriad of sidequests and cutscenes.
It feels more like missed potential than anything to explore something meaningful throughout its game in parallel with the main story. One of my favorite aspects of Trails from Zero was how it was able to to integrate the political intrigue of a story taking place in a relatively weak buffer microstate and the resulting failures of its law enforcement losing the support of the public into its own main story. The potential to do something similarly interesting and nuanced was here, but it feels sadly underdeveloped when it comes to portrayal in either the main or side story content.
Where Things Fall Shortest
The main story of this game is honestly rather disappointing given how much fun I had with its main cast.
Although Daybreak isn’t especially action-packed, I found it to be a pretty well-paced game by the standards of the series. It starts off with direction and some interesting foundational pieces. However, by the time the game gets to Chapter 3, it begins to have a real problem with characters making odd decisions and stuff that bent my suspension of disbelief a bit too much.
Things only get worse by the game’s final two chapters, which are absolutely chock full of contrivances and ridiculous elements that feel like they were done for the sake of it. None of these are quite as bad as a certain accursed plot element of Cold Steel 3 and Cold Steel 4, mind, but it’s definitely a pretty low point for what should have been a climactic section of the game. The game sadly loses a lot of momentum for me in its conclusion, not helped by the fact that this series struggles to handle meaningful stakes at times given how long it has been going.
Much of the plot is driven by this game’s primary antagonist faction, the mafia Almata. Put simply, Almata is a borderline parody of every annoying villain trope this franchise has run into the ground. They feel cartoonishly villainous, with motivations injected into points long past when I should care. Almost all of them have at least one (if not several) boss fights where you deplete ~50% HP bar before they leave saying “I already did what I came here to do”. Outside of one of them having something resembling a vibrant personality, they’re extremely forgettable and rather shallow villains.
The one thing I can give them credit for is they leave a more readily apparent body count than Trails villains in the past have, which establishes them as at least something of an immediate threat. Still, their actions feel ridiculous, especially given how contrived sections like Chapter 5 get. Moreover, they just feel like a stale retread of previous villain organizations, making me less forgiving of their issues, given they already made several of these mistakes.
Trails Through Daybreak is another dud of a Trails story, with plenty of missed opportunities and potentially neat ideas being soured by questionable writing decisions. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its good moments here and there (one particular scene in Chapter 5 is actually among my favorites in the entire series), but those few moments are ultimately insufficient.
Hitting Things
The combat system of the Trails series has always been a personal favorite, but I’ve definitely felt like feature creep got to be a little overbearing in the last few games. Thankfully, the turn-based combat of Trails through Daybreak dialed some aspects back while making some very welcome changes.
As before, you’re placed in an arena for each battle, with the option to perform attacks, crafts (special skills), and arts (spells). Movement is no longer a dedicated action, and you’re free to move your characters around the arena before inputting a command, which I like. One cool addition to battles is what’s called the SCLM system, where characters standing next to each other can empower each other’s abilities or do a follow-up. This functions somewhat similarly to the combat links of Cold Steel, but I like this system more. It also comes with the noticeable drawback of requiring characters to be close together (and thus more vulnerable to AoE skills).
Also worth noting is the changes to S-Crafts. Normally in Trails games, you can interrupt the turn order with at least 100 craft points (CP) to perform an S-Craft. In this game however, you require both at least 100CP and 2 full notches of what’s called S-Boost, something you can also use to empower your character and actions for a few turns. There are more decisions to make with S-Boosting, and S-Crafts aren’t quite as spammable since you need more than just CP. Another change is that S-Crafts only use 100CP rather than draining all you have left like in previous games, giving you a bit more flexibility there. I for one quite like this system, which is helped by S-Crafts feeling at least a little less powerful than they got in certain Cold Steel titles.
The turn roulette has also changed to where combatants are locked into their random benefits, meaning you can no longer intercept enemy critical turns, though you can still see them ahead of time to respond. I find the turn order indicator on the HUD to be more annoying to follow than in previous games, but it’s still serviceable.
In what feels like an effort to spice up the overworld navigation portions of battles, Trails Through Daybreak introduces the Field Battle system. Unlike the turn-based battles (called Command Battles), Field Battles play out in real-time with attacks, dodge-rolls, and occasionally building up meter that stuns enemies.
Unfortunately, Field Battles feel rather superfluous. The actual action combat is very shallow, especially when compared to Falcom’s more action-driven titles like Ys or Nayuta: Boundless Trails. It’s not all that fun or rewarding to fight enemies on the field like this, which is unfortunate because there are times when it’s actually safer to do than fighting Command Battles. Generally, Field Battles work best as a means to get started on Command Battles (which typically yield more experience and are more engaging). That’s not to say Field Battles aren’t at all fun, but they are underwhelming. There are plenty of forced Command Battles (which all boss fights are) that make the Field Battle system feel more supplementary than a key part of the game.
Pondering My Orbs
Another key system of Trails games that Daybreak tweaked is the orbment system. In Sky, Zero, and Azure, this involved placing quartz in your character’s slots in particular configurations to get spells and stats. This was a fun way to build characters but could be a bit on the obtuse side. Trails of Cold Steel went the opposite direction, with quartz having more specific perks and spells rather than tying it to your overall configurations.
Daybreak is somewhere in the middle; quartz are back to their old style (e.g. quartz of “defense 1/2/3” being Earth elements that give you a bonus to defense), however they give different kinds of benefits to combat, like making your attacks have elemental properties, among many others. Your arts are now largely based on “Arts Drivers” given to each character, which gives them a preset group of arts as well as a couple of slots to put in arts of your choice.
