Recent reviews by jmporkbob

Yes.

Yes.

Fantasian is an amazing game that everyone is overlooking. It's one of the best overall combat and boss designed turn based games I've ever played. Do yourself a favor and play on hard if you like a challenge, because that's the original difficulty and everything is very intentionally designed. You'll have to use all your tools to overcome most of these bosses past the first act. There's some flaws, like the controls being a bit better on mouse due to the original touch design, but overall it was highly worth it. 50-60 hours of content with engaging combat, more if you want to do everything. Prolly a 9/10 for me.

I greatly enjoyed Nordics. I think the battle system is much better than in Napishtim and Seven (the first games with their respective battle styles). I think it will be subjective as to whether someone likes it more than 8 or 9, but I personally like the new direction over perfect guards and dodges being as insanely powerful as they were. Parrying is still very strong and encouraged, but it's not all-consuming overpowered. You're still incentivized to play fast and loose via chain attacks giving you a skill point cost reduction.

Obviously it's got to be said that this PC port is one of the best ones out there in the entire industry, period, and deserves only the highest praise. I think this is PH3's best work yet, and that is saying something. It is the definitive way to play Ys X, and that's not just by nature of it being on PC, but because of all the additional features added. The only minor thing I thought was curious to be missing is that there was no map supersampling, unlike in the previous few titles.

Music, I also gotta get out ahead and say it's another fantastic soundtrack. Some tracks like "To Be Free", "Through the North Wind", "Heat Hazard", "Young Swordsman in the Eyes", "Destined to Keep Running", "If I Could Go Back to Those Days", "And the Adventure Begins", and several others (I really gotta stop before I name 20 tracks) instantly got added to my all-time classics list. I will say that some songs like "Depths of Gray", "Deep Inside Where No Light Reaches", and "Shield Brothers" probably get heard a bit too much, and it would be nice if some of the lesser used ones could have seen some more time. But it's a minor complaint.

The cross action system is a bit on the unique side, and it will take a few hours at least to internalize it, but once you do it's a pretty satisfying system that allows for player expression in ways the series simply wasn't capable of before. The flow I mostly settled on was using individual skills or basic attacks to start, parrying when the enemy attacks, and then using duo skills once the revenge gauge built up enough for how i felt in the moment. I think the 2 biggest weaknesses are 1) the aerial combat is basically nonexistent and doesn't feel great, and 2) while skill animations are playing out you get something like a 90% damage reduction.

For #1, I understand aerial combat being low on the priority list when you are making a new combat system in a new engine, because aerial combat has never really been a focus of the series. I'm glad they focused on the main combat feel, which is what REALLY matters, but would like for aerial combat and jumping in general to feel better in the future games.

For #2, I'm guessing they made it this way for ease of casuals, because some of the skill animations are pretty sick looking and lengthy. But I don't see how this choice persists in the long term, because you should be forced to commit to a skill and eat ♥♥♥♥ if you chose poorly. They need to just make the skill animations shorter, I guess. Either that or allow you to animation cancel out of them. (Possibly both?)

The ship combat, I don't see as a major selling point of the game. It exists primarily for thematic cohesion of the setting and a way to explore in a different manner to previous Ys titles. That said, the ship combat was never unfun to me. It was perhaps a bit on the easy side, but I was never upset to take several battles here and there. I think they perhaps introduce it in the worst light possible, because you are on a derelict ship that is nigh-unseaworthy, so it is slow as molasses and controls like garbage. Makes a lot of sense from a role-playing perspective, but again not necessarily the best first impression. There are a TON of upgrades though, and by mid game you will be zooming around like crazy, without even worrying about sticking to the jet stream currents. (Also fast travel exists once you've been somewhere, so it's not like traveling is tedious.) If this combat doesn't click with you, then you are practically never forced to engage with it, and can avoid all the encounters out on the sea—so I can't forsee it being a slog. (It is a very good source of ship upgrade materials though.)

I'd say the story of at least 70% of Ys games are basically just an excuse to go on adventure. I feel like people tend to have nostalgia glasses on a bit too much when it comes to that. Does this one punch above that? Absolutely. It's a very strong premise to begin with. After that it kinda steps back, to being events that propel the journey forward in order to get out of the way of the gameplay and exploration. But in the final 30% of the game it comes back out of the shadows with a twist that I certainly wasn't expecting and a strong conclusion to the themes and main-focused characters. I think the side characters weren't quite as strong as in the previous couple games, owing a lot to them not being in the party. Some of them definitely had some shocking turns of events to their arcs I wasn't expecting though. Karja is definitely in the top few characters of the entire series. Also, there is a ton of lore to the Obelia Gulf region explored that I found very cool and interesting.

For perspective, I've been the kind of guy who would rather silent protagonists slip into being a thing of the past—especially when it comes to Zelda, Persona, Dragon Quest and those kind of games. But for some reason in spite of that, I've still been okay with Adol being mostly silent for some reason. Maybe it's the way they handle it. I will say I'm kinda getting to the point where I'd be alright with him being fully voiced. It's not like they don't have the voice actor right there. I do hope they eventually do this in the future, but I will say I was genuinely impressed with how well Adol's goofy personality gets across in the game, and was shocked at how well they handled the bond between Karja and Adol coming through despite this massive limitation. So more power to Falcom.

One place where the game can be inconsistent is the visuals. On the one hand, the main character models and animation work is better than ever. On the other, we have low texture work, much less post-processing and lesser lighting than Trails through Daybreak, and some of the environments are a bit lacking—especially land geometry out in the distance. I understand that Falcom were developing for the Switch foremost and lack the resources to truly retool for higher fidelity on multiplatform while doing a simul-release, and this is the reason for this. It's mostly not something that gets in the way of things, but it is at least something worth noting.

Overall, most of my true complaints end up being the result of the game being small budget, small dev team, and short dev cycle—and developed primarily for the Switch. I also think the game is a bit too easy, but realize I should have played the game on higher than Hard. The superboss on Hard while doing a no heal challenge—oh man, now that was the type of resplendent challenge I was looking for. So I see that it's not that they don't know how to make a challenge anymore; it's more like Mario or Kirby where the challenge is left to optional endgame stuff in order to keep the game accessible to little Timmy down the street (and especially in this case where they don't have the dev resources to fully rebalance the game on higher difficulty). I'm definitely looking forward to replaying the game later this month on Inferno difficulty, and I think that says a lot. I'm also looking forward to how Falcom builds on this battle system in future titles!

Despite all the odds, they somehow managed to do it. You can really tell the passion the devs have for the series. It would be so easy to mess up such a beloved game, but they managed to nail it in nearly every way.

The Good

• Turn-based system seems like it'll be fun. It's sorta like Press Turn but with a few minor twists that change it some, but not too too much.
  
• No monster fusion, finally! Yes! (Personal taste.)
  
• Story and world seems like it will be good, at least from what I've seen so far. There's some really cool ideas in there.
  
• Not a high school setting, hallelujah!
  
• The class system is interesting, and I think a good change of pace from the other Atlus games. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the way they get upgraded by social links, though.
  
• Voice acting is good, at least 95% of what I've heard so far.
  
• The music is fantastically composed. I'm fully expecting a number of Persona fans to say it is drab because it's epic fantasy orchestral music instead of effectually pop music, though.
  
• Not actually a silent protagonist, finally. Still seems he doesn't have a personality, but we'll take any progress we can get.

The Neutral

• As with all modern Atlus games, the UI is too busy and intricate. This is technically breaking a cardinal design rule, but it's one that can be bent without too much consequence, usually. You will just be wondering what you are staring at the first few times you see menus or result screens, until you finally parse and internalize it.
  
• The jury is out on the characters. At least so far none of them really left an impression at all.
  
• There are way too many ideas, mechanics, & features that are just directly pulled from Persona. It's hard to get immersed in the world when the game keeps pulling me out of it by making me think of Persona by being exactly like it. It really could've stood to forge its own identity a bit more.
  
• The field combat, I don't even fully understand why it exists. There's essentially no substance to it; you attack 3 times and then are forced into turn-based mode. I thought this wasn't going to detract from enjoyment, but the last couple dungeons makes me feel it's going to slip toward a negative. A random enemy you don't see, or is sometimes even behind the one you're targeting so you can't reach it, can jump forward and one-tap you with no warning. Seems more trouble than it's worth but of course you're always gonna be pushed toward wanting a preemptive strike, so that's gonna be a conflict.
  
• When I was doing the optional dungeon at the end of the demo, that was the moment the game most had me sold and in its grip. I thought, man if there are cool little dungeons like this throughout the game it can really be a lot of fun. And then I got to the boss who is twice your level and hits 3x harder (or more) than any other monster in the dungeon, one-shotting at least one or two people per turn, and that just immediately wiped that feeling out of existence. What a waste of time. I'm not grinding for 10 hours in the prologue to even try to take that thing down lol.

The Bad

• The Persona engine is back. After P3R, it feels like a downgrade. The models and animations look good sometimes, mainly cutscenes, but in normal gameplay it can be not very flattering at all.
  
• The fast travel screen is pretty terrible. The list is not in alphabetical order. They're not separated by district. There's no discernible way to easily find the location you want aside from memorizing it until other locations are added to displace it. Holy god, what were they thinking?
  
• Few options, no anti-aliasing whatsoever aside from supersampling, and optimization seems pretty poor overall. If you have a strong enough system like me, it'll be mostly acceptable and your 160 fps will drop to 80 fps as the game engine desperately tries to load in parts of town while you run. But if you're not like me you'll get unplayable performance drops like others in the forum are mentioning.
  
• The squiggly lines from Persona 5 while you're running are back. This is a cheap and terrible way to give a fake impression of "speed". But they made it even worse this time because running also makes the edges of the screen blurry and also adds a slight fish-eye lens effect. And no way to turn it off, brilliant! (Bonus points: The camera slightly jiggling back and forth from Persona 5 is also back. Why? There is no need for this and doesn't make static camera shots "cool". A static camera should just stay still.)
  
• The guessing game of what is the enemy's weakness still exists. Seems like there are some ways to mitigate this sometimes, but not always.
  
• The idea of upgrading social stats and upgrading social links while dealing with time management yet again is not very enticing to me.

Conclusion: Many of its systems are not fully explored in the demo, and I'm sure some haven't even been introduced at all. But I can say that the game is clearly "Fantasy Persona" from the very core of its DNA. It's not trying to obscure that at all. So I feel pretty confident in saying that the majority of people who like Persona will like this game. Of course there will be some who don't like Persona but will like this game, and who do like Persona but won't. But at the very least you can always try the demo to see for yourself. I personally don't intend to buy the game out of principle, because I hate Atlus's business practice where they re-release the complete version of the game 2-3 years later at full price again, but if you don't have any issue with that then it has the makings of a recommendable game from the demo.

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First off, can you start here? Yes, you certainly can. It's a new arc—a soft reboot, a new main cast, in a region that effectually hasn't been visited yet. The game will explain everything you need to know, and you won't be confused or lost in the story. That said, the optimal experience will always be to play the game in the original intended order (Sky arc → Crossbell arc → Cold Steel arc/Reverie → Daybreak).

This is the order the world and lore is established in, and the very strongest aspect of this series is its worldbuilding, lore, and characters. If you don't play in that intended order, you will miss out on knowing who the returning characters are and how you're supposed to feel about them. When certain names are dropped showing this character is connected with that one, or when the lore builds off previously established lore, you won't know it's supposed to be an eye-opening moment. Secondarily, there are several previously undiscussed factions and countries that come into play here, in addition to all the prior established ones. It might be a bit much to keep straight if you are new, but it shouldn't be overly detrimental.

At the end of the day, you can play here as long as you are cognizant that there is more to the series than you'll be able to be aware of, and that's fine. An entry point is an entry point; just know it would be beneficial to understand the context for the rest of the series before you progress to Daybreak 2 and certainly Kai (English name pending), where the previous arcs will start intertwining and the overarching story of the entire Trails series begins heading toward its conclusion.
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With that out of the way, the game itself is very good. To me personally, it's the best opener game to an arc in the series. The new engine looks quite nice. The models and lighting for the most part are striking. You'll see the seams of it being a low budget game here and there, but overall a promising start for this engine. There's also a very much needed tonal shift from the previous arc. Things are a bit darker, the main character is more of an adult. His interests and experience reflect this, and I can't overstate how refreshing this is, not just to the series but JRPGS as a whole.
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The battle system is also very promising, and one of the main selling points on display. I do think it is a genuine innovation in the JRPG space. It doesn't eschew its turn-based roots, while also giving an action-based option, to both give you the discretion to to use that if you prefer and/or speed up fights against weaker mobs. Furthermore you can seamlessly swap between these at will. You're never forced to do action, but you are also ABLE to use only action on every fight except forced encounters and bosses. I wouldn't say the action combat is particularly deep or complex compared to Falcom's many other action game outings, but it does exactly what it's meant to.

The combat gameplay loop has a very good flow once you get used to it, if you play both the action and command side of things as is intended. You attack them, slowly building your gauge and dealing a slight bit of health and stun damage. If you perfectly time your dodge to the enemy's attack, your gauge gets a big boost. When the gauge is full you can do a strong attack which deals a lot of health and massive stun damage. Once the enemy's stun is maxed, if you then initiate turn-based mode you'll do extra damage, delay the enemy, and get other bonuses. From what Metaphor Refantazio has shown, its combat seems like a more watered down version of a similar premise. Daybreak's is just a satisfying loop that most importantly rewards you for playing well, and I look forward to how Falcom improves it in the future.

And I didn't even mention how the new orbment system brings back aspects of the Sky/Crossbell/Cold Steel ability systems in various ways that ultimately make for a perfect melding of old ideas that were once abandoned, and familiar things that are more recent but still different, with something that is entirely new. Rather than me breaking it down, I think a vet to the series should just experience it and see how much it feels like a culmination of everything in the series to this point.
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Okay, so there are people out there who say the music in this series continually has gotten worse. I honestly can't understand what planet they are from. I will admit that the Cold Steel arc's music didn't quite resonate with me as much as the prior arcs, but it still had dozens of amazingly written songs. Daybreak's soundtrack has a strong jazz throughline that, in a way, feels like a homecoming to Sky while also being something completely different. I could go through listing dozens of tracks I love from this game. I love the soundtrack so much, and it's my favorite since at least the Crossbell days. I'll just never understand people who say this is the worst one.
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I also just don't understand how after all this time Falcom still manages to make characters that are just so good and still feel distinct from older ones, even if they may share some aspects or fit into the same archetype. The majority of the main cast are likeable very quickly, and while it wasn't something like a Tokyo Xanadu where I love everyone, there wasn't anyone I disliked which is a big difference from the first Cold Steel game.
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The story on a first impression I thought was pretty good. Getting to know the new characters and locations is great, questions for the future are set up, and there are some excellent villains here. My biggest issue with the game is the villains and their motivation kinda fell apart toward the end. I don't know if experiencing it with the full localization might change that. But at the same time I know Trails, and I don't expect to fully understand what the villains were up to until a game or two from now. In hindsight it will probably make more sense.
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Lastly, I have to say that the most impressive thing to me is that somehow, in a series where worldbuilding has always been its greatest aspect, the worldbuilding in this game may actually be the best yet. Calvard, the great melting pot of the continent we have heard about for ages now, is finally on display. We finally get to see new cultures we haven't experienced before. We finally get to learn about new countries from the East that weren't mentioned directly. The cities feel more alive than EVER. Sidequests are, on the whole, a bit more interesting than in the past. We get to see the consequences of past games, and how the world doesn't just forget about the previous events, but they provide new goals and stepping stones to further build off. I could keep gushing, but I think at this point I've said enough.
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Trails through Daybreak is a wonderful game with a lot of great, fresh ideas. It's the best setup game in the series to date in my personal opinion. I'm excited to replay with the dub, despite having only finished the game several months ago. I'd rank it in the upper echelon of the series; my fourth favorite overall, still in the S tier, and of course best opener game. Happy Trails, everyone!

My second favorite Ys game. Really good story, wonderful characters, amazing OST, and a solid mechanical underpinning for the combat. The bosses are pretty difficult in an old school way, but it's in a fair way where you just have to master each boss and execute well. There are easier difficulties, but I never tried them because I love the challenge. A true classic; highly recommended!

Great game. If you were the kind of person who the first game completely blew you away because it exceeded any expectations you could have had, it's possible that this game won't be able to live up to that, since you have a good idea what to expect from AITSF. I will say that the quality and structure of the game as a whole is an objective improvement over the first, with some aspects being subjective whether you think the first or second game is stronger.

Also you can actually play this game with no knowledge of the first at all. Not only is it not required, because the two cases are not related at all, but Nirvana Initiative specifically goes out of its way to not spoil the first game. The only thing you won't understand is some jokes that carry over from the first game. I guess also the majority of characters that got development in the first game won't get any in this one, so the way you are meant to feel about some returning characters will be missing. That said, I'd still recommend to play both because they're great, so you might as well.

The best PS1 game this year!

Rest in peace, Murayama-san. Thanks for giving us one more.