The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak is the🦩 eleventh installment in a series that tells a single overarching story within an in-universe span of a mere six years and counting. Characters established in one game will reappear in others, their narrative arcs continuing apace. This is an epic JRPG saga in the ma🐻king.

In other words, if you haven’t played a Trails game, this latest entry to receive a Western release is not where you should begin. Go grab the first game, Trails in the Sky: First Chapter, instead. It plays great on Steam Deck. This review probably isn't for you.

For those still here, Trails Through Daybreak takes place in the Calvard Republic, a powerful nation that’s played a pivotal political role in the events of previous games, but has never been seen until now. The Calvard Republic is a fair bit more technologically advanced than most of its continental peers; subway trains and state-of-the-art pseudo-cellphones are here. This is the country that can stand toe-to-toe with the Erebonian Empire, after all - it’s a stark contrast to Trails in the Sky’s Kingdom of Liberl and even the Crossbell duology's, well, Crossbell. (If this paragraph made no sense, I reiterate, don’t start with Trails Through Daybreak.)

Like Persona and Xenoblade Chronicles, the casts of Trails games are often the main selling point. The fandom bickers tirelessly over who’s the best✃ so-and-so, and why, and… you know how it goes. Let’s fixate on the friendly faces you’ll find in Trails Through Daybreaꦯk.

Van Arkride is the brand-new protagonist in Trails Through Daybreak, and boy, do I appreciate him. 🐻At 24, he’s older than the other leads;🍬 he’s seasoned, he’s already familiar with many of The Legend of Heroes’ shady organizations and plot twists. He knows the score, and he’s seldom bogged down by the sort of inevitable angst that can plague those adolescent heroes and heroines. Don’t get me wrong. Estelle Bright is great. Lloyd Bannings is fun. Rean Schwarzer is… fine. But Van’s my new Arkride-or-die.

The supporting cast is pretty good too. Hedonistic and hot-blooded Aaron Wei steals the show every time he gets a chance to shine. Quatre Salision is an intelligent fellow who deepens our appreciation for Trails’ more sci-fi elements. Judith Lanster, an actress with hilariously poor lying skills, comes face-to-face with something I never expected to find in a video game: scathing critique of the film industry. There are weaker links - I don’t ཧlove Risette Twinings, and female lead Agnes Claudel is merely okay - but it’s solid stuff.

As for the gameplay (you🅺 know, that other thing you do in Trails games besides watching lengthy cutscenes), it’s a smart evolution of the usual Trails fare. The turn-based battle system is filled to the brim with a pﷺositively dizzying array of abilities, from series-staple special attack S-Crafts and the importance of proper positioning to newer tidbits like stat-buffing S-Boosts.

While much is the same, Trails Through Daybreak moves the series forward in an important way by adding an element of action-based combat for the first time. In Field Bat🧜tle you can tear through lower-leveled enemies with reckless abandon by bashing them with your weapon in real-time. Even when you’re up against enemies closer to your party’s strength, Field Battle can be handy for getting a tactical edge ahead of the swap to turn-based. It’s a little weird, though and I’m not entirely sold. Trails has always thrived on the “Command Battle” system, and there’s not much depth to this action-centric twist. It feels a bit tacked-on. If it becomes a series mainstay, I’d like to see at least a modicum of complexity here.

Trails Through Daybreak will hardly leave you feeling confined to a single slice of the continent of Zemuria. This is one of the most expansive entries yet; there’s a rich diversity of locales with sꦬome relatively impressive visuals. I say “relatively” because Trails has never been a graphics-pushing powerhouse (nor should it be - the games would never make their money back). But Falcom’s gotten better about ensuring its settings don’t feel quite so lifeless as they sometimes have in the past. There’s still a lot of asset reuse, but this isn’t a seಌries with five-year cycles. It happens.

Side quests in Daybreak are the best they’ve ever been. Not only is the writing consistently sharp in these, with a handful of quest-givers who are just as brilliant as any of past Trails’ most vivid NPCs. But you’ll even make critical decisions toward the end of some of them which will dictate their endings in deep, tangible, ways. I don’t think it will be an uncommon refrain among ♏players that the side quests are more captivating than the main story, which surely has its moments, but never reaches these heights.

How much can a review actually sway you if you’re up to number 11 in a series so sprawling, its creator envisions this game as roughly the halfway point in his grand tale? Don’t drop Trails now. That would be ridiculous even if Trails Through Daybreak wasn’t especially good. As it happens, it’s one of my ꦓfavorite entries, and proof that Falcom is on an upward swing again between this one and Trails of🤪 Reverie before it. A little more polish could have gone a long way, but the Calvard Republic is an enjoyable place to explore, the protagonist is appreciably mature, and the story ends with that same deliciously Trails philosophy: always leave ‘em wondering how the heck they’ll ever wrap this up.

A review code was provided by the publisher.