Now I am a big Trails fan. I've played all 10 prior games at least once if not multiple times and even played the second arc - the Crossbell games Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure - via a translation patch prior to the games being officially released in North America. So I have supremely looked forward to playing this game - even basically dropping my reading on the train for like a month to play this game all the way through - and am not the most neutral observer. That said, despite being a huge Trails fan, I haven't always loved every game in the series: the last arc, the Trails of Cold Steel games, drove me nuts in a couple of directions: the games were ridiculously easy mostly and incredibly easy to break in gameplay and the story in the last two games got really really cliche and bad, as Falcom seemed to avoid taking any difficult choices and relied on laughable plot turns to close everything down. The last game though, Trails Into Reverie, was a really fun fanservice-y game and the characters involved even in the bad games were still largely very enjoyable (except for Cold Steel protagonist Rean, who sucks), so I still had hopes for the series. And Daybreak delivered heavily on that front in both the story and gameplay...even if I had some minor complaints here and there.
I'm probably going to spend way way too long on this review after the jump, sorry, but the short of it is, Trails Through Daybreak is a really fun JRPG that I happily recommend to both newcomers and old players of the series alike.
Really the main plot here isn't particularly unique or super exciting, but it's done pretty well: every chapter features Van and his ever increasing group of playable allies hanging around the capital city of Edith doing small optional jobs for other citizens, making moral choices about how to do them, before a main unskippable mission leads him to another new part of the Country where the main plot is taking place. And besides the job, you can also as usual speak to characters throughout the setting and do a few things: for example, you can see bits and pieces of 12 different movies throughout the story, which are really fun to see as they're overacted. And while the main plot may not be super unique, it does feature a number of genuinely surprising twists to keep you interested, with the tone of it being by far the darkest of any of the Trails series so far....and yet the game pulls off the darkness really well. So while the story structure will have you generally being unsurprised when the bad guy mafia Almata shows up to be behind the mysterious events occurring in each of the game's first few chapters, how they are doing so and what they are doing will often surprise.
But what makes Trails Through Daybreak shine isn't its general plot but rather, the game's characters are generally tremendous and you will want, once you finish the game, to spend more time with them. This has been a Trails series strength since the beginning, but Daybreak stands out even here. And of course, like all Trails games, the very minor-est characters you can talk to or overhear at various parts of the games all have their own bits of writing to give them at least a little depth and interest (and humor). But the main shine here is the main cast, and most of them are fantastic. Lead character Van for example is our best series protagonist since original protagonist Estelle Bright. He's a guy with a tragic past who has responded by making a living doing jobs - involving fighting, mediating, detective work, whatever - for people on all sides of the moral spectrum, even if he has a hidden heart of gold. But he's not just some gruff antihero or noir detective - Van has a personality outside of that inner moral core, and it's not just being a cheeseball who likes to give heroic speeches (ugh, Trails of Cold Steel protagonist Rean Schwarzer). Instead he's a dude who absolutely LOVES sweets, to the point he can be bribed with rare and unique dishes from new locales, and is obsessed with his custom sports truck and the new models of cars that are coming out of Calvard's top car manufacturers. He has friends from childhood he has backstories with, especially Elayne, who he used to date in High School before he dropped out for mysterious reasons and disappeared for 3 years...with the two of them going similar but different paths in the end: Elayne becoming a famous bracer (the law abiding version of Van's job) and Van a Spriggan, which forces them back into conflict and communication...and they have clear chemistry despite their relationship seemingly being over. Van's also so damn likable that he's got connections all over the Trails world - at one point it's a running joke that Van has heard of or knows of everything - so he's also not some naive hero who needs to learn about the world as the story goes on, which is refreshing after multiple arcs like that.
