The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails Review

10.10.2023 - 13:31 / 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, while the overall narrative isn’t anything outstandingly inventive, the characters themselves are full of charm. Like so many other Nihon Falcom games, every NPC matters – from your primary cast down to the shopkeepers and guards. They’re all worth talking to, and will have plenty of unique dialogue as the game progresses. In the case of this game, that sense of depth is layered through the setting itself. Remnant Isle is a small island, and everyone in the village knows each other. That small-town vibe makes it so much more meaningful when the characters all actually comment on each other and have noticeable connections and histories.

The real heart of The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails comes from the gameplay, though. This game feels like the best elements from the Ys series and another Nihon Falcom obscurity, Zwei: The Arges Adventure, were mashed together. The siloed, bite-sized nature of the game’s stages makes it clear that this was a handheld game. Rather than exploring vast