TLoH: Trails through Daybreak II - Review

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RPGamer reviewed The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II:

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The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II Review

Shizuna's Day Off

Nihon Falcom's The Legend of Heroes series has been a bastion of consistency as the long-running series has told the deeply interconnected tales of the continent of Zemuria. The developer injected some much welcome freshness with The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak, taking the game to a new nation and introducing an incredibly strong selection of new cast members as well as adjustments to its gameplay formula. Its follow-up, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II, ends up being a bit of an odd duck in the series. Rather than doing much itself to advance things, it puts the series in a holding pattern ahead of a game that does promise upheaval for the series, and is perhaps best considered an elongated, but still very enjoyable epilogue for the previous game.

Trails through Daybreak II takes place three months after the events of Trails through Daybreak. Returning protagonist Van Arkride, working as a "Spriggan" - effectively a hybrid of private detective and bounty hunter - based in the capital of the Calvard Republic is approached by Elaine Auclair to help in investigating a series of gruesome murders. Van is connected to these murders through the apparent culprit, a red beast-like creature that looks eerily like the blue Grendel form that Van was able to take on at key points in the previous game. However, their investigation swiftly ends in their untimely deaths, introducing Trails through Daybreak II's primary narrative feature: time leaps. The leaps, enabled by the mysterious Oct-Genesis devices that were the focus of the previous game, allow Van and his allies to return from disaster to a previous point with some memory of what transpired and therefore make alternate decisions to change fate.

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While it may not be the most memorable entry in the series, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II still has plenty that series fans thoroughly enjoy. Spending more time with the memorable and delightful cast is never a bad thing, and even though there are elements that don't quite hit the same or feel a bit superfluous, there's never any point where the game is in danger of becoming grating. Fans may well come to appreciate its role in simply holding the fort before Kai no Kiseki comes to shake Zemuria up.

Score: 3.5/5