Ys IV Part II : The Dawn of Peak Fiction

In the 80’s there were few developers who actually knew what they were doing more than Hudson Soft, these guys are probably single handedly responsible for Nintendo opening itself to third party developers to make the NES/Famicom the legendary console we know today. Hudson Soft first and foremost were people who didn’t just like video games as a way to make money on a newly expanding market, these guys were very passionate about new technology and the wonders of gaming as a whole.

But eventually, when you enjoy making games so much, you start to become ambitious and soon Hudson Soft will partner with NEC the prime micro-computer manufacturer (and creator of the famous “porn game machine” known as the PC-98) under a share common interest of building the game console of the future : The PC-Engine otherwise known as the Turbografx 16 outside of Japan. The PCE was a really impressive machine for the time and even today, I’m still kind of blown away by the technical capabilities of the console which only has an 8 bit processor but packs a lot of punch otherwise especially with the CD Add-on that they’ve adopted earlier than many other companies at the time.

However, they were releasing a new console on an highly competitive market, Sega and Nintendo were fiercely competing for domination and other companies who dared venture on hardware territory knew that it was complicated to stand out amongst the crowd and that’s when Hudson had a brilliant idea, they will partner with Falcom to port their classic Ys title to their console. Ys 1 and Ys 2 were already considered classic of NEC micro-computers system and they have already existed many ports of the game to pretty much all available platforms at the time including the NES and the Master System but Hudson’s version on their PC-Engine was going to be different, it wasn’t just going to be a port, it was going to be a full-on REMAKE !

Ys Book 1&2 took the first two games in the series and combined them together into a single one like it was originally planned for the first time and the game will receive the most premium treatment imaginable ! A graphical overhaul which put new life into the game, touched up gameplay that made the experience smoother to play, smoother leveling curves which mitigated the grinding, new tracks to accompany certain important moment with new remixes on the absurdly insane sounding PCE soundchip which was able to make freaking miracle happened, it had animated cutscenes and full fucking voice-acting for a game released in 1989 and they did it both in Japanese and in English as this was the first game in the series to be shipped internationally (not counting the weird European port of Ys 1 on the Master System) !

Everyone’s mind was freaking blown away by how much love and care was put into this new iteration, gamers who were alive to see it happen before their very eyes as children couldn’t believe their eyes ! It was a true epic adventure with all the proper care put into its presentation to heightened that sense of wonder. It’s clear that probably the reason why Ys even got so popular in the first place and managed to stay relevant was because of this port right there, the game was well received pretty much everywhere and magazines sang the tales of how Hudson made Ys 1 & 2 a legendary game going beyond its simple ambition !

And all of this before Zelda or any other company was able to release their next-gen titles !
The PC-Engine version of Ys 1&2 was a massive success and single-handedly was enough of a reason for people to even buy a PC-Engine in the first place. It was clear that Hudson Soft didn’t just enjoy Ys, they didn’t just like Ys heck they didn’t even love Ys ! THEY WERE TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT YS ! So much so that Hudson was allowed to port Ys III for the PC-Engine too with the same level of care and polish as what they did for Ys 1&2 even tho no amount of polish managed to make the game any good in the end and they botched the localization of it but oh well…

So when Falcom couldn’t make Ys IV themselves, Hudson seemed like the obvious choice to direct and create a new entry in their series ! But making a game from scratch with only a design document full of concept arts, a few guidelines and no lines of code or any prototype was a vastly different task than just taking an already existing game and polishing it to completion but unlike Tonkin House who was this small no-name company playing with their turds trying to make a barely playable game to satisfy the guideline, Hudson had something that they didn’t, they had experiences with making successful cult classic games but most importantly they had PASSION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCmsS8eD_XY

From the moment you boot up the game you understand that the level of production value here is through the fucking roof ! You ain’t playing some dinky ass, poopy ass, budget ass, Tonkin Ass, Cold Steel Era Falcom ass “product” ! YOU ARE PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME ! MADE BY REAL DEVELOPERS ! WITH REAL TALENT ! REAL PASSION AND A REAL BUDGET TO GIVE THEM THE MEAN TO PRODUCE A MASTERPIECE AND YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY WERE GONNA TAKE THE CHANCE ! THERE IS NO BRAKE ON THIS TRAIN ! DAWN OF YS IS A GAME THAT’S GOING TO SHOW MODERN FALCOM PLAYERS HOW WE USED TO DO IT BACK IN THE 9 TO THE TIES ! A PRODUCT MOLD IN THE VOLCANO OF LOVE AND FORGED BY THE FINEST SOUL-MAKER IN THE INDUSTRY !

What made Ys 1&2 so legendary already was the visual presentation of it all, it made the original script of those games popped even more than they originally did in spite of the limited presentation and the added animated character portrait, voice acting and even cutscenes really added a lot of flair to the original two games. But Ys 1&2 Hudson was merely adding on top of the original game. With Dawn of Ys, they had full control over the game's presentation and how it would fit inside of the game ! And I’m happy to report they did a phenomenal job on just the visual presentation and scene direction level !

The first few minutes of Dawn of Ys already introduce the game in a much better way than Tonkin's version did. After coming back from one of their travels, Adol and Dogi stop by Esteria. It's been 2 years since the event of their adventure there and everyone is waiting for them ! A lot of things have changed already, Goban has opened a shop, Lilia now lives among the people of Esteria and is constantly waiting for Adol’s return and her health got better too ! Sarah is alive and managed to survive the assault of Dark Fact and his army after mysteriously disappearing in Ys 1 ! As you walk toward the city, the title of the game fades on top of the screen, everyone is celebrating Adol’s return ! This section feels like a genuine victory lap and a great way to welcome us back to the world of Ys after so long and I love every single minute of it and it’s all done really well !
One thing that’s clear from the game’s visual presentation is that the game will put more of an emphasis on its narration and especially how it’s going to be told through its visuals, you have much more scripted events the likes of other RPGs at the time where you lose control of Adol’s character for a moment to witness dialogues and scenes ! The general artstyle of the game oozes of that timeless 90’s anime charm, the character design is pretty damn excellent and on par with the striking designs of the original game, many characters from the first two games even got a face lift for the occasion, each of the game’s portrait and cutscenes are superbly animated and full of details ! That recreation of Ys II final battle is only a technical flex before the game bombards you with an avalanche of colors which pops out of your screen and invites you to live the adventure of a lifetime !

While the in-game graphics might be less impressive than the anime style portrait, cg’s and animation I just love how colorful the game looks which complimented by the extremely varied environments the game make you go through from lush forest to snowy mountains to a creepy abandoned mansion and even more, the visuals manage sometimes to pull off some really cool things with the environment and it definitely make the journey feel more alive than ever !

One particularly impressive thing about Dawn of Ys is that while text boxes are still the norm for dialogues with regular NPC’s most of the big story scene are entirely dubbed with animated character portraits popping on the screen and sometimes even CG’s much like in visual novel to highlight some of the more important moments, the original Japanese performance is honestly pretty stellar and I’m still shocked at how cleanly the voice acting sound on such an old hardware.

However this raised an issue when it came to the availability of the game for the longest time as much like Mask of the Sun, Dawn of Ys remained a Japanese exclusive and in the case of Dawn while an english fan translation already existed for a while most of the important dialogue remained untranslated simply because they couldn’t display subtitles during the game numerous voiced only segments. Thankfully nowadays this is no longer an issue thanks to a group of talented but amateurish voice actors who banded together with the goal to bring a fandub of the entire game !

While it’s not quite as professionally well made as the official dub of Ys 1&2 with the only professional voice actor here being Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin of THE Oppenheimer and voice of Skeletor in the He-Man series giving his voice to Darm in the intro of the game. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the crew delivered a hack job and I think that on average, they did manage to at least capture the feel of that era of voice-acting. I think it was probably something the dubbing team wanted to transmit with their performance, something that sound like it was recorded by a bunch of voice actors going off way too much in a at times goofy, at times overly serious and badass tone and I just think it works really well and definitely feel like the game actually did came out in the west. The only issue with the English Dub however is that the general audio mixing is rather poor, you can feel each member of the team had different mike quality and the voice acting can sometimes be a bit muffled by the music or sound effect playing in the background and with no option to arrange the audio mixing yourself in the settings you’ll have to sometimes open your ear wide to understand what the hell are they saying. Be sure to check their website at : https://www.ysutopia.net/downloads/ys4/Ys%20IV%20Dub%20Readme/readme.html
But back to the story, as Adol is celebrating with his friends, Sara the local fortune teller tells him about the distant land of Celceta. While she was escaping the forces of Dark Fact she discovered a connection between the black pearl and some ruins recently found on the mainland and she asked Adol to investigate it ! Without losing a single minute, Adol answered the call to adventure and in the dark of night set out to Celceta the mysteries of this ancient land ! But in the shadows, a sinister group of individual are trying to perform a dark ritual shown in a metal as fuck way too fucking gory for this franchise animated cutscenes before the game starts off with this absolute BANGER !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9JTh0gAXs

GODDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN MY DUDE THESE SAXOPHONES ARE MAKING MY ASS WETTER THAN A FOUNTAIN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON JESUS CHRIST !

