Celebrating 20 years since the release of Trails in the Sky, The Legend of Heroes: Trails games have taken fans on an intimate journey through its expansive and diverse continent of Zemuria. Whether it’s the fantastical feel of the Liberl Kingdom in the Sky trilogy, the cutting edge city in Crossbell’s dualogy, or the might of the Erebonian Empire in the Cold Steel games, the series continues to make players fall in love with its impressive cast of characters over the span of 10 games. Now with Trails through Daybreak, we finally step foot into the Calvard region, and it feels very much like a new beginning while also feeling like a homecoming.
Trails through Daybreak stars Van Arkride, the owner and sole proprietor of Arkride Solutions. There, he works as a “spriggan,” somebody working in the gray area of the law. He doesn’t work for the police, has no sort of national or political affiliation, and to take it an extra step, he’s not a bracer either. For those unfamiliar with the Trails series, Bracers are local officials whose sole responsibility is the safety of its local people. The Sky, Crossbell, and Cold Steel games each had local bracer guilds assigned to Liberl, Crossbell, and Erebonia respectively, and it’s the same case in Calvard as well. All this said, it’s not uncommon for Van to take jobs that could otherwise go to the police or the bracers. The main difference is that he offers his own service in between (with often higher fees) and he doesn’t have to report any of his dealings either. The man has the freedom to make an honest living doing as he pleases, as long as it isn’t obviously illegal. But the moral ground? It hardly exists.
Operating on the gray area side of things is what appealed most to Agnés Claudel, a promising young student attending Aramis Academy, the most prestigious high school in all of Calvard. Daybreak‘s story really begins when Agnés comes to Van with a job to help her find family heirlooms called the Geneses, a mysterious type of orbment (a device that allows people to utilize combat and support Arts, which is the term the series has used for magic spells). Knowing that Agnés went to Arkride Solutions with this job and not the police nor the Bracer Guild is all the more telling that there’s more to this high schooler than meets the eye, and this along with the plights of several other characters, including Van, are what really makes Daybreak‘s plot as gripping as it is.
While you aren’t a bracer, you can still expect some bracer requests thanks to an old immovable friend longtime fans should remember.
From here, Daybreak follows its tried-and-true gameplay loop of doing jobs and sidequests, receiving a bigger job to do to handle outside of your main city hub, finding out the job is part of something bigger going on in the region, and repeating the process realizing that everything you’re doing becomes an even bigger part of saving the world. Whether it’s Estelle Bright simply following in the footsteps of her father to be a better bracer, Lloyd Bannings looking to be an ace member of the Crossbell Police, or Rean Schwarzer looking to make an impact with the Erebonian Military–the foundation has always started simple and ended up being something bigger. In the case of Van Arkride, he’s just trying to vibe and make ends meet no matter who he sides with, but of course we find out he’s just as important to the fate of the world as every other Trails protagonist before him.
That said, doing these sidequests and jobs aren’t just about achieving high ranks as a spriggan. Whenever you complete a task, you also add some notches to the LGC board. The LGC board tracks the sidequests you do and decisions you make and gauges them into separate ratings for how you deal with the Law, things that are more Gray, and even how you deal with Chaos. Again, there’s hardly any black and white with the jobs you do. While some sidequests will be easier than others, this isn’t one of those RPGs where you save a kitty from a tree. Trails through Daybreak goes further than that.
Secret sidequests and questions to make sure you’re paying attention? Yes, the series still has those. And I’ve still got it with the S ranks!
One of the sidequests you’re on employs the team to spy on a guy who took money out of a cash register at a convenience store he works at. When we tail him, we find out that the reason he took the money was because he was responsible for a bike accident that ended up breaking someone else’s camera. So to make it right, the guy who took the money offered to replace the camera to prevent pressing charges. The reasoning doesn’t matter, right? The guy who took the money is still wrong… But it turns out that the person having their camera replaced intentionally caused the accident for the purpose of swindling the guy into buying a better camera than he already has. Also wrong. So as Van, we have to decide whether to tell the guy who took the money to be completely honest about the situation which would be the truthful and lawful choice (and he can get fired anyway), or we can encourage him to just slip the money back in the cash register–no harm, no foul, except that he’ll live with that guilt forever and probably won’t be trusted by his buddy ever again. That’s more gray area. I ended up going with the lawful choice after asking my for my girlfriend’s advice because I just didn’t know what to do. And as you’d expect, the decisions got more difficult as the game progressed.