I personally like some of these changes. It’s not as easy to figure out as that of the Cold Steel games, but I think it adds a touch more depth to how you build your characters while also doing its own thing different from what I’ve already done in older games.
Difficulty
I played my playthrough of The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak on its highest difficulty, which is once again Nightmare. As a series veteran, Nightmare wasn’t particularly hard, but I also didn’t expect it to be considering this game is the first in this new arc, and it felt pretty fair. Coming off Reverie’s Abyss difficulty, Daybreak is quite a drop-off from a game where nearly everything can quickly kill you, but that’s okay given what it is.
While there are still some busted tools, the removal of systems like Brave Orders and tweaks to S-Crafts meant that I still felt like I had to actually engage with the game and work things out. While I didn’t game over super often, I still had a lot of fun with the systems in place, rarely feeling like I didn’t have to at least try. Granted, this game has a lot of options that felt pretty powerful and I’m not typically the one to find the most broken options, so it’s possible I missed something cheesier than what I used. Still, Daybreak has an engaging enough combat system that I felt Nightmare gave me enough to feel satisfied.
Presentation: Visuals
The visual engine this game uses is a welcome step forward for this series. While Trails games got better looking over time, Daybreak is definitely the best-looking 3D one yet. Character models are more expressive than ever, and cutscene and fight choreography have noticeably improved. These games are never going to win any “cutting-edge visuals” awards, but they’ve definitely come a long way. If I had the slightest nitpick, it’s that the darker color palette and shading sometimes felt a bit dry or otherwise off, but I got used to this pretty quickly.
What’s really impressive to me is how nicely everything flows in motion. The transition from Field to Command Battle (and vice versa) feels pretty seamless. Buildings are no longer considered separate screens, meaning you can go in and out without dealing with loading. The actual experience of moving around in this game is just nice and smooth, and instances of lag or other performance issues for me were incredibly rare. Once in awhile, I’d quickly go from one area to another and it’d take a little bit of time to load some NPCs or objects in front of me, but as someone who grew up on the Playstation 1, I can more than deal with it in this game’s case.
Most of the character designs (and a good amount of the 2D art) were done by Enami Katsumi, who originally did the character art for Trails from Zero and Ys Seven. I quite like his character designs, and I think they translate pretty well to this new engine in 3D, so I’m glad they brought them back. That said, Katsumi’s style is distinct enough that it stands out a little bit from Falcom’s in-house art teams’ other 2D art in the game. Though at this point in this series, they use art from so many artists who have worked on the series that it’s practically become a charming point unto itself.
Presentation: Music & Sound
The music for Trails Through Daybreak is…fine. Unfortunately, I don’t feel the same kind of musical identity with this game as I have with previous titles. There are a lot of tunes that feel like they’re just there to fill a general purpose (e.g. “boss battle”, “tension”, “sad scene”), without much in the way of cohesion or strong identity. They fill those purposes fine, but not many tunes really stuck with me, keeping this soundtrack from really elevating this game. Battle and boss tunes in particular were noticeably underwhelming, like they were trying to reach those bombastic highs of previous games but it never quite clicks.
Where Daybreak’s soundtrack is at its best is in the town and dungeon themes. While these don’t tend to stick with people as much as story-beat and boss themes do, I did find them to be one of the stronger areas of this game’s soundtrack. The sound design is also quite dynamic; some properties like volume shift as you enter buildings, and Field and Command Battle themes have somewhat different orchestration.
I played with the English dub on, and I think the voice actors did a very good job here. I came to like at least a few of the characters in this game off the backs of strong performances even from some actors I didn’t recognize. My only issues with the voice acting itself were one case of what felt like a miscast (not a bad performance, mind) and a couple of scenes in this game using the odd bleeped curse words (which happens in both English and Japanese). Still, as with the last few Trails games, the amount of actual lines that are voiced is once again spotty and inconsistent. Conversations will often start voiced, before suddenly stopping or being suddenly voiced again due to a character raising their voice.
Verdict
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak made for a rather enjoyable playthrough that was hard carried by its main party and how fun combat was. I also like that it trims some of the fat that had begun building with the bloated previous arc. This is one of the best put-together Trails games in a long time, complete with some solid cutscene choreography and a near-seamless feeling of play in between combat and cutscenes.
By this point, I think the Trails series is holding itself back from reaching the highs that led me to become such a big fan in a few ways. Daybreak’s story runs into many of the same problems previous games did to a frustrating extent. While the gameplay and overworld navigation aspects see some nice improvements, narrative elements like worldbuilding feel increasingly like they are resting on their laurels while many repeated aspects are growing stale. Daybreak has some new ideas, but it also has a share of things I am getting less patient with, which is saying something for a series that has always demanded patience.
I did enjoy this game more than I did Cold Steel 3 or Cold Steel 4 off the backs of its gameplay and characters, though I definitely was left hoping for better in its narrative and side content to go along with the areas it did improve. I think it’s still a good experience for series fans, however, especially if you’ve gotten to this point and know what to expect. It’s a bit tough to recommend for newcomers given how long running this series is by now, and it has its flaws that others might find to be bigger problems than I do, but the highs made up for the lows enough to say I still had an overall pretty good time.
THE LEGEND OF HEROES: TRAILS THROUGH DAYBREAK IS RECOMMENDED
If you’d like to check out the previous games in the series, here are our reviews for Nihon Falcom titles. If you are looking for another JRPG, you should check out our review of Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk DX.
Thanks to Reef Entertainment for providing a PC review code for The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
