CrossOfFate
Bio
I’m a big fan of RPGs and Mecha shows and the like. I’m always up to hear peoples recommendations of whatever most of the time.
My Ratings Scale:
5/5 - Games I absolutely love.
4.5/5 - Games I love that have just one ore two things holding them back.
4/5 - Games I like that have more than a few flaws.
3.5/5 - My personal guilty pleasure games.
3/5 - Average games that just kind of exist.
2.5/5 - Really disappointing sequels to games I like.
2/5 - Bad games that are absurdly forgettable.
1.5/5 - Bad games that are memorable for all the wrong reasons.
1/5 - Games that I hate, to the point that I question the sanity of their fans.
.5/5 - Games that I actively despise. These are games that should not exist.
I’m a big fan of RPGs and Mecha shows and the like. I’m always up to hear peoples recommendations of whatever most of the time.
My Ratings Scale:
5/5 - Games I absolutely love.
4.5/5 - Games I love that have just one ore two things holding them back.
4/5 - Games I like that have more than a few flaws.
3.5/5 - My personal guilty pleasure games.
3/5 - Average games that just kind of exist.
2.5/5 - Really disappointing sequels to games I like.
2/5 - Bad games that are absurdly forgettable.
1.5/5 - Bad games that are memorable for all the wrong reasons.
1/5 - Games that I hate, to the point that I question the sanity of their fans.
.5/5 - Games that I actively despise. These are games that should not exist.
Badges
Loved
Gained 100+ total review likes
Well Written
Gained 10+ likes on a single review
Gamer
Played 250+ games
Donor
Liked 50+ reviews / lists
Noticed
Gained 3+ followers
Gone Gold
Received 5+ likes on a review while featured on the front page
N00b
Played 100+ games
GOTY '23
Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event
Liked
Gained 10+ total review likes
Pinged
Mentioned by another user
Favorite Games
274
Total Games Played
018
Played in 2024
054
Games Backloggd
Recently Played See More
Recently Reviewed See More
Another of my favorite guilty pleasure games, the Game of Thrones RPG is a great example of how a good adaptation of a license and a great story can carry an otherwise mediocre to bad game.
I'm a huge fan of both the books and the HBO shows, and right out the gate the first thing I noticed is how the rough presentation is. The graphics and art design are a mix between the show and the books, faithfully recreating a lot of the most iconic locations like King's Landing and Castle Black. But any positives this might add are held back by how dated the graphics and character models look. Animations are stiff, the textures are blurry and the voice acting for almost every character ranges from boring to downright terrible. Even the two main characters suffer from this, with Alester's voice actor sounding confused half the time and Mors sounding like he's been smoking 12 packs a day since he was 9. Only the characters voiced by the actors from the show do a good job, especially Varys and Commander Mormont, who serve as the narrator and one of the main quest givers, respectively.
Combat is also pretty decent, with the entire system reminding me a lot of Dragon Age: Origins. Hell, on PC the UI even looks the same as DA:O. It's fine for the most part, but the lack of permeant party members really hurts it since it makes it almost impossible to plan for combat encounters going forward. And even when you do get a permeant party near the end of the game, it only consists of 2 people and a dog, so it always feels like the game is holding back from letting you go all out.
So by this point, this probably sounds like it's just another forgettable, low budget licensed game thrown out to tie in with the show. And it would be, if not for how good the story is. It was apparently co-written or edited or overseen by George RR Martin himself, and he officially gave it his seal of approval by voicing a character named "Maester Martin" modeled after him who shows up as a cameo. It's very clear that he had a hand in the writing since the format of how the story is told matches the style of the books and the show almost perfectly, alternating between Alester and Mors whenever the chapters switch before their stories sync up and they team up for the rest of the game. The story starts out slow but it gets really interesting as it goes on, with tons of twists, a decent amount of side content and one of the coolest final boss fights I've seen in a western RPG. I won't spoil it, but how that reveal and fight is handled is proof of how important a good ending is to a story like this, something that Game of Thrones the show would spectacularly fail at years later.
If you're a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire or either of the HBO shows, then you owe it to yourself to play this. It's $15 at most and goes on sale for much cheaper than that all the time on Steam. Even if it's just to set it to the easiest difficulty and playthrough the main story, it's a worthwhile experience that's backed by the author of the books himself.
I'm a huge fan of both the books and the HBO shows, and right out the gate the first thing I noticed is how the rough presentation is. The graphics and art design are a mix between the show and the books, faithfully recreating a lot of the most iconic locations like King's Landing and Castle Black. But any positives this might add are held back by how dated the graphics and character models look. Animations are stiff, the textures are blurry and the voice acting for almost every character ranges from boring to downright terrible. Even the two main characters suffer from this, with Alester's voice actor sounding confused half the time and Mors sounding like he's been smoking 12 packs a day since he was 9. Only the characters voiced by the actors from the show do a good job, especially Varys and Commander Mormont, who serve as the narrator and one of the main quest givers, respectively.
