To someone who isn’t an avid fan, Legend of heroes the series may seem difficult to break into. The dozen or so games released over the past two decades are spread across four distinct arcs that all work together to build one of the most detailed and tightly interconnected universes in all of gaming, one that is more slowly approaching an epic conclusion. However, with this new release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak, there’s never been a better time to try these games. Trails Through Daybreak is a fresh start for the series in more ways than one, offering an experience that will appeal to fans new and old.
Trails Through Daybreak is set in the Republic of Calvard, an economically dominant nation with a level of technological advancement comparable to the modern real world, and begins with an introduction to Van Arkride, a local ‘Spriggan’. Van’s role is a kind of private investigator who takes on shady cases that the local police don’t want to cover themselves, but it seems that work is going a bit slow for him as he is woken up from a sweet dream in his office by a student named Agnes Claudel.
She explains that she would like help finding a mysterious artifact that belonged to her grandfather, and although Van is reluctant at first, Agnes manages to convince him. They eventually find the artifact, but that’s just the beginning of Van’s problems as it’s revealed that there are seven more of them and they all need to be returned to prevent something catastrophic from happening to the world. He hires Agnes as his assistant and the two embark on a journey that takes them all over Calvard, meeting new friends and enemies along the way as we learn what the artifacts are really for and who else is looking for them.
It’s a beautifully paced story, and we’re happy to report that it’s completely accessible to newcomers. One of the best and worst features Paths series that you kind of have to play all of them to really understand why they’re so highly praised, which becomes an increasingly daunting task with several hundred hours of content to catch up on.
Still, not only is Trails through Daybreak the start of a new arc with a new setting and a new setting, but it doesn’t rely too heavily on existing knowledge of events and lore from the previous games. While it’s true that fans of the series will generally get more out of the countless references and cameos sprinkled throughout, its commitment to telling a largely self-contained story makes it feel like the most accessible Trails game in a long time.
Plus, it’s fun to see how the writers approached a protagonist who’s a little more morally gray. There’s now a morality system that feels like a lighter version of something you’d find in a Shin Megami Tensei game, where Van’s decisions and dialogue options will affect his position on a scale that balances Law, Chaos, and Grey. While this doesn’t go so far as to lead to multiple different story paths and endings, it does affect which factions Van can align with much later in the narrative and which playable characters can end up on your team. We really appreciated how this morality system added more nuance to various tasks and interactions, giving you a little more to chew on and think about than simply following stories to their inevitable conclusions.
While this isn’t necessarily a positive or a negative, it’s still important to emphasize that Trails through Daybreak is very much a ‘story’ RPG. Much like the previous entries, it really takes time with world building through the lore dumps and character interactions, which can often lead to extended sequences of 10-15 minutes at a time where you’re scrolling through mountains of text and cutscenes with barely any gameplay to break it up.
For the most part, the story is well paced and worth engaging with, but those who prefer more systems and mechanics driven RPGs may want to pause before diving into this one. Trails through Daybreak certainly has a lot of great gameplay, but it doesn’t feel like its combat sequences or character progression systems are intended as primary concentration.
Gameplay in Trails Through Daybreak follows the typical formula of visiting new towns with each chapter, choosing various side quests to complete at your leisure, and diving into nearby dungeons for some good monster battles and exploration. It may feel a little old fashioned, but the gameplay loop here is solid and remains consistently engaging throughout the 60 or so hours the briskly paced story should last, mostly aided by excellent turn-based combat.
Said combat uses a unique mix of action and turn-based systems, though it certainly favors turn-based systems more. When you encounter a group of enemies, you can usually just hit them with your staff or sword to weaken or destroy them, with each hit increasing the power of the stun. When this is charged, you can then launch an AoE stun attack on all stragglers that can be comboed into a turn-based fight where your team has the first turn.
Once in alternate mode, things play out much like past entries into Trails. The timeline at the top of the screen shows the turn order for your team and the enemy team, with each action you take having a casting time that potentially leaves the door open for enemies to respond before you can act. As part of the new combat system, you can now freely move characters before choosing their action, giving you room to figure out which attacks would be most effective as you line up to take out multiple enemies in one hit or trigger secondary effects such as bonus damage if hit from the side.
