this game did the impossible for me. it PEAKS so much i loved every second of enjoying this masterpiece and was honestly dumfounded by how much Cold Steel redeemed itself and became such a phenomenal arc and jump in quality

my favorite lore in the series and so many long-awaited moments in this came this was a gift for anyone who started all the way from the sky arc and didn't skip any arc. this is comfortably my second favorite Trails game

the end of the saga

The Legend of Xenogears: Trails of Cold Saga IV
(the game that broke my brain)

Where do I even start with this game? The lore is batshit insane (derogatory), everyone treats Rean like he's the second coming of Anime Jesus, the characters take literal days to rest in the middle of WW3 after doing a day or two of hiking, the vast majority of the returning cast is flanderized to hell and back TO THE POINT IT HAPPENS IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CUTSCENES IN THE GAME (thankfully Renne is at least spared such a tragic fate), they revive 3 separate characters (Toval, Olivier, and Victor) who died very much onscreen, in a very unambiguous way, to which the party's reactions were very apparent, because Falcum can't stand killing off their OCs (yes it's a spoiler and no I don't care), they revive Crow 3 times by taping his soul to Valimar or some shit, the curse only exists to make the party have 3 billion boss fights with the most rando characters imaginable (WHY AM I FIGHTING THE FUCKING MUSIC TEACHER FROM CS1 GET ME OFF THIS TRAINWRECK), Thomas fucks off for the 4th game in a row despite being built up to hell and back (hey remember when Dominions were actively involved in the plot and eventually became party members? well that sure is a thing of the past), TOWA ISN"T PLAYABLE YET AGAIN, Musse becomes a grand chessmaster or something idk, McBurn sure is a boss fight and mcburninates everyone and activates his inner Trogdor and gives you an item that unlocks the true ending (?????) and you can only get the true ending by completing all the quests in the game (????????????) and the last quest is beating up the dragon Holy Beast (???????????????????????????????????????), all the women party members, INCLUDING REAN"S FUCKING STUDENTS (INCLUDING FUCKING ALTINA) (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA), are romanceable (screaming internally) (I still can't get over the Laura cave scene and that's a whole other bucket of worms), TOWA ACTIVELY FORGIVES CROW ON SCREEN FOR BEING DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ACTIVELY AND QUITE POSSIBLY KNOWINGLY PUTTING HER LIFE IN DANGER IN CS1 (that shit should give her PTSD at least and that's not even getting into her very possible abandonment issues SET UP ONLY 1 GAME PRIOR), Alberich is there to be a bad guy who does evil bad guy things because that's what the evil bad guy do (on top of functionally being a really bad ripoff of Dmitri Yuriev which should be a war crime on its own), Kloe isn't playable yet again AND IS LITERALLY PUT IN A POSITION TO BE PLAYABLE but Falcum didn't want to animate her or something I guess (I don't think she even gets a Brave Order either when Schera of all people does which is extra retarded, especially with hindsight from Hajimari BECAUSE SCHERA IS PREGGERS AND IS IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ACTIVE WARZONE), the party fights Osborne and Arianrhod at the bottom of the Gnome BDSM factory hobbit hole thing (??????????????????????????????????) way before the end of the game which takes away what little crumbs of gravitas he had left (I don't think he even gets an Anti-Order WHICH YOU"D THINK HE WOULD SINCE HE APPARENTLY CAN SPREAD THE ANTI-ORDER VIRUS TO THE IRONBLOODS), the writing generally being barely passable at best and an absolute fustercluck at worst, the gameplay being the easiest it's ever been even on Nightmare and every enemy being walking bags of HP (I checked at least a few times per chapter if I didn't accidentally switch it to an easier difficulty even when I wasn't optimizing everyone), and a lot of other stuff that probably slipped my mind but I don't care because this game's plot is frighteningly worthless.

Before I start ranting about the game's comically lopsided reception compared to how it actually is, I want to say that there are a handful of things I did like about the game.
-I liked that Juna was basically the protagonist for the first chapter of the game (and honestly she should have just been the protag, or at least a deuteragonist, for the rest of the game). Alisa entirely dropped being the deuteragonist during CS2 and it would have been nice to have someone fill in that role, especially since it would give a chance to split the cast to focus on other parts of Erebonia with Class 7 focusing on one part and Class 7 2 focusing on another part (why in the shiny fuck we didn't get to go to Jurai or North Ambria instead of farting around for the entirety of Chapter 2 I will never fathom). But anyway, Juna protag I very much appreciated for the short time it happened, since she's easily the only one left with any amount of tangible reason to want to stop Daddy Osborne from being a big ol' meanie (and NO, Crow no longer counts).
-There were a handful of bonding events I liked, despite easily being the worst handled aspect of the arc. I liked the one with Altina where she tried to help liberate Ymir from Imperial soldiers, the one where Emma tried to purge Ishmelga from Rean at great personal risk to herself (even though, let's face it, the only reason they did it was to have a reason for Emma to be naked), and the one with Musse showing Rean her suicide gun. There were a few problems with the setup for each of them (and frankly for Emma's it really should have just been a plot scene instead of Insert Epic Anime Fight #236754762354) but the fact that I really like the ideas for them more than makes up for their shortcomings.

And now for the rant.

If it isn't obvious, this is one of the worst games I've ever played, and not just because it's such a massive blueball for longtime fans who want something more substantial than having shiny objects dangling in front of them. And it really stinks because the plot can be summed up as "Xenogears meets Highlander during WW3" which sounds fucking awesome, but somehow Falcum made it the most boring, mind-numbing, tedious waste of time ever. Falcum has been building up Osborne since FUCKING SKY THE THIRD and his scene in Ao where he was openly threatening Dieter in a room full of dignitaries from other countries was easily one of the best scenes in the entire series, and in this arc he's been nothing but an absolute tin can of a person. I legitimately can't even tell if it's one of those "iT wAs JuSt iShMeLgA aLL aLoNg" plotpoints or if Osborne was completely in control the entire time because the way the writers explain the mind-melding whatever the hell was going on with him and Alberich is extremely confused and misleading. To be fair I completely clocked out by that point in the game, but I actively tried to look it up and ask other people what was happening with that, and either method didn't help me to understand much better beyond "Ishmelga and Osborne were doing stuff together". To put it in perspective, one of my favorite game series is Xenosaga. There is a very delicately woven, intricate plot of subterfuge, corporate spying, fucky experimentation, and intrigue all centered around an event that took place 14 in-game years ago. There are many different factions with different interests either trying to vie for control or to oppose the factions that would disturb the peace. To say that the player needs to almost take notes at some points while playing the games would not be an understatement. And those games are much easier to follow than most of anything in this game and Cold Steel because the writers had a goal they wanted to accomplish and actively articulated what everyone was doing when they were doing it, and the player can easily see what was happening and can make reasonable guesses as to what could happen next, and has many twists and turns to keep it interesting that don't come out of the same nowhere that Ishmelga showed up from. With this game, that sense is very much absent, at least for me. And Takahashi's plans got derailed partway through making the series; he had to cut down from 6 games to 3 games, with some supplementary content to fill in necessary gaps that couldn't make it into the games proper. What Takahashi accomplished in just 3 games, a VN and a phone game was monumental; what this game accomplished with all the buildup, time to develop and money that Falcum could muster was a tragedy. And for the final nail in the coffin, the entire Xenosaga series can be 100% completed in roughly the same time someone would 100% complete CS1.

