This weekend, after about 90 hours, I finally finished my Trails journey when I beat Trails Beyond The Horizon.

But before I begin, just a bit of context. 

My favorite game of all time is my first Trails game, Trails Through Daybreak. I played it on my Switch and loved every second of it! Due to device limitations, I could only go back as far as Zero initially and wow, the Zero-Azure combo blew me away. Eventually I got a Steam Deck and was able to play all the games and so finally after recently finishing Daybreak 2 (and really liking it alot!), it was time to finally wrap things up (for now) with Horizon.

STORY & CHARACTERS

Like the title implies, this is the reason for the season - the story and the characters. This time around you got Van and the crew of Arkride Solutions doing their thing, which again, my favorite team! Van, Risette, Aaron, & Agnes can literally take on anything together. You also had Rean and a few Class 7 folks and Kevin with our Picnic Squad, each lead had their own routes.

Van's route was my favorite. It's comfort food for me and any time I get to have Aaron come in and just demolish some baddies or Agnes/Quatre drop a devastating art, while Van draws hate and Risette keeps us safe is a good time for me. So much so that it was when we meet back up with Aaron in Daybreak 2 is when that game finally clicked with me.

Rean's route was okay. Clearly setting up for future games, but honestly as much as it felt great to play Class 7 again, outside of the broad story of finding his master and how he engaged with Shizuna, I found his route the least effective for this game's story.

Then Kevin, which for the plot, makes so much sense for him to be there, BUT.... his route was probably the shortest which made me feel like his story could've been deeper.

In hindsight, I wish it was just Van & Kevin in Horizon. It would've been a few less characters to manage from a build perspective and maybe then we could've had a deeper team on Kevin's route and saved Rean for later games? It made the game feel a bit sloggy during Act 3 which sucks because that's when a lot of good lore started dropping!

Oh well, it is what it is.

But the LORE!!! Oh my!

If you make it to the end, both in the Grim Garten & in the main game, Horizon will blow your mind at the 13 games over 20 years lore! I can't speak to what was laid out, but holy cow. When the credits rolled, my jaw was On. The. Ground.

If you are invested in the Trails universe, Horizon is probably one of the most important games in the series!

GAMEPLAY & COMBAT

Trails gonna trails! Slow builds, cozy side quests, monster exterminations, and then a long dungeon to fight bosses. That part, I loved! I think the combat is getting a bit too much "stuff" in it with the ZOCs and quick arts and fall back to action combat and chain attacks and shard commands. It's... alot. I enjoyed it, most the time, but it can be chaotic.

Sometimes it breaks the game! Other times, like when fighting 4 bosses at once, it'll break you (I'm looking at you Kevin's route in Act 3, woof).

Unpopular opinion, except for the lore dump, I didn't care for the Grim Garten. It felt too... too heavy. I almost preferred the Märchen Garten from Daybreak 2 because it was just a simple "grind as much as you like" playground, where Grim Garten just exhausted me. I almost bailed on finishing it, but the internet said I couldn't miss the lore, so I popped it on Easy and wrapped it up.

And yes, it was some good lore, so glad I got to see it!

But in the end, the gameplay is Trails gameplay. I wish more games were turn-based with moderate positioning/tactical elements (beyond just front row/back row). I hope one day indie developers who grew up playing Trails over the past 20 years will make more Trails-like combat games!

A MINI-GAME RANT

Not gonna lie... I don't like the mini-games very much. The stalking game & the hacking game from Daybreak 2 show up in Horizon and I really don't like them.

The stalking game is so slow and annoying. Like... painfully slow.

And the hacking game is fine, but at the higher levels, just kind of ridiculous.

It may just be because I felt the game was getting pretty a bit much by the middle of Act 2, so to do these side mini-games just made everything feel even more exhausting? I don't know, but I don't love them. But hey, at least Horizon scaled back the collectathon shard search from DB2!

SOUND, GRAPHICS, & PERFORMANCE

I played Horizon on my Steam Deck exclusively in handheld.

Music was great (especially that final dungeon, wow), and performance was really solid. I didn't notice any slowdowns or stutters. The game crashed once and there was one time in the Grim Garten where Van got stuck in a nook and I had to quit the game and start that Garten session over. But otherwise, great!

I have no idea about the FPS, but if it dropped down, I didn't notice it.

CONCLUSION

I have some mixed feelings about Horizon. It's a fun & familiar start with Van, Rean, and Kevin. You get to see all the places from the previous Daybreak games with favorite characters across the arcs.

But with all the extra mechanics, people to manage, grim garten, mini-games, and just sheer amount of story they are trying to tell, but mostly tease, by the time you are in Act 3, you may find yourself exhausted and ready to wrap it up.

The finale is awesome though and the ending and final boss fights are so memorable! Did it make up for the bloat & slogginess? To a lot of folks on their tier list, yes. But for me? Less so:

FINAL SCORE: OVERALL B+ but with an A+ finish!

Oh and hey - Inspired by all the fun screenshots I've taken in Horizon, I started sharing some over at casualJRPG to supplement hanging out here.

Anyways, onward and upward! Finally playing People of Note & having a great time with it and hopefully wrapping up Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen soon!

Until next time!

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