But it's not just Van who is an excellent character - much of the main and major side cast is excellent as well. I've already mentioned Elayne, who is not a main cast member but is very close, and she has an excellent plot arc of her own as we learn what really drives her as a bracer to try to be the morally just heroine of the people. But then we have for example one of my personal favorites in Aaron Wei, a Japanese delinquent type (despite the clear China-inspired setting he comes from) who might seem to be the typical such 18 year old boy: he hangs out with a bunch of rough and tumble similar boys to beat people up on the streets and loves to make mature talk (to the confusion of the team's resident 13 year old) and to go out at night to drink or see nightlife (at one point Van follows him to a strip club). And yet, he also cross-dresses regularly to perform as a female sword maiden in a local theatre, cares deeply for his people and only fights those he sees as acting to harm them (like the Almata mafia), and is extremely well perceptive in how he sees through people, especially Van, and tries to help them in between cracking lewd jokes. He's the rare example of a charismatic delinquent type character who actually feels like the type of guy you can understand being drawn to and has actual charisma....I loved him tremendously despite being absolutely nothing like him. Then we have other major cast members like Quatre Salision, tech genius teen adopted into a family by the nation's top scientist, who struggles when his adopted mom is away and some of the scientists he considers to be his family are acting coldly or oddly; Feri Al-Fayed, 13 year old Jaeger (teen mercenary soldier) who is naive to the world, and bumbling actress/cat burglar for justice Judith (also known as Grimcat in her alter ego) who is a source of much really fun comic relief in how over the top she is and how bad she is at keeping her secret identity. Not all the major characters are winners - arguably our second main protagonist Agnes Claudel is a pretty boring teen heroine to be honest - but so many are and the side characters, like Elayne and others and even a few returning side characters like Zin, Walter, Renne, etc., are often just so good. And while some of the villains can be generic - one dude named Alexandre is a real snorefest - and none of them are super complex, they're often still incredibly entertaining even in their evilness, particularly 2nd in command of Almata Melchior and the incredibly campy Arioch. The cast is an utter joy to be with, and it makes playing this game so much fun.
Also helping in that regard - and in helping carry the game's messages - is the game's setting: the nation of Calvard. We've heard about Calvard before as the other major superpower in this area of this world in prior Trails games, but here we get to really see it, and it's a fascinating and complex and diverse nation. In some ways it's a spin on France and America as a country who 100 years ago was ruled by a nobility until a revolution ushered in democracy (itself an unusual thing in this world, as most of the countries we have seen are monarchies, even if there are democratic societies down below ). Calvard is a big country, which features a wide range of settings, climates, and peoples - especially given the influence of immigrants of Eastern Zemuria (who are in the vein of Chinese immigrants, as we've seen before in the Crossbell games) and Central Eastern Zemuria (think the Middle East) You have settings featured within that range from a very metropolitan and Western seeming central city in Edith, a rural small town village in Creil, an Eastern China-esque city in Longport which is largely ruled by its Triads-esque Eastern mob group Heiyue (seen in prior games), a desert city filled with Central Eastern immigrants which is hosting a film festival in Tharbad, a technological marvel of a science city in Basil, etc. etc. You have a growing movie industry which plays a big part in the game, as well as performances of various different types by other cultures, plus just lots and lots of culture clash. As established in prior games tangentially of course, this results in sometimes there being an undercurrent of prejudice, especially towards those who are Eastern or Central Eastern Immigrants - a theme that rings very true these days in the United States. And then of course we have the nation being led by a recently elected President who is very heavy into nationalist jingo and the building of weapons and military might (although he is thankfully not anti-immigrant himself)....as someone put it on social media, it seems very on point for there to be a moment where this President responds to a national tragedy by announcing the triumphant build-up of the nation's military, even if there's no one to actually use those weapons on...
Finally, I mentioned Aaron Cross-Dressing before, but I just want to highlight it and other aspects of this game that make this game and its setting a remarkably far more queer-friendly game than prior games. Prior games featured male characters being forced to cross dress and being incredibly uncomfortable with it as a joke (not a great trope) and featured as its only LGBTQ characters lesbian characters who would sexually harass other female characters as jokes. Not good. This game however features the cross-dressing as entirely something normal and legitimate without it being a joke, features a pair of side quests involving two men with romantic attraction to one another (although the game has that subplot end with Van yelling to them about their "friendship" instead of anything more, which was disappointing), and features a number of guys who are interested in other guys. One of these turns out to be a major villain, but the fact that this villain is blatantly gay and sleeps with other guys is just part of who he is and isn't treated as a villainous trait, but just part of who he is. Being gay isn't a joke or evil, it just is (and one main character is hinted to be trans or intersex) which is really great to see and a big improvement for the series.
