Nihon Falcom is in for what’s likely going to be its most active year in its history as far as new releases in the west go. Hot off the heels of last month’s release of Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana, Falcom is bringing Trails fans in the west one step closer to catching up with the rest of the series. The superb Trails through Daybreak came out just over seven months ago, and now fans are headed back to Calvard in Trails through Daybreak II for more spriggan action.
We’ll be forward with this. Unlike its predecessor, if you haven’t played a Trails game, this is definitely not the place to start. Where to start is a whole thing that this review won’t go over, but we’ll say the previous game is a solid place if you don’t want to go back more than 10 games.
Daybreak II‘s story begins just a few months after the events of the previous game, and we’re put back in the shoes of Van Arkride. Calvard is once again at peace, sort of. Arkride Solutions eventually gets a request from the A-Rank bracer and Van’s childhood friend, Elaine Auclair, in the hopes of getting his help to investigate a series of bizarre murders, which leads them to a mysterious man who can take the form of a Grendel–the same extraordinary being Van can morph into. Obviously, Van has to take the case, or be tried for a bunch of murders he didn’t commit.
Feri is back with her innocence! Yes, she’s talking about boobs.
Trails fans know that it goes deeper than that. A demo of the game, essentially the first chapter, was released a couple weeks ago and it does a fine job of letting the player know what’s in store for the whole experience. Every gameplay facet that made the first Daybreak what it was is back. It’s an extension of the story, and that’s a good thing.
What might come as a surprise to people is that despite being the second game in the Calvard arc, it plays very similarly to Trails in the Sky the 3rd and Trails Into Reverie, and it’s both a good and bad thing. It’s good because the storytelling and world building are as superb as its ever been, but it also works against the game because there are a bunch of scenarios where you don’t feel like your time or effort is respected.
Branching paths!
If you haven’t played the demo, you’ll find that the big gameplay twist is that a lot of the progression in Daybreak II feels like Groundhog Day. You’ll go through the story, something bad happens, and that forces you to backtrack in an attempt to have you try something different. It’s an interesting presentation choice–in fact, the first time it happens is utterly shocking. The problem with this approach is that you really don’t have a lot of control over it. Paths in the game are designed to be failed, and the fake feeling of agency makes the premise feel corny. Sure, at the end of the game you’ll come to know why things are happening the way they are, but it also makes you second guess how sharp some of the characters in the game are, which couldn’t have been Falcom’s goal.
Back to The 3rd and Reverie comparisons, while both of those games were fully canon, they each contained outside dimensions in Phantasma and the Reverie Corridor that also doubled as too much of a convenient way to bring its many characters together both to expand on their development while also being a form of fan service. As a self-proclaimed Trails series sicko, I’m totally invested in the world and characters in the series, but it doesn’t really excite me when the characters are taken away from their worlds to serve some other typical video game purpose, like understanding how to use certain characters.
The battle system from the previous game is back, but with some caveats. First, the action-based field battle system is more intuitive. You now have the ability to use spells, instead of switching to a character that melees magic. You also have the Cross Charge ability which allows you to call an ally to perform a strong counterattack when you pull off a perfect dodge. In turn-based battles, you can activate a shard boost when an enemy is stunned to unleash an EX chain attack. All these changes make battles both in turn and action-based feel more visceral.
Daybreak II has the Marchen Garten, a virtual reality space the Malduk Company created that can be used to enhance the Xipha and orbal network. Basically, this is Calvard flaunting their technology, and it’s mainly used to both grind levels for rewards and have the various characters you recruit to your party interact with each other. Each floor in the Garten consists of a random labyrinth where you’re required to either kill a number of enemies, power up magic posts, or break objects. Once you do, the path to the next floor opens, and you do the same thing until you beat the floor’s boss. This was fun the first couple times, but it got awfully repetitive, and felt like a slog as I progressed through the game. As you’d expect, you find out Marchen Garten has some other grand purpose central to the story, but it didn’t make these optional grindfests any more engaging to go through. The good news is after the first try, going through the other floors is completely optional. The bad news is they encourage you to finish them to earn Spriggan Points (SP) that are central to your rating at the end of the game. To add to the annoyance, like the Reverie Corridor before it, post-game content all happens in the Marchen Garten, and you can’t get the real ending unless you finish it.
The Marchen Garten levels are not fun, but hey, at least they reward you with points to open gacha boxes that don’t allow you to just open all the boxes at the same time…
Speaking of things that are there but otherwise don’t feel needed, some of the treasure chests in the game require you to hack them to open them. To hack them, the game puts you in control of Mare to navigate a maze filled with traps and walls where you have to press various buttons to get past them. It sounds simple enough, but a time limit and the fear of getting caught makes things a stressful. Like the Marchen Garten, you can choose to skip this minigame entirely, but if you do, you lose out on SP.