There was also this sidequest where you see this little girl alone near the sewers looking for her sister’s earrings that she lost during a recent storm. Despite not remembering a storm happening recently, we offer to help her, follow her through the underground sewer system and see her just make her way through them unscathed, despite all the monsters down there. Eventually, the little girl finds the earrings after we take out a boss, and when we make our way up to the surface, we find the little girl again and she doesn’t even know who we are. Then, her mother comes and tells a story that makes us realize that the mother is actually the little girl’s sister (who lost the earrings), and the little girl that we helped actually died of drowning years ago. So the little girl in front of us that looks like the girl we helped? That’s her daughter, and that’s who we give the earrings to. When I finished this sidequest, I had to take a break. I never expected a sidequest to be that heavy, and there were more in the game just like it.
Both the LGC ratings and darker sidequests are subtle but meaningful improvements that help keep what’s probably becoming an obvious formulaic approach fresh, and the extra wrinkle of Van and his crew not being your typical defenders of justice really adds to the agency players will feel like they have when getting into the game. While you won’t really see how favoring Law, Gray area, or Chaos really affect gameplay until the latter half of the game, the fresh perspective of these jobs should keep new players invested while longtime fans will appreciate the tidbits of content that are a nod to the games they’ve played before. The game is just more enjoyable knowing that it’s not all about being a good guy, it’s not all about being a jerk, and you even get a job or two from Heiyue and Ouroboros–that’s meta in its own right.
Perhaps the most talked about change in Trails Through Daybreak is in its battle system. Traditionally, the Trails series has used a turn-based battle system where you planned around a visible turn order to build up Craft Points (CP) that are used for more devastating attacks to fall enemies. While Trails Through Daybreak still has a re-tooled version of the same same turn-based system, the game also uses an action-based mechanic where it’s primarily used to weaken non-boss enemies before battles–but if you so choose, you can take out an enemy right there. It’ll just take longer because you can only chain combos in the turn-based system.
As for the changes with the turn-based system, there’s a new mechanic called S-Boosts. S-Boosts can be used to enhance your attacks, arts, and crafts, depending on the drivers you have attached to each character’s orbment. You can choose to not use them, and doing so results in the gauges constantly raising with each turn. Also worth noting is you can’t use a character’s S-Craft (their ultimate move) unless you use at least two S-Boosts. You typically can have up to three when you start a battle, and when you use an S-Craft, that maximum of three increases making the battles even more intense.
The ability to switch between action- and turn-based battles adds wrinkles and an element of strategy that feels refreshing to players who might’ve started to find the combat dry.
I first got my hand at trying out this system with the game’s PS4 demo, and I found it archaic at first. The action-based stuff felt a lot like the Ys games, which shouldn’t be surprising considering Falcom also made those games, but it never really clicked that the action-based stuff was really best used to just stun enemies before switching into turn-based to make it all easier. I did appreciate that you can switch characters on the fly, and they all felt different, and it was also a way to build up their CP gauge without relying on them in turn-based mode. Eventually I got used to all of it, and I do believe I’ve been programmed to think this is the ideal way to approach the Trails battle system moving forward.
Shifting things over to the turn-based changes, I also struggled a bit. You no longer have a birds-eye view of the entire turn order. You only know who’s going next, and what status effects a character will have as the battle progresses. It’s really easy to ignore all that, and doing that can be your downfall–this is what made me struggle early on because I was programmed to play the game in such a way where before every big fight, I just made sure my entire party was at 200 CP so I can unleash my S-Crafts and end fights early, but the fact that you have to use S-Boosts now all but eliminates what’s really an exploit.