And I'm not here trying to say everyone who likes this game is bad or anything, but I genuinely envy the people who can just turn their brains off and enjoy this shit. Superficially, longtime favorite characters make appearances and generally do things that they might do in this situation, so the immersion isn't ruined. There's a lot of pretty crazy stuff happening after Rean makes a comeback which amps up the stakes for the latter half of the game, and Cassius comes out of retirement to teach Rean a pretty cool and (relatively speaking) mechanically interesting S-craft that, admittedly, is one of my favorites in the series and can reasonably compete with all-time greats like Sakura Morning Moon.
All that being said, the amount of praise this game gets despite how much of a shitshow it is at a glance deeper than cursory always baffled me. There's people who either love this game to pieces or there's people who absolutely hate it with every fiber of their being, which is really unfortunate because the writers (might) still have an amount of passion for the series but to have it fail on this scale, especially with a relatively decent track record, says to me they need to slow production of this series down and let the series breathe a bit and have them think through everything properly. With the few things that I liked, even when it's an unfortunately very small part of the runtime it's genuinely up there with some of the other games I really enjoy. And to top it all off, I don't think Trails is even recoverable after this game; Hajimari did a decent job of trying to retcon a lot of the really dumb nonsense that was set up in this game and is basically just CS4 2: The Search for More Hanging Plot Threads, but Falcum's braindead insistence on having characters futz around on screen until the plot happens has finally caught up to them, and the plot is no longer something I can take seriously in any capacity.

Anyway, Cold Steel in general is an arc that I suggest people skip (the amount of stuff the player needs to know from it to get into Kuro can literally be summed up in a paragraph) but especially skip this one. The only parts of it that I think are worth watching are up on Youtube so just search around there.

---{Graphics}---
☐ You forget what Reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ Paint.exe

---{Gameplay}---
☐ Masterpiece
☑ Great
☐ Good
☐ Not bad
☐ Meh.
☐ Playing with anything is more fun than that.
☐ Just no

---{Audio}---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

---{Soundtracks}---
☑ Masterpiece
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ Terrible

---{Audience}---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Moderately Fast
☐ Spoiled-Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare Comp.

---{Difficulty}---
☐ Just press "W" for Win
☐ Easy Peezy Lemon Squeezy
☐ Requires some Brain Cells
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Difficult AF
☐ #1 Player of Dark Souls Speed-runner

---{Story}---
☐ There is a Story?
☑ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Background Check
☐ Good Enough
☐ Lovely
☐ Masterpiece
☐ It‘ll replace your life

---{Game Time}---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short like your 8=D
☐ Average like mobile game
☑ As like Trails series :D
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If u have some spare money left
☑ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
☐ A Scam just like Gambling

---{Bugs}---
☐ Do you mean the insect?
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Some but it's funny
☐ Can get annoying
☐ Goat Simulator
☐ Unplayable
☐ The game itself is a bug

-[THE GOOD]-
Orb crafting system are better than all of the previous games and more orbs than all of the previous games
Item crafting system are better than all of the previous games and more items than all of the previous games
Reward system are better than all of the previous games and more rewards than all of the previous games
Falcom soundtrack quality with new soundtracks
Fun turn-based combat system and they are better than all of the previous games
Fleshing npcs and awesome world building
Some characters get new s-crafts
New crafts and improved old crafts feeling good with more crafts
Link system with more combinations
More mini-games and they are better than all of the previous games
Each character has a unique gameplay
Possible to make different character builds
Mech battles are good designed and better than all of the previous games
More mechs for player
Art design is pretty good, especially mech designs and character outfits
Some hard bosses are good choose for the battles
We can use horse and vehicles again and we can customization as like CS2
Decent dungeons design still continue
Sub master quarts system is pretty good and they can be multiple use possibilities
Order system is pretty good and they can be upgrade
Semi-open world is back
Lost arts is back and they have new ones
Some good fan services
Two Divine Knights, Ordine is back
New Divine Knights customizations
New consumables for Divine Knights
Valimar can be upgrade in story progression
Divine Knights battles are awesome
UI and art design is awesome
Normal and true endings are good

-[THE BAD]-
Writing quality worst than all of the previous games
Generic anime cliche problem is still continue and worst than all of the previous games
Bonding system was a mistake
Poor story presentation quality is still continue and worst than all of the previous games
It focuses too much on the main protagonist problem is still continue and more than all of the previous games
Too many cast problem is still continue and worst than all of the previous games
Some pacing problems again and worst than all of the previous games
Animation quality is bad but they add some improves
Harem consept was a mistake
Curse consept was a mistake
Some bad fan services
Soundtracks slightly worst than previous games
Chapter 2 totally fillers and was a mistake
It had the potential to be a masterpiece, but the producers abandoned that chance for some unnecessary concepts. If these mistakes were not made on purpose, it would be a 10/10 game
Souless UI desings

---{Score 7/10}---

Edit and Note: I love the Trails series, but I changed my review from positive to negative for the entire CS arc. Falcom still making the same mistake in Kuro 2. CS has its own charm, but it's not like it's the worst arc. The thing is that the CS arc is damaging the Lore of the entire Kiseki universe. This is such a big loss that it seems very difficult for Falcom to recover it. I hope this doesn't turn into a Star Ocean 3 disaster. I'm sorry to say this, but now it's time to react to Falcom. Falcom, I'm disappointed. Give us back the old Kiseki! I want to play masterpieces like Sky and Crossbell games. Not your mid games like CS and Kuro.

Cold steel is a very messy arc.

