The Legend Of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II Review (PS5) – I Got Your Number

My time with The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak was one where I loved almost every second of it. Getting The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II announcement almost immediately after release made me ecstatic beyond belief. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the game and now it is finally here!

Game Name: The Legend Of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II
Platform(s): PS4, PS5(Reviewed), Nintendo Switch
Developer(s): Nihon Falcom
Publisher(s): NIS America
Release Date: February 14th, 2025
Price: $59.99

Disclaimer: If the next few paragraphs don’t make sense, please be sure to check out the introduction to trails article so you know where to start in this adventure.

Three months have passed since the end of Trails Through Daybreak as Van is going back to his normal lifestyle as a Spriggan. His part timers have gone back to their cities and walks of life. Elaine knocks on Van’s door and lets Van know that there is a Grendel causing mayhem. Instead of blue like Van’s Grendel, it is crimson colored. As Van is looking into it with Elaine, they discover information for the eighth genesis and discovers that it is in pieces. Now with newfound information Van goes on a field trip finding the next pieces of the genesis while he leaves Edith in the capable hands of Swin and Nadia (From Trails Into Reverie).

There is also a new system to tell the narrative with the paths feature. It is very similar to the Trails Into Reverie system where you choose to go between C’s path, Rean’s path, and Lloyd’s path. The big difference to that system though is you are unable to swap between them after choosing which path you want to take. Viewpoints are between Van during his field trip to find the Genesis pieces, and Swin and Nadia taking over the role of the Spriggan in Edith.

Living The Spriggan Life

When you are in the shoes of Van Arkride, you will be in a few different cities with two or three party members as you stroll around and pick up 4SPG’s. When you aren’t dealing with 4SPG’s you will be traversing dungeons and sewers fighting enemies getting to a big boss. There is also one big addition to the game that fans of Reverie will like, the Märchen Garten.

I did a big deep dive into the overall features of Märchen Garten in a hands off preview event I was able to attend so if it feels like you want to know more about this system go check there. Overall you will get access to the Märchen Garten pretty early on in the game when Mirabel from Maraduk wants help from Van and his team to figure out what force is taking over it. It is a virtual reality simulator that also has its own network.

The way you deal with the Märchen Garten is you choose a floor you have available to you and then you will follow a path that gives you a few sections to choose from. These sections have the reward you get from following the objectives before you can go to the next section on that floor. These sections have enemies you fight and you can get shards from defeating enemies or breaking objects around the map. Then when you finish the objective such as defeating a certain amount of enemies or disarming devices you can get access to the next section. The final section of a floor is the big boss. Defeating this boss clears the floor and you get a MVP of the floor who gets extra skill shards to use to enhance their S-Crafts.

  Combat in Trails Through Daybreak II has been significantly enhanced. In real time combat certain characters like Risette have had improved movesets that make them faster. Combat with new characters are amazing. New party members like Celis and Leon, the dominions from the last game, are now playable and they are extremely fun to play. Celis has a lot of range and speed with also a devastating amount of strength with her moves.

Trails Through Daybreak II has a few additions to the real time combat of the first game. The first big one is charge artes. Back in first game, if you found an enemy weak to artes but resistant to physical attacks you had to switch to a character whose basic attack used artes like Agnès or Kincaid. Now you can use some of your EP to use an arte and charge it to do some serious damage. This makes it a lot more fluid in keeping your combos going. Another big change is cross attacks. If you do a perfect evade you will get an icon to switch to a different character. Once you press the correct button, the character will max out your charge gauge to do a big charge attack on the enemy you just evaded. Then for the next few seconds they will glow with a golden aura. In this state they gain additional base stats. Once the state is over, if you do a perfect evade by evading right when an enemy is about to hit you, then you can repeat the process all over again. This made it much more seamless to transition between all the characters in the party.

Real time combat isn’t the only combat system to get a boost for the sequel. One thing that also got added to the turn based system is EX chain’s. If an enemy gets stunned during combo, if you are linked with another person, you can use a bar of S Boost to attack or do a normal craft, once finished, the linked partner and the character that initiated the EX chain do a combo craft together. This can do some serious damage, especially if you do an AoE craft to combo craft a chunk of enemies on the battle zone.

