AnGremlin
The combat system initially impressed me but this version rapidly became annoying, and meanwhile the environments and enemies would be unchanging for hours, the sidequests were some of the worst I've ever seen, and the writing was both bad and insanely offensive, like the worst parts of Persona 4 forever
Story's pretty good if step-incest being the core doesn't make you tear out your eyes immediately, which is a big if, and the combat would have been cool if i played it new but unfortunately I played it after Cold Steel 1 so the Quartz system in this series makes me insane, ESPECIALLY at low levels in this one
Given that this story is 4 games and several years long, the first school year is unsurprisingly a pretty slow ramp up to what ToCS is. Also, they simply should not have included the little sneak peek into the next game's mechanics you get, because they had NOT figured it out yet and I kind of hated it lol
One of the best Trails games - even numbered games really tend to be better as they're more willing to assume you at least played the one before and continue the story and leveling from where you left off rather than starting over. The Civil War is also just a fun part of the story, characters I really didn't like get more background and become more Normal, and also this is the only game that lets you wear Groucho Marx glasses, which I choose to believe they canonically were the whole time
Played the mostly-complete English fan patch in 2022, translated a lot of the remaining dialog for myself. Really good game, and also a comparatively wild departure from previous games in a lot of ways. Kind of felt like a weird end but that's probably bc it's the first time I've finished a Trails game I couldn't play the sequel to lol.