The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon Reviews
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon is another confident entry in a series. It offers a deep, flexible battle system, a massive amount of content, and a story that rewards long-time fans with meaningful payoffs and familiar faces. It’s not the best place to start your Trails journey, and newcomers may feel lost despite the helpful recaps. Consider jumping on Trails in the Sky also available on Switch 2 first. For existing fans, or players who already know they enjoy this style of RPG, there’s a lot to appreciate here. Personally, I’m far from a complete Trails expert, but every entry I’ve played has won me over through its combat systems and world-building. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon continues that trend. It may not surprise you, but it delivers exactly what it promises.
Trails Beyond the Horizon delivers strong writing, countless returning characters, and a big narrative push, even if its largely unchanged combat keeps things familiar rather than fresh.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon, while the furthest thing from a good starting point, offers a terrific mid-point in the Calvard Arc that all fans will be very happy with. The game doesn't do much to switch things up from the previous two games, but as the saying goes: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Trails Beyond the Horizon ultimately feels like the course correction the series needed after the detour that was Daybreak 2. It successfully balances its massive cast and deep lore to deliver the major payoffs that fans have been anticipating since long before the Calvard arc even began. The pacing can be glacially slow as it builds toward these reveals, but the way it weaves years of plot threads together is incredibly satisfying and fills me with excitement for what lies beyond this horizon.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon successfully continues the Calvard arc with a strong story, colorful cast, and deep, flexible combat, and while its slow start and overwhelming systems make it far from beginner-friendly, those who push through are rewarded with a massive, memorable adventure full of standout moments.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Trails Beyond the Horizon marks a new chapter in The Legend of Heroes saga, as well as the 20th anniversary of Nihon Falcom's JRPG saga. Some questions raised in previous episodes will be answered, but at the same time, new mysteries will keep the plot intriguing. The gameplay is solid and fun, and the developers' experience is evident. Unfortunately, despite an excellent PC port, the graphics are inferior to those of the remake of the first chapter of Trails in the Sky released in September, and there is no Italian translation. However, these are negatives that fans of the saga will certainly be willing to overlook, given the usual high quality of the saga's writing.
Review in Italian | Read full review
More so than any of the slow burns this series has to offer, The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon feels like an endpoint that they unfortunately had to build an entire JRPG to get to. The road to get there is forgettable, and the ending left me with a somewhat bitter taste that made it not feel as worth it as I’d hoped, even as a series fan. So much of this game consists of recycled ideas and stories that were either done substantially better in previous games or that have been done so often that they’ve become stale. While Trails games have their commonalities, they usually mix things up enough between games such that they’ve yet to feel this outright repetitive. Even during the slow parts, rarely have I been so downright bored as I was playing this game at several spots, especially before Act 3. It’s not completely devoid of highlights, but they don’t quite make up for its deficiencies when it comes to the experience of playing this game. Horizon just doesn’t have a whole lot I found as fun or enjoyable as I’d hoped, even when compared to the more outwardly flawed entries of the series. Combat is less enjoyable and the cast of characters largely felt like they were going through the motions. The story has a lot of shakeups once it gets going, but increased scope does not mean an increasing worth of investment. It seldom offered much that truly stuck with me for good reason. I’ve been patient with this series, but my patience only goes so far when it drags its feet just to arrive at the conclusion it does.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon is an excellent entry in the Trails series and the strongest game in the Calvard arc. The combat system is one of the best in the series and the music will leave a lasting impression on you. The story is interesting and will grip you until the end. It resolves mysteries from previous games all while setting things up for the future and leaves you clamoring for more. If you have been following Trails for a long time, I highly recommend you pick this game up, you will love it. Newcomers, however, should play earlier entries first before tackling this one, to maximize their enjoyment of the game.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon builds upon the story of its predecessor while also bringing together some of the series’ beloved heroes.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon is a fantastic JRPG adventure and one that sits comfortably as a follow up to Trails through Daybreak II which had some pacing issues. These seem to have been all but resolved thanks to it's fantastic gameplay, new appealing visuals and combat and a cast of characters that we have grown to love through the years. If you've been keeping up but felt somewhat disconnected then Trails Beyond the Horizon will certainly fill the void that Trails has been missing.
The stakes are as big as ever, and the grand scale of world building and character development continue to outpace what most story-driven RPGs can only dream of.
Trails Beyond the Horizon feels built for fans who already know Zemuria, but it's three-route structure feels fresh and pushes the Calvard arc into exciting new directions.
The complex narrative, with multiple perspectives, the hybrid combat system, and the various mechanics that make it deep without overwhelming the player, make Trails Beyond the Horizon a spectacular JRPG to play.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon understands where it sits in a long-running series and builds from there. It brings familiar characters together, keeps combat feeling solid across long stretches, and relies on consistency rather than big shifts. The story takes its time and can feel overly comfortable, but strong character work helps carry things forward. It’s not trying to reinvent Trails, but for players already invested in the series, it feels like a steady step toward what comes next.
For me, The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon is easily the best game in the Calvard arc thus far, and one of the greatest games in the entire franchise, though with the caveat that it is made possible by building on twelve games worth of context. New players should really avoid leaping in here and go back to at least Trails Through Daybreak, but series fans are in for a treat.
More than anything, it’s great to see Trails Beyond the Horizon take steps to answer some of the series’ longstanding questions, and set the stage for the grand finale of the entire epic. There’s still nothing else out there quite like Falcom’s series, and Trails Beyond the Horizon is a strong reminder that those hundreds of hours it takes to play all these games is well worth it. And perhaps more importantly, picture proof that Falcom is willing to learn from its past, and I’ve more hope than ever that it might truly be able to stick the landing for the wild experiment that Trails has become.
Trails Beyond the Horizon is a solid sequel to a saga that showed great potential in its first outing. The stakes are wildly impressive and goes places I simply didn’t see the series reaching. While the non-critical elements of the story do drag on, with several pointless and boring side quests, the core narrative told across three different paths, each with several of the series’ best characters, results in a climactic finale that shows why this series is one of the best JRPG’s out there.
Trails Beyond the Horizon finally moves the series’ main plot forward in a satisfying way, despite leaving off with a massive cliffhanger. With fantastic combat refinements, not even a slow first Act can dull our excitement about where the series goes from here.
Trails Beyond the Horizon is a game that feels like it's setting up the foundation to pay off the fandom with a conclusion that's set to surprise people, for better or for worse. Five years ago, I likened Trails of Cold Steel IV to Avengers Endgame. Trails Beyond the Horizon might as well be Avengers Doomsday, and there's no telling what to expect when the sequel comes out.
Trails Beyond the Horizon paves the way for the end of the Trails franchise. It's not a perfect game, but it incorporates everything good and bad about the series, resulting in the most Trails game possible. Combined with more polished combat, it was the right recipe to make it one of the best games in the series.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review