The Trails, or Kiseki, series, is one that I am relatively new to. In 2016, after a binge of big PS4 Platinums that included Doom, the Witcher 3 and Dark Souls 3, I was about to go on holiday and wanted a nice fun JRPG on the Vita to take with me to play in the evenings. On recommendations online, mostly comparing it Persona 4, which is a title I adore, I picked up Trails of Cold Steel. It did not go well however, I struggled with it and bounced off it pretty quickly. Although the story was interesting and I enjoyed the premise, the game felt slow and sluggish to play. All the animations and movements in combat drove me mad and the story wasn’t enough to keep me attached to it. In 2019 I saw an advert for a PS4 version, and I decided to try again, thinking maybe it would be less sluggish on more powerful hardware. What I didn’t realise until I bought the game, was the PS4 versions had a turbo mode, and that was the missing piece for me. I was hooked, and when I realised Cold Steel was actually the 5th game in the series, I went back to see what I was missing. Now, 5 years later, I have just finished the 11th game in this series, Trails Through Daybreak, and my 10th Trails Platinum. So how far has the series come in the time I’ve been following it, and how time-consuming was the Platinum trophy? Let’s find out.
The Trails games are turn-based JRPGs, that lean heavily into the anime aesthetic and storytelling tropes. Set in the continent of Zemuria, each arc of the series is set in a different nation of the large continent and follows some of the people that live there. Trails through Daybreak is the start of the series’ 4th Arc and is set in the Republic of Calvard, a large nation that has been ever-present in the series narrative but never really explored before. Daybreak is also set a few years after the end of the previous entry, Trails into Reverie, and this immediately highlights one of my favourite things about the series. In-game there have only been 6 years since the series began with Trails in the Sky. Still, the world is in a time of change and the aftermath of the huge conflicts of the Cold Steel arc, has brought on huge technological changes, but it feels natural like the world has grown along with the characters in it. This is helped by the fact that although the core cast of characters you control is different in each arc, there are always guest characters or NPCs that you know from the previous games popping up. It’s a level of worldbuilding and shared long-form narrative that particularly appeals to me and it feels like exploring a real, albeit crazy world full of magic and mechs.
Thankfully the new party that you follow more than holds up by themselves. The main lead, Van Arkride is a really interesting choice of protagonist, because of the way he bucks certain trends the series has followed for so long. In most JRPGs, you tend to play as someone new to the world, or young or an amnesiac, so you have the world explained to you as you go, so the player learns along with the character in a way that feels natural and expected. Van Arkride is not this person, much like the player who has probably played the 10 games before this one, Van has been around Zemuria, he knows a lot of the major players, both Villainous and Virtuous and was involved in some of the older story beats before his game even begins. In this game, the main character is actually the mentor, introducing the younger members of the team he builds about the characters they meet and places they go. Cold Steel 3 and 4 had this too, with Rean being the mentor, but I found Van to be a much more likeable and interesting protagonist because he felt much more experienced and so much of his backstory is hidden or vague. It made a refreshing change of pace to experience the story this way.
One of the new additions to the gameplay that ties into this change is the alignment system that the game has. Throughout the story, and in many of the sidequests, Van is given options on how to deal with situations. Depending on your choices, they give you alignment points. These alignments are Law, Grey and Chaos. An early example of this choice in action is a sidequest where you find a woman’s stalker, and you have the option to either turn him in to the Police or Blackmail him to leave the woman alone. One gives you points for Law, the other for Chaos. Each of these alignments has levels, and although this alignment system doesn’t affect the majority of the game, it does offer a big choice in one of the later chapters, on who will and won’t be your allies, and what cutscenes you see.
The story itself is in my opinion one of the series best. Van is what’s known as a Spriggan, a handyman who is half mercenary, half private investigator, who takes on work from both sides of the law in his firm Arkride Solutions. He is hired for a job by Agnes, a student who needs help hunting down some family heirlooms that belonged to her great-grandfather. This job quickly turns into them encountering the mysterious group known as Almata, who are using these heirlooms to perform acts of terror across the Calvardian nation. Each of these acts brings Van and Agnes new allies as well as new enemies and the culmination of this story is incredibly cool and sets up the next part of the arc that will hopefully come out early next year. After Trails into Reveries story left me feeling a bit let down last year, its great that Daybreak is a return to form for the series.