S-Craft spamming aside, turn-based combat also takes a more strategic approach with positioning too. Previous games in the series tried to make this matter, but it never actually did. In addition to trying to stay out of the reach of enemies, you can also position your characters to attack the backs and sides of enemies for a slight bonus, and you can compound that bonus with assists by standing close enough to another party member. I did the latter a lot, until later enemies in the game started using their own ultimates and arts to really make me regret keeping my characters bunched together. The game, especially on easier settings, doesn’t really punish you that hard for making these mistakes, but you definitely do have to take these into account for boss fights at least. Since you have the option of switching out of turn-based fights back to action-based, I also found that to be a nifty strategy in order to stagger enemies again when things got tough.
Before looking at things as a whole, I do want to talk a little about Calvard and the game’s cast, namely Van. Fans of the series have been looking forward to finally exploring Calvard ever since the adventures in Liberl where we got to fight alongside Zin the Immovable and learn about characters like Kilika and Walter. All of them make a return here, and while the series has never been known for its visual prowess, the art style really makes these characters, the entire cast, and setting really shine.
The Trails games handle world-building like no other series, and when I envisioned Calvard, I thought of it to be a really feudal and eastern-inspired territory, much like what we saw in a game like Ghost of Tsushima, but it was far from that. It was a refreshing surprise to see Calvard more technologically impressive than both Crossbell and the Empire. You see cars left and right, Van and company travel mostly via his pickup truck on the freeway, and you watch movies at the capital theater in your spare time. Whenever you visit a new town or village, you’re immediately shown differences in culture. Kabuki-inspired dancing in Langport, the rising popularity of smoking hookah in the desert, and relaxing in the bath with some tea in Lonlai–Trails through Daybreak did an amazing job highlighting the diversity in each area, and I’d argue that the town diversity is the best in the series.
This chef is full of it. Macarons are hardly affordable. They’re delicious, but expensive.
The dialog in Trails Through Daybreak is also tremendous, but it also suffers from the same issue that’s plagued the series since Trails of Cold Steel — for seemingly no reason, voiced dialog stops being voiced completely out of nowhere. It even happens mid-conversation and you never know when the talking starts or stops. We’ve been told that the reasoning for this is that they only replace the dub of what’s actually spoken, which means that the Japanese versions of the game also have randomly unvoiced phrases. I’m not asking or expecting every piece of dialog to be spoken. That’s probably impossible because the Trails series is known for having their NPCs say three different things per chapter, and that the writing and localization efforts for previous games in the series resulted in various forms of stress, crunch, and even suicidal employees. I just don’t see the point in hiring voice talent if we can’t at least get the cutscenes fully voiced. Either that or not at all, and the latter would be a shame because this game actually has some of the best acting in the series–especially from characters like the game’s movie actress Judith Lanster (Britney Cox). Van (Damien Haas) too. They were both awesome, but random points of silence just takes you out of it.
Let’s get back to Van. He’s the oldest main character in the series, and with that, he’s seen things. When it comes to callbacks to previous games, despite us not knowing him, he seemingly knows all about them. It’s like talking to an old friend about the series. Not only this, but his understanding and pride of being a Calvard citizen goes above and beyond the homerism that Estelle and Juna show for Liberl and Crossbell, without being a matter-of-fact kind of guy. Van is beyond chill, and his love of movies and hot baths really add to his demeanor. Throw in his love for all kinds of food and sweets, and you have all the reasons why he’s now my favorite protagonist in the series. Speaking of him being a foodie, the game also introduces a new cooking system that encourages you to buy all the meals at every place you go. It’s personal, but the dude is me, and I love it.
Aaron is one of the best characters in the game because his dialog is absolutely unhinged. I have no idea how the game didn’t get an M-rating.
As someone that’s enjoyed the Trails game from the very beginning, at least in North America where I was pretty much forced to enjoy it on the PSP first, there isn’t a single bad entry, but there are two main things that hold the series back, and Trails through Daybreak addresses them both.
