Musings from Lythos

Trails Through Daybreak 2

Trails Through Daybreak 2 is, in theory, a game that shouldn't exist. With Ys X's development running into trouble, the game had to be delayed and there was now an opening in Falcom's release schedule - and while this has never been officially confirmed, it sure feels like what they did was they took some unreleased Daybreak 1 DLC (or maybe Act 1 of what would eventually become Beyond the Horizon), stretched it out to 60 hours, and got it out the door as quickly as they could. The budget is clearly tight, there's a ton of asset reuse, and some of the decisions about the game's plot seem to be more in service of "how can we get some more playtime out of this?" rather than what's best for the story, but despite this, I didn't dislike the game for most of its runtime - the seams are just so visible that it's hard to ignore them when they've been staring you in the face for 30+ hours.

Side note: Only Falcom would have a sudden opening in their production schedule and decide to fill it with a full-fat JRPG. Thanks guys. You really shouldn't have.

Picking up after the events of Daybreak 1, Van and friends learn about a potential serial killer in Edith, and upon tracking him down, discover two things: first, he's using the eighth and final Genesis to turn into the Grendel Zolga, a crimson variant of Van's own Grendel transformation, and second, that this is going to be a game about ~Time Travel~. Upon finding the culprit, Elaine is killed, and Van gets sent back to before the encounter to try and find another way that results in everyone getting out alive. Shortly thereafter, Swin and Nadia (from Trails into Reverie) join the party, and the game quickly makes its structure clear - Van takes on jobs outside the city to track down the missing pieces of the final Genesis, while Swin and Nadia investigate Edith itself for clues about the Grendel Zolga. The gang reconvenes on an island resort for a quick break before shit hits the fan, all but one of the Geneses from the first game get stolen, and we spend the entirety of Act 3 tracking them down again before heading to the finale.

Laid out like that, you might think that Act 3 is The Problem - and a lot of people do, to be clear - but if anything, it's the only part of the game that actually feels like it's DOING something with the time travel mechanics and storytelling. Make no mistake, it probably could have stood to have been a section shorter than it actually is, but I feel like the framing of Act 3 as "Well, time to go get all your doohickeys back that you spent the entire first game collecting" is far more damaging to its reputation than any of the actual content contained within it. What you actually do in Act 3 is far more compelling than anything that happens in the rest of the game, and in a world where Daybreak 2 was released as a DLC chapter for Daybreak 1, I can absolutely see them cutting straight to Act 3 and just playing it out from there. Not helping things is how slow the rest of the game feels, especially in comparison to Daybreak 1. In that game, we were collecting a Genesis in every chapter; here, we get a fragment of one in three of the first five chapters, and we don't even get anything to show for it because they immediately get stolen from us once we get them all.

Also not helping things is the way that the time travel mechanics are implemented - some of the bad ends are avoidable if you're paying attention, but you'll be railroaded into a lot of them before being sent back to try something different. In one particularly dumb instance of this, there's a boss fight in Act 1B that kills you in a cutscene afterwards, so in the next loop you come back with some extra help. But wait! That's not the right extra help, so you do the boss fight again, die again, and THIS time you have an option to explore more of the Blacklight district to get the help you need to advance the plot - naturally, you'll have to fight the boss for a third time after this. And as much as I did enjoy the spectacle of Act 3, it's not exactly a short part of the game; start to finish, it ran me almost 17 hours, over a third of the entire game's playtime up to that point. While it's not all retreading old ground, it sure is a lot of retreading as we attempt to get back to where we started the game.

Of course, the fact that Daybreak 2 "isn't supposed to exist" doesn't mean that it can't push the narrative forward or provide value in some other way - indeed, the series is still building on the material that was first laid down in Sky 3rd, and neither of the Crossbell games (Zero/Azure) were originally planned until Falcom decided that they were going to need to cover a lot more groundwork before moving on to Erebonia, and those are two of the best games in the series. This...is not what Daybreak 2 does. As far as the overall metaplot is concerned, absolutely nothing of consequence happens in Daybreak 2, leaving us more or less exactly where we were at the end of Daybreak 1. While we do ultimately collect the eighth Genesis, the villain(s) come out of nowhere and aren't set up at all, no major questions have been answered, and frankly, the story is more of a sequel to Trails into Reverie than anything related to Daybreak 1. Similarly, though they're less common than they were in Daybreak 1, there's still plenty of hangouts and bonding events in the game, but very few of them tell us anything we didn't already know about the characters involved. Character interactions, sure; most of them are even good! But character growth, not so much. Honestly, the bond mechanics as a whole feel pretty superfluous in this game, they're not even available outside of two of the game's twelve chapters.

Putting aside the game's story, the game's combat has seen a few minor tweaks that are mostly for the better. You can now cast spells in field battles, and there's a new "Cross Strike" ability that you can do after a perfect dodge. The combat UI has also been significantly improved, chiefly in the form of an actually functional turn order indicator. Aside from that? The name of the game is "minigames" in Daybreak 2. Daybreak 1 lacked anything that didn't directly tie back into its story, but here, you can barely turn around without bumping into some unwelcome gameplay intrusion. Fishing, card games, stealth tailing sequences, hacking, basketball(??) - you name it, it's here, and it's probably not very good. For good measure, it also throws in the Marchen Garten, a Reverie Corridor-esque dungeon that you can access at any time for grinding purposes with new floors being unlocked roughly every chapter. While optional in the moment, it's a great way to get extra septith and goodies, and an additional seven floors open up once you finish the story to fuck around in as you wish. Completing them all results in a scene that sets up Horizon, but I couldn't be bothered to do all that so I watched it on Youtube instead. Zero regrets.

Some rapid-fire notes before we wrap up:

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the game, but I think a large part of that is riding on the fact that the second half of the game is much, much stronger than the first half. There's a non-zero amount of "yeah fuck it, just roll with it" that you have to swallow, especially when it comes to the villains, but when it does hit, the game knows how to make it stick. In a perfect world, this game wouldn't exist at all (or at least not in this form), and if we got Act 3 and the finale as a Daybreak DLC or the first half of a hypothetical Daybreak 2 that got the development time it really needed, I'd be happy as a clam. But unfortunately, this is the game we have to work with, and it's...fine. Impressive, even, given the constraints that led to THIS version of Daybreak 2 existing. But at the end of the day it's a 7/10 RPG that's hanging out with Sky FC and Cold Steels 2 and 4 at the bottom of my Trails ranking, and I dislike it for a lot of the same reasons. Horizon is supposed to be very good! Let's hope it proves to be so in January.