RPG Review: Trails Through Daybreak II

	Do you like FF13-2? Then this game is for you! 🤪
	whoops! i uh kindaaaaaa accidentally booked our anime beach episode at little st. james island.

Where do I even begin here. I had high hopes for this game because (aside the dumb repeat fight ending) I enjoyed the first game and was looking forward to continuing my adventures. However when I went on Amazon Japan I saw very low rating and a harrowing review:

Unfortunately they were right. It truly ended up being a kusoge. 🥴 Anyway mild spoilers below of why the game is bad but also kinda spoilers the game direction so read at your own risk. ⚠️

Trails Through Daybreak 2 starts off with Van and Elaine having a FFXVI beach scene and then turning to the camera and saying “this ship is 100% the official canonical ship.” Little did we know that it all goes downhill from there until it got to the point where I decisively settled on declaring it The Worst Trails Game(tm). It has two big negatives on it over CS2, which was my previous pick for The Worst Trails Game. The first is that it’s loooooooooooong. It was about 75 hours to clear the game and get the little epilogue for clearing the Reverie Corridor Thors Academy Schoolhouse Thors Academy Annex New Schoolhouse Eryn Forest Phantasma Tartarus Mementos Tristram Cathedral Palace of the Dead Märchen Garden. There weren’t really even that many sidequests compared to the previous game making up all that playtime either! The reason this time was simply terrible pacing (with Act 3 being the absolute worst) caused by the boneheaded decision to do FFXIII-2 time loops. (Or perhaps FFIV-style “you just gathered all the crystals but whoops, Golbez took them again!”)

So remember how I made the joke that nobody dies in Trails except in Daybreak where they die and just keep getting brought back to life? Well they decided to take it 1 step further and do some kind of mix between a bad-end filled visual novel and FF13-2. To put it simply, they would constantly make our party meet a bad end -> immediately die -> our magical Sega Genesis time travel item would warp us back to a “safe spot” and we’d have a flashback that we just died and do something DIFFERENT than we did before. Whether it be going to a different cave, talking to a different NPC or going back a week earlier. The most convenient part of this nonsense is that if we somehow captured our shikon no tama genesis that got taken away from us, they would magically teleport back WITH us even if we had “died” in the bad end.

Definitely a monkey’s paw moment for us when our wishes of “I wish Trails games wouldn’t constantly require you to do homework for 50 hours” and “I wish the second game in each series isn’t about spending 90% of the time finding all your team members that were separated from you for a completely arbitrary reason” were answered with these time loop shenanigans. The typical format is a bit stale from being used over and over again for 20 years, but in retrospect yeah, it was still better than this. The main problem with the time loop setups is that it constantly undercuts anything and everything that’s happening. Any tension or suspense evaporates when you assume that any bad outcome will simply be reset. Any forward momentum gets undo when they’re forced to go back again. It very clearly spells out to you that nothing that happens matters, so both emotionally you check out but also you stop caring because it’s all literally filler now. That was the second big strike against it compared to CS2. CS2 really should’ve been a maybe 5 hour long final chapter for CS1. While yes, that means that like 20 hours of it were pointless, that still means that those other 5 hours did matter. I legitimately can’t think of anything that actually mattered in the story here. 75 hours and honestly none of it mattered!

So yea seems like a novel thing right? Well not after 23 god damn times it isn’t! I actually started doing a countdown on my stream and by the end we were at 23. When we did a count, there was actually a 24th dead end that we SOMEHOW managed to dodge probably because we went a certain direction that we weren’t “supposed” to go. So basically the game rewarded you for going off path and punished you for following the quest markers. 🤪 Because of this constant die-revive-redo pattern, it completely broke the flow of the story, and basically made me disconnect mentally from the entire thing. I have 77 hours after completing the entire story (including the Märchen Garden NG+ crap) and I still feel like it was a glorious waste of time.

The timeloop stuff got so bad that we started a counter of how many times we died and had to reset (we didn’t actually always die in these situations but we still called them deaths regardless.) We didn’t really think that much of it at first when it only happened like once or twice in a chapter, but once we hit the beach episode there was a time when we died more times in one sitting than in the entire rest of the game combined at that point. And then later on in Act 3 it got even worse when we had another session where we died roughly as many times then than in the (previous) rest of the game combined up to that point. There was one particularly bad stretch where I think we had to reset 3 times because the characters were acting dumb simply for the purpose of wanting to make the game reset multiple times (whoops, we only checked ONE of the cars that blew up instead of both of them! Silly us!) It became a meme, but unfortunately not a funny meme. I’d also say that this stuff was made even worse by how there weren’t really as many sidequests, nor where the sidequests that were there as good as the previous game. The only fun one that stuck out was the one that was kind of a continuation of the stalker quest from the previous game where Elaine had to pretend to be the girl pretending to get married in order to fill the stalker with so much NTR range that he tries to do a mass shooting at her wedding.