This is a common issue with many of the questionable new features. Another example is with the new stealth mechanic. Every once in a while, you’ll come across scenarios where you have to follow someone in town. If you get too close, you get caught. If you lose the person you’re following, you have to start all over. For the most part, they’re pretty easy, as all you have to do is follow them, and then hide in glowing hiding spots when you see them. There were quite a few times where these glowing spots are in plain sight and I hid directly in front of someone’s vision. Again, once or twice this is cool, but you do them frequently and there’s never a point where you’ll want to skip them just because of the SP penalty.
Fishing is back and it’s fun!
Just to go into a bit more detail with the minigames, this was one critique a lot of people had with the previous game–there just weren’t any. Daybreak II has a bunch of them. There’s the aforementioned cybersleuthing to open chests, there’s basketball (which is actually fun), and there’s a new card game called Seven Hearts–which kind of feels like Vantage Masters meets Uno. All these pale in comparison to fishing, a minigame that never should’ve left. The fishing system in Daybreak II is completely different from what we’ve seen in the series before. They don’t tempt you with SP penalties if you don’t care to fish either.
As for how long it is, Trails through Daybreak II will take you anywhere between 60-80 hours to complete, and if you’re one of many the series’ many fans who’ve played through all of them, it’ll take you a bit on the longer side to finish–the funny thing is thats actually considered short for a Trails game.
Trails’ best in class world building is back. Acerbic Tomatoes! The Arseille! That Trails in they Sky 1st Chapter remake can’t come soon enough.
If you’ve read up to this point, it probably sounds like a negative review, but make no mistake about it: Daybreak II is a great game because it has everything that made the game before it fantastic and then some. The problem is that a lot of the new stuff and some of the risks the game takes makes it feel like filler, and the series doesn’t feel like it’s taken things up a notch from a gameplay perspective because a lot of this new stuff is just not fun. SmashPad has scored every Trails game up to this point over a 4, but this game gets a 3.5 primarily because of the way it takes advantage of player FOMO when forcing through a section you just don’t care about. I still loved it, and I can’t wait for the next entry in the series, but Daybreak II doesn’t take the series to new heights like its predecessor did.
Here’s to hoping the next Trails game in the series sticks the landing a little better.
Nihon Falcom is in for what’s likely going to be its most active year in its history as far as new releases in the west go. Hot off the heels of last month’s release of Ys Memoire: The Oath in…
Nihon Falcom is in for what’s likely going to be its most active year in its history as far as new releases in the west go. Hot off the heels of last month’s release of Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana, Falcom is bringing Trails fans in the west one step closer to catching up with the rest of the series. The superb Trails through Daybreak came out just over seven months ago, and now fans are headed back to Calvard in Trails through Daybreak II for more spriggan action.
We’ll be forward with this. Unlike its predecessor, if you haven’t played a Trails game, this is definitely not the place to start. Where to start is a whole thing that this review won’t go over, but we’ll say the previous game is a solid place if you don’t want to go back more than 10 games.
Daybreak II‘s story begins just a few months after the events of the previous game, and we’re put back in the shoes of Van Arkride. Calvard is once again at peace, sort of. Arkride Solutions eventually gets a request from the A-Rank bracer and Van’s childhood friend, Elaine Auclair, in the hopes of getting his help to investigate a series of bizarre murders, which leads them to a mysterious man who can take the form of a Grendel–the same extraordinary being Van can morph into. Obviously, Van has to take the case, or be tried for a bunch of murders he didn’t commit.
Feri is back with her innocence! Yes, she’s talking about boobs.
Trails fans know that it goes deeper than that. A demo of the game, essentially the first chapter, was released a couple weeks ago and it does a fine job of letting the player know what’s in store for the whole experience. Every gameplay facet that made the first Daybreak what it was is back. It’s an extension of the story, and that’s a good thing.
What might come as a surprise to people is that despite being the second game in the Calvard arc, it plays very similarly to Trails in the Sky the 3rd and Trails Into Reverie, and it’s both a good and bad thing. It’s good because the storytelling and world building are as superb as its ever been, but it also works against the game because there are a bunch of scenarios where you don’t feel like your time or effort is respected.
Branching paths!
If you haven’t played the demo, you’ll find that the big gameplay twist is that a lot of the progression in Daybreak II feels like Groundhog Day. You’ll go through the story, something bad happens, and that forces you to backtrack in an attempt to have you try something different. It’s an interesting presentation choice–in fact, the first time it happens is utterly shocking. The problem with this approach is that you really don’t have a lot of control over it. Paths in the game are designed to be failed, and the fake feeling of agency makes the premise feel corny. Sure, at the end of the game you’ll come to know why things are happening the way they are, but it also makes you second guess how sharp some of the characters in the game are, which couldn’t have been Falcom’s goal.