The characters from Class VII in general are one-dimensional and are composed of two properties. They love Rean Schwarzer and they have a singular character trait attached to them. There are exceptions and some have a bit more substance but each character can be boiled down to that.

In addition, the bond system and feel wholly separate. Every game feels like they start their relationship from zero and just devalues every previous entry. So the events that are supposed to add character to them just feel hollow or are very surface level like the characters having tea.

The redeeming factors of Cold Steel games are actually everything not related to Class VII. So visiting places like Hamel, characters from both Liberl and Crossbell getting closure, not to mention what has been alluded to with books from previous games.

This is a game I have played, yep. This is gonna be my longest review by far due to this game having way too much to talk about. This is a game I had such insane low hopes in before I went into it due to hearing some things here and there from my friends on discord and since 2 Xenoblade faces on twitter were playing it around the same time I started CS4, which is maybe why I can give it some slight props in certain situations. I’m the type of person who can find some things to enjoy in a game where all else fails, and there were some things in this one I did find. The one thing I found myself really enjoying was the non-true ending. It was something I did not expect for them to do and I really took a lot out of that. It kept a sense of stakes in previous events (that the true ending reverted cause fuck stakes) and added more on top of that. A second thing was that the combat was so fucking broken that I found comedy in it. I’m sorry, I should not be doing half of the hp of a final dungeon boss on nightmare difficulty. The difference between this game being easy and a game like CS3 being easy is that CS3 is too easy due to corny things. I will 100% rather broken caster Crow over broken Spirit Unification and Sledgehammer easy. I honestly really like how the game flows into getting Rean out of the BW. It’s a great change in pace and a pretty decent difficulty boost in showing that Rean really is the core of every group he is in. And lastly it would be a disservice to knock the good scenes the game has. There are more great scenes in this 1 game then the past 3 games which has to be some pluses to it. But we’ve all run out of things I enjoy, you know what time it is. The amount of fraudulent characters in this game is hilarious. You make a game which has characters like Cedric and Claire and expect me to enjoy these villains. There are only at max 3 villains in this game I enjoy and thats so fucked up. The only character that I feel like kept getting real development in this game was Ash, and this is only because Joshua was in this game. Another thing I really don’t like was that it feels like they tried to fit way too many references into this game as to previous games. It’s been known that Cold Steel is just a big Sky reference but holy shit there's just so many in this game that it just feels like they just wanted to reference it. There's a scene where Ash says for no reason that Joshua would look good in a dress and it is 100% only there so they can say it is a reference. The worst offender of them all is the story. Jesus it's so nonsensical, nothing happens for genuinely 35 hours of the game. The curse is an awful story mechanic where it is only there to help create needed conflict to evolve the story. “Huh, how do we make x event happen? OH YEAH IT’S THE CURSE THAT CAUSED IT”. And finally, why the FUCK did they reintroduce Gilbert. It is an awful character who is so painfully unfunny but APPARENTLY THIS WHOLE COMMUNITY LOVES HIM??? WHERE DO YOU SEE THIS I GENUINELY CAN’T TELL MAN. Coming from someone who genuinely really enjoyed CS2, I really wanted to end this all saying that it wasn’t the only Cold Steel game I genuinely enjoyed. Coming out of that, I can’t say that this was an experience I would recommend. There are some great things about this game, but the other side of the coin is much heavier. Take me back to Crossbell please

Date beat: 10/23/23
2.8/5

Erebonians: "People can't be this mean and hostile to each other, there must be some mysterious dark force at work here!"

Me, educated in European History: "Mate, you are Germans, and this is called Prussian Militarism."

Utterly braindead and painfully convoluted contrivances bombards the entire plot, but fuck it, I can't deny the highs are so fucking high.

Cold Steel 4 seems to be a polarizing title amongst Trails fans, and here's what I have to say:

I enjoyed it. I've never backed this franchise because it was necessarily the best written, nor had the best engine, etc, but as far as the gameplay, I get into such an easy rhythm of the day to day and the exploration, that I just kind of feel at home with all of the systems this franchise has. Cold Steel 4 was more of the same gameplay that I've been satisfied with from the previous 3 games. While I can argue that CS2 was the best experience because it had the tightest narrative, after about 300 hours into the franchise, I was happy with the payoffs of CS4, even ithe dialogue was cheesier than a damn four layer lasagna.

I do see validity in the lower scores this game has received, but as far as my experience, the CS has been a franchise that I can just ease into, and with knowing exactly what to expect, I've really enjoyed this series.

Can't believe I'm finally finished. I know there's still a bit more to experience with Azure, Zero, and Reverie on the horizon for me to play, but it's safe for me to say that I've really enjoyed the ride with trails of Cold Steel! I do love this franchise.

Trails of Cold Steel IV : End Of Saga (and my sanity)

Before properly starting this review, I wanted to tell you a little story about myself.

In 2019, there was a game by the name of Kingdom Hearts III, now I know this is gonna sound off topic but bear with me for a second. Kingdom Hearts as a franchise was really important in my formative years of gaming, I received the first entry on Christmas of 2003 (the same year I got my PS2) probably because my mom saw Donald and Goofy on the cover and thought it was just one of many Disney games that she already brought home to keep me occupied during her busy hours.

What she didn’t know is that this single event was going to change the trajectory of my life forever and was going to trigger my biggest most long-running autistic hyper obsession I’ll ever have in my life. I’d say that KH1 is the most important game in my life because as funny as it’s going to sound, it was the game that taught me that games could be so much more than electronic distractions, more than just a virtual toy to lose a few hours on. Oh sure I did have games that could’ve also done that in my library such as “Link’s Awakening” or “Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver” but as excellent as these games were, they were a bit too “cerebral” for my younger self and I only got to finish them several years down the line when I was intellectually inclined to do so.

KH1 was this perfect blend of complex yet simple, engaging yet straightforward, beautifully poetic and epic. And of course being attached to Disney properties definitely did help. Exploring worlds based on some of my childhood favorite movies was like a dream come true and all of this packed in a great deal of mystery and a seemingly deeper lore that one might not expect from a crossover game. By the end of KH1, I was so charmed, so starstruck by how magic the experience was that I said to myself : “I don’t know what this is, but I need more of whatever this is !” and thankfully enough, KH1 was also an amazing gateway title to the wider world of JRPG’s. It was thanks to KH1 (and a neighbour who was deep into RPG) that I got to play FFIX, my first Final Fantasy game for the first time, my aunt brought me Dark Cloud 2 and so forth and so forth, combine this with me discovering the internet and the wonderful world of emulation and I was set for life catching up on all the amazing games I’ve missed out on over the years and still am catching up to this day.