One of the strongest aspect of the Ys series ever since its infancy has always been its amazing soundtrack, baring some exceptions, you know that an Ys game is going to own several asses just going by the soundtrack alone and I must report that the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys is once again completely out of this world ! For the first time in the history of the franchise, it’s the Falcom Sound JDK team handling the soundtrack. The Falcom JDK team is Falcom's very own personal rock-band. Composed of many prominent members joining in and out as the company evolve with time, the JDK team was originally founded to make CD quality audio version of Falcom’s soundtrack to sell them as promotional material but eventually, the JDK team took a more prominent role in development and as the advent of technology and sound quality went on, the JDK team now started actually composing for Ys as well as other Falcom titles.

Ys IV soundtrack was composed before the game ever began development and most of the music were made on CD’s that were later released as the “Ys IV Perfect Collection” but while the original album is freaking phenomenal on its own, that doesn’t take away the excellent instrumentalisation that went into translating the original composition into something that could be played by the PCE absolutely insane sound chip ! It’s simple, the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys might be my favorite soundtrack in the entire series ! While Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack for the original 2 Ys games was already an absolute joy for the ear, his departure didn’t mean that the JDK team couldn’t up the ante and provide a soundtrack which tells a million words with only a few notes !

The synths, the guitars, the FREAKING SAXOPHONE in the intro of the game, everything about this OST oozes from pure 90’s funk and pop with a lot variety in the composition, of course you get your adventure tracks that make you pump to rush into battle like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYZDs0ARqg but you also get more ambient music that makes you feel like you’re adventuring in a scary yet sacred place and you don’t belong there with ominous sound reverberating through the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRx_ZBoSrE then you fight a boss and the music goes : https://youtu.be/4HNEPXbNEK4?si=oaBREVaNcJIG7zqj !


There is so much variety and energy to the soundtrack that to me it easily rivals some of the greats like Final Fantasy, Megaman, Castlevania or even Donkey Kong Country with which Dawn of Ys shares its sense of harmony and insane instrumentalisation which seems impossible to do on such ancient hardware but yet it does !

And I even like a lot of the creative choice they make when remaking old tracks, Fountain of Love, Tears of Sylph and the Syonin for example is composed with an instrumentalisation closer to that of the PC-98 instead of how it was in the PCE version of Ys 1 to clearly separate the homely, familiar and old-school feeling of Adol’s quasi home-town which contrasts with the rest of the adventures which uses more elaborate instrumentalisation as Adol dives into the unknown, the same way Adol evolves and his adventure get more grandiose and epic, the soundtrack get crazier and more complex in return !

Heck at some point in the game, you return to Darm Tower which is about to crumble and fall, they could’ve done some weird melancholic version of the tune but nah, your return to Darm Tower is accompanied by some funky, jazzy upbeat version of the original tune, what once used to be the base of operation of a great evil and Adol’s greatest challenge yet is now a freaking dance party !!! You’re dancing to the beat of your old enemies main theme and desecrate their corpses because that’s how strong and confident Adol became through his adventure and to him the Darm Tower isn’t a place of challenge to him but a leisurely walk to the DANCEFLOOR BABY : https://youtu.be/hMnq4RSmZtI?si=mxLh4IP0a_1t2QcR

Theme of Adol 1993, Field, A Great Ordeal, Temple of The Sun, Karna, A Kiss from Eldeel, so many great tracks henched into my brain thanks to Ryo Yonemitsu exquisite arrangements of the JDK’s masterclass of a soundtrack for the PC-Engine ! I’m not a music theorist so I can’t really explain with technical terms how and why these tracks work for me but the vibes are genuinely immaculate !

The Ys franchise is first and foremost about adventure, about this intoxicating feeling of wanting to give everything up, grab our bags and journey to places unknown ! Pushing with relentless motion through the different places Adol visits on his journey and a soundtrack this energetic and varied only emphasize that feeling even more !

But fear not my friend because Dawn of Ys isn’t just a really cool aesthetic served on silver platter of banger tracks, it’s also first and foremost an EXCELLENT videogame ! Once again, we’re back to Bump Combat and I know that after everything I’ve just said that might’ve gotten you a little bit too excited you’ll probably say something of the likes of : “Oh really ? We’re doing this ancient ass, clunky ass, stupid ass bump system again ?” and ladies and gentle straw men who live in my head, I’ve heard your plight !

After all, Bump Combat is such an acquired taste that I had to spend two whole reviews talking about the strengths of a well executed version of such a system as well as its merits when it comes to the flow and the momentum of the game and the cracks that shows when this balance isn’t respected by badly coded hitboxes, stilted movement, terrible boss design and so forth. But Ok I know this can be a turn-off to some people but once again put your bias aside because Dawn of Ys took Bump Combat and made it EXCELLENT ! It’s easily the best game featuring bump combat in the entire series (it’s also the last one if we don’t count all of the countless ports of Ys 1&2 for modern platforms).
Dawn of Ys, much like Mask of The Sun, decides to take the same basic moveset as Ys II, with the same sets of magic to unlock too. One might think of this decision as lazy since the game doesn’t really offer much novelty from a strict gameplay sense but while your toolkit may be the same, the way Hudson uses that toolkit is much more different and the game is full of surprises at every turn. The only real difference now is that you now possess the power of DIAGONAL movement which is an actual god sent for fighting enemies or just traversing the map and offers a greater degree of freedom when it comes to positioning and even puzzles !

Unlike Tonkin House who understood so little of the appeal of the bump combat system they implemented elements of game design which came in contradiction to it, Hudson decided to play with that element of constant motion with sometimes really clever movement based puzzle making almost each dungeon in the game pop with creativity and flair they couldn’t really achieve back then. Like I said in my first review, the secret of the early Ys games was their simplicity and ease of access but also its constant sense of motion which made you rush into battle to the tunes of power metal ! But while simplicity is indeed charming, ambition is definitely more enthralling !

While Ys II chose the route of streamlining the game to be more accessible and focus more greatly on its narration by designing their game in a more linear fashion, Hudson decided to take the freedom of Ys 1 and the varied setpieces of Ys 2 to create the perfect synthesis of the Ys formula imaginable. Dawn of Ys is a game which never stops going and always comes up with new and exciting ideas for your adventure !

When you arrive on the mainland to start your adventure, boom you’re confronted by the Romun Empire and sent to prison where they take your cool ass equipment from your adventures in Ys II and you’re mad as shit about this but you break-out with the help of cool characters such as Durgen and Karna and you realize that sometimes the game will make you fight with ally who also deals with enemies the same as you ! One time you’re on a raft and have to survive an onslaught of enemies, one time you’re in a volcano ! One time you’re turned into a monster and have to find a way to turn back to normal ! One time you’re in Esher Space and the gravity is flipped upside down and so much more !

What about the bosses tho ? Well Hudson also pushed themselves on that front, Dawn of Ys possesses more than 15 bosses compared to Mask of The Sun mere 9 and it’s one more boss than both Ys 1&2 combined (proving once again that Dawn of Ys is the true Ys II if the first two games are combined into one complete experience). With bump combat and magic available much like in Ys II we can imagine that there would be an imbalance between the two mechanics but nope, each boss of Dawn of Ys is extremely well designed and fun to fight !

All of the bosses strike a good balance between having to use bump combat and magic to defeat them and when it comes to pattern and all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about here, some of the later bosses are true marvel of boss design which fully plays into the strength of the somewhat simple yet effective battle system of the series so far ! A friend of mine once told me that the Twin Head boss in Ys 1 was the best they could do with Bump Combat and he was immediately proven wrong upon playing Dawn of Ys for the first time and realizing that even the first boss of that games tops any boss from either Ys 1 or Ys 2. Dawn of Ys is a game of constant wonder that always finds a way to surprise you at every turn with its setpieces, and each one of them go by so fast that you don’t get to see the time pass ! This game's sense of flow and pacing is so immaculate that not a single moment of it is boring and you feel like you’re living a really epic adventure with twists and turns and revelations at every corner ! The game may be short, it can be completed in a little over 10 h but these 10h are so intense and filled with stuff that you feel like the adventure is 10 times more epic and grand than what you can imagine !

