Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails

 The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails

First game of 2024! :D

Legend of Nayuta is a platformer-style action-RPG released by Nihon Falcom on the PSP in 2012 in Japan only.

In 2023, a full English translated version was released for the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.

I played the Nintendo Switch version.

Legend of Nayuta follows the adventure of a boy named Nayuta as he explores a mysterious alternate world that was thought to only be fantasy, with the help of a tiny fairy named Noi.

You start the game in your hometown, with a small community of NPCs to talk to, a few shops, and other important characters. What I like about Falcom games is that they tend to have rather detailed NPCs - every town NPC is a unique individual with their own name and character design, and they all have something new to say to Nayuta after every story scene. There is only one town in this game, and it's nice to see how each character changes and reacts to the story.

The game is divided up into stages accessed through a world map screen. Each level takes the form of an RPG-style maze with monsters and platforming. In each stage, there are three hidden crystals, one hidden treasure chest, and one bonus mission to complete, such as "beat the stage taking damage fewer than 10 times", or something like that. Each stage has a different bonus mission. When you complete bonus missions and find the hidden treasures, you earn star points, which are used to learn new sword techniques in town.

Nayuta can find and equip weapons, armour and helmets that improve his stats - the way equipment is presented is very similar to classic Ys, where every item is obtained in a row for you to select, which is a system I do like. Nayuta can use either small swords or broadswords, which both have different attack speeds, but to be honest, the difference felt fairly minor to me. 

Noi can also get her own equipment, which confers benefits to Nayuta such as "enemies drop more items" or "you don't take damage from falling into pits". So while every new piece of Nayuta's equipment outclasses the older ones, Noi's equipment has a bit more situational purpose to them. Which is nice!

Noi also can equip various magic spells, which work on a cooldown timer system. Most spells are some form of projectile magic attack, but they have a nice variety to them - fast-shooting orbs, slow-moving poison sludge, multi-hit tornados, homing icicles - there's plenty of different spells, and they all have their uses. When Noi uses a spell enough times, it can level up and get stronger, which is nice. It's fun to collect and try out all the different spells.

The first four worlds each take place on a separate continent, and as you progress through the game, you unlock different seasonal variations of each level. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. This means that each level actually has four levels in one - the level design changes drastically depending on the season, so even though the basic geometry layout is the same each time, the way they actually play is completely different. Sometimes paths are blocked off in certain seasons, or the path through the level is changed, the switches and gates are in different locations, etc - it's basically an entirely new level.

The season-changing system is not actually utilised as much as I was expecting. Each stage has the "default" season that you play through for the story, and then one additional season gets unlocked after the story arc in that area is completed. The third season for each area is only unlocked as a post-game challenge, and the fourth and final season in each area is exclusive to New Game Plus! So in a regular playthrough with no extras, you're really only going to be playing two seasons of each level. I find this rather odd to be honest. For such a large aspect of the game to be mostly optional content feels a bit unusual.

Actually, there's a rather large amount of other content that is locked behind New Game Plus too for some reason - many quests and smaller character plotlines can only be seen during New Game Plus, including some collectibles, which means that New Game Plus is required for 100% completion of items as well. It's a little bit annoying that they make you replay the game a second time just to see all the content. But thankfully New Game Plus does have quite a bit going for it - you can unlock various benefits such as increasing the level cap, increasing Nayuta's movement speed, removing the cooldown on some of Noi's abilities, etc, and you also unlock a higher difficulty mode for use exclusively in New Game Plus. It's a pretty nice implementation of New Game Plus for this kind of game, but at the same time, I don't particularly enjoy how I was forced to complete an entire second playthrough just because I wanted to see all the quest lines and get all the items.

The story of this game is fun, though it is essentially just a "bad guy wants to destroy the earth" plot for the majority of the game. But the characters are nice, and the plot resolves in a nice way, so it's all good as far as story is concerned. There are a lot of cutscenes, but only a handful of lines have voice acting. And annoyingly, there are quite a few typos in the English script. ... the localisation job does feel rather sloppy at times.

Overall, Legend of Nayuta is a competently-built, but overall rather unremarkable game. The level design is good and fun, but it's not anything mindblowing, and it certainly can get repetitive. I wouldn't particularly recommend this game, because it's not really a must-play by any means. I think Falcom fans would enjoy it, but aside from that, it's just nothing all that special at the end of the day. It's a nice platformer-style RPG, and it's well-made. That's about all there is to it.