But KH was different, unlike many JRPG series Kingdom Hearts had its own mythology, its own internal lore and hinged heavily on its continuity. It was in fact one of the series main selling points, you came for the Disney shenanigans and you stayed to hear about the next chapter in Tetsuya Nomura’s wild ride. And while I skipped Chain of Memories when it came out (only to come back to it, to understand KH2 a lil better), I played KH2 and holy shit that game got me hooked for good and I was set for life ! Between the Mickey letter at the end and the awesome secret ending with these badass knights holding keyblade in some sort of desert, I knew that whenever KH3 was going to come out, it was going to be the best fucking game in my life.

Now KH2 was released in 2005 and KH3 eventually released in 2019…

When Square eventually announced that we’ll get not just one, not two but three KH games before the release of KH3, I was going insane !
But deep in my mind all I really wanted was KH3, the fabled conclusion to the epic saga that I was now a part of because in the end that’s one of the reasons I even got obsessed with KH in the first place. It felt like I was becoming a part of something ! I was witnessing the birth of a cult-classic franchise and I was witnessing first hand the continuous creation of its bigger story…

This excitement lasted for a while… but then an event happened which started instilling doubt into my faith in this franchise, this was the release of a little game known as Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance. As a videogame, KH3D is probably one of the most serviceable games in the franchise but its story is where I started realizing that the writers were kind of stuck in a corner with this whole “seeker of darkness” arc. The plot started going off the rails with retcons on previous antagonist coming back for plot contrivance reasons, the 2 main lead were going through the same character arc they did in the previous mainline title only served on a different plate and fucking Time-Travel was a thing and made an already convoluted story even more convoluted and everything felt like it’ll lead to all the tragedies in the series and the investment I had in said tragedies being ruined for cheap fanservice down the line.

And yet, I didn’t give up, I still waited for the day KH3 would be mine. But 15 years is a long time, in 15 years a lot of things happened and the little boy who was having fun pushing the triangle button to get on the Hydra’s back in 2005 has went through a lot, I graduated from elementary school and high school, I’ve entered college then dropped out of college, I had a stomach surgery, lost my virginity, experienced many other games and many other media and sadly developed something known as : critical thinking. Since then, I replayed all the KH games through the HD collection discovering the Final Mix version of these games for the first time and realizing that KH2 wasn’t just “great”, it was “a masterpiece” and easily the single best Action-RPG ever released even almost 20 years after its release and while I still hold a lot of fondness for both KH1 and KH2 (and 358/2 days to a lesser extend), the same couldn’t be said for the portable entries.

I tried to get back into BBS but I found the game to be a boring slog with terrible writing, a bland trio of characters, a battle system that was fundamentally broken and became monotonous very fast once I understood the “cracks” in the code and a story that’s full of good ideas but executed sloppily and had to resolve to using a shit load of retcon about how the Keyblade worked in order to expand the universe which killed a bit of the magic of the first game’s plot in my opinion. Suffice to say that while I don’t find BBS bad, it’s definitely a game that aged like piss in my mind because it was trying to make the world too complex while not delivering where it mattered (aka : the character writing, the main plot and having a fun complex battle system).

When KH3 finally came out, I was a changed man and part of me still couldn’t believe this game was real and I could actually purchase it at my local game store. So I did play KH3, spending roughly 40 or so hours completing it and to say that my disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined was an understatement. KH3 was indeed the big conclusive finale of the franchise and as such it’s the converging point of everything the series has built up to this point but sadly, it was also the culmination of all the bullshit the series has accumulated over the years and has slowly but surely transformed a once beloved and respected cult classic JRPG series into some sort of a running joke.
I kinda live with the disappointment nowadays and the Re:Mind DLC probably helped mitigate some of my issues I had with the game initially but I simply couldn’t believe in the “KH plan” anymore. The problem with Kingdom Hearts is that what was once the game series that taught me that games can have genuinely great and engaging writing on top of fun gameplay became just this confused mess of shitty fanservice and lore-flopping. Like the series forgot that it was supposed to tell a story with themes and shit and instead just became a collection of cliché and lore stuff thrown haphazardly into a semi-coherent mess and in the end, it wasn’t even conclusive enough, most of it was set up for the next arc which is going to be based on the story explored in the mobile game and … man I just couldn’t care less.

I already invested so much time and energy with this franchise but nowadays, I can’t even gather the energy to recommend it to anybody anymore. I think KH is very different for the people who discovered the franchise now without any nostalgic childhood attachment to it, the early games are a bit janky and most of the portable entry are not the height of gaming promised by your peers, only KH2 stands out amongst the rest for just being some sort of miracle accident which ended up creating one of the most fun and versatile action-rpg ever released (but only if you’re playing on critical mode, why would you play KH2 on anything but Critical is beyond me)

The reason I went on this tangent about KH is to tell you that after KH, I always seeked for something else that I could claim as my new hyper-obsession and at the time I was playing KH3, a friend of mine was talking about the Trails Series and hearing about it made me jump out of my chair, it sounded too good to be true ! An expensive multi-generational epic journey through multiple connected entries with an insane amount of attention dedicated to worldbuilding and continuity ? Damn, maybe I found what I wanted. So over the past 3-4 years, I caught up with the series and I did find my new hyper-obsession… well not with Trails… but with another less “respectable” franchise that I already mentioned in my CS2 review but that’s a story for another time.

I really wish I could’ve become a true super highly obsessed fan of Trails who couldn’t help but marathon these games, but the story of my relationship with Trails was a rocky one, full of powerful highs and unfortunate lows. Full of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential, not everyone can be the next Matsuno and with the last few entries I kinda gave up on the series giving me something meaningful to latch myself onto, I never became a fan of Trails but I can somewhat empathize with Trails fans due to my experience with the KH series and how it went from my lifeblood to my favorite gaming toxic relationship.

And these problems, these minor issues that I reported in detail back during my Azure review kinda grew out of proportions like a big cancerous tumor filling itself with pus and dead cells and it all culminated in me playing Cold Steel IV.

The worst JRPG, I’ve ever played

Not “one” of the worst, that was true for all the previous entries but this one, easily takes the cake as “THE” worst experience I’ve ever had playing a JRPG.

This is quite a bold claim especially for someone like me who has well over 5000 games logged on my account, I can already smell the comments coming from a mile away.