And this proves that a game can make us feel and experience many things with more intensity no matter the actual game time, something that Falcom seems to have forgotten with time ! It’s not about how long and how stuffed with content a game is, it’s not about how much you can pad out a game to give the illusion of something richer, deeper and more interesting. It’s about making the most of what the content you have to truly impact the minds of the player who experiences your art ! And if length and only length was a determining factor some medium like films wouldn’t be so successful and Hudson understood it perfectly.

The story of Dawn of Ys is also one that I wanted to give a lot of credit towards. While Mask of The Sun followed the guideline of the design document to a T without attempting anything fancy (and with how awkwardly the story was told here, they didn’t attempt to even follow it right imo), Hudson took the idea of a direct sequel to Ys 1&2 further and did a lot of really cool things with the continuity and the established lore at the time ! The game is called “The Dawn of Ys” because more than just a new adventure in a brand new land, Adol was about to discover the secret of what he went through in the first two games ! It seems that Celceta holds the answers to all the events that lead to the corruption of the Black Pearl and the fall of Ys before Adol’s arrival in the first game and as you explore Celceta, you find yourself uncovering these answers and I absolutely love the connections they made here !

From the relationship the twin goddesses had with the inhabitant of Celceta, to the origins of Darm and the Black Pearl, to how certain things in Esteria and Ys relate to things in Celceta and how everything played into one another. One of my absolute favorite moment of the game is when during one of the game many info-dump flashbacks, you not only learn the real name of Dark Fact but also it’s revealed to you that one of the items you’ve been using in Ys 1 is actually a super important item in the global lore of the series ! Meaning that you now have to depart for Esteria and revisit the map of Ys 1 now free of all the demons ! Can you imagine the absolute flex that it is ? They didn’t have to do this and yet they did ! And it’s so good seeing all the characters from the first two games but also the different places and what they became after Adol’s departure, Ys 1 which used to be so simple, is now relegated to a small chapter inside of a much more ambitious whole ! Sure, it’s not on the level of say, the second half of DQ3 or the Kanto reveal in Pokemon Gold and Silver to name a similar exemple but man I’m a sucker for that type of stuff !

Everything about Dawn of Ys to its presentation, to its music, to its story, to level design, to the way the game builds on the basis of Ys 1&2 and plays with its continuity make the game feel like a non-stop constantly moving grand epic to which we never see the time passes ! They took everything that made Ys 1&2 so iconic and perfected it, Hudson didn’t just want to create yet another title in the prestigious Ys saga, they wanted to create the Ultimate Ys game !

The game is a love letter to the series and what Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, now too busy to work on their own project accomplished years ago and in many ways they managed to surpass them (well at least as far as making a Ys game goes !) and I believe that no one understood the appeal of Ys more than the team at Hudson Soft.

However, Falcom had other plans for the franchises and didn’t want to let go of Adol and the series and with Hudson hopping a bit too much above the initial guidelines to make a conclusion to the series instead of yet another episode, they decided that the game would now be considered not canon and Mask of The Sun will therefore be the version of reference for every subsequent Ys title. On one hand, I get it, this isn’t Hudson’s series, it was Falcom’s and if they wanted to continue with this series they just couldn’t let something like the ending of Dawn of Ys happen and give the series the proper closure it deserves.

Personally speaking, while what Hudson Soft did can be compared to mere fanfiction, it’s really good fanfiction and aside from coming into conflicts with the modern lore of the series and offering an epilogue that could have easily been acknowledged by Falcom without actually hurting the continuity, I think that what Hudson did here is phenomenal, the ending of Dawn of Ys is perhaps my favorite ending in the series despite and never fail to make me emotional. So many of Hudson’s ideas for the lore and continuity of the series at least in my opinion could’ve been reworked into the main timeline as I do think that some ideas here are actually better than what Falcom will eventually do with them !

Much to my dismay, that means that for how excellent Dawn of Ys is, its legacy is now forgotten, even Falcom seems to be really keen on ignoring the game’s existence or any influence Hudson might’ve had on the franchise (in fact : in the modern port of the older titles, you can play every OST’s of each version of Ys 1,2 and 3 but not the PC-Engine version but I bet it’s due to copyright issues rather than pettiness) and I think this is a great injustice.

I really do implore you, if you enjoy Ys especially Ys 1&2, I urge yourself to try out Dawn of Ys even more so if you were disappointed by Falcom’s own take on the game they did 20 years later with “Memories of Celceta” (but that will be a story for another time !). It’s really a masterpiece and easily amongst the best the series has to offer, a true labor of love and passion made by people who probably loved and understood Ys more than its original creators.

The next game in the series will be handled by Falcom themselves and who knows, maybe they won’t fuck it up… right ?

See you next time, as we take a look at “Ys V” the game, the game which almost killed the Ys franchise !

Never looking back. The SSS are my family 😭





P.S. Rixy Mixy is my pookie wookie

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

Trails of Cold Steel 3 : The Troubles of Continuity


As I’m playing through this series and writing these reviews, I came to actually question my own sanity.

Why do I keep up with this ? “This makes no sense” I ask myself, there’s so many games out there, so many experiences that I’d rather be having than playing through these titles. Some of my friends who have followed my journey and have shown much more appreciation than me towards this franchise all told me to stop.

“You’re simply not getting it” they say, “You nitpick every aspect and don’t let the games enthrall you by its simple yet sophisticated beauty” they say, “It was never about class warfare but rather imperialism, you literally have reading comprehension issue you fat fuck” some of the more virulent people said.

And yet, here I am, still on the grind, still trying to find out the appeal of this admittedly niche RPG series made by the video game company equivalent of your local Pakistani Store Clerk selling you its finest expired bottle of room temperature sangria for you and your friends at 1am on a Tuesday. If this wasn’t apparent on the tone of my previous two reviews as well as my admittedly less vitriolic but similarly mixed reviews on other titles in the series (“Trails the 3rd” aside), I don’t particularly hold this one close to my heart and by that I mean that despite this being the 8th entry in the series, I never became a “fan” of Trails.

“Fan” is a strong word to describe my relationship to this game series. I appreciate a lot of what the series tries to establish though. The scope and ambition on such a multi-generational scale is something almost never before seen in the history of Japanese Role-Playing games. The only 2 exemple that comes to mind is the Suikoden series that I’ve mentioned countless time in my reviews (and I still advise many Trails fans who haven’t got the chance to try it out to do so expeditiously) and the Rance series that I’ve also mentioned in my previous post and which you can even get to see a review of its ninth episode on this very account (and this one is a bit touchy to fully recommend unless you are really as open-minded and shameless as myself).

But these 2 cases never really reached quasi-mainstream appeal, Suikoden is appreciated by many people in the old-school JRPG community but less so people who grew up on more modern hardware and even so, the Suikoden franchise got discontinued by its own developer Konami because they’re still in the top 3 worst gaming company in history. As for Rance, well, after 30 years of services it finally ended its run in 2018 in one finale conclusive episode that has yet to be translated (and which I’m extremely excited for) and even then the franchise had to pretty much reboot itself in the early 2000’s to reach a wider audience and recalibrate its lore (which is mostly contained outside of the games themselves).

Trails for now has existed since 2004 meaning that next year, the series will celebrate its 20th anniversary and ever since the release of the first title, they’ve pretty much been super consistent on releasing these games to the point that starting with Cold Steel 3, the games will release on an almost yearly basis.
No other JRPG series has this much potential for quasi-autistic level of brain rot. It’s also interesting to note that all of the franchise's thorough worldbuilding and lore is contained entirely within the games themselves. Each games comes with its set of NPC’s who changes dialogues for every minor advancement in the plot, there’s an almost nuclear level of attention to detail and little easter eggs to find (some of them missable through pretty cryptic conditions), entire Skyrim book size novels you can gather as collectibles in each titles to get the characters final weapons and which foreshadows events to come.

Other franchises would make you do extra-homework to get the juice out of that stuff but here all of that extra-homework is integrated into the actual gameplay loop, you don’t usually have to reach for an obscure novel or interview where the author says all elves are gay or something like this to get juicy tidbits on the world around you and it helps those games feel more lived in and fleshed out than any other setting in the history of RPG. And at the core of it all, it’s a human story, it’s called “Legends of Heroes” not because you play as heroes but because you hear about them constantly, you just play as the random little people who yes are going to save the world from impending doom but you’re never going to be on the same level as the heroes of old.

In Sky FC, all of that game is spent running around the world and hearing how much of a badass your dad is, how much good he has done for people and how inspiring such a person is and yet he’s a military general. To some he probably is a war criminal but to his people, he’s a hero and you’re just playing as his kids. It’s a very Dragon Quest V approach although that game was more thorough on one’s journey to adulthood.

And yet, I never found myself to be attached to the point of autistic obsession (and for context, I’m literally autistic, I swear I’m not just using that term as a meter for how addicting fictional crack can be) and it’s weird isn’t it ? I should be all over a series like this, I should be celebrating its ideas and hailing those games as an example for JRPG’s to follow like it seems to be the case with most of the people who play these games but for the most part I don’t and I can’t really explain myself why.

