Sholva The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon Review

The pinnacle of the series, so far: this game is incredible. This review could be extremely short, and simple, if I said there’s a song in it called “Kevin Graham”. And that’d be the review: this game is a ten out of ten just because of that. But the game’s actually a lot more than that : ) By itself, alone, this game improves the modern combat formula that started with the Calvard arc: combat is really fun and engaging, now even more so than ever in Field Battles, with more tools to deal with the stronger enemies, like slowing time down for a few seconds, or certain characters having their special “awakened” state available at full boost. Command Battles are also better than ever, with so many ways to build the characters with various shards skills, arts and quartz that, closer to the end game, start becoming the usual crazily absurd and creative. Before continuing with all the stuff that makes this game basically yet another high peak in the series, we have to talk about PC Performance and settings and, as it is tradition, PH3 have done a masterful job, they’ve ported several games on this new Falcom Development Kit engine, and now we even have DLSS 4.5, which is crazy. My machine runs a Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, with 32 GB of RAM, which is more than enough to run this game at the Ultra Preset at 100+ FPS, with DLSS, at 1440p output resolution. Like all PH3 PC ports, it does scale up, and down, quite comfortably, with settings and resolution so, if your machine is quite low spec, you’d still be able to play the game (as long as it’s Steam Deck level or better, for sure). This game is a bit more GPU intensive than the previous two Daybreak games, mind you, but the bump in Model Quality and other visuals, like Lighting and Animations, is quite noticeable too…so well worth the slight performance cost compared to previous games. This game looks and runs beautifully, it has the best animated cutscenes, and camera work, from any Falcom game, although the Sky 1st remake is quite close, animation wise. Moving on, this has become almost quite certainly my favourite game in the franchise because, to be honest, no Trails game exists in a vacuum: every new instalment, and arc, relies on the foundations established in previous works and, Beyond the Horizon here, has immense pay off to things that, quite literally, started in the very first game of the series, Sky FC, obviously Sky SC as well, the 3rd too, Crossbell and Erebonian arcs, Reverie and, obviously, Daybreak I and II. It is because the series has such unmatched World-Building, that we were able to reach this level of peak in the story, now thirteen games in. If you ever have doubts about something in a Trails game being there “just by coincidence”, I’m going tell you that no, it’s not an accident: they know, they put things where they need to place them, because everything is planned since the beginning. I love the Arkride Solutions Office cast, they grew a lot in Daybreak II, with some of the best Connect Events in the series, but Horizon has even better ones and, an amazing QoL feature: now you don’t need to save scum, or NG+, to watch them all, as there are special connect tokens that can be looted. These events are so important and paramount in Horizon that you need to watch them all: they’re fantastic, emotional in many cases, very funny too, when need be, and I enjoyed them so much. The Voice Actors (played it in English) have perfected their roles so well, what an amazing cast of incredible people, all of them and, of course, great direction. The new Soundtrack pieces in this game are quite something, with some of them evoking leitmotifs from, literally, ten games back, Cold Steel vibes too in some of the tracks where it made sense to have that vibe, and so on. That new Enforcers version theme for Horizon…that was nice, as it has the leitmotif of one of the best tracks in Sky SC. This game elevates not only the Calvardian arc, but also the whole series, to new heights which, honestly, makes replaying the older games a treat, to see how everything was threaded together with such elegance and intent. Overall…I am immensely satisfied with Beyond the Horizon: it’s been everything I was expecting, and then it packed a lot more, that I was not expecting. How will Falcom surpass this? They will, for sure, we’re honestly in the “final saga” for “reals”, this time, as it is quite obvious after finishing this game. How many games we have left? Who can tell, but I can tell it’s been a pleasure going through this journey and, also, watching others follow it and seeing their reactions. Another great year for Trails fans, in 2026, for sure, and looking forward to what comes next.