There are a couple of quite huge improvements in Daybreak over its predecessors, and the main one of these is in its combat. Trails has historically been a turn-based series, with each game layering more and more mechanics and strategy to the basic combat. Daybreak goes a little further still, offering the option of both turn-based and real-time combat, and the ability to switch between them. There are some pretty big caveats to this change though, firstly, real-time combat is incredibly basic. You have a normal attack, a dodge and a charge attack that needs a meter to be filled before it can be used. You do pretty decent damage in the real-time mode, but the real strength of this is that it fills the enemy’s stun gauge quicker, and recharges your S-Boost bars. When an enemy is stunned you can quickly change into turn-based mode to do a pre-emptive strike and get the upper hand, the reverse is also true though, if you take too much damage in real-time mode, it will force you into turn-based mode but with the enemy having a preemptive strike. The other major caveat is that the game forces you into the turn-based mode for boss fights or other event fights.
Turn Based mode is where the meat of the game lies though, and is where some of the more interesting changes lie. The most important being Daybreak feels so much faster in combat. This is the first Trails game I’ve not had to use the turbo mode for. It is still there which is great but combat felt smooth and responsive, so I just never turned it on.
As for combat itself, there isn’t much to say about the actual turn-based part. You have your basic attack, your Crafts which are unique special attacks that often get boosted by positioning, you have your Arts which are spells and when you are positioned close to an ally, they will do a nice follow-up attack on your basic strikes. Like most JRPS though, the meat is in the preparation.
The Trails games use a system that is very reminiscent of Materia from FF7. You get Quartz which gives you stat boosts, like Attack UP, or HP UP but also has an elemental value to them. In the older games combining these quarts gave you access to Arts when you reach a certain threshold, like learning the healing Art Tear when you have Water to level 2 or something. It was something I always liked because there had to be a balance between boosting your stats and having access to spells. Cold Steel did this differently, with Quartz being the spells themselves but each one giving you a stat boost. It made it easier to specialise characters in different ways but, especially in Reverie meant you could build some insanely powerful characters.
Daybreak changes things yet again though and in a way I’m not entirely sure I liked. It has gone back to Sky’s quartz, being stat boosts, but now these don’t give you access to spells, they give you access to Skills. These skills will randomly activate in battle to give you a little boost. An example of this is if you have enough Earth aspected Quartz, like Defense UP, sometimes you will put a shield on an ally when they are attacked. The problem was these never felt really powerful, except for one big exception a skill called Ark Feather, which had a chance of activating when you cast an art and would do a follow-up attack that could delay the target’s turn.
The arts themselves are assigned separately, in items called Drivers and Plugins. Equipping these to a character lets them cast the specific art, and at the beginning of the game, it felt like I was quite limited in what I could cast. It was never bad enough for me to hate the system, but it just felt like, it had narrowed down what kind of builds you could make for each character.
Graphically Trails Through Daybreak is a marked improvement, but it still has a lot of jank to it. It’s part of the charm of playing a niche, not triple-A RPG, and in fairness, its original release was a cross-gen PS4 game, so I can’t blame it too much for looking like a PS4 game. The areas you visit and the art direction are very good though, from the modern cityscape of Edith where you spend most of your time to the desert oasis city of Tharbad, there are a lot of cool locations to see. I do wish some of the early game dungeons had a bit more variety to them though. I know they are all in the underground part of a metropolis but still, a little more colour wouldn’t have hurt. For the most part, the game does run pretty well, which I would expect from a PS4 game running on the PS5, but there are some noticeable slowdowns in combat, especially when there are lots of effects on the screen.
Traditionally, the Trails games are long affairs, and their Platinums follow this pattern, with most of them having very similar trophy lists. Daybreak is no exception to this habit but there are some changes to the completionist level that I did appreciate. In older games, you have to use a skill or item to scan enemies to add them to your bestiary for trophies but no longer! Now just fighting them is enough to do the job which is a huge change for the list. You also don’t have to open all of the 224 treasure chests this time around, only 150 of them. That’s still quite a lot, but it is a huge improvement and means you don’t have to have a guide open the whole time.