“But CaaaaaaaaaaAAAaaaaani, you can’t possibly say this is worst than the likes of stuff like FF2, Sonic Chronicles, Any Compile Heart Games ever made, Lagoon, Lunar : Dragon Song or wtv… if you say Cold Steel IV is the worst, you should really start considering playing more truly bad games !”

And here’s the thing my dear readers, I do play bad games, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, I’ve had my fair share of experience with bonafide turds ! From games that are barely playable, those with awful game and level design flaws, bad controls, bad music, gameplay, completely nonsensical plot and generally an experience in which all of these elements combined into something truly awful !

I remember fondly when my mom got me “Realplay : PuzzleSphere” on Christmas and I ended using the “PuzzleSphere” in question more as a mace to hit my brother on the head with than an actual controller because of how much the game sucked ass, or getting “Space Chimp” and “Zatura” on the PS2 (bet you don’t even remember Zatura ! It was a shitty sci-fi rip-off of Jumanji that was released in theaters for some reason) ! And don’t get me started on Shrek Fairytale Freakdown for the Game Boy Color ugh. Heck I even gladly played bad games from franchises I love, Megaman X6 and X7 comes to mind as two different flavors of bad games, several Castlevania entries too and to stay on topic with the subject of this review : Ys IV Mask of The Sun and Ys III Wanderers From Ys are legitimately worse games than CS4 !

To me there’s layers to bad video games and to quote Yahtzee from the Escapist : It’s not the bad games that are the worst to review, it’s the bland ones ! The one that just takes ideas from several places and mish-mash them into a semi-functional but seemingly indistinguishable mess, the kind of games that makes you feel “nothing” at the end of the day and might make you hate the medium or genre they came from more by their sheer laziness and incompetence !

I usually love playing bad games because to me every experience is worth having, I have a lot of fondness for bad videogames. I don’t think people make bad games on purpose and you can learn a lot about your own taste or learn a lot more about what not to do when making a game from playing bad video games ! Bad games have cultural values because you can teach about their failures at game design school to teach younger devs what not to do when making a video game ! I sometimes think that some bad games have some “soul” to them, like the developers made it as a labor of love and not a labor of pure exploitation to get a paycheck at the end of the month. So yeah ! I love bad games ! Some pure exquisite kusoge of the highest level !

But even amongst BAD and I mean BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD games, Cold Steel IV, heck even more so the entire Cold Steel saga stands out in the sea of forgettable throwaway garbage that the industry pulls out on a monthly basis thanks in no small part to being part of a larger series and in doing so and failing completely at everything it does retroactively ruin my enjoyment of the entire Trails franchise up to that point ! And you may think that my little KH3 tangent at the start was to pad out time ! Well, you’re right !
But it wouldn’t be a Trails game without a copious dose of pointless padding now wouldn’t it ? (and don’t worry, it’s not just an elaborated meta joke, there’s a lot more in common between KH3 and Cold Steel IV than meets the eyes)

This time I won’t make you sit through an entire slew of paragraphs talking about the gameplay this time around because unsurprisingly, it hasn’t changed, like at all. Aside from being able to stack 2 additional BP on top of the 5 you could already stack in previous games, there is no change to the battle system this time around. That doesn’t mean that CS4 improves on the battle system, the enemy design, the boss design or god forbid the exploration but we’ll talk in due time when I’d talk about how basic the entire thing is and how it ruined my enjoyment of the entire experience.

On a more minor notes, there’s a few QoL improvements here and there especially when it comes to NPC, now every new dialogues are notified by a “NEW” next to the area you want to quick travel to which makes it easier to do an NPC sweep but also makes it harder to ignore that part of the game if you’re autistic like me and can’t stand looking at unfinished business.

In fact, unlike most games in the series, I actually did manage to get a full rank of AP point this time around by just fucking around completing side quest ! Was that necessary ? No, did it make my suffering last for longer than necessary ? Absolutely ! But I’m glad that at least in midst of all of the game’s issues, there are smudges of brilliance thrown here and there and I’d say that not making the 100% completion requirement as cryptic and obtuse as the other titles for no reasons (especially due to the needlessly padded out nature of these games preventing me from ever wanting to replay any of them, even the ones I did enjoy) was for once something that I did appreciate (now as for the actual quality of the side content, we’ll talk about that in a minute).

The game starts on probably the only good part of the game until a long while, the game teases you on being good by bringing back the playable cast members of the previous two arcs and even opens up by a shot of Estelle brand new PS4 HD Graphics ass, showing that the priorities and demographic of this game changed a lot since the last time Estelle was relevant in anything and was actually a respectfully written female character unlike most of the cast of this mess of an arc.

This section which seemingly serves as a tutorial to the game mechanics (you know, the one’s that hasn’t changed from the previous game) will let you play as husks of your favorite characters pretending to have any relevance into this game plot, a running theme throughout the entire thing but we’ll get to that later down the line (and I’ve been saying this a lot already HUH ?). After a boss fight against two of the worst antagonist ever written in the series, the game can actually continue

In the last episode of Rean Schwarzer epic Schwarzin adventure, our boy turned completely schizo after sniffing too much of the gnomes racist perfume infusion therefore triggering the release of said gaz throughout the entire country and activating the cheap cliffhanger protocol that’s so near and dear to Falcom’s writing team to make you play another 80-90 hours slog of a game where only 30 of said hours (assuming I’m being generous here) will be of any significance thanks to the power of cockblocking !
After this gnome endeavor from last time, our heroes got teleported to Eryn village, the hometown of Emma (the plot delivery glasses girl) and the base of operation of the ancient Hexen Clan aka the Witches aka Ancient Guardians of the world who lives like Internet hasn’t been invented yet like in the funny wizard boy book written by a notorious transphobe. It’s here that the rest of Class VII realizes that their teacher has gone missing and is stuck in some sort of gnome BDSM dungeon at least according to a few cutscenes and the deliciously edgy title screen of the game and thus they need to save him !

But how will they do it ?

Well by going through all the places you’ve already slogged and backtracked too with next to no change to the level layout of enemy types of course ! But don’t worry, you’re not just going around planting magic needles on the ground for plot reasons, you’re also doing this to find your missing friend and yes

Yes, you’ve been waiting for this one haven’t you ?

It’s time for yet another epic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onXp-Ft404E

“Final Fantasy VI Search For Your Friends Rip-Off moment™ !”

