THE ONE WITH VAN ARKRIDE!!!

Finally arriving at Calvard, Trails through Daybreak (or Kuro no Kiseki) is a much-needed breath of fresh air for the series.

Falcom really stepped up their game with this narrative, fortunately continuing Reverie’s streak of great character writing. This game truly felt like a big return to form.

Trails has never looked as good as it does now. With the power of an in-house engine and motion capture, Zemuria was brought to life in ways we’ve never seen before, most notably with its seamless transitions.

As for gameplay, at first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the combat. It’s a massive overhaul compared to what we’ve been used to for the last seven games. But as I progressed through the game and acquired more options to push the limits of the new combat system, I found myself having the most fun I’ve ever had with combat in this series. It got to the point where I even struggled to go back to the Brave Order system.

Orbments also received a big change. To my delight, Sepith values are back—and better than ever, in my opinion. Now, instead of trying to gun for the values of your desired arts, you’ll want to aim for the very awesome Shard Skills. These can do a myriad of different things, and trying to find the ones that fit each character best is super fun. It makes every build feel much more unique.

While the larger cast is still quite big (as usual), the core group has been considerably streamlined—and hoo boy, did it work wonders. The Solutions Office dynamic is INCREDIBLE, and it really brought together the feeling of a close-knit, ragtag family. I was genuinely impressed by how fleshed out most of them were in a single game, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for this group.

But while this is a very good game, it is not without its flaws. The main one I want to point out is how unremarkable the OST is. There are definitely some standout tracks here, but they don’t carry the other 80 or so extremely bland and forgettable ones. This is a huge shame considering the legacy Falcom’s games have with their music.

Other stuff would be the bland city layouts outside of Edith and the severe lack of side content—though I’ve heard the sequel almost overcompensates for this, so I’ll keep an eye out.

Overall, Trails through Daybreak is an amazing experience that every fan of the series should try. And for newcomers, it’s not a bad entry point, all things considered. There’s a lot to enjoy in this game on its own.

i gooned on shizuka and unmitigated evil

Great game. Can't wait for the second game

Cold steel could never

JRPG ensh1ttification is going full throttle. This is the first Trails title I've ever bothered to increase the difficulty on and it still feels like I'm literally just pressing the automatic win button the game wants me to press. They straight up tell you which attack to use in combat to deal the most damage and the "action combat" system is just pressing a button a few times to give you an even more insurmountable advantage over the enemy, so you only have to press an automatic win button 3 times instead of 4 to guarantee victory.

This, of course, is after Cold Steel made exploration and learning anything about what to do a thing of the past by simply clicking the quest marker to automatically proceed with every quest.

Writing-wise, I can see where it might have the potential for it to at least be better than Cold Steel's writing but I didn't get far enough to see if it lived up to that potential because the gameplay was so unbearably boring that I stopped playing and probably won't be coming back to this serious except possibly replaying the Sky trilogy at some point.

It's strange, because Reverie actually had decent combat, at times even forced me to use a braincell or two to win (this is not common for turn based jrpgs by my experience), like the limited turn battle against Cao. And its take on dungeon crawling was about as good as that of a turn based jrpg can get. It looked like Falcom was actually sort of on the right track with that game, wriitng issues aside (again, better than Cold Steel but not what I'd call great writing).

Between this and Infinite Wealth, I'm wondering if the JRPG genre is going through its own mass dumbing down phase in recent years like some crpgs did around 2010 - 2013. Or "streamlining", as some might call it. The e̶m̶b̶a̶r̶r̶a̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶l̶y̶ o̶b̶v̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ g̶a̶s̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ justifications that I hear for it are transparent nonsense. "Games are made to be accessible to people with lives, not dweebs who sit in front of a computer all day" - I actually heard this one on the falcom subreddit - a sub full of fans of games that have hour long cutscenes where you can't save and require you to read hours of in game material and talk to every NPC multiple times to get all of the lore lmfao. "People don't play these games for combat, they play the games for story" - is another one I've heard. This one is MORE plausible, but it's still very obviously devoid of integrity because all of these games have a ton of combat - it's impossible to miss that it's a big part of the games. Not only that, but after every cold steel release there was a part of the fandom that was obsessive about strategizing how to optimize their orbment builds for the highest difficulty setting, which obviously wouldn't happen if gameplay/combat weren't a major part of the games. Now it's nothing but memes and low effort sh1tposting.

Nope, sorry but it's just plain terrible, massively dumbed down game design any which way you try to slice it. Of course, if you like games where you can just shut your brain off and coast with no element of having to outplay the CPU whatsoever, then maybe this is the game for you but it's a far cry from what I personally look for in a rpg - j or not. And considering how much better Infinite Wealth sold than the rest of the Yakuza franchise despite having some of the worst writing I've ever seen and the same dumbed down "press the automatic win button x number of times to beat the game" nonsense as Daybreak does, perhaps the genre at large is only going to continue in this direction, diverging further and further from my interests. Yeah, I think it's about time for this lifelong jrpg fan to finally walk away from the genre instead of hanging around complaining about the rampant ensh1ttification and begging developers to do better.

Trails, but darker and more mature than usual. What's not to love?

Falcom does story with the best out there. Each game get's a little bit better on the graphical end, but come for the story. It doesn't disappoint!

Trails series is always been amazing and this sequel do not miss the mark. It is Falcom so i was sure it was good, nice story great characters, finally a main character with some spine and great combat, highly reccomended