Combat is also pretty decent, with the entire system reminding me a lot of Dragon Age: Origins. Hell, on PC the UI even looks the same as DA:O. It's fine for the most part, but the lack of permeant party members really hurts it since it makes it almost impossible to plan for combat encounters going forward. And even when you do get a permeant party near the end of the game, it only consists of 2 people and a dog, so it always feels like the game is holding back from letting you go all out.
So by this point, this probably sounds like it's just another forgettable, low budget licensed game thrown out to tie in with the show. And it would be, if not for how good the story is. It was apparently co-written or edited or overseen by George RR Martin himself, and he officially gave it his seal of approval by voicing a character named "Maester Martin" modeled after him who shows up as a cameo. It's very clear that he had a hand in the writing since the format of how the story is told matches the style of the books and the show almost perfectly, alternating between Alester and Mors whenever the chapters switch before their stories sync up and they team up for the rest of the game. The story starts out slow but it gets really interesting as it goes on, with tons of twists, a decent amount of side content and one of the coolest final boss fights I've seen in a western RPG. I won't spoil it, but how that reveal and fight is handled is proof of how important a good ending is to a story like this, something that Game of Thrones the show would spectacularly fail at years later.
If you're a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire or either of the HBO shows, then you owe it to yourself to play this. It's $15 at most and goes on sale for much cheaper than that all the time on Steam. Even if it's just to set it to the easiest difficulty and playthrough the main story, it's a worthwhile experience that's backed by the author of the books himself.
A pretty fun demo of a game that could have been. I would not pay more than $5 for this (I got it on sale, it usually costs $10), as it is literally the opening act to a story that does not exist, but what's here is interesting. It's more of a novelty than anything else though.
This review contains spoilers
So, here we are. The worst Trails game. I will never understand how there are people out there stupid enough to try and defend this shit, but the Falcom fanbase already feels like it's made up entirely of braindead simps so I don't know why I'm surprised. I could sum this whole thing up by saying that I genuinely cannot think of a game, JRPG or otherwise, that's as disappointing to me as this one. That this was my reaction to the series as a whole once I finished CS IV. But for an actual explanation as to why Cold Steel IV is one of the worst games I have ever played, here we go.
First off, I'm skipping over the good section because Falcom does not get credit for anything in this game that's good. The overall gameplay and combat are identical to how it was in CS III, both on foot and in your Divine Knights, so they don't get points for that. You don't get to say "Hey they fucked up the story but at least they didn't fuck up the gameplay too!" and act like that's not the bare minimum. And when you market your game as a story focused RPG, with literal hours upon hours of cutscenes, and your story feels like it was written by a 10 year old, then you have failed at what you set out to do.
The writing in this game is some of the worst shit that I have ever seen in my life. In any form of media. I have read literal fucking fanfiction that is better than this. I don't know what happened between this and CS III, but every character is an idiot now. They all either waste their time with shit that doesn't matter while the actual plot advances offscreen, or they just constantly talk about how much they want to fuck Rean. Rean has been turned from a deconstruction of the stock Light Novel/Anime hero, to just being the stock Light/Novel Anime hero. They have stopped trying to do anything interesting with his character anymore and just turned him into what everyone who hated him said he was. This is capped off by him getting a God-awful redesign that looks like someone's Deviantart OC circa 2006.
They continue to use the Curse as a crutch so every villain sucks and has the same exact "they were just brainwashed" motivation. And making things even worse is that the pacing is somehow worse than CS I! The first 2 Acts of this game do not matter. They are pure filler built around bullshit fetch quests and saving Elise, who I am now calling the single worst character in the entire franchise. Elise Schwarzer is Estelle Bright if Estelle Bright was completely unlikable and written by a dude who is jacking off to Lolicon as we speak. She is every creepy anime incest trope rolled into one insufferable package. So of course, she's perfect for this game.
The only time anything remotely interesting happens is during Fragments, which is ruined when Catgirl Celine shows up because you've got to get that money from the Furry crowd apparently, and Eventide. Eventide feels like what the rest of this game should have been, and it's nice solely because you get to see this massive cast of characters actually interact with each other like people for one of the first times in the series. But even this is immediately undermined by how contrived and poorly written the Finale is.
First off, Osborne's motivations in this game win a special award for managing to out nonsense everyone else in this garbage plot and ruins the ending of Azure in the process. If everything he was trying to do was to free Erebonia and the world from the Curse, and if the Curse only affected the people of Erebonia, THEN WHY DID HE NEED TO ANNEX CROSSBELL? The entire emotional crux of the ending of Azure was Crossbell getting annexed by the Empire despite everything and then it turns out that not only was the occupation not that bad if you go off how everyone acts in CS III, but it apparently only happened because the people making the decisions are the dumbest motherfuckers on the face of the planet. Osborne was originally written to be an Otto von Bismarck/Napoleon expy who loved his country and wanted to annex Crossbell because he wanted Erebonia to eventually rule over the entire continent. Them trying to pivot to all of this being a big plan to stop the Curse not only turns one of Trails best villains into a dumbass, but it feels like a massive retcon that only happened to make this specific game fit in with the rest of the series.
