RPG Review: Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak

	I can’t believe it, people actually die here and don’t get brought back to life.😲 (Well that happens too, but it wouldn’t be a Trails game without zombie demons.)
	brb taking my underage coworkers to go see Golden Blood unrated edition

And so we’ve finally finished grinding things in FFXIV and have resumed our Trails backlog. I bought this one on the PS5 because Falcom was having a PSN sale which ended up costing me like $30 after the yen conversion. In order to get bonuses for data carry overs, I will be playing the 2 subsequent games in Japanese as well and well because I’m not waiting for a localization, that may be crappy anyway. After that god awful cringe Reverie localization, I don’t feel like paying “extra” for the Steam version only to be met with meme translations. Also Falcom has been considering using AI to speed up the translating which well kinda rubs me the wrong way. Anyway I’m waiting for a sale on the 2nd game (probably not Kai since it’s super new) but either way the yen being so cheap vs the dollar will be like a discount for me either way.

So first off, we played the game this time in Japanese because let’s face it, with the crazy exchange rate and the fact that this game is technically a few games old at this point it was only about $30 on PSN compared to $60 on Steam. Generally the fact that it wasn’t in English wasn’t a big deal except for when the game got very technical. This could be in the context of game mechanics or when everyone starts speaking in sci-fi technobabble. The former didn’t really matter though because we played on easy mode, which made the game so easy that the fact that we weren’t remotely doing the systems properly didn’t matter. The latter was sometimes a problem, but in this cases Google Lens worked out well for any sections where a quick machine translation was good enough to let us know the jargon that we didn’t understand. The other reason was because the Reverie translation was realllllllly bad. Now that was uncharacteristically bad, since the previous games were fine and from what I saw when looking at comparison videos the translation this time was also fine. HOWEVER, it brings me no pleasure to say that yep, Aaron is just as bad in English as he is in Japanese.

So anyway on to our story which while it takes place IN Calvard, we travel to quite a few other areas around Calvard as well. There’s this Arabian-esque and Japan-esque area which made me forget what exactly Calvard was to begin with. I thought Calvard was supposed to be the “eastern” area but it was more like in the middle and it was more like a modern city more than any previous Trails games. (It’s because we thought that Calvard was the far east back in Sky because Jin/Kirika are from there and didn’t learn that it’s actually supposed to be France/America until later on.) It was probably closer to Erebonia than Crossbell or Liberl in terms of modernization at least. The plot is actually very similar to Crossbell but rather than being Bracers or Cops, Van runs his “do shady stuff for money that you can’t go to the Bracers or Cops to” agency from his small office on top of a restaurant. Before he knows it though, he ends up getting a bunch of interns (plus a random freeloader actress) as he finishes his requests. By the end of the game we went from 1 to 7 and on and off we have helpers coming and going like Van’s exgirlfriend, Renne, Rixia, Cao, and all those other battle priest people. It got so busy that Van had to actually convert his truck into a van. 😹

For the first four chapters this was the best Trails game since Sky. It still uses the typical “first game” setup where you’re going around doing homework, but the shifts in the tone and the character types were enough to really freshen those quests up and make them soooooooooooooooooooo much better than pretty much every JRPG sidequests, even outside of Trails. The game actually leans into the idea that Van is an unauthorized fixer that you go to with the kind of jobs that you can’t trust the cops or Bracers to handle, which in turn makes all the daily chores you’re given a lot more interesting than usual. We only did the bare minimum amount of homework in all the previous games because the sidequests were generally either just bear ass quests or “go find my missing notebook/horse/etc.” without anything particularly unique about them. Yeah you get some XP or gold or whatever but who cares, it’s so boring (and we’re cheating anyway lol) that the reward isn’t worth the tedium. This time we did (or at least attempted to do because I think we might’ve accidentally forgotten to do one or two of them after picking them up) every single one because this time Falcom generally went out of their way to actual do something fun with them.

So most of the game we basically spend time just doing stuff for people and once they reveal the bad guys this time Almata, who are of course just leftovers from the DG cult + some royal family relics it’s quickly revealed that they are so utterly hated that even Ourboros wants them dead. 💀 Then we get our usual Seymour character, Melchior, who shows up like 10 times, then runs away. This basically continues and they also slowly reveal the the past about our whole cast – though there’s still a few gaping holes which will hopefully be filled in the following game.

A lot of people really like this game more than most of the Trails games because it’s “darker” but I think the issue more is that the game takes it concepts more seriously. Like a story doesn’t need to have killing in it in order to make it “good”, but rather I point to how the Cold Steel games feature MULTIPLE wars and nobody dies in them. Meanwhile someone betrays the mafia? They get whacked. It’s not good because “death = good” but because that’s the way the story should logically be flowing. Similarly Almata are just lol murderhobos, but at least that gives some kind of motivation behind them instead of endless “WAIT! WHAT IS OURBOROS AFTER?/Haha…wouldn’t you like to know.” That said it did make the story feel a bit threadbare because every chapter more or less boiled down to “twink Joker wants to kill people because lolrandom”.

