In any long running game series, there are inevitably going to be titles that stand as hotly debated weak links. Trails is no exception to this, with some of its more contemporary titles like Cold Steel IV being particularly big spots of controversy. Today’s title, however, sticks out even among this category. Well before the game came to the west people were already dooming and glooming about its dip in quality, which is incredibly surprising seeing as the preceding game was so well received. I’m something of a Trails contrarian though, and while my expectations for today’s title were fairly low even before discussion picked up, the controversy only made me more curious. After another 50 hour romp through Calvard, I’m ready to share my thoughts once more!

Developed by Nihon Falcom, published by NIS America, and released in February of 2025, Trails Through Daybreak II is a action/turn-based hybrid RPG available on Steam, PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch. Its premise involves an underworld fixer being swept up in a serial murder investigation filled with shadows of his previous adventures and time traveling shenanigans. Players interact with the game through hybrid combat, environment exploration, equipment upkeep, a variety of mini games, and a lot of cutscenes. Note that I played the Steam version for this review.

The story of Trails Through Daybreak II takes place in the Republic of Calvard two months after the previous game and follows Van Arkride. The tale begins with the bracer Elaine Auclair informing Van that a series of murders have happened in Edith, and out of concern for Van warns him that the suspect looks eerily similar to the Grendel that Van uses. The two set off to confront this crimson beast only to meet an untimely death at its hands, but the power of the Genesis somehow rewinds time and events play out in a way that prevents the loss of their lives. From here it’s up to Van, Elaine, his assistant Agnes Claudel, and many others to track down the culprit of the murders, tie the loose ends of Almata’s downfall, and ultimately bring peace to Edith before word of the horrors spreads to the public.

The opening hours of Daybreak II are actually quite strong. It has an interesting premise filled with mystery to hook you in, Van is significantly less insufferable than before, and Act I has quite engaging storytelling overall. This made it all the more devastating that from Act II onwards the writing falls right off a cliff. Just about every section of the game’s story starting from Act II is riddled with some combination of tedious roadblocks, unsatisfying conflict resolution, or just generally underdeveloped ideas. There are so many options to prove my point, from the absolute buffoonery that was the Heiyue subplot which advances without any meaningful input from the protagonists (INCLUDING Aaron Wei) yet eats up so much screen time, or the total drag that was Nemeth Island as a whole. But for the sake of time I’ll narrow in on two other topics which represent the game’s most severe issues.

The first thing I’d like to focus on is the time travel aspect, also referred to as the Dead Ends. This particular system promises a story where the player’s actions can cause the heroes to mess up big time, and part of the fun will be navigating the game in your own way to see how many or few Dead Ends you come across. The first few times it happens in the Prologue and Act I were pretty forced, but I saw it as necessary to give the player and the characters time to acclimate to its presence. As the game goes on however, it becomes abundantly clear that the branching timeline is an illusion, and you are going to be made to see every single Dead End before the credits roll. This not only absolutely massacres the pacing of later chapters, it’s just plain terrible execution on a concept other games have been doing for years. Visual novels for instance are known for brutal premature endings, but actually seeing those endings is fun and surprising because you know that it was your choices that brought you there. How Daybreak II manages to entirely avoid giving the player any meaningful interaction in the most obvious place possible is absolutely baffling, and reeks of a desperate attempt to pad out the runtime. 

The other issue is born of a more specific event in the story but is emblematic of a wider problem. One of the primary mysteries running though the game is the identity of The Gardenmaster, a villain who spends most of the game pulling the crimson Grendel’s strings for nefarious purposes. When his real identity is finally revealed, the game plays it up as a massive revelation which forces the protagonists to confront a dark side to the ideals that birthed the Republic. A really, really interesting idea with one minor problem: this person was not built up to in the slightest, nor do they explain what his ideals actually are in that scene. I was of course very confused by all this, but then I remembered that with Aramis Academy now being explorable in-game. Maybe I could research this character that way! So I went to the library, and there was a book that covered this character. You wanna know what I found in it? A table of contents which explains everything the main story does (that is to say, nothing), and no actual text.

A TABLE OF CONTENTS. WITH NO NEW INFO.

This is what absolutely devastated me about Daybreak II as a narrative and retroactively the previous game: it refuses to do any real worldbuilding despite being part of a series whose whole appeal is its painstakingly fleshed out setting. It genuinely feels like 80% of all lore in this game is either completely surface level with nothing to say, or actively contradicted by what the rest of the game shows. This is absolutely unacceptable and it almost kills any excitement I have looking forward to Kai no Kiseki, because if the writing and worldbuilding are handled like this game then it’s going to be pure misery. On the whole Daybreak II’s writing is a confused mess, and the sad part is its greatest sin was getting me invested for a brief moment. Its best ideas and promises are abandoned in favor of bloated time-stalling, and I can’t help being totally let down.