Overall the plot, characters, and setting for Trails through Daybreak will draw you in and keep you interested throughout, so it's definitely a high point in the series. Oh yeah and the music for the game is also fantastic. But of course, this is still a game, not a visual novel, so let's talk next about the gameplay:
Gameplay: 8.5 out of 10 - Falcom took the opportunity with Trails through Daybreak to keep some parts of the Trails' game structures intact but to otherwise largely overhaul completely the way the game plays. So yes, again we have a protagonist who will do sidequests each chapter to raise his ranking in some arbitrary ranking system that will award him rewards for reaching certain milestones (who is giving such rewards is never explained; nor does it matter). You have one of my least favorite parts of the Cold Steel games in bonding events - now renamed connection events - although these events now are thankfully platonic (the game thankfully does not try to again give its main protagonist a harem and instead these connection events has nothing to do with Van's two potential love interests...to the extent it even wants to go there) and are much shorter and don't outstay their welcome, so they're actually fun now. You still have crafts (special attacks) and arts (magic spells) to use in battle and you still have a game broken into chapters where as mentioned above you learn new skills, gain new characters, and explore new areas. You also still have quartz that you can plug into slots to improve and customize your characters, with different characters predisposed to certain element quartz...although those are naturally different in many ways.
But despite that shared framework, there's a lot changed. One thing that's new is the game now has an alignment system that allows you to complete quests in ways that add to your "Law", "Gray" and "Chaos" alignment scores, sort of like how Mass Effect has the Renegade/Paragon meters. You can add to each alignment score independently, and depending upon how high you get various scores, you'll get some small changes: the ability to team up with different characters in a certain point of the game, a slightly different boss pattern in the finale as certain characters come to help you, and if you max out an alignment level, you get to fight a superboss for another ultimate weapon in the final dungeon. You can't max out all three alignments in a single playthrough, which encourages further multiple runs though the game.
Also very different is the game's approach to combat. Combat is now broken into Field Battles and Command Battles. Command Battles are your standard turn based combat battles like in prior games with a few noted differences that I'll talk about below. Field Battles are a thing in dungeons for everywhere other than boss fights - now, you can in a simple combat style attack enemies on the field in real time and actually kill them if you do enough damage. Each character has a regular attack, a dodge, and a charge attack that becomes available after doing enough damage or getting a perfect dodge of an enemy attack, and the characters' attacks are all different with different properties...which will allow a player who puts enough effort into it to switch to the character that best fits the enemies at hand or to the character who best fits them. If you suck enough at field combat - and I am bad at real time combat - and the enemy does enough damage to you or hits you with a big attack, the game will knock you into a Command Battle with the enemy getting a first attack. If you're good enough at it, you can stun enemies on the field, which will then allow you to switch to a command battle and get a prospective attack. Or you can just stay on the field until you kill enemies, but that's a rough option for enemies with a lot of HP. You can switch back and forth between the two combat systems at any time, although the game tends to flood a lot of earlier dungeons with lots of weaker mobs to get you to use field combat...which is honestly a little annoying to a player who prefers turn based combat like me...but it's bearable and you can skip through these mobs generally easily.
Switching to Command Battles is super easy, and the game goes back and forth from field to command battles super quickly - no longer is there any loading screen to get into turn based combat or, when you've won a battle, a victory screen - the transition is super quick and makes the game flow immensely well. Command Battles feature an interface change that is one of the few unquestionable downgrades in the system change: now turn order is shown in a gauge up top with allies on one side and enemies on another which is not nearly as clear as you'd want as to how actions will affect the turn order....whereas the Cold Steel games turn order interface was pretty great to be honest. But other than that, Command Battles feature a bunch of interesting differences that are largely upgrades or just different. For one, you can finally move before taking an action in a single turn, so now you don't need to waste a whole turn moving so you can attack in a direction you'd like. I've been wanting this since the series' first game (when certain enemies could do it) so this change is great. Secondly, you can't s-break or take other actions to change the turn order to steal bonuses: while there are still bonuses that randomly pop up for allies and enemy turns, those bonuses are attached to those characters and can only be stolen by killing those characters (the killer will grab the bonus) or by using a special really hard to get shard skill (more on that later). This is a loss of a tactic from the series' beginning, but the series makes it because it's trying to change s-breaks, the series' limit breaks, which you could previously do at any time if you had enough craft points (CP). Here instead, you need at least two S-Boosts from a new S-Boost gauge filled up through combat or bonuses, to S-Break, so they're seemingly harder to use as often. Of course, S-Breaks now only take up 100 CP no matter what....so you can still use them a lot and I've seen that the speedrun for this game still uses them to badly break the game.....so this is more of a sideways change, but it does require a change of strategy. Also combat features damage bonuses for certain moves being used in certain ways (Flanking an opponent in the back or side) and offers extra damage for pulling off more hits against enemies in a row without them getting a turn, which adds to the incentives to use various attacks.
