I am six chapters into Kuro no Kiseki (recently announced to be localized as Trails through Daybreak). Currently playing using Zerofield's/4chan's fan translation.
The Republic of Calvard feels unpleasant compared to the other countries. In the prior Trails games, you can talk to every NPC and there is a sense of community. The family unit was still intact. Across 10 games and 1,000+ hours, Ellie's family was the only one that was divorced. Gordon family in Trista was the only example of marital disharmony, and it never got real bad. You didn't see anyone struggling to afford things or pay the bills or worry about losing their house. The worst you saw was the occasional casino, but you didn't hear about people losing their entire life savings to gambling. The Trails world was idylic.
Then you get to Kuro no Kiseki, and Calvard seems spiritually ruined. Lots of divorcees. Abusive alcoholic fathers and wives sick of their husband and fights breaking out within the home. Widespread drunkeness. Drunks puking on the street in Tyrell District. Men on the streets at night soliciting prostitution services. Strip clubs. Calvard has a big movie industry and apparently R-17 stuff is very popular. A police officer flips through girlfriends like the phone book. One night stands. We see people losing a considerable portion of their savings to gambling and lying to their wives about it. We see insane consumerism, with people taking out 10 or even 15 year loans to buy the latest cool car, people just having to buy the latest laptop, etc. We also see people having spent their whole lives as unhappy wage slaves, but having never managed to save up enough money to start their own business or build a big family. An unmarried middle-aged man is fired from his job and tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train. Also, you can't talk to all of the NPCs. You run past hundreds of nameless NPCs, so it feels there isn't a tight knit community.
And that's before getting to the widespread corruption, with foreign crime syndicates like Heiyue controlling the second largest city in Calvard and the government does nothing about it. The newspapers and governments tell straight up lies. We see some police officers so demoralized with the system that they resign to become bracers.
Kuro isn't aesthetically dreary. At a first glance it doesn't look like Shadowrun, for instance. But it doesn't feel like a place I want to spend 3 games and 300+ hours in unlike Liberl, Erebonia, or even Crossbell.
Aesthetically, Calvard looks boring. So I haven't seen any native Calvardian architecture. All I see is either boring, brutalist modern architecture or Chinatowns. Also, the steampunk and cassette futurism tech aesthetics of prior games are gone. Instead you just have modern looking technology. Slim laptops, slidephone orbments with LED screens, modern looking trucks, etc. Apple stores instead of the old timey shops. Even that cool looking half-dome orbment machine of the last 10 games has been replaced by a boring ATM looking orbment machine. People wear modern clothing like hoodies. Also, the journey feel of prior games is gone. Rather than hiking through a vast wilderness to the next town, or riding an old steam train, or riding an airship, the heroes instead drive a modern looking truck along the freeway and get stuck in traffic jams (yes, that happens in chapter 2). It doesn't feel like a romantic, wide open fantasy world I want to explore like in the prior games. It just looks like the boring one I already live in, along with the same destitution of society.
One thing that made me nervous early on was the introduction of mosques and the game claiming that they worshipped the same goddess as the Church. I was worried that it was going to be some "Aslan = Tash" nonsense, but later on it turns out to just be more of a foreign culture's artistic depiction of the same faith (like a Chinese Christian's depiction of Jesus. Later on, you can visit a Church dressed up as an asian-styled temple, with what appears to be a tabernacle styled as a Butudan). I think I just had a kneejerk reaction due to how often I hear "Abrahamic faiths all worship the same god!" crap. Not sure if these Japanese devs were aware of that. A sidequest later on has a villainous cult leader preaching salvation by works rather than faith, but none of the heroes called him out for his heresy when everyone in this setting went to Sunday school when they were a kid, so I'm not sure how much the devs understand Christianity. I do find it odd that we haven't we heard of "Alusha" before over the last 1,000+ hours of Trails? Literally never once mentioned, not by an NPC from a foreign country or as trivia in a book or by Father or a Sister.