If you’ll allow me one last diatribe, I have something of an obligation to give a few quick words on the handling of racial politics in Daybreak II, seeing as I previously tore into Falcom about this in the longest article I’ve ever written. I’ll begin this section by assuring you that the content surrounding this topic in the game is still not impressive, largely because it continues to say one thing (racism is rampant) whilst showing another (relatively racially harmonious society occasionally intruded upon by a small movement). The lack of any racism in Messeldam completely contradicts the assertion that Northern Calvard is supposed to be the hotbed for this issue, and the topic still desperately needs some dedicated screen time overall. Not to mention the decision to use “white” people as the bad guys in a European inspired setting is a notion that has only soured further in recent times (do NOT look up anything about the situation in Europe unless you want your day to be ruined). With all that said, I do think the depiction is an overall improvement in Daybreak II. The anti-immigration faction actually gets to do a few things during the main story, and while they’re a small presence they at least lend the anxieties expressed by some of the characters a level of believability. I’d even go so far as to say that the scene in Act II-B’s Dead End had genuine nuance, as the terrorist leader actually makes logical decisions and doesn’t act like an evil caricature (or at least less of a caricature than I expected). I still think Trails would be best served moving away from this topic entirely, but if they insist then I hope they learn from their improvements here. I’m not looking for a game that glorifies racism, but I do expect a game that treats the subject with proper dignity beyond easily digestible oversimplifications.

Moving along to the gameplay side of things, Trails Through Daybreak II is unsurprisingly based on the first Daybreak game pretty heavily, but there are some notable improvements. Action combat has been expanded to include usable Arts as a part of the player’s repertoire, and a perfect dodge system was added which allows you to switch to another character and gain a boost for a set duration. The Arts honestly didn’t feel worth using most of the time since they cost EP for benefits better covered by switching to a character with arts-damage basic attacks, but perfect dodging was useful and impactful in making the action combat more engaging. It still takes a back seat to the core turn-based system, but it at least encouraged me to clean up weaker enemies purely in action mode more often. Speaking of the turn-based combat, the S-Craft spam has been removed such that you can now only use your best move once per Boost. In its place is the new EX Chain mechanic, where if you trigger an SCLM Chain off of an attack or Craft while the enemy is stunned and you are Boosted, a powerful follow-up strike occurs. If that mechanic sounds like a mouthful that’s because it is, but in practice it actually manages to unite the many aspects of Daybreak II’s combat into one central win condition, and I think it’s great. Working to build the enemy stun bars, managing your Boost gauge so that you’ll have enough to lay in on the enemy when they are stunned, positioning your squad with a balance of spreading out to avoid AOEs while staying close enough to pivot to SCLM range when the time comes, it’s all brought to the forefront with such a simple addition. I daresay that this might be one of Trails’ most well thought out combat systems to date, and managed to keep me engaged in spite of everything.

As far as exploration goes, the core mechanics of navigating the areas to find treasures, fight enemies, and solve requests is all there, but there are a mixture of changes both good and bad to discuss. The first one worth mentioning is the chapter structure, as the earlier acts of the game can actually be played in whatever order you like, between either an Edith-focused section with characters like Swin and Agnes, or another story elsewhere with Van. It’s not a major change, but it’s actually pretty nice to play through Act I and then get to decide whether you want to check in with the other party or keep the momentum with your current team. No matter what you do however, there will be an entire side mode vying for your attention called Marchen Garten, which gives you the opportunity to use all of your unlocked characters in a procedurally generated dungeon and keep them up to speed. It’s a narrative improvement over the True Reverie Corridor for sure, and some of the rewards like craft upgrades are positively excellent incentives to dive into this mode, although I wish instead of being generated it had actual level design. As it is it’s a fun diversion, but a little bit shallow if you try to binge multiple floors. 

The other main new addition is the return of minigames. Fishing is now available basically on command as long as there’s water, and the process of reeling the catch in is not bad either. Basketball is the weak link seeing as its quite a limited expression of the sport in question and not particularly fun. The new card game Seven Hearts is a bit like Cold Steel’s Blade if it were four-player and drew more inspiration from Uno than War, and it’s fine despite being more than a little luck-based. The real highlight for me was the hacking minigame, which tasks you with exploring mazes and avoiding defense programs to reach a goal. The great part about this one is that it’s mostly tied to chests in the field, meaning you’re rewarded quite heavily for solving them. On the whole the minigames are a good bunch of distractions, definitely worth a few minutes of your time before heading back to the main quest.