S-Boosts exist for another feature however. As part of one of the three parts of the new Orbment system, each character gets to equip a Holo Core - which is essentially this game's version of the Master Quartz. The difference is that Holo Cores only give stat and effect boosts when a character equipping theirs uses an S Boost, so they're significantly less impactful than Master Quartz (although some of them have effects that are very strong). S boosting also increases the frequency of use of another quartz-based ability: the Shard Skills. Similar to how the first 5 Trails games dealt with Arts, characters in this game can equip Quarts to one of four lines (Weapon, Defense, Arts, or Extra) and depending upon the elemental value of those lines, each character will have a certain number of shard skills that will trigger in battle. Shard Skills range from the boring "adds damage of a certain element" to attacks/arts to more interesting ones like "allows a character to reduce damage from another person" or "allows a character to resurrect once after death" or "adds a delay-inducing magical attack to arts" or the aforementioned "allows a character to steal turn bonuses from enemies", etc. They're not all super interesting, and there are a few clearly more useful shard skills than others, but they provide more customization of the sort the Cold Steel games lost when it dropped this system for its magic. Meanwhile, S Boosts increase the frequency that these effects will trigger; as such, who to use these S Boosts on and when can be a major factor influencing battle strategy. Finally, to conclude this way too long bit about orbments, each character is now limited to having between 7-8 arts spells equipped and to equipping specifically one Arts Driver...an item you can buy/collect that contains 7-8 arts slots for the equipping character. These drivers tend to have themes (one's wind/time, one's defensive, etc.) but most also have free slots you can customize to allow characters to have more particular selections of Arts to use in battle. It's a system that would be more useful if you didn't tend to use the same 3-4 arts more than any others in the end, but ah well.
Finally, replacing Cold Steel's Divine Knight (Giant Mecha) battles is the (very minor spoiler) new battle system that shows up at least once per chapter: where Van transforms into a demonic-like form called the Grendel that can perform 2-3 attacks per turn and has massively increased stats. Grendel fights at first seem interesting - with Grendel getting basically one new ability each time he shows up in story - but really just feel by the end like normal battles with one overly powerful character to rely upon. And the difficulty is thus way way reduced anytime you have him.
Really if I have a big complaint about Trails through Daybreak it's that: while the game isn't super obviously broken like the Cold Steel games, the game is still often way too easy, even with me playing on the highest difficulty from the start. Nightmare difficulty doesn't seem to raise enemy stats as much as it used to in the prior games in the series (probably because the abilities you have are less broken to combat them), but this meant that there were very few battles that I felt super worried about losing - I game overed against one mid-game boss once, and then never again. You can still be on edge on occasion against later bosses, who have a habit of spamming their s-crafts over and over, but you'll also likely have Grendel for those fights, which makes knocking down those bosses significantly easier. If you're looking for a particularly challenging JRPG....this isn't going to be it still. But even without the difficulty, the gameplay is still very very fun with a lot of customization to allow you to play and beat the game in different ways, so it's not too bad honestly.
Overall Trails Through Daybreak is a top tier JRPG for me, with it rivaling some of the best games in the series (Trails in the Sky SC, Trails to Azure). It's a super excellent start to a new arc, and while I probably no longer have time for a replay of it to really see every alignment result and the connection events that I missed, well I had a blast and can't wait for the sequel. it will have a lot to live up to.
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