The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails Review

thesixthaxis.com:

It always warms my heart to see an obscure Japanese game get a 2nd lease on life. While NIS America has been slowly localising every entry in the exhaustively long-running and interconnected Trails RPG series, there was a PSP spinoff back in 2012 that never got an English release. For as much as fans of Trails and Ys and the Nihon Falcom catalogue can appreciate a niche hit, even The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails seems to have been passed by and ignored by most people. Now that it has an official English release across multiple platforms, I can’t understand why this game wasn’t a cult classic – it’s fast-paced, full of content, endearingly written, and easily one of my favorite Nihon Falcom games.

If you’ve got the same trauma I have from the massive breadth of Legend of Heroes games that Nihon Falcom has made, rest easy – The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails is a completely standalone spinoff that doesn’t require knowledge from any other games. If anything, the game shares more creative and narrative cloth with Nihon Falcom’s other long-running franchise Ys. Protagonist Nayuta yearns for adventure, but all he can do in his home of Remnant Isle is study mysterious reflective shards that tease him with hints of an outside world he may never discover. That is, at least, until a giant tower falls from the sky and lands right next to the island, giving Nayuta and his best friend Cygna the perfect opportunity for adventure.

Plenty of other RPG trope shenanigans play out from there – a mysterious evil emperor, a masked swordsman, mysterious fairies, alternate worlds – the narrative beats of The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails aren’t anything special, but the simplicity of it all is definitely part of the charm. Plus,