The lore and on-going mysteries of the universe are only marginally interesting to me as they are attached to some elements I’m not super crazy about (aka : Ouroboros and their “plan” more on that later). The themes the series explores can be fascinating in spurt but the actual execution always finds itself lacking and I guess most importantly it’s the general package that I find to be a tiring drag at best and a grind at worst.

Many hail these titles as hidden gems or even must-play masterpieces of the genre but I don’t see it myself and for cause, I think they’re lacking in several areas where most other RPG franchises or individual games don’t. Trails is so derivative of the trend of its different eras and not always to the series benefit. I know the JRPG genre is a big hodgepodge of mutual influences that keeps bouncing from another but that still doesn’t mean a series can’t have a solid identity on top of it all and Trails definitely has one… and then immediately abandons it to follow the next popular trends and causing the series to lose its sense of consistency.


At times, it’s hard to imagine CS1 and CS2 were either planned or thought out by the same minds who imagined the Sky or Crossbell saga and yet here we are. I guess this is also due to the fact that the series main head lead Toshihiro Kondo doesn't actually have much control or hold over the actual development of these games, perhaps due to the fact he’s too busy running the company than actually working on titles himself. So this series despite being this long sprawling tapestry of ideas that are meant to fit into one another don’t actually have anything resembling a true solid artistic vision.

And that’s what happens usually when a series goes for so long, people change, people get older, teams are reformed, priorities and aims get rethought and eventually you end up with something that divides people rather than unite them under a common front.

There’s a reason why many enduring franchises in the history of JRPG don’t usually do the whole continuity thing or when they do, it’s very sparse and almost a non-factor. It’s because titles such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tales Of, Shin Megami Tensei always try to reinvent their wheel, proposing new settings, new universes, new lore so that everyone can jump on any titles and get a fully complete experience and also allowing new creative leads to put their spin on them without compromising the sanctity of other titles.

Yes of course, some of the game in the Final Fantasy series had sequels but most people agrees that their often times inferior and an hindrance on the original game legacy (hi collection of FF VII) but Trails is different because unlike those franchise it decides to stick to its gun and have this continuity play a big part of its development history and that means that this game series more than any other JRPG franchise need a strong vision to hold itself together.

You can say that despite me not being a fan of Trails, I’m still somewhat fascinated by its ever-growing popularity and the sheer praise all across the board the series get (even for Cold Steel believe it or not), if anything it’s fun to discuss about these games, to theorize about them, to talk about what they did wrong, what they did right. For how much vitriol I gave the first 2 Cold Steel games, they still occupied a masochistic part of my brain, I couldn’t think about anything else.

More than anything, when I dislike something beloved by many, I find myself questioning “why can’t I like this ?” Especially something like Trails that literally has almost all of the ingredients to make for the perfect blend of JRPG goodness because I really want to like Trails. I'm jealous that I can’t be a part of this cultural effervescence, being a Trails fan is like a commitment, it’s a promise, it’s like being a part of something.

This franchise somehow has put a curse in my brain that forces me to desire more, even when I know I’m going to probably end up frustrated or disappointed. If anything, the promise of Trails is a beautiful one ! It’s the promise of being a part of something bigger than yourself, something that will follow you for how much longer it wants to be, even running to the grave. It’s grand, it’s infinite, even at its worst it's presented with such confidence that you can’t help but want it to succeed and you want it to be at its best because I know it can work, I know how good these games can be when they actually try and by god… I WANT TO LIKE TRAILS AND IT FRUSTRATES ME THAT I CAN’T ! IT’S LIKE BEING A KH FAN ALL OVER AGAIN FOR ME ! IT’S A ROAD PAVED OF GOOD INTENTIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS !
Trails is like a toxic relationship, it hurts but somehow you can’t get away from it, it’s a slow acting poison that hurts your brain and every Trails fan, as cult-like as they are, feel like crypto-scammers pulling off a successful rugpull. I don’t know why I keep going with this franchise but I sure am too deep into this to back down, I should’ve probably done so years ago.

Do I think the Trails promise is fulfilled or is it a promise filled with lies and self-sabotage ?

Today, I want this review to be less of a review and more of a thought piece on my troubled yet loving relationship to this beloved series.

Because if anything, Trails of Cold Steel III finds itself in an interesting spot when it comes to the history of its own franchise and in many ways feels like a turning point that the franchise will have trouble ever coming back from.

Trails of Cold Steel III was released 3 years after the end of the previous episode, funnily enough that’s also the length of the time separating the event of CS2 to the event of that game in canon. Yes ladies and gentlemen this game is a timeskip arc much like One Piece did midway through its run. As such Trails of Cold Steel 3 had the time to actually think about ways to actually improve its formula and also its presentation and in many ways let me put it briefly, I did actually enjoy Cold Steel III more than its two predecessors at least on some of its more frivolous elements.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, CS3 is the first game in the series to be entirely designed for home consoles, specifically the PS4, while the game isn’t winning any medals in technical prowess, the game is overall kinda pretty and has an overall nice art direction. Some people might write the entire thing off as generic anime bullshit and they’ll be right, but at least it doesn’t look like a PS Vita game with “cutscenes” that looks like a puppet show by the world's worst puppeteer. The environment design allows itself to be much more detailed and creative, most of Western Erebonia’s location are far more striking visually and more memorable as a result than any town or cities from the first 2 games and while the dungeon design can be up to discussion, I’d say the roads and the more “natural” environment definitely are more pretty to look at.

CS1/CS2 had awful direction when it comes to its many cutscenes or extended dialogue section which wasn’t helped by the absolutely colossal size of the character roster which didn’t help setting up these scenes especially with the limited budget and that problem definitely carries over in the late game of CS3 when the party is fully complete and you get an especially hilarious scene where Rean enters an hotel room followed by 14 character model slowly walking and trying to fit somewhere onto the screen. Here most of the scenes actually have proper stage direction and feel more cinematic which is what one could expect from a 3D video game from the year 2017 and is probably the results of Falcom’s experimentation on their previous title (and most successful title in their line-up) “Ys VIII : Lacrimosa of Dana”, which already significantly improved the presentation from that series.



The action segment are hype, there’s multiple camera angle and some pretty creative use of direction to convey certain feelings or emotions even during the more intimate moments and while we’re not reaching Square’s level of cinematography (this ain’t this series forte anyway) it’s definitely cool to see that Falcom is finally coming into their own to match the rest of the industry instead of falling behind as their status as a double AA studio would’ve suggested (even if the most technically impressive thing about that upgrade is the addition of bouncing physics on the ladies which were… certainly an interesting priority from the studio to say the least…). Another cool thing I could mention about the presentation is how seamless the battle transition are, previously in the series you’d be teleported to a different area entirely here Trails decide to take on the more standardly modern approach of having the battles take place directly on the field and while it doesn’t really matter from a strategic perspective (or at least very little) it’s a pretty cool thing to see and speaking of battles.

A lot of things actually changed between CS2 and CS3 when it comes to the battle system, in my review of Cold Steel 1, I’ve mentioned that while the general fluidity of the battles has improved I still felt like the game was a significant downgrade compared to the series earlier output because of how it streamlined the customisation process to an almost baffling degree making for a less fun and engaging battle system (definitely not helped by the series jump to 3D) that was easily breakable and rendered many of the series core mechanic (namely its magic system) completely obsolete. CS2 in particular was a broken mess of a game, thanks to this game being balanced around late game abilities which made most of that game an easily breakable one even by accident.

CS3’s takes a lot of the more solid elements of the battle and progression system of its two predecessors and expands on them in surprising and interesting ways. First off, the battle UI has changed from a circular menu system to something similar to Super Mario RPG or Persona 5 where each button corresponds to a menu. It needs a little getting used to after so many games of using a similar UI but the change really is welcome and greatly improves the fluidity of battle. Links and Brave points are back and better than ever. First off, Links aren’t tied to bonding points anymore and while it removes the gameplay reward of bonding events I don’t think it really matters because it’s definitely an improvement. Now links levels ups by having the characters linked to one another which was already the case in the previous two games but here it grows much faster and makes it so that pairing any characters with one another instead of just Rean a much more viable option.

But now chaining link attack to obtain brave point actually is more interesting this time around, in the previous game chaining attack had two purposes :

-Triggering passive abilities to help you in battle
-Gaining brave points that could be used to unleash a small combo attack known as “rush attack” for the price of 3 BP or an all-out attack known as a “Burst” which makes the entire attack the opposing team.

While these mechanics are still present, they’re now counterbalanced by the addition of a second use for Brave Points : Brave Orders. Brave Orders are instant buffs that can be applied for a set number of turns and stays active for the remainder of those turns and are only canceled out by the end of that order or the activation of another.