Yes because the same way CS3 was pretty much a repurposed CS1, the same goes for CS4 being a repurposed CS2 ! Because here at Falcom, we love recycling our own ideas (borrowed from several other franchises which did it miles better anyway) and running them to the ground because you bitches have no standard and will eat anything up and accept how stagnant the franchise has become by now !

So after another tutorial dungeon to re-teach you about all the mechanics you already experienced with in the prologue (I shit you not) in one of the series now titular “Tartarus rip-off which looks randomly generated but isn’t actually randomly generated” dungeon (aka : Old Schoolhouse 3 : Revenge of the Sith) you’re out in the world to plant some magic needle to find the Gnome Headquarters, repeat that in a pattern of 3 times, get one party member back and experience what’s happening to the world in the eve of a full-scale war.

I’m going to give credit where credit is due with Act 1, starting off the game without its titular main character is actually a pretty cool idea in a “passing of the torch” kind of way. Rean has always been the strongest, baddest party member in all 3 previous Cold Steel games (if you didn’t have Laura to one-shot everything and anything that is). So it creates an interesting power imbalance which forces you to play with how well NC7 plays out of one another, this balance is pretty cool and makes for some cool moments. At that point, the story hasn’t really devolved into full crayon-eater mode either so it’s alright, I do wish that Act 1 or at least the idea that the game featured NC7 as the new lead party member actually lasted for longer because Act 1 is going to be one of the last time outside of bonding events that the characters will get to shine in any particular way with some insanely cool character moment and interesting arc.

However, I must insist that this part of the game is still relatively boring to go through. Since this is the sequel to a previous Trails game, most of the environments are ripped straight out of CS3 and with little change to the environment (aside from the skybox because that’s what war does to you) and…

Ok I think I need to come clean about the padding issues in this franchise because it is genuinely going out of control the more I advance throughout the series. See the issue with Trails isn’t that the games are too long because BIG NEWS !

JRPG’s ARE LONG !

…

Right ?

No, it’s just that in been long, these games really don’t offer much in terms of actual proper game design, while there was some effort made all the way back in the Crosbell duology to mitigate those issues, in the end, Trails has never been a series known for how excellent its gameplay loop and game design was. Ultimately, the problem with Trails is a fundamental issue with how these titles are constructed and this isn’t something I only recently started complaining about in this arc, it’s something true for the entire series up to that point. That the first game is a slow burn to get yourself familiar with the world and the setting ? Fine ! But why in the absolute living fuck does that slow pacing need to translate to every title regardless of whether or not it’s an intro title or not ?

I swear to god, it’s something you start getting numb to because of how much the game tries to find ways to make the act of playing them less of a chore, by adding more quick travel points or even turbo mode or things of the sort but it never really solves the issues ! These game structures are so rigid and artificial that you can almost see and feel where they pointlessly added stuff to artificially make the game last longer ! But I can already hear you say :

“Well if these games are so long, it’s because it’s to establish the atmosphere and the worldbuilding and the” blah blah blah cut the crap already, you know it’s not true !

You know that most of these games could be cut in half and only get better for it in terms of rhythm if you only keeping in it the actual meaningful content and that’s the problem because we’ve all been fooled into thinking that it was actually necessary to be like that in order to communicate the plot better but it’s not even fucking true is it ?

Even less so when all of the actual good scenes and character moments are contained almost exclusively in the bonding events scene which for the record are both some of the best and some of the worst in the series for reasons we’ll get into later.

These games barely evolved their formula and I’m getting tired of them, as an RPG it’s also some of the milquetoast RPG structure you could ever eat. What’s your favorite dungeon in CS4 ? The series of corridors with brown bricks or the ones with blue bricks ? SO MUCH VARIETY IT’S STAGGERING !
It’s crazy how much I managed to put out and how much so many people managed to put out with how dull and boring the loop of battle, exploration, fetch quest and cutscenes gets in this series, it’s literally driving me nuts at how fucking dull this shit it, I’m going insane !

The only thing that’s carrying this series is just text since the “cutscenes” (if you wanna even call it that) have always been so fucking low budget, badly directed and animated that you might as well make it a visual novel instead and I’ve seen Visual Novels with better staging and direction than most of the dialogue scenes in this game !

God it’s also so fucking predictable, you can make a freaking drinking game out of this !

The characters are in a pinch ? Take a shot as they get their ass saved by a random third actor that was seemingly in the room this whole time and solve the situation on their own while “Sword of Biting Gale” plays !

Take another shot when the characters are done talking about their next step and a villain that was positioned on a roof or a hill was observing them menacingly saying “Nyeheheh, class VII, We’ll see about that !”

Take another shot when the progression is stopped by Rean doing another unwarranted and frankly unnecessary pep-talk friendship speech for no fucking reasons !

Ludo-Narration ? Staging ? Direction ? Not using every repetitive character trope and cheap narrative tool in the book to tell your story through what the medium can offer instead ? I never heard that shit from a freaking Falcom game ! Good god, this is the lowest of lows, you know some games have good direction, others have bad direction but Welcome to the Kiseki series where we just won’t direct our cutscenes at all…

And fuck there is so many characters now, each dialogue and cutscene take fucking forever because Billy, Eddy, Mandy and Roger all have their snarky little comment to make on the situation and often time there’s like 60 or so character on screen and they all have to say something and it’s always the driest, blandest, most unimportant piece of dialogue why did you fucking Talk Elliot Craig ? NOBODY ASKED YOUR WHITE ASS OPINION ABOUT WAR ! YOU ARE A NOTHING CHARACTER SAYING NOTHING AND I HATE YOU ! AND ALL OF OLD CLASS VII FOR THAT MATTER ! GOD WHAT A BUNCH OF BORING USELESS CUNT I SWEAR TO GOD !

Act 2 is probably where the game starts hitting the shitting fan with this !

After saving Rean, the game’s overall quality and pacing take a complete nosedive never to return. I said in the last review that if we dug deeper we might reach China ?

But holy fucking shit, we haven’t just reached China, in fact, We dug so deep that there was no more ground to dig up and we’ve now entered an alternate dimension where the laws of physics have been broken and now everything works in “Kiseki Hours” where a single hour of gameplay progress amounts to 5 IRL time and nothing freaking happened !


Act 2 is just a pure narrative void, there is nothing of note that happen in Act 2, you’re just doing a lot of fetch questing, each worst than the last and you enter pointless conflicts with characters because this game is so starved for time and content that it starts throwing boss fight against some of the most random individuals, in fact most of the setup for boss fights in this game make no sense at all. As I was playing through the game I was even wondering half of the time : “Why are we fighting this person ? It’s completely pointless ? Why are we doing this ?” and that my friend is thanks to a really useful tool the authors have come up with to artificially spawn conflicts out of the blue !