In the end, to borrow a quote from the RPG Site Review, Trails of Cold Steel was a mistake. It took everything that could have made this the series best arc and fucked it all into the dirt beyond the point of redemption. CS I & II, when taken on their own, are worth experiencing since they're at least coherent and feel like they're building up to something. CS III is good as long as you stop right before you finish Chapter 4. But I cannot think of single reason for anyone to play this game other than sunk cost fallacy. The writing is terrible, the characters have been bastardized to the point that they might as well be different people, the plot makes no sense if you put even a moment of thought into it, and the whole thing feels more like it exists out of obligation rather than as the "climatic finale" to the Erebonia arc that it was supposed to be. I'm going to see Trails through to the end, but every game that I play going forward will be with a massive amount of hesitation in the back of my mind. Because after seeing this and the ending of CS III, I know now that Falcom can fuck it up at any time.
First off, I'm skipping over the good section because Falcom does not get credit for anything in this game that's good. The overall gameplay and combat are identical to how it was in CS III, both on foot and in your Divine Knights, so they don't get points for that. You don't get to say "Hey they fucked up the story but at least they didn't fuck up the gameplay too!" and act like that's not the bare minimum. And when you market your game as a story focused RPG, with literal hours upon hours of cutscenes, and your story feels like it was written by a 10 year old, then you have failed at what you set out to do.
The writing in this game is some of the worst shit that I have ever seen in my life. In any form of media. I have read literal fucking fanfiction that is better than this. I don't know what happened between this and CS III, but every character is an idiot now. They all either waste their time with shit that doesn't matter while the actual plot advances offscreen, or they just constantly talk about how much they want to fuck Rean. Rean has been turned from a deconstruction of the stock Light Novel/Anime hero, to just being the stock Light/Novel Anime hero. They have stopped trying to do anything interesting with his character anymore and just turned him into what everyone who hated him said he was. This is capped off by him getting a God-awful redesign that looks like someone's Deviantart OC circa 2006.
They continue to use the Curse as a crutch so every villain sucks and has the same exact "they were just brainwashed" motivation. And making things even worse is that the pacing is somehow worse than CS I! The first 2 Acts of this game do not matter. They are pure filler built around bullshit fetch quests and saving Elise, who I am now calling the single worst character in the entire franchise. Elise Schwarzer is Estelle Bright if Estelle Bright was completely unlikable and written by a dude who is jacking off to Lolicon as we speak. She is every creepy anime incest trope rolled into one insufferable package. So of course, she's perfect for this game.
The only time anything remotely interesting happens is during Fragments, which is ruined when Catgirl Celine shows up because you've got to get that money from the Furry crowd apparently, and Eventide. Eventide feels like what the rest of this game should have been, and it's nice solely because you get to see this massive cast of characters actually interact with each other like people for one of the first times in the series. But even this is immediately undermined by how contrived and poorly written the Finale is.
First off, Osborne's motivations in this game win a special award for managing to out nonsense everyone else in this garbage plot and ruins the ending of Azure in the process. If everything he was trying to do was to free Erebonia and the world from the Curse, and if the Curse only affected the people of Erebonia, THEN WHY DID HE NEED TO ANNEX CROSSBELL? The entire emotional crux of the ending of Azure was Crossbell getting annexed by the Empire despite everything and then it turns out that not only was the occupation not that bad if you go off how everyone acts in CS III, but it apparently only happened because the people making the decisions are the dumbest motherfuckers on the face of the planet. Osborne was originally written to be an Otto von Bismarck/Napoleon expy who loved his country and wanted to annex Crossbell because he wanted Erebonia to eventually rule over the entire continent. Them trying to pivot to all of this being a big plan to stop the Curse not only turns one of Trails best villains into a dumbass, but it feels like a massive retcon that only happened to make this specific game fit in with the rest of the series.
In the end, to borrow a quote from the RPG Site Review, Trails of Cold Steel was a mistake. It took everything that could have made this the series best arc and fucked it all into the dirt beyond the point of redemption. CS I & II, when taken on their own, are worth experiencing since they're at least coherent and feel like they're building up to something. CS III is good as long as you stop right before you finish Chapter 4. But I cannot think of single reason for anyone to play this game other than sunk cost fallacy. The writing is terrible, the characters have been bastardized to the point that they might as well be different people, the plot makes no sense if you put even a moment of thought into it, and the whole thing feels more like it exists out of obligation rather than as the "climatic finale" to the Erebonia arc that it was supposed to be. I'm going to see Trails through to the end, but every game that I play going forward will be with a massive amount of hesitation in the back of my mind. Because after seeing this and the ending of CS III, I know now that Falcom can fuck it up at any time.