A mechanic quite reminiscent of Master Arts from Trails to Azure which sadly were not all that relevant as they were tied to the rather slow growth rate of Master Quartz in that game and were as such an entire mechanic relegated to the endgame (and even then, more so the final dungeon).

Brave Orders are a fantastic addition to the game battle system as it makes them more dynamic and offers new options to approach fights or get yourself out of tough situations and this game has plenty of those especially early on to make their usage more than necessary to bypass some of the game's tougher challenges. In fact, due to some nerf to crafts (especially support ones mostly replaced by an equivalent in Brave Order) and the addition of some brave orders encouraging that playstyle, Arts are now more relevant than they used to with some brave orders outright removing casting time or boosting magical damage output to absurd degrees. Arts were always presented as the best option to deal huge damage but because of the way CS1 and CS2 were balanced more in favor of crafts (which were plenty in that game with most of Class VII being absolute beast on that front), arts became completely irrelevant and the way the orbment system was changed as to give you less flexibility when it comes to getting spells and the available pool of spell selections, literally there was no real reason to give a shit about it.

In fact, Orbment have also been slightly touched up to go in that direction, now instead of one master quartz, each characters can equip up to two master quartz and stacking their effects to one another, you can even set another character main master quartz as its sub-MQ in order to do interesting combo builds which greatly improves the flexibility that was lost with the orbment system. Unfortunately this means a lot of Quartz who are simply giving out spells (most of the time the ones you get early on in the game) becomes complete filler as 2 MQ fully leveled Master Quartz on one character is more than enough to give you a full kit of Offensive and Support Crafts at your leisure.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean than sticking to a strict craft-centric playstyle isn’t viable (especially on normal difficulty which is how I’ve played the game) but it’s really cool to see Arts make such a comeback which also ties to a new combat mechanic in this game known as “break”. If you’ve played FFXIII (or any JRPG released since 2009 who seem to have ripped off that mechanic) then you’re probably familiar with this. On top of having a HP bar, enemies now have a break gauge that you need to deplete in order to “break” their stance which cancels out any buffs they might have, delay their turn as well as skipping it when reached and of course making them more vulnerable to attack and receive extra damages.

So now the objective is less going to be about strictly depleting the enemies HP’s and debuffing them when necessary (since debuffs unfortunately still doesn’t work on most enemies sadly) but breaking their gauge to then chain their asses with your most powerful abilities by combining all of your tools to make tons of damage and even not make them play at all (by the end of the game, it becomes quite ridiculous when some bosses just straight up did NOT attack me for the entire duration of the fight).

Some enemies such as bosses can enter a “enhanced” state that makes them stronger encouraging you to break them as fast as possible as to not get your ass kicked and it’s overall a pretty fun system that keep each encounter engaging and the customization aspect being put in the front of the battle system once again truly makes it a really fun game to play.
Unfortunately, some elements within the game kinda ruins the fun of such a system and I’m going to cite them for good measure :

The boss design in CS3 is noticeably god awful in more ways than none, almost all boss encounters have the tendency to have an instantaneous un-cancellable healing spell (which also acts as an all-encompassing stat buff) they just randomly spam whenever they feel the need to, that’s pretty much true of 80% of the numerous boss encounters in this game and it becomes so tiring that eventually most of the boss-fight will make you want to cheese them rather than engage with this rather annoying mechanic.

On the topic of boss fights, there’s definitely some weird power creep when it comes to the speed stat of most of the game major bosses, what I mean by this is that for some reasons a lot of bosses have an insane amount of speed and can just play for multiple turn without letting you play at all. One of the bosses late into the game (the Dark Dragon) on top of having annoying healing spells, also summons a shit load of minions which are all faster than you but worst than that, all of his attack are meant to delay your turn or force you into a state of slow agonizing death as your turn gets skipped because of a random status effect which forced me to just endlessly tank hit with damage resistance order and spam S-Craft for survival and it wasn’t fun at all. A non-negligible number of bosses and even regular encounters operate on the same logic, so if you’re willing to play these games, I suggest finding ways to upgrade the speed of your characters as soon as possible as it is perhaps the single most important stat in the game.

I also said the game was more focused on giving priorities to Arts but for a good chunk of the early game all the way to almost the end of the second chapter is pretty stingy when it comes to giving you Sepith the currency that allows you to upgrade your orbment and customize your characters more. This makes a lot of the early game encounter stupidly difficult because of a clear lack of option rather than because it’s a fair challenge and on the opposite side, the late game gives you an over-abundance of options thanks to the roster of playable characters growing exponentially to eventually attain a number of playable character that’s somehow higher than what Trails the 3rd gave you and that game was built around the idea of having so many party member to switch from whenever necessary.

I say this because the initial cast of characters, namely New Class VII, are overall pretty well-balanced and work in pretty good synergy with one another. Their brave orders are not too stupidly broken and encourages you to make strategic use of all of your available option but rather quickly in some segment of the story and during almost the entirety of the end-game, you will be joined by several characters most of which have absolutely stupidly unbalanced battle orders that completely nullify any semblance of challenge in the last few hours of the game sometimes to a ridiculous degree as it’s simply going against established power-gap between some characters inside of its own lore (namely McBurn who is always claimed to be the strongest baddest motherfucker around but melts when Laura equipped with the domination quartz does little as to breathe in his general direction).

On that last point, the game does mitigate that issue a little bit by having many fights where the requirement to finish them is not to beat the enemy but to reduce its health to a certain percentage. It’s kind of an artificial way to keep the consistency between gameplay and lore power-level but the game completely forgets about it by the end which makes it pointless.
Lastly and coming back from CS2 are the mech battles and this time around they’ve been vastly expanded upon than its original incarnation and as such feels like proper boss fights with actual strategy involved. For starters, Valimar isn’t the only playable unit during those fights and you can be joined by two other characters with their own mechs and their own playstyle. The game keeps a lot of the fundamentals of the original system where it’s a guessing game of touching the enemy in certain area of their body to unbalance them and chaining attacks but it’s definitely less arbitrary and with more characters on the field, some of those encounters become much more strategic and the system also incorporate the burst and break system from regular fights which makes them much more dynamic.

Most of the mech fights in these games aren’t particularly difficult tho and much like CS2 mostly serves as some sort of victory lap to conclude certain key point of the story but it’s also terribly badass to get to fight the 3 Aions from Trails to Azure in giant mech fights when they didn’t have the luxury to have those in the game they originally came from which makes for some nice bit of fanservice in a game already filled to the brim with it.

In fact let’s segway into my next segment right away and talk about CS3’s approach to storytelling, worldbuilding, exploration, game structure and fanservice and the reason why I think CS3 is both a return to form for the series who chooses to heavily embrace its legacy and an unfortunate turnover that may as well stopped me from being fully engaged with its main proposition.

CS3 is a game which is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its own arc and even the whole series as whole. On the surface CS3 is both a continuation of what came before it and some sort of a soft reboot of its own arc bouncing off of new foundation and re-focusing on establishing a new story arc within the Cold Steel Saga. What this entails is that unlike the other arcs in the series which were constructed in a “Build-Up” and a “Pay-Off” game similarly to how old PS1 games divided their stories on multiple discs due to space limitation except each disc is its own fully complete game experience.

In the case of the Sky Arc this resulted in a trilogy in which its first 2 games constituted the main bulk of the story they wanted to tell and the appropriately titled “Sky the 3rd” was an isolated story set in more or less the same premise and served more the purpose of an anthology title expanding on minor plotlines and characters from the previous two game while preparing the terrain for the future (and despite its very derivative, experimental and budget direct to dvd nature is arguably the best game in the entire series but you’ll have to check my review on Sky the 3rd that I probably plan to re-write at some point to truly understand my position). The Crossbell Arc stuck to a duology format and skipped the anthological third game in favor of a more tight and complete experience (even if Azure ends on a pretty sour note which obviously sets up the events to come in the Cold Steel series regarding Crossbell).

Cold Steel on the other hand is 4 games long and instead of being a huge game divided in 4 discs, it’s rather 2 games both with different aims and themes which are loosely connected by the throughline of Osborne Shenanigans and Rean Schwarzer doing some Rean Schwarzing. What that means is that CS3 is less a sequel to CS2 than it is a second intro game in the middle of the arc (which creates some issues down the line, more on that later).

