Trails Beyond the Horizon is the 13th game in the Trails series of JRPGs, a series of interconnected games on the fantasy continent of Zemuria (it's also the third in the "Calvard Arc" of this series). As my few readers may know, I'm a huge fan of this series, whose first game just got remade last fall (see my review HERE), but whereas that remake was very approachable for new players, Trails Beyond the Horizon is obviously not - just like the 13th book in a long running fantasy series is not going to be approachable for newcomers, the same is true here. Instead, the series truly embraces its long-standing epic nature here by combining the continuing main Calvard arc plot of protagonist Van Arkride (Spriggan/Mercenary for hire) with two new subplots led by former Trails protagonists Rean Schwarzer (from Trails of Cold Steel) and Kevin Graham (from Trails in the Sky the 3rd).
The result is....both uneven and often exhilarating. The gameplay of Trails Beyond the Horizon takes the gameplay from the Daybreak games and enhances it further with new mechanics that are real general pluses (only one of which is super broken, which is a plus for Falcom), so the game is pretty much always a blast to play. I really enjoyed the character-work done with the old returning characters (even Rean, who I pretty much hated in the Cold Steel games) and the game's side quests and minor characters' character arcs remain excellent. And of course the way the story winds up, ending in a cliffhanger ending of epic proportions, is tremendous and has me desperate to see how the story continues/concludes. On the other hand, the game's new three route structure, where you switch between Van, Rean, and Kevin's plotlines on occasion, as well as other issues with how the plot proceeds, result in the game's pacing being immensely frustrating, and the story not always really feeling like it clicks together. I'll try to be more specific after the jump, but the result is an excellent game that just feels like it could have been streamlined far more effectively and wasn't in favor of trying to expand far more than Falcom probably should.
Note: I play JRPGs in many ways as a power gamer, trying to tune my characters' abilities and setups to be maximally powerful even though that may take me longer, although I don't try to grind deliberately to overlevel or anything. That said, I also love the flavor and story of these games, which further impacts my play (For example, I refuse to part Renne from Pater-Mater, despite it not being her best holo core). The result is that I played these games on Nightmare with certain self-imposed restrictions on myself, which affects some of how I perceived parts of the gameplay.
Trails Beyond the Horizon takes place a little bit after Trails Through Daybreak 2. Van's group has recovered all 8 Oct-Geneses, which the late Professor Epstein mysteriously said in his journals would be necessary to stopping the end of the world. Shortly thereafter, Calvard's President Roy Gramhart (and Agnes' father) announces "Project Startaker", a plan to fire a manned rocket into outer-space for humanity's first manned spaceflight, and all of Calvard's government begins focusing upon the space program, seemingly out of nowhere. This creates excitement yes, but also unrest and confusion throughout the country, which Van and Arkride Solutions try to handle in the 3 days prior to the Project's launch. In the interim, two other groups come to Calvard: First there's Rean Schwarzer and his Thors friends - Crow, Fie, Towa, and Altina (and Mint) - who are invited to Calvard to assist with testing a mysterious giant mecha tied to the space program and are further enticed by a message from Rean's old master that he is in the country. Then there's Kevin Graham, Dominion of the Septian Church, who hires Rufus, Swin, Nadia, and Lapis to hunt down an urgent heretic decreed by the Church's saint, a heretic of tremendous fame and impact amidst the space program.
The way this all plays out is that, after a prologue where Kevin, Rean, and Van all meet at a Marduk training facility and after a first chapter that follows just Van, the 2nd and 3rd chapters - making up most of the game - are split into various "routes" that each follow one of the three protagonists and their teams. The routes are not divided evenly - After chapter 1 is all Van, Van then gets 6 routes and then the finale, while Kevin and Rean each just get 3 routes, and you'll sometimes go a while before a route of one of Kevin or Rean pops up again to play...and once you start a route, you cannot jump back to a different protagonists' route until you finish it (so this is not like Trails into Reverie).
