Trails through Daybreaking down the Combat System. How Falcom figured out the Combat Formula

Trails through Daybreaking down the Combat System. How Trails Through Daybreak cracked the Combat Formula

 The Trails Series has a history of slightly different combat variation. In this article, I am going to talk about the one used in Trails through Daybreak. In my opinion, the Daybreak combat system is the best system, which combines the Trails in the Sky / Trails from Zero combat system with the new open world combat system that flows seamlessly between each other. In this article, I'm going to explain how it works and why it's so genius, so if you already know how it works, you can skip ahead a bit 

Slotting up your Quartz

Quartz is a running mechanic in the Trails series. By slotting in a quartz, you gain that quartz’s effect. This can range from additional health or critical hit chance, to a chance to status the enemy, or even causing certain attacks (arts) to charge for less time before going off. Included in the newest addition to the series, the Xipha has 4 different rows to put quartz in, Weapon, Shield, Drive and Extra. What makes the placement of quartz interesting in this game, is that by placing quartz of a certain element (water, wind, earth, fire, time, space and mirage) into a Xipha slot, you get an elemental affinity of that type to that row (ex. Attack 3 gives you Fire +6). In this game, there are certain skills called shard skills that can only be obtained by having a certain amount of elemental affinity in that row, and these skills differ depending on the row (but in theory all characters can have the same bonus skills). This ranges from the breaker skills which lower an opponents’ stats, to healing and CP / EP recovery skills, to new shard breaker skills which lower opponents’ stats when releasing shards. The final detail of quartz that makes slotting them in a fun puzzle includes something called single element slots. Like their name suggests, you can only put quartz of a certain labeled element in that slot, but in return, you gain DOUBLE the elemental affinity the quartz would normally give you. This allows for some characters to more easily use certain bonus skills than others. 

Driving the Master into a Holo

In this game, Falcom split the master quartz mechanic from the last game into 2 separate pieces, drivers and holo cores. Drivers have a certain list of set arts that a character will be able to use and a number of customizable slots. By giving one to a character, they can use the pre-installed list of arts and whatever arts you put in the customizable slots. While some drivers are a strict list, others have partial or a good chunk of customizable slots. These customization options are called plug-ins and once purchased from the shop, can be put into any driver(Xipha). The second piece that was split from the master quartz turned into a holo core. These are AI that give a character a small buff on 2 stats and massively buff key stats when a character is “boosted”. This can be from evasion, to crit chance, to defense, to even massively buffing attack but lowering defense. By using cores and drivers together with a character's unique skills (crafts), the player can drastically change what a character excels in.

(Arts and) Crafting your way to Victory 

In the trails series, the attacks players can use are found in skills called arts and crafts, and they're in this game too! Characters have 2 bars, EP and CP. EP iworks like Mana in most games and are used for charged attacks called arts. To use crafts, which are unique character skills, CP is used instead. By combining arts and crafts, you can knock down your enemies. Conserving CP and EP is the key to planning for boss battles in the Trails games. In my experience with old trails games, CP is harder to gain than EP because there are barely any places in the series that restores CP, while EP can be restored anywhere HP is restored. This is where the big change that Falcom implemented changes the game

Stepping in the Overworld Combat

New to the Daybreak series, characters can now engage in full blown overworld combat. While in previous installations, players could attack enemies in the overworld, this was mainly used for player advantage and enemy advantage. Each character has their own fighting style, but they all have a basic attack combo, a charge attack, a dodge roll and a dodge attack. By combining these, you can maneuver your way around the map and attack enemies in the overworld. In addition, by hitting enemies in the overworld, your characters recharge their CP, getting rid of the old issue of having too little CP to go around. Unlike enemy advantage and player advantage in other games, Daybreak intertwines this into its overworld combat mechanic. After hitting an enemy enough times (roughly 2 charge attacks) an enemy is stunned and by releasing shards when an enemy is stunned, you can get the advantage. Conversely, if the active character is damaged too much, the enemy will gain advantage.

Shard Swell!!! Flowing from overworld to command battle

While these two types of combat DRASTICALLY differ, Falcom does an incredible job of making this combat seamlessly flow. When an enemy is stunned, by releasing shards, a shard attack will be performed. In addition to dealing damage, this will cause any shard breaking skills to activate. This greatly incentives players to stun an enemy before triggering a command battle. But the best part is that if a command battle is too tough or tedious, you can attack in the overworld. And if an overworld battle feels like it's dragging on too long, you can switch to a command battle anytime.

Tying a Link of Xipha, putting together the best combat in Trails

This new combat system is by far the best one in the series, in my opinion. While the command battles keep combat mostly the same, the overworld combat fixes many of the in-game problems. Overworld battles can be used to grind CP and sepith (a resource in game gained by chests and by defeating monsters). By having overworld battles, it is easier to run away from enemies or interact with them in the overworld. Thirdly, this allows players to choose how many enemies they want to interact with at a time. This can be done by only getting close to certain enemies or K.O.ing weaker enemies and going into a command battle with the stronger ones. Finally, this gives the players an actual reason to engage with monsters as the damage they do translates over to the command battle. All of these factors together creates the genius of the overworld battle to command battle flow, giving players a reason to engage in the overworld AND in command battles. While there are also a few downsides to this type of set up, by creating this system, it gave players the flexibility to engage with the world in the way they want to, and by doing that, Falcom has truly created a masterpiece

Sources:

Xipha. Kiseki Wiki. (n.d.). https://kiseki.fandom.com/wiki/Xipha