Trails Through Daybreak II Review (PS5) – The Ark Rides Again
Trails games through the series have often been pretty samey. It’s the same basic structure each time, the same amount of chapters, they come in little groups where the location is virtually the same from sequel to sequel. It’s good to know this going into the series – they are games more interested in lots of dialogue and a continuing narrative and much less in spending the budget on realistic graphics or entirely new systems, mechanics, or worlds.
If you don’t know that at this point then you must be a Trails virgin. Let me really start by saying don’t start with Trails of Daybreak II. It’s a sequel to Daybreak I (duh) which came out last year, and while there’s plenty from the last game recapped, you’ll be jumping in mid-story. The first Daybreak however was a really good entry point to the series – check out our review from last year.
What I’ll say next shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone still here. Trails Through Daybreak II uses masses of the same locations, the same graphics, the same animations, and the same systems, and mostly just serves you up a new story, a few months on from the last. There is a little new ground broken and a few new things we’ll cover, but it’s largely a case of if you liked the first one etc. That said, they could have broken a perfectly good game with a terrible story for instance, so you’ll be relieved to hear that Trails of Daybreak II manages to surpass its predecessor in stakes and story for virtually its whole runtime.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Trails of Daybreak II starts just a few months after the end of the last game. Van Arkride is alone at Arkride Solutions, his grey-area investigators or ‘Spriggan’ business, which takes the jobs that aren’t suitable for the Bracers guild or the police. The shady jobs. His extensive group of assistants (party members) from the first game all left promising their return, but things have gone real quiet in the capital.
Until now. Suddenly there’s another Grendel, a man who can turn into a creature that looks suspiciously like Van’s own strange power, wreaking havoc and murder, and of course Van is suspect number one. Joined by Agnes and Elaine, they begin investigations and face off against the beast. What happens next is serious spoiler territory, but it’s barely even the end of the prologue. Queue new powers, time travel, a slew of fun new villains, the final Genesis, and a hunt for the last remains of Almata.
Trails of Daybreak II is a pretty straight continuation of the last game, but it does try new things I wasn’t expecting. There’s the same overlong script and too many scenes and silly movie shoots, but at the same time, it manages to spark mystery again immediately. It’s not just the last Genesis, there’s a strange time travel power now, there are two branching stories, and the Grendel has its own evil red version of your AI Mare, and there’s a hell of a lot that demands answers and powers the story forward. It somehow manages to begin feeling pretty fresh.
Groundhog Daybreak
For players who have also played Trails into Reverie, Van is joined by two returning characters from that game, which I have not yet played. Apart from Van’s own familiarity, a few scenes after they are introduced it won’t make much difference if you started with Daybreak. Returning fans who have played the whole series in order will of course get a kick out of getting to catch up with returning characters. These two characters are set up as ‘substitute Spriggans’ and from Chapter One onwards, had their own branching ‘B’ chapters to complete.
So of course things start in Edith, the capital of Calvard, I mean it’s where Van’s office is. Of course, the vast majority of locales are the same as the last game, but why would the city necessarily change? I sighed, thinking this was all going to feel very familiar. But within an hour or so, new parts of the city are revealed, new hubs and shops, new event spaces like the Grand Circuit for car races. I was pleasantly surprised that more effort had gone in than I’d guessed at.
And once the prologues over and Chapter One splits, Van heads to a new city altogether. So any concerns with familiarity should really be laid to rest. It’s a sequel, so of course there’s some. You’re buying it because you had so much fun with these characters the first time, and that’s what’s intact. The characters (Van goes off to bring them all back), the writing, and the interaction. The world, the locales, and most of the rest, apart from Trails staples, are new, invigorated, and refreshed.
Dawntreader
So, let’s talk new systems. Your AI, Mare, gets more screen time in this instalment, and has her own little minigames now. One involves a kind of virtual hacking maze for certain treasure chests, that while basic, was appreciated. The other though is the biggie.
Trails Through Daybreak II introduces the Marchen Garten (pronounced Mar-shen) a kind of expanded virtual reality battle simulator from the first game – expanded into floors of a dungeon tower for you to explore. The Garten is a little nod to Persona 5’s Mementos, a kind of optional dungeon, that you can use to grind levels whenever needed. I always appreciate these in JRPGs, even if I don’t want to 100% them, it’s always brilliant when you find a boss you can’t do, to be able to grind out levels somewhere else, and just come straight back.
The Garten also comes with expansions to your Xiphas, your phone system. You can now gather little data packets wherever you go, physical or virtual reality, and then have Mare convert these, very excitedly, into items for you in the Garten menus. It’s actually an insanely lucrative item system, which balances the lack of money I felt I had for a fair chunk of the game.