The only thing that keeps Rean and Kevin's groups from being totally out of play for a long while is that the game once again includes a virtual roguelike dungeon creation - the Grim Garten - where every so often a new set of randomly generated dungeons are generated that you can choose any combination of the three teams to go through. The Grim Garten this time is a bit more like the original True Reverie Corridor from (from Reverie) in that it has its own fully formed and important story that is revealed every time you finish a section and contains a space for characters to hang out and do things and have new dialogue.
Still, while the gameplay of the Garten can be fun - and I enjoyed the challenges that the game throws at you to beat certain bosses in under a certain amount of turns, which required me to think real hard how to accomplish it - it, as well as the multiple routes and even the way Van's own chapters are structured - results in horrible pacing that just keeps interrupting the most interesting parts of the main story for other less interesting and annoying things, so as to really just frustrate you (the most notorious example of this is the final domain of the Grim Garten unlocks right before the final boss, meaning your characters have to make the in-universe choice to deal with this virtual issue right before epic events begin when they're on a time crunch and it's like, wtf?).
The clear biggest narrative thread is in Van's route, and even there it takes a while to actually get into the meat of that route, but when Rean and Kevin's routes intervene, you're often wondering why does this matter? And while both of those routes do become interesting, they often do so right at the end of each segment when you stop having the opportunity to play as Kevin or Rean, so as to just leave you more frustrated (for example, Rean Route 2 ends with a major shocking revelation that leads to a lot of questions, and then it'll be a long time before you ever play as Rean again and an even longer time till that revelation is ever addressed). It also doesn't help that Kevin and Rean's routes feature 4SPG sidequests that make no sense for either to undertake (especially Kevin) so as to further slow their plotlines down. And frustratingly, despite all the characters all hanging out and communicating in the Garten, they all decide for no reason to keep some secrets...but then the final arc of everyone's chapters has some of the characters knowing some of what's going on for the others anyway...but not to a full extent, which just kinda made no sense whatsoever.
Yet despite my complaints about the story and plotting of Trails Beyond the Horizon, there is so much done here that is extremely extremely well done. The interactions between the characters, especially the new groups of lead characters, are utterly excellent and they are constantly a joy to have time with. Connection events with them are fun, and they've even managed to somehow make Rean Schwarzer, the most angsty boring protagonist ever (whom I hated), into a fun character by making him the cross between a zen-calm swordsman and a nerdy history professor hanging out with his buds. He feels like a real complex person now, it's amazing! Kevin's team is similarly super fun, even if I had some issues with how Kevin seemed to relapsing back before his character development in his original game, as the Picnicking Front remains fantastic in their interactions and Rufus and Lapis are a joy to have back. Character moments with the main Daybreak cast are similarly excellent - both in the main story and in the connection events (several of which should've been part of the main story, but the game allows you to see all of these this time with ease so it's not the biggest deal) - and the stories of the side plots and the minor characters you can talk to each chapter develop in fun and interesting ways if you so take the time to invest in them, as I have.
And of course the main story here is, when you finally get to it, generally excellent, even if Rean and Kevin's plotlines often feel like side matters. We have been waiting since Reverie for the reveal of both Gramhart's and Ouroboros' three year plans, and that finally happens here, to explosive effect, to go along with the plans of another spoiler character who seemingly tops them all. I'll give my only minor spoiler here and state that this game does end in a cliffhanger and since a sequel hasn't yet been announced and isn't expected until 2027, we have a long time to wait for resolution...although with this game bringing up to current with the Japanese fanbase, we'll also get to find out that resolution at the same time as Japan, which is super exciting. I'm maybe a little annoyed that the game waits until the very final moments to reveal some of the cards it has been teasing all game, but the payoffs are big enough that I'm still satisfied.