Back to The 3rd and Reverie comparisons, while both of those games were fully canon, they each contained outside dimensions in Phantasma and the Reverie Corridor that also doubled as too much of a convenient way to bring its many characters together both to expand on their development while also being a form of fan service. As a self-proclaimed Trails series sicko, I’m totally invested in the world and characters in the series, but it doesn’t really excite me when the characters are taken away from their worlds to serve some other typical video game purpose, like understanding how to use certain characters.
The battle system from the previous game is back, but with some caveats. First, the action-based field battle system is more intuitive. You now have the ability to use spells, instead of switching to a character that melees magic. You also have the Cross Charge ability which allows you to call an ally to perform a strong counterattack when you pull off a perfect dodge. In turn-based battles, you can activate a shard boost when an enemy is stunned to unleash an EX chain attack. All these changes make battles both in turn and action-based feel more visceral.
Daybreak II has the Marchen Garten, a virtual reality space the Malduk Company created that can be used to enhance the Xipha and orbal network. Basically, this is Calvard flaunting their technology, and it’s mainly used to both grind levels for rewards and have the various characters you recruit to your party interact with each other. Each floor in the Garten consists of a random labyrinth where you’re required to either kill a number of enemies, power up magic posts, or break objects. Once you do, the path to the next floor opens, and you do the same thing until you beat the floor’s boss. This was fun the first couple times, but it got awfully repetitive, and felt like a slog as I progressed through the game. As you’d expect, you find out Marchen Garten has some other grand purpose central to the story, but it didn’t make these optional grindfests any more engaging to go through. The good news is after the first try, going through the other floors is completely optional. The bad news is they encourage you to finish them to earn Spriggan Points (SP) that are central to your rating at the end of the game. To add to the annoyance, like the Reverie Corridor before it, post-game content all happens in the Marchen Garten, and you can’t get the real ending unless you finish it.
The Marchen Garten levels are not fun, but hey, at least they reward you with points to open gacha boxes that don’t allow you to just open all the boxes at the same time…
Speaking of things that are there but otherwise don’t feel needed, some of the treasure chests in the game require you to hack them to open them. To hack them, the game puts you in control of Mare to navigate a maze filled with traps and walls where you have to press various buttons to get past them. It sounds simple enough, but a time limit and the fear of getting caught makes things a stressful. Like the Marchen Garten, you can choose to skip this minigame entirely, but if you do, you lose out on SP.
This is a common issue with many of the questionable new features. Another example is with the new stealth mechanic. Every once in a while, you’ll come across scenarios where you have to follow someone in town. If you get too close, you get caught. If you lose the person you’re following, you have to start all over. For the most part, they’re pretty easy, as all you have to do is follow them, and then hide in glowing hiding spots when you see them. There were quite a few times where these glowing spots are in plain sight and I hid directly in front of someone’s vision. Again, once or twice this is cool, but you do them frequently and there’s never a point where you’ll want to skip them just because of the SP penalty.
Fishing is back and it’s fun!
Just to go into a bit more detail with the minigames, this was one critique a lot of people had with the previous game–there just weren’t any. Daybreak II has a bunch of them. There’s the aforementioned cybersleuthing to open chests, there’s basketball (which is actually fun), and there’s a new card game called Seven Hearts–which kind of feels like Vantage Masters meets Uno. All these pale in comparison to fishing, a minigame that never should’ve left. The fishing system in Daybreak II is completely different from what we’ve seen in the series before. They don’t tempt you with SP penalties if you don’t care to fish either.
As for how long it is, Trails through Daybreak II will take you anywhere between 60-80 hours to complete, and if you’re one of many the series’ many fans who’ve played through all of them, it’ll take you a bit on the longer side to finish–the funny thing is thats actually considered short for a Trails game.
Trails’ best in class world building is back. Acerbic Tomatoes! The Arseille! That Trails in they Sky 1st Chapter remake can’t come soon enough.
If you’ve read up to this point, it probably sounds like a negative review, but make no mistake about it: Daybreak II is a great game because it has everything that made the game before it fantastic and then some. The problem is that a lot of the new stuff and some of the risks the game takes makes it feel like filler, and the series doesn’t feel like it’s taken things up a notch from a gameplay perspective because a lot of this new stuff is just not fun. SmashPad has scored every Trails game up to this point over a 4, but this game gets a 3.5 primarily because of the way it takes advantage of player FOMO when forcing through a section you just don’t care about. I still loved it, and I can’t wait for the next entry in the series, but Daybreak II doesn’t take the series to new heights like its predecessor did.
Here’s to hoping the next Trails game in the series sticks the landing a little better.
by Danreb Victorio