Introducing

The Curse !

The Curse is a fascinating tool of narrative design that allows the writers to do whatever the fuck they want and justify any actions any characters at any moments might take !

In the text, it is said that the curse is something that acts on the human brain and forces them to obey their deeper instinct, but what it essentially does for the most part is turn everyone evil, violent and racist for seemingly no goddamn reasons. It also make characters act in completely uncharacteristic ways so you can have a fight with them or they can fuck you over to pad out more freaking time and justify you going through another boring ass dungeon and fighting another pointless boss fight !

But in reality, the curse is whatever the writers want it to be, yes sometimes it does make people evil and racist but sometimes it can make them addicted to gambling, sometimes it can erase memories, sometimes it can make animals aggressive and turn them into demons, sometimes it can make somebody mess their paperwork or lose their key, sometimes it can make a nun break a pot, sometimes it can force a child to run head first into the nearest kidnapper, sometimes it can power-up robots and machines and most importantly of all, sometimes it can turn your jacuzzi into purple goo which is fucking terrible isn’t it ?

The curse has no rules and no consistency whatsoever, the curse is seemingly the cause and the consequences of everything in the plot ! In fact, doing the sidequests makes the curse even worse as you realize that there are no concrete rules to the curse nor are there any concrete rules to how it works, how it affects certain people and not others or even how you’re supposed to cure people from it !

Elliot will use the power of music to turn a demon into a regular horse again and it’s never brought up ever in the actual main plot ? Bro if you can just get rid of demons like that why are we still busy fighting them in the first place ? The curse can also seemingly get cured by just “talking it out” with the person who’s affected like ok sure why not but also sometimes the curse just heals… by itself ! Magically ! With no real reasons behind it ! One time there’s a little girl who forgets who the SSS is but later without any side quest or extra scenes or anything, the girl just randomly remembers who they are and it’s ???



The only consistent thing about the curse is that it only spreads across the empire and respects the state's border but they never actually give a proper explanation as to why it works like this in the first place ? Why in the absolute living goddamn fuck is an ancient demonic curse from aeons past cares about the modern state borders of some bum ass country ? Like boohoo, poor little curse, it can’t get past a silly barrier ! I thought the Sept-Terrions were supposed to transcend the rules of the mortal realms and be these super-powerful artifacts !

I mean for fuck sake, the previous Sept-Terrion was LITERALLY ABLE TO REWRITE REALITY ! The Power Creep ceiling has already been met ! You can’t make something crazier than something which literally can ignore the rules of physics and rewrite reality how they see fit ! And yet, the game will always try to pretend that the Great One and the curse is the most dangerous fucking threat to have ever existed and seemingly the reason why the entire series happened up to this point !

Oh yeah because yeah, how about that ?

How about this franchise lore and worlbuilding being completely fucking wasted in favor of shitty JRPG plot number 5840 ?

Yeah, remember the gnome shit from CS3 ? That was already pretty fucking bad wasn’t it ? Well get a kick out of this !

Every

Single

Event

In

The

Series

Was all part of some

ANCIENT

RACIST

GUNDAM

GOD



To rebuild itself and become ultra-mega powerful, Ishmelga is the name of the robot and the one who wants to bring the world to an end, with Black…. oh wait no silly, let’s make this antagonist even more of a fucking joke than he already is by making it a Dr.Jekyl and Mr Gnome situation, yes the leader of the gnome, the absolute mastermind behind everything, is just a random sockpuppet for Ishmelga ! And even Osborne is a sockpuppet for Ishmelga, but you see he did all the evil shit ever so he can STOP Ishmelga thanks to his son Rean Chad ThunderCock Schwarzer !

Remember the cool duality between Olivert and Osborne ? The whole class warfare story ? The Imperialism ?

Get the fuck out of here man, it was NEVER ABOUT ALL OF THAT !

It’s all a setup for a shitty mech battle tournament arc with the most non-existent stake possible.

None of the villains actually wants to win most of the time, you fight people that are sometimes evil, sometimes virtuous and sometimes nothing at all thanks to the curse making things more confusing

Osborne is a wet fart of a character and a complete disapointment, the guy went from a cunning manipulator to literally a bootleg Xehanort from KH3 with the exact same end goal of “doing all of this for the good of the world” which is just “stop the racism god to spread more racism”

Oh yeah, because speaking of Olivier ?

Well fuck you he’s alive, in fact everyone who died or disappeared at the end of CS3 are alive and they’re alive because GEORGE NOME actually saved them because GEORGE NOME is not all bad guys, he has good heart inside of his tiny lil gnome heart. Everyone gets revived and sometimes they even get shitty mind control masks and have chuuni names like “Red Rosweil” who is a resurrected Angelica with her memories erased but her PEDOPHILIA STILL INTACT

FUCK YEAH LET’S GO I LOVE THIS CLOWN ASS FRANCHISE !

Yeah right, let’s make all the characters make jokes about pairing minors and adult in the same franchise that has an honest to god CHILD BROTHEL SUB-PLOT ! Hey !

How about we make said CSA victim a victim of jokey funny lol super funky sexual harassment heh ?

Ah Angelica, she ain’t just a pedophile ! SHE’S OUR PEDOPHILE !

As for Olivier, well if character assassination was a sport, the guy would be a gold fucking medalist because goddamn what have they done to my man.

To be frank it’s either getting character assassinated so thoroughly that you might actually file a complaint for manslaughter or seeing all of your favorite characters come back with their personality stripped down to a mere caricature of what they once was just for empty fanservice moment that will only work on the lowest common denominator to try and make people think this game has anything of value as the “END OF SAGA” ! When in fact absolutely nothing of value is to be found here

The story is empty, the characters are empty, the themes are bland and generic, the villains are a joke and half of them don’t even want to win because of the shitty reasons they even do all of this in the first place !

Every part of the plot is an excuse to either pad out more time or to have a “cool” boss fight against some of the most random people ever that has no reason to happen

Irina, why are you evil ?