The first of which is the fact it’s really hard to jump into the series. No matter how much NIS America tried, the last localized entry, Trails Into Reverie, was not a place to do it. Trails of Cold Steel III and IV absolutely were not a place to do it. If you started with 2022’s release of Trails from Zero, it wouldn’t be my recommendation (because you’re still put in the middle of things), but that’s a fine place to start if you had to. Like Zero, Daybreak introduces new characters from the onset, but that’s not why it’s a great place to start. The reason why I’d recommend Daybreak as a place to start is because Trails Into Reverie pretty much put a lot of the story and stakes from previous games to rest. Trails through Daybreak is a new beginning and all the nods to the past are simply those–they’re just nods. You don’t actually need to know about anything that happened in previous games, but you’d definitely appreciate the game more if you did. There’s a codex in the game that gives you an understanding of a lot of the Trails-y terms in the game, but they aren’t necessary. So all that said, is Trails through Daybreak a good place to start the series? I would say yes. I’d still recommend you play the rest of the series, but I’m not going to gatekeep and say you NEED to play those first. You don’t. You can play this, and then go back. You should go back.
The second thing that holds the series back is the fact that we’re still behind Japan. When the game came out a couple weeks ago, the sequel literally got announced at Anime Expo that day for an early 2025 release. From there, we’ll still be one game behind, but it’s also very possible that we’ll finally really catch up once that game comes out. That, in my mind, is the main way this series can really gather wider acclaim and finally be mentioned in the same breath as games like Final Fantasy, Persona, Xenoblade, or Tales. A worldwide day and date release would be a huge step for both Falcom and NIS America.
All this aside, along with the consistency that Falcom has had when delivering awesome Trails games (they’re all good), The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak stands tall as one of the best games in the series and one of the best games of the year. I spent over 105 hours to roll credits because I’m that sicko that does every sidequest, and I don’t regret a single second of it. I might even go back and get the Platinum on Nightmare mode thanks to New Game+ and High-Speed Mode still being a thing.
Celebrating 20 years since the release of Trails in the Sky, The Legend of Heroes: Trails games have taken fans on an intimate journey through its expansive and diverse continent of Zemuria. Whether it’s the fantastical feel of the Liberl Kingdom in the Sky trilogy, the cutting edge city in Crossbell’s dualogy, or the might of the Erebonian Empire in the Cold Steel games, the series continues to make players fall in love with its impressive cast of characters over the span of 10 games. Now with Trails through Daybreak, we finally step foot into the Calvard region, and it feels very much like a new beginning while also feeling like a homecoming.
Trails through Daybreak stars Van Arkride, the owner and sole proprietor of Arkride Solutions. There, he works as a “spriggan,” somebody working in the gray area of the law. He doesn’t work for the police, has no sort of national or political affiliation, and to take it an extra step, he’s not a bracer either. For those unfamiliar with the Trails series, Bracers are local officials whose sole responsibility is the safety of its local people. The Sky, Crossbell, and Cold Steel games each had local bracer guilds assigned to Liberl, Crossbell, and Erebonia respectively, and it’s the same case in Calvard as well. All this said, it’s not uncommon for Van to take jobs that could otherwise go to the police or the bracers. The main difference is that he offers his own service in between (with often higher fees) and he doesn’t have to report any of his dealings either. The man has the freedom to make an honest living doing as he pleases, as long as it isn’t obviously illegal. But the moral ground? It hardly exists.
Operating on the gray area side of things is what appealed most to Agnés Claudel, a promising young student attending Aramis Academy, the most prestigious high school in all of Calvard. Daybreak‘s story really begins when Agnés comes to Van with a job to help her find family heirlooms called the Geneses, a mysterious type of orbment (a device that allows people to utilize combat and support Arts, which is the term the series has used for magic spells). Knowing that Agnés went to Arkride Solutions with this job and not the police nor the Bracer Guild is all the more telling that there’s more to this high schooler than meets the eye, and this along with the plights of several other characters, including Van, are what really makes Daybreak‘s plot as gripping as it is.
