this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Glad you liked it! I think it's still one of the best games in the series to this day, with only two others (Investigations 2 and Great 2) being contenders for the top spot.
AJ is unique because it's fairly ambitions and tries to make major shifts in direction in the series. It doesn't succeed (a VNDB review calls it a "beaultiful failure"), but the fact that it tried to be different still makes it an interesting experience.
I've always felt that overwhelming the player with mechanics is part of the "Xenoblade experience". ๐
But yeah, I agree XCX goes a lot higher in complexity than other games. Been a while since I played it in the WiiU but I'm pretty sure I beat the game without completely figuring out some of the mechanics.
That was a major pain point on the original WiiU version as people outside your party didn't get any experience, making it much harder to swap team members an get affinity to unlock their storyline. Thankfully it looks like this was fixed in the Switch version.
Playing Trails Through Daybreak II!
Reached the Final Chapter. It's a good game and I'm having fun, but it's definitely in the lower tier of games in the Trails series.
Story is weak, relying too much on certain (annoying) tropes that Falcom loves to use. It's also lacking the higher stakes and more adult themes that I praised the first game for, and feels like it was rushed and needed a bit more development time.
Played the Atelier Yumia Demo!
One thing I respect about Gust is how they are always experimenting and trying new things with the Atelier series. Yumia feels very different from recent entries, more serious and story-focused instead of slice-of-life.
Exploration is open world, even more than Ryza 3. Combat is similar to the Ryza series being an ATB variant, but adds a bit more action elements like movement and dodging. Alchemy is a bit simpler (at least at first glance) but comes with some interesting QOL features like the ability to synthesize common items while exploring the world.
My initial impression is that I'm going to enjoy this game, but it probably won't make my list of "Favorite Atelier games". Let's see if the full game changes my mind.
Let's hope so. I would be really annoyed if they didn't get any experience.
As for Trails Through Daybreak 2, they seem to have annualized the series. This one was released just an year after the first game. They should probably start taking some time.
Trails games are usually released in pairs, then there's a break before the next one. The developer works on a "one game per year" schedule, so they rotate between Trails, Ys, and sometimes a new/different game like the recently announced Tokyo Xanadu sequel.
The reason we've been getting so many of them in the west is because we were far behind on releases, Daybreak 2 has been out since 2022 in Japan! From what I heard NISA is very happy with the sales of the series, so they've been been rushing to localize the remaining ones.
Right now there's only one left until we're finally caught up (Kai no Kiseki, released in Japan last September), then we're probably waiting a couple years for the next one.
I actually went by the Japanese release schedule. Daybreak and Daybreak 2 released within year of each other. With trails game, I guess they can reuse assets from one game to next, at least within a series, so that should decrease the development time. Still, quite a feat in these times for a dev to release game each year.
Yup, there's a ton of time saving there since most of the games in the series are part of a "duology" that takes place in the same country, with the same characters and so on. Which is also good for players since waiting only one year makes it less painful when a game ends up in massive cliffhanger. ๐
Though I just double checked and Reverie -> Daybreak -> Daybreak 2 were all one year after the other which is highly unusual, even more because Reverie -> Daybreak not only takes place in a different setting but also marks a change of the in-game engines.
It is possible that they have multiple internal teams which are working on different games in parallel, with each game in different phase of development.
I'll see if I can find some interviews or details about how they develop games. Would be an interesting read.