This can be explained by 2 factors, Falcom troublesome development cycle when it comes to these titles and an excess of ambition due to the scope of the region presented in the arc (Erebonia is a much bigger territory with a long running history draught in different war, conflicts and different cults and even other races running the place, Erebonia being “the land of fairytales” as the game says at some point). Initially Cold Steel should’ve been 2 games one focusing on the eastern part and one focusing on the western part but due to the games becoming too long for their own good and Falcom having trouble transitioning to the HD era like most of their contemporaries (which hit them even bigger due to the company smaller size) both of these titles were separated into four rather than 2 and we already see how that became an issue with Cold Steel 2 which had very little to say with its plot in comparison to the actual length of the game (which was filled with countless hours of fetch questing in a quest hub in the mid-point of the game reminiscent of FF VI’s World of Ruin).

As such CS3 being an intro game feels somewhat like a repeat of CS1 both in its ambition but also its story structure. We go back to the rigid chapter based structure of CS1 and the rest of the series ditching the three act structure of CS2 and we also go back to a very similar repetitive routine of “Fetch questing at school then fetch questing on road trips” with all the same stop of “old school house, free day, practical exam day and train trip” that made CS1 a drag to play for most of its runtime but this time around CS3 has less chapter and as such less places we actually go to, you could think this would mean that the game would be much shorter and you’d be wrong because each of the game 4 main chapters last for an ungodly amount of hours and could each constitute and entire SNES RPG length by themselves and I mean that both for the better and for the worst.

So all of the ingredient were there to make this game a terribly boring and mindless experience, the mandatory spinach to go for the desert and while it is true on some level and we’ll develop that in a bit, I can say that this game at least make an actual effort in an area Cold Steel traditionally spectacularly failed at and its : The Characters.

I can’t believe I have to state this as a major improvement because you’d assume than any games of that length would at least put some effort in its characters but the first 2 Cold Steel might as well had the worst cast of characters of any RPG that I’ve played and that’s saying something when I played some pretty heavy stinker. In many RPG’s, there would usually be a few weak link or some characters you simply can’t fucking stand, for CS1 and CS2, if you go back to my review of those games, you’d realize ALL and I mean ALL of them were underwhelming, annoying or outright bad to the point that the side characters (like my sweet and beloved Towa who actually gets to play a bigger role in this game and I’m happy for it) and even the fucking NPC’s were miles more likeable and interesting despite not being the main focus of the story. It was a failure on all levels and even the sequel couldn’t elevate them to anything other than a nuisance to the story and this was also not helped by how Rean was characterized in CS2 which ended up killing all the interest I had in the character and gave me a lot of disdain for him.

In comparison New Class VII looks like they came from a completely different dimension and had a completely different narrative design philosophy behind their writing to the point that I’m actually shocked they belong into the same series as characters such as Machias or fucking Laura of all thing. Let me put it simply, I love New Class VII and I love them to bits. It's not my favorite cast in the series but they definitely reach the same standard as the SSS.
Probably in response to the criticism made to the cast of the first two entries as well as other technical difficulties of having such a large roster from the get go, the initial cast of CS3 is composed of only 4 characters (Rean included) later joined down the line by two other additional party members during the midway point of the game (and which aren’t really a surprise since they show up in the opening) for a total of 6 characters, a far cry from the 9 initial party members of the party that evolves into 11 by the second game. What that means is that unlike CS1, there’s no real necessity to separate the team for balancing issues or to procedurally introduce their gameplay style over the course of multiple hours and that’s great because that means that New Class VII can have something the original never actually had : An actual group dynamic.

New Class VII actually talk to each others, take actions together sometimes without needing Rean’s approval on everything, not all of their relationship involves sucking Rean’s dick off (well outside of Musse that is but that’s because she’s an horndog which is set on making Rean fired) and they even develop relationship with one another. There’s even a slight hint at a potential romantic pairing with Juna and Kurt and while I’m not especially crazy about it, it’s been a while in this series where romance was allowed to exist outside of the main character in the available vagina equipped individual breathing in their general direction for more than 5 seconds. The interactions between these characters are really nice, they have cool back and forth with one another, they feel like an actual group of friends and you get to actually see their relationship form and grow unlike Class VII which they tell you these characters care for each others but really they just all collectively care about Rean and that’s about it.

They also are much more nuanced and fleshed out characters than their senior counterpart, you feel like these characters weren’t just made with one word making up their entire personality this time around. Juna is definitely the outlier of the bunch in my opinion, she’s probably my favorite character in this game (probably because she’s literally Lloyd with tits and more personality woops) and some of the scenes later on definitely cements her as one of my favorite character in the series, she could’ve easily taken the protagonist seat instead of Rean and I wouldn’t have minded. The only unfortunate thing about Juna is that her entire existence is a retcon, she feels like Graggle from the Simpson when they talk about how she’s super buddies with the SSS (but really only with Randy tbf) when she wasn’t even a playable character or even an existing one in some version of the Crossbell arc. I would’ve much preferred if Juna was just an SSS super fan and a Lloyd Larper trying to find an identity of their own to carry on the fight that the SSS couldn’t continue themselves as a real passing of the torch moment, it’s a missed opportunity but she’s still an amazing character nonetheless.

The other cast members are also nothing to shy on about, Ash is a punk with attitude who constantly disobey the rules, gambles and partake in underage drinking while still having a soft spot from time to time, he’s definitely the most entertaining character and his problematic behavior contrast well with Rean’s new position as a teacher trying to set him straight and speaking of setting thing straight let’s talk about Musse.



Musse is not the most well appreciated character in the game simply because the entire schtick about her is that she’s a 16 year old temptress trying to bait Rean into the dark side of Discord moderation. Personally, I like Musse, they could’ve made a character like this much more awkward if they wanted but thankfully Rean’s newfound maturity allows him to quickly set boundaries between him and her which creates a somewhat fun dynamic of playful one sided flirting between the two that got a few chuckle out of me since Rean is trying really hard not to get fired and I just kinda like her mischievous little devil attitude which actually hides her real identity as this game version of Lelouch VI Britannia funnily enough that I’m curious to see more developed in the upcoming game (actually one of the only thing I’m excited to see developed in the sequel… because… well we’re not there yet so let’s move on).

Altina is a daughter type character, in this game you learn that her and Millium are artificial beings known as homunculus and while Milium is this peppy little girl who jumps around everywhere and feels a wide array of emotion, Altina is closer to a robot and is only learning through being around her classmate and Rean that she’s more than just a tool for war and she can be an actual human being with feeling. Some people might say that she’s just Tio again and yeah, she kinda is a K-Mart brand Tio but I don’t really mind it as much as her arc differs in some areas and since she’s also the closest character to Rean by that point, it makes for some interesting retroactive commentaries on what happened in the first two games (and probably the only relevant connective tissue from 2 to 3 aside from the late game revelations of CS2).

Lastly there’s Kurt…

Kurt…

Well…

He… exists I guess ?

Yeah sorry, I got nothing on Kurt, all JRPG parties need to have a few weak links and he’s definitely one of them. His entire deal is trying to live up to his family’s legacy and … yeah his existence makes you wish Mueller wasn’t completely shafted by the developers of the game honestly, I don’t know Kurt is kinda there, he’s inoffensive and has a few cool moment but he’s as basic as a “boy with sword” archetype could get.

BUT WHAT ABOUT REAN THOUGHT ????

In the last episode of my Kiseki journey, I said that Rean went from a character I was neutral about to one who actively grinded my gears for the entirety of CS2. I still don’t really care much about Rean, I still think he’s one of the weakest aspects of this arc and since he’s the main protagonist so much of the element in the story revolves around him. However, I will say that the premise of his character in this game at least makes him more tolerable. Rean is now a teacher at Thors Academy instead of being a student, this new position of power alongside his experience in the first two games at least makes him somewhat wiser and is a more interesting foundation for his character and the relation he’ll have with the rest of the cast.
Rean is also directly punished for his lack of decision making and spine in the original game, so he’s now pretty much tied on a leash by Osborne who uses him to do his bidding. Rean, of course being the little bitch that he is, agrees to play into the Ironbloods game and is forced to do shit against his will. That lack of agency coupled with Rean not really knowing what Osborne is cooking is going to be the main hook of CS3 and I’d say that for once it’s a good thing. Rean being forced to do stuff that he doesn’t want to do well… Actively forces him to take a position and do stuff rather than bitching about not doing stuff and bullshitting his way into acting up anyway without really thinking about the consequences of his action and when you know how Rean is when he actually HAS agency over his actions, you can’t help but think that it’s a better outcome for his character rather than the contrary.

That doesn’t stop Rean from being spectacularly flat in this game, not helped by the plot tendency not to clues us in or develop what’s the deal with him and Osborne in this episode and only playing cat and mouse with your expectations once again to make you excited for the sequel (as all of those Intro games tend to do just be gigantic teaser for their sequel anyway).