Don’t get me wrong, I still liked the characters. While annoying (because you had to hold and press the X button) the gacha at least gave some fun outfits and accessories (why no cat ears though?) to wear for free without having to pay for a DLC. The entire story felt so disconnected too because they would jump from one arc to another with no real smooth flow. For example first you were doing all the Chinese mafia shit with Cao Li and Aaron, and then suddenly you were on pedobear island traumatizing Renne about her past prostitution. I think it’s good to delve into characters’ pasts but it should have been better connected and certainly without all the time wasted dying and restarting the chapter scenes. I get why they did it, as ultimately it connected to the Lapis disappearance (which once again was just a random OH BY THE WAY flashback), connecting Swin and Nadia and Rufus and just generally trying to have Quatre and Renne get over their trauma, and give a bit more background to Cao Li other than “Shady mafia man who pulls strings from the background”. However, the way they did it, was stupid and poorly thought out, and the entire thing was just overshadowed by the dumb death time travel. Only the final ending (and I mean real ending not the NG+ garbage) where I truly thought it was actually well done and it gave closure to one of my ships that uh…died in the first game. 🥹

The entire game just fills like a huge filler, especially the character Shizuna. What the fuck is even the point of Shizuna? She’s like a god damn blue mage who vanishes and then conveniently shows up when she feels like it, can just copy anyone’s skills and steamrolls any boss fight that had previously killed our entire party. She doesn’t even have a real background and there’s no flashback or story or anything about her. I think someone just wanted a girl-Rean in the series lmao. It clearly didn’t work which is why Rean is coming back in the next game! Clearly, someone in Falcom just wanted to shove in Samurai-Waifu but they couldn’t figure out what to do with her so…filler character. Fortunately, I had once again bought the game in Japanese on Japan PSN along with the next game (Kai no Kiseki) so 2 games combined with the cheap JPY cost me about $70. I’m certain that the English version of the game will run you at least $60 for just the regular copy. This game is NOT WORTH THE FULL COST. It feels like a long DLC, it’s closer to Trails to Reverie or Trails in the Sky 3rd which is bizarre to me because I thought it was supposed to be a SEQUEL to Daybreak 1 and have a normal fleshed out story. Well, it kinda did, but it got buried by 70 hours of pointless filler (including a beach episode – but I always like beach episodes – but not when I find out the beach is a former pedo island and we die like 10 times during it.)

Anyway, weirdly enough the lack of the normal Trails game structures made it feel like they also in turn didn’t know what exactly to do with all the various party members. I joke about how Estinien is FFXIV Poochie (“whenever Estinien’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking ‘where’s Estinien?'”) and then this time Shizuna got to be Trails Poochie. There isn’t much going on in terms of story, and she doesn’t exactly have anything going on in terms of depth or backstory, but uh yeah she’s part of the party now so she’s gotta be doing uh something, yeah. That said the one good thing I’ll say about the game is that Falcom turned the knobs juuuuuuuuuuuuuust enough that they managed to shift Judith over from “insanely annoying” to “extremely funny because she’s so annoying.”

So overall I’m just incredibly disappointed how this game turned out. I had some people in my stream who had preordered the game and decided to watch it just to check it out and honestly my only thought was “cancel your preorder and wait for a sale cause this shit ain’t worth the full price.” The game is also SO long and I played on VERY EASY mode. I can’t imagine how many hours you need to put into this if you are playing Normal or higher unless this is the only game you plan to play in 2025 or you download cheats (which I played legit cause PS5 🥲.)

Now that all said, it was significantly better than CS2 in three important ways: it didn’t have constant 15 minute long boss battles, and it didn’t have a bafflingly long epilogue that kept going and going even after it felt like it should’ve naturally ended multiple times, and it didn’t have winces with your loli imouto.

TFW I have to use Youtube since I can’t embed Twitch clips here.🤡

I just hope that Kai no Kiseki is better, but seeing another friend playing it and complaining about it doesn’t give me much hope. You can find my Twitch highlights in my Daybreak collection, any videos that start in January 2025 are from Daybreak 2.