RPG Review: Trails Beyond the Horizon

	I MISSED A SHIT TON OF IMPORTANT PLOT DUMP BECAUSE I DECIDED NOT TO GO INTO THE OPTIONAL SIDE DUNGEON, INSIDE THE FINAL DUNGEON, RIGHT BEFORE THE FINAL BOSS (╯°益°)╯︵ ~ ┻━┻
	trails within snowglobe

So the usual. It’s Trails. You’ve got the same cast of characters, same battles, same homework, same setting, same grinding dungeon, you know the drill. You’re gonna get what you came for.

First of all I want to say how I am ONCE AGAIN furious at the stupidity of Falcom’s pacing and how because of it I missed a HUGE CHUNK of plot lore because of it. Just like in the last couple of games, there’s this “grind dungeon” aka Grim Garten where you kill trash, roll in the gacha and get some funny glams, items, exp etc. However in the previous games (Daybreak 2, Reverie) even if you did not see everything, once you finished the game you had the option to just “go back to that place” without having to replay the whole game over again. Well whoever programmed Kai no Kiseki decided “nah fuck that shit make them grind another 80 hours lol” and because of this I missed an entire plot dump about Orboros and the background of the game. (Thank god for the person who uploaded their playthrough to Youtube!🙏) When the final ending happened, I was confused as fuck because I was supposed to have seen these scenes and lore to actually understand what’s going on. I had to have someone who read spoilers elsewhere explain this shit to me because LOL I BASICALLY MISSED ALL THE IMPORTANT SHIT but hey I spent like 70 hours doing 4SPGs, grinding dumb trash and playing in the Grim Garten gacha woot!

We were completely baffled by what was going on in the finale. At first we thought “oh maybe this is because we’re watching in Japanese and missing out on the technobabble?” But that wasn’t really it. Then I started googling around for spoilers-okay discussion threads for people talking about what was happening and were incredibly confused by everything that people were talking about because none of this stuff came up at ALL for us while we were playing. It wasn’t until I found a Let’s Play tumblr that more or less outlined everything that happened in each chapter and saw a HUGE chunk during their finale writeup where I went wait a minute, we NEVER saw any of this??!??!?! Turns out what happened was that earlier on in the Grim Garden we hit a blocked off area and assumed “oh this is probably the area where you go in the post-game section in order to unlock the epilogue scenes.” Nope! ACTUALLY what you were expected to do was to go back in right before going through the point of no return before the final set of boss battles and then that area would open up and you’d get to see all this stuff.

I don’t wanna keep ragging on every Trails game I play because I do like the characters and all the fun interactions but I am so tired of them wasting 80% of the game on stupid filler shit (including Shizuna who continues to be a filler in this game too!!) and then squishing everything into the last hour, including the possibility of missing important part of the plot!! The ending just left me confused and disappointed and whatever “feelings” I was supposed to feel I only felt confusion and anger at “what the fuck’s going on?” After watching this one scene about Agnes and her mother, it could have been REALLY impactful if it was played in a flashback before the final moments of the game…but instead I watched it in a youtube video after the fact and the impact was much much less.

The irony of these Trails games is that because we know that Falcom uses the same formula over and over and over again, we made multiple assumptions at the end of the game based on everything that they’d done previously in their games and it turns out that ALL of it was changed! We assumed that there would be a post-game dungeon (nope), that the point of no return would be clearly indicated (nope), or that maybe this was a quasi-mandatory bad end and they’ll let us jump back after the credits and redo whatever we needed in order to get the good end ala CS4 (nope).

The game itself is very similar to Trails into Reverie and Daybreak 2 (but without the resets….well maybe less resets 🤣). You do your side quests, 4SPGs, but this time it’s split into 3 groups: The Van Group, the Kevin and Rufus group and the Rean/Altina group. That said, the Rean group felt like the biggest filler. They literally had no reason to be in there other than to just shove in “popular characters from Cold Steel”. Kevin was kinda relevant, but honestly I don’t really know why we needed Rufus, Swin, Nadia and Lapis in there at all.