Overall I was actually enjoying the game. Up until Reverie, I had to resort to 3rd party tools to brute force through the game because the grind was so bad. In this one though it wasn’t that bad. On very easy mode I was able to just kill quest monsters and a couple trash mobs here and there and make it through. I also learned that killing like 1 trash mob at a time gave shit exp and you had to find huge clusters of them but also clustering enemies together was kind of annoying? So I do say I probably liked this battle system the most and also it allowed you to ignore enemies a lot more easily: aka even if you bumped into them a battle wouldn’t start until you hit the □ button on your controller.

Unfortunately in an ironic turn of events, the pacing for the game got reallllllllllllllly bad during chapter five (compared to the typical Trails game where it’s really rough starting out but eventually smooths out). The Almata death game goes on wayyyyyyyyyy too long and then it being punctuated by night time periods where you can do more requests felt too much like the “sidequest tornado” joke because of the urgency of that element of the MSQ. And then when we thought it couldn’t get worse the final chapter had an endlessssssssssssssssss slog fighting trash mobs in every district of the city before getting to an almost anticlimactic final dungeon (the balance between the two should’ve been flipped, and the whole amount of time probably cut in half).

I liked all the characters (except Melchior and most of the idiots in Almata because they were just so stupidly shallow power hungry bored idiots) but again I do wish they had dug more into their pasts or more development about them rather than focusing so much on all the tedious fetch quests. Some of the side quests were surprisingly interesting and some god dark quickly. A bunch by the end got really boring but it was nice that if you did a lot of those quests you had this kind of final quest where all the NPCs you helped threw a sweets party for Van to thank him for everything. 😊

For example there’s an early quest where a guy hires you to help him track down his long lost sister. Sitting in the back of everyone’s minds is “why wouldn’t he go to the cops or Bracers about this?” Then as you progress through the quest and locate her, you learn that he’s not actually her brother at all but was stalking her and is trying to locate her after she tried to change her identity to escape him (which of course is why he couldn’t go to the cops). Then at the end there’s a fun little role-playing choice (as with many of the sidequests) where you can decide whether to turn him over to the cops or to extort him in return for not turning him in. Like I’m not going to say that the sidequests in this game were as good as the games with the very best sidequests (cough Baldur’s Gate 2 cough Witcher 3) but there’s barely any JRPGs that I can even think of that let you do any kind of role-playing like this at all, so these elements put this game miles ahead of the typical JRPG when it comes to how well the sidequests are handled. (And the average Western RPG sidquests too for that matter, look at the slop in games like Skyrim for example.)

I think my biggest complaint has go to be the final chapter. Oh my god was it long. It should have been more like 2 chapters, or maybe it shouldn’t have existed at all. They basically took all the bad guys you killed in the previous chapter and brought them back to life. It was so “not this shit again” and having to fight all this trash first just to fight them YET AGAIN which then segued into Van’s past and the truth about his “Take the Grendel”. I feel like they could have tied that in better without having to Zombify the bad guys again and at one point I almost ragequit because I couldn’t figure out why none of the markers were triggering on my screen (because I was so tired of all the trash fights I didn’t pay attention to the directions of using the stupid robot to find the markers for you.) So the game ended on a REALLY draggy note for me but now that I’m done with it and I look back at my 88 hours of playtime, I guess at least the first 60 hours weren’t too bad. It’s just that final chapter that everything fell apart and knowing that there’s a sequel made it feel even more tedious. Hopefully Kuro 2 doesn’t have this issue.

And finally I just wanna talk about muh ships. My main ship is Van x Elaine because whatever, they broke up for silly reasons and tbh they still both have the hots for each other. I can’t see Van with Agnes because of the age gap and well frankly she’s still a teenager which is just weird especially since Aaron keeps calling him old man over and over. I was shipping Dingo and Marielle but that ship sunk like the Titanic unfortunately. I also have a crack ship with Aaron and Judith because he loves older women and 2 tsunderes going at it is popcorn.gif for me. 😎🍿

Sorry haters but I’m on team “no romance mechanics in my RPGs”. You can have characters be shipped in a preset way, but get that dating sim shit out of here. And it’s a realllllllllllly good decision on Falcom’s part this time because it was bad enough in Cold Steel and would have ended up even worse because Van is a grown ass adult and a lot of the waifus are underage this time. That of course still forced me to google up in the very beginning of the game “will van still get a ffxvi beach scene with elaine even if i do other character bonding events reddit” just to be safe.

Overall I’m looking forward to playing Kuro2 whenever we get to it, but maybe not for some time as I am due for some repair surgery and I would like to continue streaming the game live rather than just playing it from my bed lol. Thanks to those who stopped by both my Twitch and Youtube streams. I plan to stream on both platforms from now on so you can watch from whatever is easier for you!

Ultimately the horrible later chapters do knock the game down a few slots. At first I would’ve put it right behind the Sky games, now I’d also put it behind Reverie as well. But still better than the Crossbell and Erebonia games!

And as usual I leave you with my Van x Elaine video: