Being a fan of the RPG series The Legend of Heroes, no matter your stage of fandom, is a weird, special little thing. You feel like you’re in your own little silo at times. Despite the fact the series has been kicking on for 35 years now, it has never quite reached the global sensation status of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Still, if you’re attuned to the franchise at all when any new game comes out, long-awaited localisation or otherwise, it’s an event. The new entry The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak is a hell of an event, alright. Buckle up.

Moving away from Bracers, child soldiers and the like, Trails Through Daybreak follows a new freelancer company seeking to help everyday people and save the world. This company is Arkride Solutions, run by protagonist Van Arkride, a ruffian who lives on the edges of society and yet, as you’ll come to learn, still manages to have that little soft spot. Your call to action is from a job issued by Agnès Claudel, a student of Aramis High School who is compelled to seek after a series of eight powerful relic devices known as the Geneses. These items hold familial importance and relevance to Claudel’s lineage but are also powerfully dangerous items if in the wrong hands. As bad luck would have it, they’re largely in the possession of the Almata mafia family, a powerful group of supervillains that threaten devastation across the capital town of Edith and its surrounding locales. Uh oh!

So the story goes that more or less each chapter will entail travelling somewhere new, finding a new party member (temporary or permanent), helping overcome their plight and getting back a Genesis all by the time that part wraps up. You’d be forgiven then if you were to find the first three quarters or so of this game to be a bit of a slow burn. It is. Though it’s what developer Nihon Falcom does with that leading time to a beautifully crescendoed finale that is what Trails Through Daybreak and the greater Legend of Heroes franchise is often all about; further expanding a rich fantasy world and giving you a party that by the end of it damn near feels like family.

Van Arkride is an incredibly engaging protagonist. He’s the loner type until more employees of Arkride Solutions and friends and allies enter the picture. Then we learn more of the ruffian’s origins and backstory: his childhood spent with famous bracer Elaine, the tragedies that have occurred in his life prior to the events of the game and so on. We see him come out of his shell more and open up when he’s in the presence of the people closest to him. Better yet, Van even runs Arkride Solutions with all these facts considered. Having had a hard life himself, he’ll even hear out evildoers and those wrung out by and taking things out on the Edith society. If he believes there is good in them and that they are capable of change, he’ll help ’em out. I see inklings of Like a Dragon protagonist Ichiban in him, though less puppy dog and not so much that sense of child-like wonder. Van’s English dub is voice acted by Damien Haas, a talented personality who already has had a good lineup of gigs despite being relatively new to the scene, and portrays him beautifully.

Of course, an RPG protagonist is nothing without their party and all the many, many characters that enter (and leave) Van’s orbit are just as quality. Agnès is incredibly kind and is your first party member, a really good counterpart to Van. Feri is the adorably innocent 13-year-old who already has a lot of combat and soldier training but is desperate to prove herself following being cruelly disowned by her corps and essentially her family. Aaron is a fiery 19-year-old pretty playboy with long red hair who has a mighty talent of acting on the theatre stage but a taste for blood having expertise in sword and fist martial arts. The last party member that I’ll reveal (it’s worth having some surprises, of course) is the teenage scientist prodigy Quatre who’s got an affinity with magical arts and is incredibly valuable with his knowledge of orbments and various technologies.

You might read this list and be worried about a series of children hanging around a twenty-something. I promise there’s no ill intent or wrongdoings here. These party members practically thrust themselves into Van’s life and Arkride Solutions and suddenly the 20-something-year-old who can barely keep his own life together has inadvertently basically adopted a series of teenagers under his wing. A trope I’ll never grow tired of.

I am so unbelievably in awe of the greater Legend of Heroes world. The contemporary fantasy setting has people being gifted with sword arts and magic but also heavy weaponry, artillery and even SUVs. There are classic fantasy monsters like slimes and beasties but then your characters also have flip phones. Talk about magical. Here we have a franchise that’s almost as long-running as Final Fantasy and yet it uniquely is still keeping its same continuation and is very much not anthological. To keep that up for this long and deliver interesting stories in an interesting world and not have it be self-congratulatory and all tie back to one random guy a la modern Star Wars is just impressive. Trails Through Daybreak, which is peak Legend of Heroes, is just another wonderful voyage into a faction of people set on helping the smaller guy.

These side job activities helping others are incredibly congruent to who Van and the Arkride Solutions employees are as people. Because of that, the side offerings don’t feel tacked on as they do in other RPGs. What’s there however is perhaps too much of them without… something else to do as an aside. This is pretty much how Legend of Heroes games’ downtimes go: often text-based side missions and fetch quests. No minigames, alternate gameplay or alternate offerings. Trails Through Daybreak is already a very long game if you try and mainline it. This experience can balloon exponentially if you do everything and feel like you’ve got your work cut out for you. As not every side mission is as memorable as the last, it’s hard to feel like all of it is worth it unless you’re a glutton for punishment or a completionist. Find a list of quintessential quests and don’t pressure yourself to do everything. I promise you’ll be fine.

The Legend of Heroes franchise is in an incredibly good place these days. Turnarounds for localising entries to the West are more timely than they’ve infamously been in the past. Representation is better than ever (though it’s not safe from the occasional problematic trope), even telling stories such as a character that is androgynous. Quality-of-life implementations like being able to change difficulty at just about any time and a turbo mode that just makes everything run that little bit quicker is a godsend. If you’re like me and get nerdy about RPGs where every little mechanic feeds into and compliments another then there’s plenty of that too: orbment and crafting specialisations are better than ever and eating a healing food for the first time also fills a ‘gourmet meter’ which will in turn boost random stats. Most of all, Trails Through Daybreak is the flashiest and prettiest the series has ever been and a lot of that shows in the combat.

Returning as a staple of the franchise is what I consider some of the best of the best of turn-based combat on the market. Battles may ask you to dodge and move around the area of effect attacks on a given turn in MMORPG fashion, only slowed down and that little bit less intense. Of course, you can also be tactical with this and use it to your advantage, wrapping up a group of foes in your own group attacks. Positioning can be everything in fights, especially with meatier foes. Often I’d barely scrape through a battle by just stunning that one boss in time to cancel their devastating attack. This is par for the course for the Legend of Heroes franchise of course, but it’s entirely more engaging adding movement and positioning into the mix than just staring at a 2D combat plane for 70 hours of play.

Quartz and how they’re slotted into a character’s orbment device also comes into play. While functioning similarly to Materia in a given Final Fantasy game, it’s just that little bit deeper by small bonus passive stats being added depending on the quartz used. How they’re placed next to one another or what level of quartz also determines what combat abilities can come into play. Boy, how delightfully anime and flashy they can be as you watch your screen erupt into magical particles, devastations of fire or disastrous earth-erupting effects. Oh, the creative opportunities for experimentation!

Combat is just everything you know and love in RPGs but that little extra something. The grind has never been more seamless with the simple fact that aside from scripted fights or if you’re truly getting walloped, you can control whether or not you’re engaging in the overworld hack-and-slash gameplay to make quick work of foes or jumping into some good old fashioned turn-based fun. Daybreak even encourages you to engage with both, with the ability to stun enemies in real turn and then popping turn-based while they’re in a stupor to commit bonus damage.