The plot also completely gave up on Rean being a nuanced character whatsoever, he seems to have troubles due to some events that happened in North Ambria and some level of trauma from losing Crow in the previous game but much like CS2 these elements are not strong enough to counterbalance how much of an absolute unstoppable giga chad he is at any occasion, in fact because Rean is an instructor now, everyone thinks he’s this real badass mf that can’t do no wrong and multiple time within the narrative are meant to show just how strong Rean has become and how heroic he is. There’s a hilariously out of touch scene rushing at super speed to stop some soldiers from killing themselves and I’m sorry but it’s so over the top and corny that it makes it impossible for me to take this seriously. I’m also pretty sure that Rean is slowly but surely repeating his self-doubt arc from the previous two game on the pretense that his traumas are lil bit more believable than killing a bear as a child but since the game never expands on what happened in North Ambria and all dialogs points out to him having done nothing wrong because god forbid Rean doing war crimes while actually killing people in war to actually affect his mind and give him PTSD, what do you think this is a mature video game ?

But I think that’s enough about talking positively about the game here, I’ve promised a thought piece, not a review and I just wanted to get most of the positives out of the way first to prove to you that while I’m on the side of the game being a general improvement over the first two Cold Steel games, it doesn’t mean that the game was a success in delivering on all of its ideas and that’s probably why CS3 won’t end up joining its brethren in keeping the series afloat and bring back the standard of quality brought by the older entries as the shadow of Falcom’s wacky game and narrative design philosophy come creeping its way back on the soup no matter how fresh the ingredients are.

CS3 has a bit of an identity crisis because it's both a sequel to what came before it but also seems to want to wipe the slate clean and build off on new foundations. We already stated how CS1 was a game designed for a new generation of players who wants to be introduced to the wonderful world of Kiseki and as such it kept most of the reference to earlier entry to a minimal and didn’t really dare involve elements from older title too much (sometimes very inelegantly, such as Ouroboros being first introduced in a throwaway line in the mid-game).
What I mean by that is that the game isn’t really a sequel to Cold Steel 1 or Cold Steel 2 and the main conflict that was the central piece of these two games (the class warfare between commoners and nobles) is only a foot-note within the story. The Civil war did happen and is mentioned at several points throughout the game but the actual main conflict which started the whole thing and how it affected the country is completely glossed over and never mentioned again. CS3 doesn’t seem to be interested in bouncing back from how poorly it handled its political themes in the original two games and it’s really strange how little CS2 and the events that transpired in that game actually matters in the plot of CS3.

Perhaps Falcom realized how poorly it handled the entire thing and seem to want to sweep all of it under the rug but it’s nonetheless very bizarre that the game never actually properly addresses the consequences of the civil war and how it could’ve probably affected the public's perception on nobility and how the noble faction got punished from such careless action and seems to only want to pretend that the very existence of the noble alliance and its action wasn’t the result of some deeply rooted systemic issue but rather the folly of a couple of bad apples within the noble faction namely Duke Cayenne and Lord Albarea (which btw, CS2 explicitly said was the bad apple of the noble alliance and the noble alliance didn’t claim and actively wanted to stop this man from committing the atrocities he committed in Celdic so that’s even fucking crazier).

Heck one of the first character you meet in CS3 is Aurelia Le Guin, a former general of the Noble Alliance and a pretty minor character from CS2 who has been appointed as the principal of the branch campus and was even said to be a major player in the annexation of North Ambria a couple of years prior to the events of the game. The game will rarely if ever explain how Aurelia never got punished for her crimes, if she still believes in the ideals of the noble alliance, if she has some resentment for Rean (she seems to have none) for stealing the glory of the alliance, none of that shit is explored, Aurelia just seems to exist to be badass and steals the character arc Laura should’ve had in this game.

Another thing that CS2 spectacularly fucked over is how it portrayed the civil war and by that I mean that it didn’t portray it at all since most of the action took place in the western region and what part of Erebonia are you visiting in this game ? Well of course, it’s the western region ! And yet, the civil war is only a passing thought, everything seems to be normal, no citizens seems to have been harmed by the situation, no citizens seems to hold resentment towards the nobles, no citizens seems to try and heal from potential traumas or loss brought forth by this seemingly pointless conflict. Absolutely none of that thing is explored even when you are actually visiting the Province who belonged to Duke Cayenne himself (remember ? The Antagonist of the previous game ?) where the only thing that seems to matter is to try and elect a new Duke Cayenne (in fact Musse later reveals herself to be Duke Cayenne’s niece like what is going on with the world ?!?!) and trying to gain the favors of the population.

This is such a bizarre turn over and seemingly makes CS2 an even bigger waste of time than it actually was since it seems to matter very little into the plot of this game. In fact the only conflicts that seems to matter for the game’s plot is the annexation of North Ambria, a war that isn’t explored or explained to you at all unless you’re reaching for an optional book found in Towa’s house and was only ever shown in an anime released 6 WHOLE DAMN YEARS after the release of Cold Steel 3 and it’s weird as shit since it seems that it was a pretty big deal. But the game does not really care and wants to start over on new foundation.
I must ask myself how did they plan out this scenario sometimes because making it so none of the important stuff from the previous 2 games actually matters into its third entry is pretty wild, you could literally be skipping CS1 and CS2 and just read a summary of them and you will have almost the same level of comprehension as someone who actually got through the games. WHAT IS GOING ON ?

A friend of mine who actually like these games (and we’re still in good contact despite his dubious taste in video games) was constantly repeating to me that I was looking at the Cold Steel arc wrong and that it really wasn’t a story about the division of social class and how these dynamics affects and changes society, but rather about the “fear of imperialism and how to act against it” which is represented by the Osborne faction. And while he’s definitely right on some level (because I don’t think CS3’s handling of this topic is particularly stellar either but I’ll develop this further down this already long essay)

You may think that maybe Falcom did this as to make this entry more accessible to newcomers who might want to start the series with this one in spite of this being the third entry in the series or to focus on the new conflict of this new sub-arc without having to deal with the dust left by their failure at delivering anything of substance for 2 whole damn games but surprisingly and that’s the whole paradox of this episode, despite wanting to act as a soft-reboot of its own arc and a potential new jumping point to the series for newcomers, this game more so than any other entry in the series hinges heavily on the series everlasting continuity and constantly referencing past events from older entry in the franchise and in fact the main conflict of the narrative this time around is definitely more focus on the lore of the franchise rather than a singular theme or even political stakes like it was the case with Azure and the first Cold Steel duology.

You see many returning faces, you get to visit places that were mentioned previously in the franchise and heck one chapter takes place entirely within a new 3D rendition of Crossbell which despite how dumb that’s going to sound made me smile despite this being just an obvious overly expanded technical flex by the developers but hell if it didn’t work on me.

These moments are also treated with the utmost respect for their legacy, at one point you visit Hamel a place where one of the most tragic event in the series happened and you get to visit the grave of Loewe the second main antagonist of Sky SC and the most memorable character from that game and its treated as this solemn quiet moment like you’ve just stepped into sacred ground and as a somber melancholic rendition of Silver Will plays over flashbacks from SC, you feel some level of faint nostalgia mixed with uncertainty as you walk towards that gravestone and it’s probably one of the best story segment in the series.

At one point, you get a boss fight with Arianrodh in a setting similar to the moment you fight her in Azure complete with the same theme song from that game and an equally high step in difficulty and it’s literally so freaking hype it’s insane.

So yeah, I think that on average, I didn’t completely loose any kind of attachment to the series continuity since literally all of these moments made me enjoy the game significantly more than its predecessors and made me happy I stuck with the series despite it all but here lies another issue of … what do you even do between these member berries moments that are obviously meant to please old time fans of the series ?
Well…

That’s something we’re going to discuss now to observe how Falcom pretty much lost control of their own ambition once again and ended a game that could’ve been the long awaited return to form the series needed into pretty much its death sentence.

Cold Steel 3 suffers from what I will refer to as “Tales of Syndrome” (and please don’t see a criticism of that franchise as I happen to have a lot of sympathy for it). Like I mentioned in my first review of CS1, “Tales of” tend to compensate a passable/mediocre story with other things such as a great combat system, some technically impressive stuff for their time (I’m still blown the fuck away by Tales of Phantasia technical flexes like what the shit) and most importantly, incredible cast of characters and amazing characterization which its “skits” system is no stranger too. Oftentimes, it’s not surprising to see a “Tales Of” story fumble near the end or heck even in the middle of it, Vesperia is an amazing game up until its last 10h or so which completely annihilate any credibility the story had left.

However, the “Tales Of” series is different in one key element : It’s standalone. It’s easier to forgive a Tales Of game for not delivering because at least it’s not going to ruin your enjoyment of other entries in the series (“Graces F” corny ass writing ain’t going to ruin how stellar “Abyss” was for exemple.) and more generally it’s not going to feel like all the hours you’ve spent playing these titles weren’t worth it. “Trails” on the other hand and especially the one puts a higher emphasis on its world building and its different geopolitical stakes. Trails will always go in excruciating detail about how almost every facet of its universe works (I mean for fuck sake, how many JRPG series will stop you to infodump you on freaking Tax laws) and as such, you expect the series to do something with all of the stuff it’s setting up and as such expect nothing but excellence from it (and with this series, excellence is always close but never reached).