It helps of course that the gameplay of Trails Beyond the Horizon remains incredibly excellent and the new characters and gameplay mechanics are almost entirely just positive adds. The game retains Daybreak's combination of live action "Field" combat that can lead into turn based combat, and institutes a number of mechanics that try to buff up both. So whereas Field combat (which I'm not a huge lover of since I don't love live-action gameplay in general) previously would become rather useless on higher difficulties against tougher enemies as anything other than a way to get into turn based combat with an edge, here there's a number of new mechanics that buff it up: you have ZOC, which allows you to stop time and get a bunch of free super powered attacks in every so often, and you have Awakening, in which characters' with super modes (Van, Judith, Shizuna, Rean, Kevin, Celis, and Leon) get to use those forms in the Field for as long as your 4-level boost gauge lasts, which allows you to do a lot more damage quickly and to make Field combat a lot more bearable, or perhaps even enjoyable (again, I'm biased).
Turn Based Combat features a few new mechanics as well. S-Crafts and Shard Skills now require only one boost, but using two S-Boosts will activate the Turn based version of ZOC, which gives the character using it two turns in a row (boss enemies can use this too, only they often get buffed versions featuring 3 or 4 times as many turns in a row). And then there's Shard Commands, which are basically the game bringing back Brave Orders from the Cold Steel games, which use s-boosts to either increase the speed of attacks/magic, boost damage to attacks or magic, or reduce damage overall. They're a lot less diverse in abilities than they were in Cold Steel/Reverie, but these Shard Commands remain broken - especially the speed boosting ones (which I swore off using midway through the game) and perhaps even the damage reducing ones, since it's a LOT easier to get the resources needed to use these than it was in Cold Steel. Further to enable you to use all these skills more, multiple characters now have abilities that provide you with additional S-Boosts and one little used prior spell now also refills your s-boost gauge, and using these abilities to always have resources is an excellent additional strategy point, even if you do swear off the use of some of the more broken abilities like I tried to do.
The gameplay is also enhanced by the new characters - or well returning characters making their appearances in this game engine for the first time - are truly excellent additions in terms of gameplay. I found Rean quite boring in Cold Steel in gameplay too, but he's a lot more fun here with Spirit Unification as a central mechanic. Crow and Altina meanwhile are super excellent support/damaging characters (Fie remains boring), and in Kevin's group, Kevin is solid and Rufus is just utterly a fantastic well rounded character with options for nearly every option. And a bunch of existing characters - like Elaine, Feri, and Risette - got some new abilities that in some cases (especially Elaine) make them far more usable. The craft upgrade system from Daybreak 2 returns, but the game allows crafts to level up through use too, which helps a lot, and while certain characters really need their crafts leveled up (shields start very weak otherwise), it's not hard to do and allows a lot of fun customization. Crafts are definitely stronger than Arts in this game - a reversal of how it works in many other Trails games - but the craft variety of even the arts users makes them still fun to use like everyone else.
The overall gameplay is not very difficult if you put in effort - as with all the Daybreak games, it really seems like they've scaled back nightmare difficulty quite a bit from prior games. But it's still a blast to play and figure out combinations of skills and quartz that will allow your characters to become super powerful should you so desire. The Grim Garten is kind of frustrating still because the randomly produced dungeons and objectives within are just boring and the way the Garten requires you to fulfill certain objectives in each "domain" (level) means you'll be resetting constantly till you find boards that will allow you to do that if you want to get the maximum rewards....and yet the final boss objectives often requiring you to win in 40 turns can on nightmare make things rather challenging and fun, especially if you're like myself putting on certain restrictions. Add in quality of life improvements that allow you to watch every connection event and to obtain items from the (sigh) still-included gacha mechanic so much faster than in the prior games, and well, what you have here is a super addictive fun gameplay loop, even as the story can sometimes drag before hitting its high points. I'm going to badly miss having this game to play fresh and will be tempted for a while to start up a new playthrough.
Overall, Trails Beyond the Horizon is another really good entry in this series, with excellent game play and bits of story and characters to more than justify the issues with story pacing and flow. Really look forward to the sequel.
No comments:
Post a Comment