The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon (2024)

Hello, welcome to my RANTING.

Usually, I write short reviews adding some positive and negative comments and a conclusion, but this game reaaaaaaally triggered my ranting, so here I go.

Full spoilers ahead.

So, this is like game number 13th in the whole Trails subseries of The Legend of Heroes. Up to now, I have accepted that some of the games are better than others, and of course, my favorites are the original In the Sky and Cold Steel 1 & 2.

Since this new “saga” started, I was very on board with the setting and characters. Truth be told, I do not particularly care about some of them (like Risette or Judith), but I am soooooooo into Van, Agnes, Quatre, and Elaine that I could easily not care about anything else.

The story in the first game was very good, like, it had good pacing, which is something Nihon Falcom sometimes struggles with. And then, we had the second game, which was really… special? What to say... the game really looked like a DLC to the original game rather than its own thing, with minimal big plot revelations and mostly just revisiting (or expanding) the backstories of most of the cast. Beyond the Horizon does everything right from a gameplay perspective, but fails horribly at storytelling pace. It is so incredible to see how the gameplay has evolved from the very beginning of In the Sky. We now have orbments, secret skills, crafts, combined attacks. We even have a good “action” part tied into battles with several powers like the ZOC system or the transformations. I think Falcom has really raised the bar for themselves once again; when you think nothing else could top what they did, they go back to it and do it better. The game is just truly fun to play, nothing can beat that. Nevertheless, this has come to the detriment of what originally piqued my interest in this series. What originally made me love this series was the little details and the story. The little details are still there, because you can see most of the NPCs have dialogue, a story, a place where they belong, and probably relate to a sidequest at some point. Many of those have their own continuity across games, sometimes even across multiple sagas!

But the pace of the story… man, this was a mess.

First of all, dividing the story into episodes made no sense, because Kevin’s story is super short and runs out of fuel very fast. And then Rean’s story was VERY GOOD. I guess they did not want to risk having their favorite character go down in the charts, but it could have easily been placed as intermissions rather than an actual route. Van's story is SO badly paced. The first part has around 12 hours of sidequests that advance literally nothing in the plot. The worst part of this is not the sidequest content, but the fact that you are constantly told by other characters that they all know more-or-less what is going on regarding the space project, but they literally prefer not to say anything about it. And that’s it. Repeat that almost 6 times, for hours and hours, with little to no development, probably until the big Agnes scene. On top of that, the “additional dungeon” that you can progress through across the episodes ultimately became a very bad excuse for not having actual new places or dungeons to explore. We literally go to ONE new town (which I can’t recall being mentioned before, but maybe that’s just me), and we revisit some short “dungeon” places, but most of the battle time will for sure happen in the Dark Marchen Garten, or whatever it's called. And don’t get me wrong, the gameplay loop, as I said, was so much fun! But I just knew, while going through those auto-generated dungeon floors, that it was just padding to make the game last longer, and I did not like that.

Then, you have Kevin’s story arc, man. So, I love Kevin, probably a top 3 character from the whole series. He has nothing to do here. He has no relationship with these guys he has been paired up with, and the chemistry just does not work. At the beginning, I played along, but when you reach Kevin Route 3, I was shocked by how cheap and stupidly paced the whole thing was. Special mention to the nonsensical fight with Yin/Lucrezia, which was one of the cheapest, bullshit difficulty spikes I have ever seen in a JRPG. And then the whole thing goes nowhere; Kevin does not even have dialogue after the big final battle happens. So stupid. Plus, the team makes NO sense from a gameplay perspective. Special mention to Swin for being the most useless character EVER.

Rean's story was very good. It was nice to see some of the original Cold Steel guys back, and it really played the nostalgia aspect well. Rean's story also had a good reason to continue, and maybe it was not thaaaaat connected to what was happening, but I appreciated the effort. I did think the party roster was a little bit disconnected, especially for some battles, but I took that as a challenge and went with it.

And then, the central plot. For an 80+ hour game, I completely expected like… an explanation? Or two? I think what really harmed the experience is that by now, we kind of know what is happening. It is not a surprise; it is just a surprise for the characters. So, maybe it did surprise some people, but the time-loop/multiverse thing has been around for a while now. The third phase of Ouroboros is literally called Eternal Recurrence, it doesn’t get any clearer than that, lol. And of course, I was so happy to see the story finally move forward at the end, and even with a lot of answers on the table, other questions were raised. But at the end of the day, it is the third game in this series, and we still don’t know what the Grendel is, why Van has those powers and no one else, how the whole thing connects, why Agnes’ blood is special, and so on. The Church consists of literally stupid people who, for no reason, have two different “sides” in their own organization. We were introduced to Nina as a big, important piece in the whole thing, only for her to play a very minor role and have like four actual plot-related lines. The whole Latoya subplot was also so contrived. She used some ancient power to move water from the future into the present, breaking the laws and blah blah blah. The reason? We don’t know. She just wanted to destroy the time-space axis for testing? Why? She was set up like the big bad, and then it was just dropped at the end. It also seems like most of the characters changed sides constantly for no reason, to the point where it is impossible to take them seriously. This is something that started in Cold Steel, to be fair, but here it went over 9000, characters fight, make alliances, and sign contracts, regardless of whether that contradicts their character development or even their very reason to exist!! And then, the Vestiges. UGH. Trying to make Lagun Khan relevant? I could let that one slip, but Giacomo Conte? What the heck. Why would you even care about him? I did not even remember who he was.

So, did I cry at the ending? Well, yes, I did. The truth is I am very committed to Van, Agnes, and the guys. I just wish Falcom would learn how to write a well-paced game like they used to. It feels like they lost their touch when it comes to storytelling, even though they have developed an incredibly fast-paced, innovative way of handling gameplay. This contradiction can be seen in almost every minute of the game and this time it reallly drove me insane at some points.

That's it; I let it out.

Update time! I am about to finish Arc II, Van Route Part 3.

So far I have a mixed opinion on the routes. It really feels like the only ones that move the story forward are the Kevin/Rean parts, and then Van route is a like a recall to the previous two entries with little or no development whatsoever.

I found the first Arc stupidly slow for no reason, it took me almost 11 hours to get through it.

I love the dark Marchen Garden thingy, but it does feel sometimes like they just made that so they wouldn't have to think of dungeons for the story. It makes the whole thing look a little bit cheap.

Said the above, as an RPG is SO much fun, so many things to try and character build combinations to play around. Definitely of the strongest JRPGs out there in terms of gameplay.

TL;DR: Pace is weird, but it is a fun game to play.

Much better compared to daybreak ii which barely move up the plot. same can be said with horizon, u can skip the entire act 1 and dont miss much , it takes too long to ramp up the plot. but oh boy, when i do reach it, what a twists !!!

There so much shit happening in the last 1 hour of the games compared to the 50 hours i spend on the game. it just mysteries after mysteries and side quests and no one telling shit despite most of them knew bout the plot .

Absolutely love the animations especially flashy special attack sequences in combat and the English voice acting is absolutely spot-on.

and the rosters? Its bananaaaaaaaas. i swear every next installemnts just keep addin playable characters ! oh well it does split into 3 teams but u can hav some fun with them. seeing old rean was a delight. i cant even rmb kevin much , much needed screen time !

My fav: yeah its that goofball shizuna rem misuragi XDD and 2nd is elaine <3 get lost agnes

Wish the story wrap up better, spend so much build all that climax and didnt explained shit . Agnes in new game + is very pretty tho !

oh well . one more to go. and count me in !