From Dusk til…
Otherwise, gameplay-wise, things are very familiar. You’ll take jobs as a Spriggan that flesh out the main quest, and often involve characters, politics, or organisations from the main questline. These side-quests are again so much stronger than they are in most games. They are never fetch quests – they are regularly involved, nuanced and grey investigations into things like an abusive parent, or a stalker, or blackmail, often with little in the way of a right answer. Trails Through Daybreak II rarely ever falters with these, and the Trails series as a whole has some of the strongest side-quests of all modern JRPGs.
Speaking of other JRPGs, a system that I rarely ever care to get involved in is the ubiquitous cooking system. They’re everywhere in modern JRPGs. Ever since Ignis cooked his pointless camp food in Final Fantasy 15, I’ve avoided them as a usually empty distraction, or because the benefits are very temporary. So it’s refreshing when a game has a food system that actually makes your cooking and eating worthwhile. In Trails Through Daybreak II the first time you eat any and every recipe or snack, you gain ‘Gourmet’ points which build to actual permanent party upgrade stats. It ties into Van’s love of food and constant talk of food throughout the story, and it’s a permanent game-changing incentive. Needless to say, I bought every food item at least once, bankrupting myself in the early hours, and actually invested a little time in cooking new recipes.
Dying Of The Light
The battle system in Trails Through Daybreak II has also had a bit of a revamp. It’s not ground-up or anything and you’ll still find the same Ys-like action system in dungeons that can deal with small enemies or stun larger ones, and then the deployment of Shards into the familiar turn-based tactical mash-up from the last game. The levelling, the shards, the Xiphas, AI cores, and how to use orbments all seemed very similar, or the changes were too small to make much difference worth noting in a review.
In combat, there are a few new systems worth talking about. The first is a ranged addition for all characters in their Ys dungeon stage, allowing all characters to do ‘Arts’-based damage instead of this being only certain characters like it was in the first game.
The next is dual attacks. Stun an enemy either before battle commences or in battle and you can then use two shards and your proximity to a party members to pull off a big two-hit Dual Attack for high damage. You were always able to make a second attack with proximity to your colleagues, but these just make it even better if Stun status has been achieved on an enemy.
All In A Day’s Work
I think it’s been introduced because something else has been removed. A bit of balancing has gone on between titles. In Daybreak II you are limited in how many times you can fire off your turn-breaking high-damage S-Breaks. In the first game, you could boost shards to max and for a good while you could spam these S-Breaks and make a real dent in bosses and the like – especially when they were stunned. This time around, each S-Break now has a cool-down type mechanic, meaning you can only cast it the once until your shard boost has worn off. Once it has, re-boost, and you can do them all over again.
I noticed most bosses and enemies remained in stun for a few more turns than they had in the first game, maybe to allow time for you to Dual Attack a few times if you no longer had any S-Breaks available. It’s a bit of balancing, and nothing game-breaking. There are probably workarounds and exploits that players will find this time around too, but be prepared that some of your bag of tricks from the last game won’t work this time.
The last thing I’ll say on combat is that Trails Through Daybreak II should probably be considered a fair bit harder than Daybreak I (a little of that is due to the reasons outlined just now). I found even on Normal difficulty, and at the correct level (compared to the Marchen Garten floor, for example) I was often trounced by enemies that got more turns than felt fair and did more damage than I could sustain and heal from without just then getting the same the next turn. A fair few times on the way to this review, I had to make use of the ‘make enemies weaker’ difficulty aid after falling, just to continue.
Welcome To The Dawn
Perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same. For Trails games and for Falcom as a developer, it’s both a curse and one of the series’ crowning achievements. The trails series set itself a bar for quality from day one with Trails in the Sky. It was a quality of writing, of maturity, of consistency, but at cost or compromise on graphics. All these years later, through eleven games in English translation, it has maintained a consistently high level of writing that rarely ever falters, a tone that gets better with each entry, and a uniformity to its world-building and locations, lore and magic, that is hard to top. It has always led from just behind, not reaching the high AAA bar of graphics and never intending to. Instead of long development cycles for each new entry, the release schedule has been largely consistent for more than a decade.
Trails Through Daybreak II and its predecessor mark the pinnacle of the series’ looks, but it barely competes with current-gen graphical possibilities. But it is not the weight class it’s gunning for. There are precious few games in the JRPG space that can match it for writing, depth, or consistency, and certainly not over that timescale. So, rest assured. Another incredibly confident Trails game is out, delivering some 80+ hours of drama, fun, and depth, without ever a misstep.
Trails Through Daybreak II will be available on February 14th on PlayStation 5 (review platform), PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.
Developer: Falcom
Publisher: Falcom
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.
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