Oh you’re not evil anymore ? Ok let’s hug it out and forget about it

THIS GAME WAS WRITTEN FOR LITERAL 5 YEAR OLD

Everytime you think the story is doing something cool or half-decent, it’s canceled out by the game doing something stupid

And don’t get me started on fucking Rean

Rean, Rean, Rean, Rean…

Oh boy, you…

You fucking pointless, annoying shallow simulacrum of a character ! You are the worst of them all, I fucking despise your sorry Narou-Kei Light Novel Default Ass ever since the first game and even in this fucking game where you saw little to no actual development and even worse actually regressed just to have the same “your friends love you” magic friendship crystal thing plot from the second game !

You are everything that’s wrong with Japanese entertainment and the genre as a whole ! You’re like a pompous little snob that gets everything he wants, an harem of cute girl wanting to suck his dick at a moments noticed, a cool giant robot ready to get him out of any bad situation, some ancient cool edgy super power that often benefit you more than it nerfs you !

You’re the chosen hero of some sort of prophecy, the ultimate sacrifice and probably the sole reason why the world go round ! And yet, you ask me to feel pity for your sorry ass ? You stubbed your toe once and made it personal and now suddenly you go from shitty power fantasy guy to a relatable virtuous misunderstood hero !

YOU ARE NOTHING REAN

JUST A SHITTY LITTLE CENTRIST CUCK WITH LITTLE TO NO ACTUAL AGENCY AND NO IDEOLOGY TO CALL YOUR OWN ! YOU’RE TRYING TO FIND THE “THIRD PATH” AND WHAT EVEN IS THE THIRD PATH HUH ? WHAT IS IT ? THE THIRD PATH THROUGH ONE OF YOUR 3 ROMANCEABLE STUDENTS CUNT ? ARE YOU A DISCORD MOD REAN ? ARE YOU DONE BEING A SISCON BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY SMIDGE OF PERSONALITY THE WRITERS HAS GIVEN TO YOU ???? OH I SHOULD’VE PROBABLY ROMANCED ELISE ! YOU CERTAINLY WOULD’VE LIKED THAT YOU SACCHARINE PUPPY PERVERT !

FUCK OFF REAN

YOU ARE THE WORST

FUCK YOU !

WHY SHOULD I KNEEL TO SUCH A SHITTY CHARACTER LIKE YOU !

YOU’VE EARNED NONE OF MY SYMPATHY

YOU’VE EARNE NONE OF THOSE FUCKING DOGSHIT FRIENDSHIP SPEECH !

YOU’RE SO COOL AND SO STRONG AND MAYBE EVEN STRONGER THAN CASSIUS BUT YOUR HEART IS BROKEN WELL MAYBE YOUR ASS SHOULD’VE ALSO BEEN BROKEN BY BAITING ALL THE FUJOSHI INTO TURNING INTO CROW’S PERSONAL POWER BOTTOM ONAHOLE BECAUSE THAT’S ALL YOUR FUCKING WORTH !

YOU SHOULD’VE DIED ! OH I WISH YOU HAD DIED AND THE NORMAL ENDING WAS THE CANON ONE SO THAT YOUR FUCKING FACE WOULD NEVER FUCKING SHOW UP IN ANYTHING EVER AGAIN !

God and all of the bonding events, god what happened to this franchise man ? It used to actually be about something and now it’s all gone, it’s all a mess for dirty perverted otakus to fap to !

AND I’M A DIRTY PERVERTED OTAKU WHO FAPS TO THIS STUFF !

This game wants to be an eroge so fucking bad man and I swear to god, this game would’ve been better off dropping the pretense and have H-Scenes

The bonding events in this game are a lil more fleshed out thanks to them being the conclusion to some arcs

BUT WHY IN THE FUCK MUST IT ALMOST ALL END WITH THE VAGINA EQUIPPED INDIVIDUALS WANTING REAN’S COCK ? LIKE WOW THAT FUCKING LAURA BONDING EVENT IS SO BAD ! Rean’s all like “I wanna kms” and Laura push him against the wall AND FORCE KISS HIM

THIS GAME IS A COMEDY ! IT’S A PARODY ! IT’S NOT SERIOUS ! IT HAS NEVER BEEN SERIOUS FOR A SINGLE SECOND !

And it ruined several previous entries, because it can’t just be a shitty game on its own, it’s a shitty game that ruins the credibility and my attachment to this world ! No I don’t care what’s the deal with McBurn, he was the very definition of some 14 years old OC and his presence in the narrative is amount to nothing and you fight this guy FUCKING 11 TIMES LIKE FUCKING CHRIST AND IT’S ALWAYS THE EASIEST SHIT !

Man the ending is also a fucking mess bro what the fuck is this ! You need to collect some magic crystal in some deadass cavern so it can help you contain the racism god in your friendship crystal so you can kill him and end racism forever ISTG, I’ve seen scooby-doo episodes which are more thought out like this

Man I’ve wasted so much time on this franchise and all for this ?

And you can’t even be too mad at this because they’ve put some genuine effort sometimes, they’ve put some effort in how the story is told through the NPC points of view and everything but why should I care about Falcom’s nailing the details when they fail so fucking miserably in the things that actually matter ?

Fuck Trails man…

You guys are the scientology church of JRPG fandom

It’s all those great promises of grand epic storytelling, political writing on par with Gundam and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, an endless amount of depth and generosity and attention to detail

But all you get is disappointment, all you get for your investment is some shitty ass JRPG plot that’s borrowed from like 10 different sources that did all the things that Trails did but miles better, it’s the oatmeal of JRPG !

Cold Steel made me understand why Nintendo Youtubers don't like JRPG's

Cold Steel made me understand the POV of people who started KH with the HD collection and didn't like/get it because they never grew an autistic attachment to it when they were young

Cold Steel made me even more of a leftoid than I ACTUALLY am

Cold Steel made me trauma dump to my therapist about it

Cold Steel is my videogame on a stick that's the rival of all those AVGN rip-off

Cold Steel actually worsen my mood the more I played it

Cold Steel reminded me that anime can be cool but they can also be mad cringe


I’m done writing this review, I was going to do a serious one but get a shitty rant instead, just talking about this game puts me in a bad mood !

I don’t care if Reverie or Kuro gets better ! I don’t want to touch another one of those games for a long time if ever ! I’m not even invested anymore ! Not even ironically ! This game is a mess ! And this series is a mess !

STAY AWAY FROM THIS SERIES ! IT'S POISON IT'S ALL POISON ! THERE'S SO MUCH BETTER THINGS OUT THERE ! I SWEAR AND BEG AND CRY FUCK THIS !

FUCK

FUCK

FUCK

FUCK

ASSBALLS

FUCK

Anyway…

Hop on Rance