Lastly it’s worth mentioning the alignment system returns, allowing you to gain access to rewards and alternate play styles for Van based on the office’s reputation for being Lawful, Chaotic, or Gray. Falcom clearly took notes on the general sentiment surrounding this mechanic, and chose to address it by… making it have no bearing on the story and just offering rewards. I can understand why they might adjust it in this way because this system does have the potential to be a massive headache for the series’ narrative moving forward, but the rework done here raises the question of why it exists at all anymore. Perhaps my original desire to see this system shape Van as a character was a bit much, but at least your alignment in the first Daybreak affected which characters you allied with near the end of the game. Perhaps expanding upon this system by offering unique routes through the story via bypassing or adding certain boss fights or adjusting Van’s dialogue in places would have been enough, but it not mattering narratively at all just makes it feel like an awkward holdover. They would have been fine if they just ditched the system and gave us alternate ways to obtain the various Mare cores.

Graphics wise, there’s really nothing to complain about. Daybreak was already a good looking game, and the sequel preserves all the good of those visuals while adding a tasteful amount of extra flair. Some of the fully-animated sequences are genuinely pretty impressive, and combat rarely got old to witness. The team really settled into the new graphics engine here, and they deserve props. Another point of presentation that I think saw some improvement was the voiceover work. There’s still the problem of dialogue not being voiced where it really should be but I found that to be less noticeable overall, and the voice actors really pushed themselves while voicing a wider variety of scenes compared to the last title. Even the music I would say is a bit of a step up. While still recycling a lot from the previous game, Daybreak II’s original pieces are generally more exciting to listen to and capture the sensations of the action from moment to moment much better. Believing Heart was used in a lot of major story fights, and I don’t blame them because it is certainly a modern classic in the making. Sure the reuse of Daybreak I’s more placid tracks keep it down, but the direction has shifted much closer to where it needs to be.

Lastly, as for what we can learn from Trails Through Daybreak II from a faith perspective, there is a last-minute musing before the final boss which seems surprisingly appropriate to discuss. I’ll try to vague on spoilers, but I understand if you skip this section for today. Anyways, one of the discussions the final boss has with the party is about “the original sin,” which he relates to the way characters earlier in the story gave into false narratives and let it warp their sense of morality and act out of character. Considering this discussion is not being done in context of Genesis one would be forgiven for thinking this is JRPGs once again taking “cool sounding” ideas from Christianity and using them flippantly in their games, but upon further reflection I actually found it to be a poignant point of connection. In the Book of Genesis the real sin Adam and Eve ultimately committed was not the consumption of the forbidden fruit in and of itself but rather disobedience to God, and the origin point of that disobedience was a false narrative. The serpent spun Eve a false view of the world wherein God was a liar and that she could become a god through the fruit, and Adam and Eve ultimately chose to believe that narrative unto a terrible result. It feels incredibly important to reflect on this reality given our current times in which truth feels so hard to come by, and where every narrative is trying to shout the others down. Sifting through these perspectives can be very tough because truth can also have a transformative effect on our behavior that doesn’t always call us to be nice (which is distinct from being good), but Daybreak II and the Bible serve as strong reminders that this quest for truth will inevitably lead us to confront spiritual malefactors who will attempt to manipulate us into behaviors we never thought ourselves capable of in our worst nightmares. Stay always vigilant in times of temptation, and rely on Christ, who is The Truth and The Light, to help you avoid the falsehoods that call to mind the original sin.

In conclusion, I truly wish I could like Trails Through Daybreak II. Its combat and gameplay is mostly well considered, the graphics and music are finely-tuned given the budget, and there even ended up being thematic ideas that really intrigued me. Unfortunately this is a story-focused game before all else, and the sheer mess it makes of itself leaves me at a loss as far as who I would recommend to play it. If you’re truly committed to playing all of the Trails games like I am then you’re more than free to buy it and form your own opinion, but if you’re not already invested then I can’t imagine this game being the one to finally hook you (Not that you’d be starting with this one… right?). I definitely enjoyed it more than the first Daybreak title, but clearing a bar that low isn’t really saying much. At least with another chunk of the Calvard arc behind me, I rest easy knowing I can put some distance between myself and this massive project for at least a little while.

About PeaceRibbon

A graduate in philosophy from a campus with Benedictine monks, "PeaceRibbon" is just an ordinary introvert looking to put his hours of playing games to good use. He's played games on every Nintendo console since the family Wii and later took up PC games once aware of Steam. He's explored a lot of genres, but his favorites have been story driven RPGs and fighting games. Often finds himself going deep into gaming culture and seeking out low-profile titles over keeping up with big releases.

When not gaming, he enjoys walking in beautiful places, and overthinking just about everything. Also serves as a cantor at Mass whenever he can. Has a twin brother who shares many of the same hobbies and passions.