The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II Review
Shizuna’s Day Off
Nihon Falcom’s The Legend of Heroes series has been a bastion of consistency as the long-running series has told the deeply interconnected tales of the continent of Zemuria. The developer injected some much welcome freshness with The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak, taking the game to a new nation and introducing an incredibly strong selection of new cast members as well as adjustments to its gameplay formula. Its follow-up, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II, ends up being a bit of an odd duck in the series. Rather than doing much itself to advance things, it puts the series in a holding pattern ahead of a game that does promise upheaval for the series, and is perhaps best considered an elongated, but still very enjoyable epilogue for the previous game.
Trails through Daybreak II takes place three months after the events of Trails through Daybreak. Returning protagonist Van Arkride, working as a “Spriggan” — effectively a hybrid of private detective and bounty hunter — based in the capital of the Calvard Republic is approached by Elaine Auclair to help in investigating a series of gruesome murders. Van is connected to these murders through the apparent culprit, a red beast-like creature that looks eerily like the blue Grendel form that Van was able to take on at key points in the previous game. However, their investigation swiftly ends in their untimely deaths, introducing Trails through Daybreak II’s primary narrative feature: time leaps. The leaps, enabled by the mysterious Oct-Genesis devices that were the focus of the previous game, allow Van and his allies to return from disaster to a previous point with some memory of what transpired and therefore make alternate decisions to change fate.
Once players have met a bad end, they get to go back and take a different path.
Trails through Daybreak II keeps a chapter-based structure from the previous game, although each chapter has a different flow to it, with the earlier chapters splitting into different parties investigating different happenings elsewhere. Time leaps are involved in these different chapters to varying degrees, but despite the existence of a timeline UI to illustrate them and the different routes, they are purely a narrative device. It is not a matter of players being able to find the ideal route themselves, they will simply go through all of the failure states until the successful path presents itself.
Most of the major players from Trails through Daybreak return, with the additions of Trails into Reverie‘s Swin and Nadia as well as Shizuna stepping up as a permanent, and hugely fun, party member. While Trails through Daybreak acted as a solid entry point for newcomers, the nature of Trails through Daybreak II’s story means that the game is very reliant on players having played the previous game, and getting the most from Swin and Nadia’s character stories is also reliant on having played Reverie as well. It makes for a curious juxtaposition between the Calvard games. Even though the first game managed to pack in an incredible amount into its narrative, Daybreak II simply does very little to drive forward the overall series. The introduction of time travel likely opens up some potential scope, but otherwise the advancements are primarily in minor threads.
Saying that, Trails through Daybreak II still demonstrates Nihon Falcom’s ability to create and utilise a fantastic cast and get players feeling right at home with them. Found family has long been a huge theme for the series, and that continues here, as many of the cast members are able to create incredibly strong bonds with others and use them for support. Van remains a superb protagonist, and his interactions with others never fail to delight, sparkling in multiple different ways. There are plenty of bonding events and conversations that help showcase the different characters as well as their motivations and goals, and plenty of times where it packs the emotional punches that the series does so well. Even though it might not drive forward any lingering threads all that much, the game still manages to throw in some intriguing self-contained mysteries, plenty of twists, and charismatically threatening antagonists. NIS America’s localisation is once again excellent, and the performances from the voice cast are still right up there, with the only complaint to be had on that front being that there could be more of it.
Shizuna enjoying her “holiday” is one of the game’s more entertaining themes.
Combat features some small changes from the refresh given to it in Trails through Daybreak. During dungeon sections, players initially engage enemies in action combat, trying to stun them before switching to the traditional turn-based system. The action part now allows players to cast an assigned art rather than relying fully on physical attacks, though it’s still very straightforward and primarily a complement to the main draw of the turn-based system. The turn-based system has the standard parts one has come to expect, with Daybreak’s system placing great emphasis on character positioning thanks to the free movement, positioning effectiveness of certain abilities, combo links, and a general propensity for area-of-effect attacks from enemies.
S-Boosts retain their vital importance, using a shared meter across the party and working alongside each character’s Shard Skills. Shard Skills are passive bonuses that have a set chance of activating, increased when the character uses an S-Boost. There are a major way players can build their party by equipping different quartz to provide relevant Shard Skills, such as adding elemental damage to an attack, resisting status effects, reducing an ally’s damage taken, and more. One small change does have a great impact on the balance, as characters can no longer cast multiple S-Crafts in succession, necessitating more planning during combat to account for the lack of the powerful failsafe, while there’s also an adjustment to the UI to better showcase the upcoming turn-order between the party and their foes. But otherwise, Nihon Falcom has wisely elected to not tinker too much with a winning system where almost any action is available through just a few button presses and players can swiftly unleash strategic plans with a supremely effective UI and control scheme. The balance offers a strong mixture of challenge; many of the regular enemies will go down pretty quickly and keep things moving along, although bosses can unleash some incredibly strong challenges. On the two easier difficulty settings, however, any decently powerful party will take bosses down with little trouble.
After being absent in the previous game, mini-games return to mixed effect.
Trails through Daybreak II suffers from a relative lack of worldbuilding compared to other games in the series. The game’s new areas just generally aren’t as interesting as those introduced previously. The NPC stories also feel a bit restricted; the first game did such a great job of its character stories and rounding them off that it feels like it has left the second game with little room to advance them any further. The Law, Chaos, and Grey alignment system also returns from the previous title, but has no narrative impact this time around, making it almost entirely superficial. It definitely lends credence to the feeling that it works more as a (very large) cap on top of the first Daybreak game. The new graphics engine introduced in the previous game works as well as before, making the best use of the resources available without trying to emulate the photo-realism of big budget titles. Important characters are all incredibly distinctive and memorable in their designs and there are lots of welcome little touches all over the place to help realise the world. Nihon Falcom Sound Team’s musical score is once again solidly put together, providing a strong mix of uplifting in-town tracks, exciting battle themes, and contemplative emotional moments.
After being absent from the first Calvard game, the mini-games that were largely a staple of the Cold Steel entries make their return in Daybreak II, to varying results. The game’s version of fishing is one of the series’ most engaging, but the other mini-games just feel an obligatory reaction to players noticing their not-particularly-missed previous absence. Meanwhile, the Märchen Garden is fairly comparable to the Reverie Corridor of Trails into Reverie, acting as a mostly optional virtual dungeon where players can use a preferred party of characters to help level up or gain various other bonuses, including acting as this game’s main system for unlocking costumes. It players a nice and easy way to level up characters, gain certain resources, or engage with the combat systems, but despite an initial story connection when introducing it and adding some extra New Game+ future story hints, it feels a bit inconsequential to the rest of the game. Trails through Daybreak II tries and bumps up the explorative parts a little bit, with Shard Searching allowing players to do some tracking during certain quests and find resources in the world that are used in the Märchen Garden.
While it may not be the most meorable entry in the series, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II still has plenty that series fans thoroughly enjoy. Spending more time with the memorable and delightful cast is never a bad thing, and even though there are elements that don’t quite hit the same or feel a bit superfluous, there’s never any point where the game is in danger of becoming grating. Fans may well come to appreciate its role in simply holding the fort before Kai no Kiseki comes to shake Zemuria up.
Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Lots of fun spending more time with the excellent cast
Gameplay systems remain as strong as ever
Great voice acting (when present) and music
Lacks same level of world and character development as previous games
New areas aren't particularly interesting
Fair bit of the side content feels superfluous
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