One thing that I abused in Daybreak was the ability to place S Craft immediately after S Craft moves. Especially if you got Van geared to get a huge chunk of CP back after doing an S Craft. You could endlessly spam S Crafts without the enemy even being able to act. To rectify that in Trails Through Daybreak II, you can only use one S Craft per two bars of boost you use. Once two turns are up with that character and their S Boost status has reset, you will be able to use that character’s S Craft once again. This forced you to focus on more than one party member to dish out damage and gain CP.

One small thing to mention that I loved is you can now skip animations for normal crafts. Before you could only skip S Crafts but had to watch crafts play out in their entirety. That is something that that I loved about Daybreak 2 is the small details that help with normal gameplay. One other thing to mention is if a shop gets new items in their inventory, the store will now be orange instead of blue. Once you have at least looked at the new items in the shop, the orange will go back to the blue color so you can be confident you didn’t miss anything. I missed a few gifts in my first playthrough of Daybreak due to not knowing which shops had new inventory. It only took me one playthrough to get all the gifts this time around.

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey

I think an important thing to discuss in Trails Through Daybreak II is one of the newest additions to the series, time travel. It is more like a time reset. When your cast of characters reach a point where they die from a battle, time gets reset to a spot before they engage in the battle or choice that killed them. You will then be offered a choice to change how you engage with that same outcome. Will you bring in backup or try running from a battle you know you can’t win? Either way once you make that choice the game will let you redo the dungeon to get back to the boss or situation that killed you. The outcome can change and the story of Daybreak II will continue. This isn’t an actual feature or gimmick in the game, its just a way to tell more about the story of Daybreak II as these time resets are forced encounters. There is a reason these exist in ways to explain more about the power of the geneses. However I will admit it can cheapen certain scenes or even characters to do one of the twist kills for a person you care about just to rewind that and make most people forget it happened other than our main cast of characters. I also admit that some of the death scenes go hard for this engine. You got tons of blood in some of these instances.

For those who want to get nitpicky, yes Trails To Azure had a moment of a time reset with KeA but we never get to actually see that, it is just told to us. Trails Through Daybreak II doesn’t have to make us imagine the scenario, we see it happen in real time.

One of the things I disliked in Trails Into Reverie, is how they did their storytelling in flashbacks that you would play out constantly. It was something that was brought from the Cold Steel series but in a more annoying way with how frequent it used these flashback action scenes. Trails Through Daybreak II also uses these flashback segments but in my opinion, way better. In Reverie the flashback could go on for hours, wheras in Daybreak II the flashback is usually only a few minutes at most.

Maximizing The Engine

I was already extremely impressed with the huge bump in quality for Trails Through Daybreak, but Daybreak II made an even bigger tick to that quality. The animations for the New S Crafts are the best this series has ever looked. You can tell that Nihon Falcom has gotten much more used to the engine and models to pump it to the max. The fight scenes and dance scenes also looked impressive. Especially the ending dance scene did a lot of motions and movements I was impressed with.

Heck even segments of the Märchen Garten looked amazing with the lighting and locales. I kind of wish the main story had more locales rather than cities and sewers especially since Daybreak 1 had so many different cities and areas you could travel around. Don’t get me wrong, the new areas that we could travel to in Edith were great and it was nice to actually get to go to Trion Tower but I wanted more locations in the game.

The Trails games have a rhythm where the first game in an arc sets the stage with the second game hitting with a lot of punches. Trails Through Daybreak set a really great stage and setting that I fell in love with. Trails Through Daybreak II enhanced the gameplay and the systems to a huge degree (aside from the morality alignment.) That said, the story didn’t have a lot of punch, it really did feel like “An isolated incident” that sets the stage even further for whenever we get Trails Through Daybreak III. This cast is still amazing and having Aaron and Van share the screen always made me burst out laughing or just smiling with how great the chemistry is with the Arkride Solutions.

Day Will Break Again

The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II is a solid gameplay experience. If you had any gripes with the first game, odds are the gripes were worked on with the new mechanics to the turn based and real time combat. Animations are greatly enhanced and most the cast are full on playable characters rather than just being guest characters. This would have been a perfect sequel if the story was capitalized on more. This is sad as the second game in most arcs are my favorite games in those arcs. Cold Steel II, Trails to Azure, Trails in the Sky SC, but I think Daybreak is my favorite in the Daybreak arc so far. That said, this is still a solid entry in the Daybreak arc and is a must play if you enjoyed the cast of Daybreak. Elaine is awesome in this game though so Elaine fans rise up!

The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II will be released February 14th, 2025 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II was provided to us by NIS America for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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