Probably my least favorite Hitman game

expected this to be like. a game where I played as a weird horror thing. Which it sort of is. But I meant it with a kind of agency utterly lacking from the game because what it is under the aesthetic is a puzzle game where you must perform one specific set of actions to progress

oh my god i spent so much time on here...

I expected less from this game, having tried to play Trails in the Sky 3rd, it turned out to be pretty good though.

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.

I don't love everything in this game but it's a pretty solid ending to the story focusing on Rean after like 200 hours

Really wild shift in the middle of ToCS. I still need to watch the anime they made that fits between 2 & 3

The second Crossbell game is also good. Shrug.

Played the unofficial GeoFront translations of both Crossbell games after ToCS II - or rather, slightly after starting III and realizing i really needed to play them, which was irritating considering they hadn't localized them. Really good story and gameplay.

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

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

Unfortunately many parts of this game just didn't work for me, so I probably won't ever get through the whole thing, but other than the fact I like Kevin's story this felt like generally a downgrade from the main story games. Reverie was (/will be) a better take on the concept IMO

Better than the first chapter, in large part because the kinds of quartz and accessories you have access to don't reset to zero here and instead keep expanding. Also Kevin's part at the end kicks ass

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

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