The multiroute setup was similar to Reverie but was implemented in a much more awkward way this time. That game used an even split between all the characters where each chapter was evenly split between the three routes. This time Van’s route gets twice as much time as Rean and Kevin, and similarly sometimes it’s a long time between appearances for them. This makes the entire approach in Grim Garden confusing as to which characters you should be using. During the last stretch we did in there we thought we “should” be using Rean’s team, because it had been a while since they’d been used in the storyline so they had fallen fairly far behind in terms of levels. Nope! Turns out that they’re not going to appear in the game again (and again, no postgame segment) and instead we essentially wasted all that time and experience on them when it should’ve gone to Van’s team instead since they’d be the ones doing the finale. Same with all the guest characters. Should we even bother using guest characters or not? Just way too overstuffed without any kind of consideration. Like in terms of the story it’s silly why the other characters are doing Van’s 4spg requests, but again gotta keep that overdone gameplay formula chugging along.

Anyway after watching the video, overall, I do think the game and story are interesting but the pacing and direction is complete garbage and they should really hire someone better to do this. I was already getting tired of it when we spent all of cold steel 2 getting everyone back or trails in the sky 2 getting Joshua back etc. A lot of these games could have been ONE GOOD game instead of all the segmentation and filler. Fighting trash is not “content” nor is it engaging or fun. I played on EZ mode as usual because I am here for the story but I waste SO MUCH TIME doing stupid filler shit. The only filler shit I enjoyed was taking my groups to the movies. Also you know they were REALLY stretching out that filler when they started having Rean’s and Kevin’s groups do 4SPGS!! They literally didn’t know how to fill in hours of game so they split 4spgs between 3 different groups. Wild. They could have easily just made the entire game follow a linear plot like in Daybreak 1 but adding the dumb side dungeon AND hiding important lore in there was absolutely pinnacle of stupid direction.

For most of the game the pacing felt fine. There was nothing like Daybreak 2 where we’re constantly getting annoyed at how the game keeps resetting and we feel like we’re making zero progress, or some of the other games like CS where we’re doing endless homework, or the Crossbell games where it’s time for a 45 minute cutscene where everyone negotiates trade policy. It was only in hindsight that we got annoyed at the pacing when the finale infodumps started…But I can also say that yep, like usual Falcom totally botches the pacing both within each game and within each story arc of games. This game was the longest one yet and the vast majority of the story is backloaded in the last couple hours. Because of this it doesn’t give an A-HA! moment when we get these revelations because IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW! but rather that we get completely overwhelmed as Several Cutscenes Will Play In Sequence and we’re bombarded with so much stuff that it’s hard to really digest or comprehend. I don’t know if “padding” is necessarily the right term (there is of course plenty of padding from the constant homework quests that every Trails game is stuffed with) for this but again, these four (I’m including the necessary Kai II) looooooong Calvard games probably would’ve been perfect as two lean games. For instance I still don’t really get what the point was of including a Rean route, but I’m sure if this was one solid Kai game that you’d be able to clearly see how that story arc is supposed to be contributing to the central story. Hell the individual games would still give plenty of bang for the buck if a full playthrough took more like 50 hours instead of 80.

And of course since the ending is basically “To be Continued” we have to wait another 2 years probably to see the next game (and by then I feel like the US is going to need its own reset 😒💀). Obviously my final say on everything is – well it’s the next game in the series you gotta play it. There’s no English release announced yet but I can’t help but want to tell people “just wait for both games and play them at once because this game leaves you very unsatisfied”. It left me unsatisfied, but I was already pretty annoyed at “reset” endings and this game was like “lol I heard you like resets so….” 🥴It’s so weird I started this series out as really liking it because Daybreak 1 was pretty good but then 2 and Kai just….fell off the cliff for me. I get wanting to have fun scenes with the characters, they are definitely important, but I feel like they should have really toned down the filler and instead paced the plot points better. They should have put the important flashbacks and story lore IN THE GAME CUT SCENES and not hidden away in some side dungeon you don’t even think to go to right before the big ending of the game.

As much as I’m complaining, let’s face it there’s still plenty of other Trails games that it’s still better than. Daybreak 2, CS2, CS4, Sky 3 for sure.

And now as usual, here’s my Van x Elaine video from Daybreak 2 and Kai since Twitch is being stupid and forcing me to migrate everything to Youtube.