This review contains spoilers
The first Trails game I ever actually beat, Cold Steel I will always have a special place in my heart for getting me into the series. I tried playing Sky FC first but gave up after getting bored around the beginning of chapter 2, and even though this game has a lot of the same problems, they didn’t bother me as much for a few reasons.
First, exploring the world from a third person perspective made it a lot easier for me to get immersed than the old top down view (Even if some of the animations are rough as fuck. Seriously there’s a fight scene in this game that’s laughable with how badly it’s animated). Erebonia by itself is an incredibly interesting setting since you’re seeing things from the perspective of the people who live in the “Evil JRPG Empire.” The way this game and its sequels flesh out the country and its people are why I stuck with this through its many problems.
And the biggest problem is the pacing. Good. Fucking. God. The pacing. I’m going to preface this by saying that there is not a single Trails game out there with good pacing. Even Azure at its best struggled with this and that’s considered the best paced game in the series. But here, Holy Shit. This is one of the slowest fucking games I have ever played in my life. Not from a gameplay standpoint since the combat is much better and has a lot more going on than FCs (another reason why I beat this first) but the story moves at such a slow fucking pace that the only word to properly describe it is “unreasonable.” It is unreasonably slow. This is the kind of game that can actually put someone to sleep if they don’t care about really intricate worldbuilding or slice of life character stuff. And I really liked all that and still thought the game needed to pick the fuck up way faster than it did.
Thankfully, this game has one of the best endings I’ve ever seen, and it’s a perfect example of how to do a cliffhanger right. It hits you like a punch to the gut and makes you desperate to know what happens next. It’s something that it learned well from Sky FC (with that cliffhanger having the same effect on me when I went back and beat it), and something that CS III should have taken notes from considering how fucking bad that game’s ending is. But this does mean that CS I has now directly tied the quality of its story to its sequel, because while the cliffhanger might be effective it’s not a satisfying ending at all. But when you take it by itself, Cold Steel I is a good game to play like a few times a month over the course of a year. It’s insanely fucking long for a game that’s pure setup and way too slow for its own good, but I’d say it still succeeds at what it sets out to do and is worth playing.
First, exploring the world from a third person perspective made it a lot easier for me to get immersed than the old top down view (Even if some of the animations are rough as fuck. Seriously there’s a fight scene in this game that’s laughable with how badly it’s animated). Erebonia by itself is an incredibly interesting setting since you’re seeing things from the perspective of the people who live in the “Evil JRPG Empire.” The way this game and its sequels flesh out the country and its people are why I stuck with this through its many problems.
And the biggest problem is the pacing. Good. Fucking. God. The pacing. I’m going to preface this by saying that there is not a single Trails game out there with good pacing. Even Azure at its best struggled with this and that’s considered the best paced game in the series. But here, Holy Shit. This is one of the slowest fucking games I have ever played in my life. Not from a gameplay standpoint since the combat is much better and has a lot more going on than FCs (another reason why I beat this first) but the story moves at such a slow fucking pace that the only word to properly describe it is “unreasonable.” It is unreasonably slow. This is the kind of game that can actually put someone to sleep if they don’t care about really intricate worldbuilding or slice of life character stuff. And I really liked all that and still thought the game needed to pick the fuck up way faster than it did.
Thankfully, this game has one of the best endings I’ve ever seen, and it’s a perfect example of how to do a cliffhanger right. It hits you like a punch to the gut and makes you desperate to know what happens next. It’s something that it learned well from Sky FC (with that cliffhanger having the same effect on me when I went back and beat it), and something that CS III should have taken notes from considering how fucking bad that game’s ending is. But this does mean that CS I has now directly tied the quality of its story to its sequel, because while the cliffhanger might be effective it’s not a satisfying ending at all. But when you take it by itself, Cold Steel I is a good game to play like a few times a month over the course of a year. It’s insanely fucking long for a game that’s pure setup and way too slow for its own good, but I’d say it still succeeds at what it sets out to do and is worth playing.