NIS America is bringing Kuro no Kiseki to the U.S. and Europe in summer 2024 for PS5, PC, Switch, and PS4, and the RPG‘s official localized name is Trails through Daybreak. NISA made the announcement during a brief stream event and debuted the game’s first English trailer as well.
Trails through Daybreak first launched in Japan in 2021. Its sequel, Crimson Sin is already available in Japan as well, but NIS America had a bit of a backlog to get through before work could start in Daybreak – and a decades-old problem to solve. That problem involved localizing and publishing two games that originally released on PSP so international audiences could catch up on a story that continued in Falcom’s 2020 game, Trails into Reverie.
It’s one of those RPG series, a dense, complex network of interconnected storylines and recurring characters, but Daybreak functions as a sort of fresh start for newcomers and longtime fans. It takes place in Calvard, a technologically advanced country with a barely functioning democracy grappling with the fallout of a recent continental war that left it as the sole superpower and a swirling mix of cultures coalescing in the capital city.
In this mix is protagonist Van, a spriggan – a fixer, in other words – who takes on odd jobs big and small from anyone willing to pay. He’s a backstreet kind of guy, willing to accept commissions from desperate, morally dubious, and upright clients alike. Daybreak starts when a young girl approaches Van with a request: find a family heirloom that belonged to her grandfather.
This is an RPG, though, so the quest to find this relic inevitably leads to a crisis that threatens the entire nation and exposes the rank underside of Calvard’s government.
Daybreak is a big shift for the series on a few levels. Your choices during certain quests change how Van interacts with some people and what quests open later in the game, and the combat switches between real-time action and turn-based battles at the press of a button. Your character’s abilities change depending on how you customize them with dozens of options for magic, support, physical attacks, and more.
Best of all if you don’t feel like playing 10 other RPGs before summer 2024, you can play this one without knowing what happened before.
There’s no firm release date yet, but expect more Trails through Daybreak news in the coming months.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