While you aren’t a bracer, you can still expect some bracer requests thanks to an old immovable friend longtime fans should remember.
From here, Daybreak follows its tried-and-true gameplay loop of doing jobs and sidequests, receiving a bigger job to do to handle outside of your main city hub, finding out the job is part of something bigger going on in the region, and repeating the process realizing that everything you’re doing becomes an even bigger part of saving the world. Whether it’s Estelle Bright simply following in the footsteps of her father to be a better bracer, Lloyd Bannings looking to be an ace member of the Crossbell Police, or Rean Schwarzer looking to make an impact with the Erebonian Military–the foundation has always started simple and ended up being something bigger. In the case of Van Arkride, he’s just trying to vibe and make ends meet no matter who he sides with, but of course we find out he’s just as important to the fate of the world as every other Trails protagonist before him.
That said, doing these sidequests and jobs aren’t just about achieving high ranks as a spriggan. Whenever you complete a task, you also add some notches to the LGC board. The LGC board tracks the sidequests you do and decisions you make and gauges them into separate ratings for how you deal with the Law, things that are more Gray, and even how you deal with Chaos. Again, there’s hardly any black and white with the jobs you do. While some sidequests will be easier than others, this isn’t one of those RPGs where you save a kitty from a tree. Trails through Daybreak goes further than that.
Secret sidequests and questions to make sure you’re paying attention? Yes, the series still has those. And I’ve still got it with the S ranks!
One of the sidequests you’re on employs the team to spy on a guy who took money out of a cash register at a convenience store he works at. When we tail him, we find out that the reason he took the money was because he was responsible for a bike accident that ended up breaking someone else’s camera. So to make it right, the guy who took the money offered to replace the camera to prevent pressing charges. The reasoning doesn’t matter, right? The guy who took the money is still wrong… But it turns out that the person having their camera replaced intentionally caused the accident for the purpose of swindling the guy into buying a better camera than he already has. Also wrong. So as Van, we have to decide whether to tell the guy who took the money to be completely honest about the situation which would be the truthful and lawful choice (and he can get fired anyway), or we can encourage him to just slip the money back in the cash register–no harm, no foul, except that he’ll live with that guilt forever and probably won’t be trusted by his buddy ever again. That’s more gray area. I ended up going with the lawful choice after asking my for my girlfriend’s advice because I just didn’t know what to do. And as you’d expect, the decisions got more difficult as the game progressed.
There was also this sidequest where you see this little girl alone near the sewers looking for her sister’s earrings that she lost during a recent storm. Despite not remembering a storm happening recently, we offer to help her, follow her through the underground sewer system and see her just make her way through them unscathed, despite all the monsters down there. Eventually, the little girl finds the earrings after we take out a boss, and when we make our way up to the surface, we find the little girl again and she doesn’t even know who we are. Then, her mother comes and tells a story that makes us realize that the mother is actually the little girl’s sister (who lost the earrings), and the little girl that we helped actually died of drowning years ago. So the little girl in front of us that looks like the girl we helped? That’s her daughter, and that’s who we give the earrings to. When I finished this sidequest, I had to take a break. I never expected a sidequest to be that heavy, and there were more in the game just like it.
Both the LGC ratings and darker sidequests are subtle but meaningful improvements that help keep what’s probably becoming an obvious formulaic approach fresh, and the extra wrinkle of Van and his crew not being your typical defenders of justice really adds to the agency players will feel like they have when getting into the game. While you won’t really see how favoring Law, Gray area, or Chaos really affect gameplay until the latter half of the game, the fresh perspective of these jobs should keep new players invested while longtime fans will appreciate the tidbits of content that are a nod to the games they’ve played before. The game is just more enjoyable knowing that it’s not all about being a good guy, it’s not all about being a jerk, and you even get a job or two from Heiyue and Ouroboros–that’s meta in its own right.