In addition to their basic abilities, characters can also attack with Arts, which use a consumable mana resource called EP, or Crafts, which use a separate resource called CP that you replenish during combat by taking and taking damage. Both have their use cases offering a range of offensive and defensive actions, but the latter example is also the source of each character’s super abilities, called S-Crafts. Activating them requires the character to be fully powered up (more on that in a bit) and have quite a bit of CP to burn, but they also usually result in powerful effects like an on-screen nuke or party-wide healing and buffs .
One of the key new features of the new combat system is the Boost Gauge, which appears to be a modified version of a similar system from the Octopath Traveler games. Dealing and taking damage will always add a little more to the gauge, and then you can choose to burn up to two cells at once to boost a character’s stats and abilities, sometimes giving them a much-needed edge to turn the tide of fights. At least at the intended difficulty level, we found the boost to be overkill in most fights, but we still appreciated the extra strategic depth it adds to combat.
We really enjoyed the pacing and design of this turn-based combat system, but the same can’t be said for the action side of combat, which feels like a prototype that still needs a bit of refinement. We were hoping it would borrow some lessons and design principles from the system that represented Falcom’s Ys series, but what’s actually here is barebones and hardly feels like a real combat system. You can slash, avoid flipping and… well, that’s about it. When it comes to dispatching low-level trash mobs, this fight is good enough to get rid of enemies faster than if you went the alternate route, but fighting a slightly stronger enemy quickly turns into a monotonous war of attrition as you slowly chip away at their health bars with limited and a repetitive series of actions.
Outside of battles, character abilities and stats are primarily built through the ‘Orbment’ skill system, which is slightly modified from previous Paths entries. Each character now comes equipped with an Arts Driver, which essentially gives them a set of skills to use in battle, and these can be swapped out later. Players are then given more granular control via Quartz, small crystals you can equip your Orbment with to give your character various passive buffs, and some additional arts to round out your repertoire. We enjoyed the character building aspects of the Orbment system, especially after some time had passed and we had access to a lot more options for organizing the party, although it’s worth mentioning that it felt a bit also easily ‘crushing’ characters at a given difficulty and trivializing most combat encounters.
While Trails through Daybreak is the first game to run on the new engine, it admittedly doesn’t feel like the massive visual upgrade it could have been, like what we saw when Stories series switched to a new engine with Tales of Arise. The animations are definitely improved and look a lot smoother, while the environments you can explore feel a lot more spacious, but the character models still look like they’re from a late release for the 360/PS3 era console hardware. Fortunately, the character and environment design is strong enough that the older-looking materials aren’t too noticeable, but it’s still a bit disappointing given the opportunity this new release offered Falcom to really improve the presentation.
One visual issue unique to the Switch version is that, confusingly, Trails through Daybreak is clearly not designed or intended to be played on the console in portable mode, as evidenced by comical small text and UI elements on the Switch screen. If you have anything worse than 20/20 vision, you’ll likely struggle to read dialogue and menu text, making Trails through Daybreak the rare Switch experience we suggest you only play on the dock.
On a related note, the other problem we encountered is that the voice acting tends to be handled in a strangely inconsistent manner. While the voice actors’ performances are excellent, we noticed a few instances where only certain characters in a cutscene were voiced, or even more strangely, where a character’s words were only voiced for some parts of the same conversation. This leads to many awkward scenes and dialogue sequences where the characters switch several times between audible speech and silence, or only one character from the entire group on screen speaks while everyone else is silent.
Maybe it’s simply a product of adding lines to the game’s script after the voice acting sessions have already been recorded, or maybe it’s a budget issue, but it ultimately makes a lot of the scenes feel clunky and unfinished. A fully voiced script is certainly not necessary in an RPG, but plenty of other entries in the genre have shown a much better organization of mixing voice and text interactions, which makes Trails through Daybreak feel a bit uneven and ‘cheap’.
This isn’t a game-breaking issue by any means—you get used to the random voices after a while—but hopefully future entries in the series will address this better and have a more consistent organization of their voice interactions.