The remainder of the trophy list is long but fairly straightforward, finish the story, complete every side quest perfectly, and find and eat every food item, typical completionist stuff. There is an in-game achievement list that you need to complete but most of these also cover other trophies anyway. There are some in the list that are labelled EX and these can be ignored unless you want the in-game rewards. There are of course a few that you really should look out for though as you play.
Firstly you need to get each of Van’s alignment levels to the maximum of 5. There are a limited number of options to get points for them, and there aren’t enough to max them all in one playthrough. At the end of my first playthrough, I had maxed Law and Grey, with Chaos still being at level 1. You do have to play the game on Nightmare difficulty for another trophy, and this is much easier if you do it on New Game Plus, so as long as you remember to focus on each one til it gets to level 5 you should be fine.
You also get a Holo core for getting each alignment to Level 3. Holo Cores are equipable accessories in your Orbments that change the stat boosts you get when you use the S-Boost meter. The best one of these is the Chaos one as it gives a huge damage boost to Van, so it might be best to go for this first. There is also a trophy for getting all of these but if you do all of the sidequests none are missable.
In between major story beats you have free time sections, where you can spend time with members of your party or Van’s friends to raise their connection level. There is a trophy for raising everyone to Max, which again needs more than one playthrough. You can get very close though by buying them gifts, of which you need to give 20 for a trophy anyway, and by going to the cinema with them. You need to watch every movie for a trophy but you also need to buy the movie brochure at the end of the game. If you have seen and bought all 12 brochures there is an NPC in the riverside area in the final chapter of the game that will give you an item in exchange for them. This can be used to craft 1 character’s Ultimate Weapon, which will give you another trophy. You also need to visit the Sauna in every chapter, try and do this and the cinema every chance you get. There are also saunas to visit in Chapter 3, and the Intermission. Visiting all of them will get you another trophy.
The only real combat trophies to look out for are achieving a 100-hit chain, and getting a 4x tactical bonus. These can be quite tough if you aren’t aiming for them. For the Chain Smoker trophy try and use the Arts Cataract Wave or Aerial Dust or clustered groups of enemies. These Arts hit multiple times, and if you have Quartz equipped to speed up casting of wind or water arts, as well as the Ark Feather skill, you can hopefully get it quite easily on a group of 4 enemies.
The tactical bonus trophy, Wombo combo, is harder to get. Different achievements in combat earn a fixed percentage bonus that you need to combine to make 4.0%. The best way to do this is to find a group of at least 5 enemies, enter combat in real-time mode, do a perfect dodge, switch characters, stun an enemy then switch to turn-based. Use three items, don’t take any damage, get a follow-up attack, and use a positional craft. Then finish a group of enemies off with your S-Craft. This should be enough for the trophy. As a side note, in the in-game achievement list, there is an entry for reaching a 5 times multiplier. This is meant to be an EX achievement and can be ignored but for some reason is missing the marker. I got the platinum without earning that so don’t worry about it.
The last trophies I earned are all related to the Alignment system, and Chapter 5. Near the beginning of the chapter, you will get a choice as I mentioned before of who to ally yourselves with. Your options depend on your alignment, and which have achieved level 3. If none are level 3 the game will default to Law. There is also a fourth choice, that requires your levels of Law and Chaos to add up to more than 5. Once you’ve made your choice you are locked to those allies for the whole chapter and there is a trophy for finishing the chapter with each group. This does mean playing through Chapter 5 at least 4 times, but what I did was skip through it on very easy mode after my second playthrough and the chapter took me around 20 minutes.
Once you have done all of this, you will earn the Platinum Trophy, The Legend of Heroes.
It is no surprise really that I enjoyed Trails Through Daybreak. I love JRPGs, I like anime, and I love the worldbuilding the series is known for, and while it hasn’t taken the spot of my favourite game in the series, it’s definitely on the upper end of the scale. I like Van as a character, and the story that Daybreak builds is fantastical nonsense but I love it. It felt so good to be back in Zemuria, especially after being a little let down by the last game in the series. However, Like Cold Steel, I think Daybreak is one of the best places to jump in if you haven’t played the series before, and there are enough hints and mystery that it will probably encourage you to go back and play them all the same way Cold Steel did for me in 2019. I can’t wait to see what is next for Arkride Solutions when Daybreak’s sequel comes out.
Leave a Reply