Perhaps the most talked about change in Trails Through Daybreak is in its battle system. Traditionally, the Trails series has used a turn-based battle system where you planned around a visible turn order to build up Craft Points (CP) that are used for more devastating attacks to fall enemies. While Trails Through Daybreak still has a re-tooled version of the same same turn-based system, the game also uses an action-based mechanic where it’s primarily used to weaken non-boss enemies before battles–but if you so choose, you can take out an enemy right there. It’ll just take longer because you can only chain combos in the turn-based system.
As for the changes with the turn-based system, there’s a new mechanic called S-Boosts. S-Boosts can be used to enhance your attacks, arts, and crafts, depending on the drivers you have attached to each character’s orbment. You can choose to not use them, and doing so results in the gauges constantly raising with each turn. Also worth noting is you can’t use a character’s S-Craft (their ultimate move) unless you use at least two S-Boosts. You typically can have up to three when you start a battle, and when you use an S-Craft, that maximum of three increases making the battles even more intense.
The ability to switch between action- and turn-based battles adds wrinkles and an element of strategy that feels refreshing to players who might’ve started to find the combat dry.
I first got my hand at trying out this system with the game’s PS4 demo, and I found it archaic at first. The action-based stuff felt a lot like the Ys games, which shouldn’t be surprising considering Falcom also made those games, but it never really clicked that the action-based stuff was really best used to just stun enemies before switching into turn-based to make it all easier. I did appreciate that you can switch characters on the fly, and they all felt different, and it was also a way to build up their CP gauge without relying on them in turn-based mode. Eventually I got used to all of it, and I do believe I’ve been programmed to think this is the ideal way to approach the Trails battle system moving forward.
Shifting things over to the turn-based changes, I also struggled a bit. You no longer have a birds-eye view of the entire turn order. You only know who’s going next, and what status effects a character will have as the battle progresses. It’s really easy to ignore all that, and doing that can be your downfall–this is what made me struggle early on because I was programmed to play the game in such a way where before every big fight, I just made sure my entire party was at 200 CP so I can unleash my S-Crafts and end fights early, but the fact that you have to use S-Boosts now all but eliminates what’s really an exploit.
S-Craft spamming aside, turn-based combat also takes a more strategic approach with positioning too. Previous games in the series tried to make this matter, but it never actually did. In addition to trying to stay out of the reach of enemies, you can also position your characters to attack the backs and sides of enemies for a slight bonus, and you can compound that bonus with assists by standing close enough to another party member. I did the latter a lot, until later enemies in the game started using their own ultimates and arts to really make me regret keeping my characters bunched together. The game, especially on easier settings, doesn’t really punish you that hard for making these mistakes, but you definitely do have to take these into account for boss fights at least. Since you have the option of switching out of turn-based fights back to action-based, I also found that to be a nifty strategy in order to stagger enemies again when things got tough.
Before looking at things as a whole, I do want to talk a little about Calvard and the game’s cast, namely Van. Fans of the series have been looking forward to finally exploring Calvard ever since the adventures in Liberl where we got to fight alongside Zin the Immovable and learn about characters like Kilika and Walter. All of them make a return here, and while the series has never been known for its visual prowess, the art style really makes these characters, the entire cast, and setting really shine.
The Trails games handle world-building like no other series, and when I envisioned Calvard, I thought of it to be a really feudal and eastern-inspired territory, much like what we saw in a game like Ghost of Tsushima, but it was far from that. It was a refreshing surprise to see Calvard more technologically impressive than both Crossbell and the Empire. You see cars left and right, Van and company travel mostly via his pickup truck on the freeway, and you watch movies at the capital theater in your spare time. Whenever you visit a new town or village, you’re immediately shown differences in culture. Kabuki-inspired dancing in Langport, the rising popularity of smoking hookah in the desert, and relaxing in the bath with some tea in Lonlai–Trails through Daybreak did an amazing job highlighting the diversity in each area, and I’d argue that the town diversity is the best in the series.
This chef is full of it. Macarons are hardly affordable. They’re delicious, but expensive.
The dialog in Trails Through Daybreak is also tremendous, but it also suffers from the same issue that’s plagued the series since Trails of Cold Steel — for seemingly no reason, voiced dialog stops being voiced completely out of nowhere. It even happens mid-conversation and you never know when the talking starts or stops. We’ve been told that the reasoning for this is that they only replace the dub of what’s actually spoken, which means that the Japanese versions of the game also have randomly unvoiced phrases. I’m not asking or expecting every piece of dialog to be spoken. That’s probably impossible because the Trails series is known for having their NPCs say three different things per chapter, and that the writing and localization efforts for previous games in the series resulted in various forms of stress, crunch, and even suicidal employees. I just don’t see the point in hiring voice talent if we can’t at least get the cutscenes fully voiced. Either that or not at all, and the latter would be a shame because this game actually has some of the best acting in the series–especially from characters like the game’s movie actress Judith Lanster (Britney Cox). Van (Damien Haas) too. They were both awesome, but random points of silence just takes you out of it.
Let’s get back to Van. He’s the oldest main character in the series, and with that, he’s seen things. When it comes to callbacks to previous games, despite us not knowing him, he seemingly knows all about them. It’s like talking to an old friend about the series. Not only this, but his understanding and pride of being a Calvard citizen goes above and beyond the homerism that Estelle and Juna show for Liberl and Crossbell, without being a matter-of-fact kind of guy. Van is beyond chill, and his love of movies and hot baths really add to his demeanor. Throw in his love for all kinds of food and sweets, and you have all the reasons why he’s now my favorite protagonist in the series. Speaking of him being a foodie, the game also introduces a new cooking system that encourages you to buy all the meals at every place you go. It’s personal, but the dude is me, and I love it.
Aaron is one of the best characters in the game because his dialog is absolutely unhinged. I have no idea how the game didn’t get an M-rating.
As someone that’s enjoyed the Trails game from the very beginning, at least in North America where I was pretty much forced to enjoy it on the PSP first, there isn’t a single bad entry, but there are two main things that hold the series back, and Trails through Daybreak addresses them both.
The first of which is the fact it’s really hard to jump into the series. No matter how much NIS America tried, the last localized entry, Trails Into Reverie, was not a place to do it. Trails of Cold Steel III and IV absolutely were not a place to do it. If you started with 2022’s release of Trails from Zero, it wouldn’t be my recommendation (because you’re still put in the middle of things), but that’s a fine place to start if you had to. Like Zero, Daybreak introduces new characters from the onset, but that’s not why it’s a great place to start. The reason why I’d recommend Daybreak as a place to start is because Trails Into Reverie pretty much put a lot of the story and stakes from previous games to rest. Trails through Daybreak is a new beginning and all the nods to the past are simply those–they’re just nods. You don’t actually need to know about anything that happened in previous games, but you’d definitely appreciate the game more if you did. There’s a codex in the game that gives you an understanding of a lot of the Trails-y terms in the game, but they aren’t necessary. So all that said, is Trails through Daybreak a good place to start the series? I would say yes. I’d still recommend you play the rest of the series, but I’m not going to gatekeep and say you NEED to play those first. You don’t. You can play this, and then go back. You should go back.
The second thing that holds the series back is the fact that we’re still behind Japan. When the game came out a couple weeks ago, the sequel literally got announced at Anime Expo that day for an early 2025 release. From there, we’ll still be one game behind, but it’s also very possible that we’ll finally really catch up once that game comes out. That, in my mind, is the main way this series can really gather wider acclaim and finally be mentioned in the same breath as games like Final Fantasy, Persona, Xenoblade, or Tales. A worldwide day and date release would be a huge step for both Falcom and NIS America.
All this aside, along with the consistency that Falcom has had when delivering awesome Trails games (they’re all good), The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak stands tall as one of the best games in the series and one of the best games of the year. I spent over 105 hours to roll credits because I’m that sicko that does every sidequest, and I don’t regret a single second of it. I might even go back and get the Platinum on Nightmare mode thanks to New Game+ and High-Speed Mode still being a thing.
by Danreb Victorio