You can’t just disguise yourself as Yasumi Matsuno to be Yasumi Matsuno, Cold Steel and the Trails series has a whole has a rich universe but for the most part I feel like the franchise likes to use all of that as a carrot at the end of a stick to make you keep playing rather than something that truly wants to say anything and what is a rich detailed universe if it’s wasted on shitty character trope and weak stories.

Cold Steel 3 abandons the main conflict it desperately tries to establish for over 2 games in favor of another more lore-centric conflict. Instead of Noble and Commoners, the story revolves around Ironbloods vs Ouroboros which is less risky but also not as interesting because… well… if you think about it for a second… What does the game even want to say with this conflict ?

For the first time since Trails in the Sky SC, Ouroboros take center stages in the narrative of Cold Steel 3, I’ve ranted multiple times about how I don’t care much for Ouroboros but I think in this particular case since they’re in the forefront of the narrative, I will probably make my position a little more clearer on them.

I think Ouroboros is a hindrance to the series' ability to tell intriguing and interesting stories with its universe since their very first appearance.

First introduced in Sky SC, Ouroboros has quickly been presented as the main antagonistic force of that game but the ending of SC and some elements from Sky 3rd showed that Ouroboros are not done yet and they’re here to stay. Trails in the Sky FC had probably what is in my opinion the only good villain that the series ever had : Richard. Richard’s motivations in that game were believable, understandable and worked in tandem with the kind of setting the original Trails in the Sky wanted to portray. In fact, Richard is a character that only gets better with time because all of the stuff he warned us about and the very reason why he did the things that he did pretty much became true as the series moved forward.

However, Richard’s much like many other similar villains in the series (all of varying quality : Dieter was pretty much like Richard but was robbed due to Azure’s obsession with introducing a bigger fish to raise the stakes even when those were already pretty high and it wasn’t necessary to do so) was used as a pawn for Ouroboros which were the people who helped but most importantly used and manipulated Richard to further their own agenda.

What agenda you may ask ?

Well wouldn't you like to know ? Haha…

Ouroroboros to me is a complete enigma, it’s like their very presence exist solely to make the story worse and it’s not helped that most of the lore surrounding the more supernatural aspect of the universe (and thus what the villains will eventually seek to further their goals) are sought after by them too. Ouroboros introduction in Sky SC was dubious at best, they forced the game into a repetitive sluggish structure for most of its run and their saturday morning cartoon personality which only existed to prop up other characters in your party didn’t really help. And whether or not you like Weissman, I also think it was a mistake to make him the first big shot of Organization XIII since apparently according to the game, he was a renegade to the cause and to the plan.

But what plan ? What cause ?

Well… wouldn’t you like to know ? Haha…

Ouroboros are, for lack of a better term, annoying. Falcom really wants you to think of them as this chaotic organization with people of all horizon working together towards a certain goal but then it also wants most of its members to be a free atom that can do and think whatever they want and even temporarily or permanently leave them without any consequences especially for its enforcers since the Anguis (Team Magma Admins type of beat) seems to be all obedient to their grandmaster. A lot of fans told me that I’ve always misread Ouroboros as just “mustache twirling villains” but to be frank… there’s not much elements pointing to the contrary so far in the series ? And even if they want us to think that their cause and their cause is just… maybe a hint towards that cause would help.

But Falcom refuses to let us know, Falcom will just forcefully put them inside of a game’s plot and since they’re the main antagonistic force driving the overall plot forward that means that they’re always going to be the bigger fish in the room, the only antagonist that matter because in the end any new villains no matter their motivations or how elaborate their plans are will always end up as a new pawn for Ourobozos, they’re not interesting villains to me.
Ouroboros are just cryptic and bizarre, they’re just chaotic for the sake of being chaotic. Sometimes they will help you defeat the local bad guy, sometimes they will join them, sometimes they will oppose the villain or join them when they don’t fit their agenda anymore. And it’s really hard to take them for anything but random villain of the week when that’s exactly how they behave and present themselves for most of the series only for them to make you go : “WHAT IS THE SOCIETY UP TO” and the answer always being something like….

Well… wouldn’t you like to know ?

These villains have far outstayed their welcome for me and I’m just tired of their existence and their continued influence on the franchise. It’s impossible to take any stake, any other villains seriously when they are in the middle of the arena selling you on empty promises and “mysteries” which aren’t even that interesting to begin with. In SC at least, there were personal stakes in going against them but in CS3, you only fight Ouroboros because Rean is forced to by Osborne… but other than that… this conflict is pointless and meaningless and worst of all… actually wants to tell nothing.

CS3 has the same repetitive plot structure for all of its chapters, some people say that CS3 isn’t boring because a lot of stuff happens this time around but does it really ?

You still do a lot of pointless stuff that end up accomplishing nothing not just on a micro-level but also on a macro-level. Stopping Ouroboros isn’t an inherently interesting thing to center your plot around and it feels like a distraction at best, CS3 legitimately has nothing to say and nothing interesting to either tell or make us experience with everything that we’re doing in its main plot aside from some carrots at the end of a stick based on complete “trust the plan” rhetoric that leads to more frustration and some nostalgia bait to keep old time fans from snoozing too much at everything happening here.

I don’t know why they felt that the third game in a quadrilogy must be so light in actual substance, heck making this another intro game is also kind of an ass backward narrative choice because there’s not many things left to introduce so they need to pad the story out with the same boring structure as CS1 (which feels even less justified here than it did in that game) and new characters which, yes, are more interesting but feels like a band-aid on an open wound.

And even then, this identity crisis continues, between wanting to be a fresh start and hinging on its continuity.

At some key points in the narrative, some of your old squadmates from the first two games will get you out of a tough situation and temporarily join your party. This reunion with old characters is the emotional core of some of the game's more intimate moment but it hinges heavily on you buying into Class VII as a group and as we stated in the first two games, these titles did nothing to make me care about them in the first place and when they’re put in contrast to the new characters in this game, it’s even worse because despite some dubious attempt at making them more interesting (like Gaius being a Gralsritter which is just ???), they never get any better than what they were before and continue to be a weak narrative element of the story and steal the show of characters I’d rather be playing as.
A friend of mine insisted on telling me this game is supposedly about “the fear of imperialism and how to act against it” but for a game about imperialism, the game really doesn’t seem to want to make any sort of deep thoughtful commentary on the subject or even address it heck most of the time it tries to lowball the issues in multiple ways. Osborne is said to be an expansionist but yet all of the wars he launched to annex neighboring countries have been explicitly stated to have happened without bloodshed which to me is just a strange fact to put in the forefront of the narrative. While Trails has often been afraid to kill off important characters (to the point of extreme absurdity cf : Illya in Azure) it wasn’t really afraid to portray death of civilians or even main characters committing or being the victims of atrocious crime.

But here, you have a seemingly fascist dictator who… conquers the world…pacifically … and makes decisions who… benefits most people ? And make the old nobility fold ? And reducing taxes ? And make Rean do things against his will like… stopping random terrorists from doing terrorist shit ?

Wow that man is awful… I wonder how Crossbell is doing in the ending of Azure. It looked kinda dire and… wait… what do you mean it’s doing better than it ever did on its own ? And what do you mean everything about the ending of Azure was retconned and they didn’t respect continuity just to have Randy chill in a giant robot and Tio being an important searcher ? Weren’t they supposed to be fugitives ?

Oh wait only Lloyd, KeA and … ARIOS ??? Are ?

I mean what about Rean, he seems to be pretty troubled to have lost the control of his abilities and that’s like a main theme of this new arc about him and… wait… what do you mean he just lost control of himself for 5 seconds and didn’t actually kill anyone ? Wait but… huh ?

Hey if this is a story about imperialism, maybe they’re going to finally address why we haven’t seen the emperor yet and why he let his chancellor and the nobles do a bunch of shit while he’s supposed to be ruling the country and …

Oh… you mean he read a bunch of books that predict the future and decided… not to do anything about it and just let things burn ? Because what … What do you mean ?

“There is something in Erebonia”

Oh no

…

Can you hear it ?

The trumpets of the bullshit writing apocalypse are ringing ! The deads are rising from their graves and pretend to have a secret identity, an ancient dragon is awakening out of nowhere and forces you to do a dungeon that looks like the final dungeon but will later be revealed to have nothing to do with the actual main threat of the plot… and… oh no… are these…
GNOMES ???

GNOMES…. GNOMES…. GNOMES…

Nobody’s going to read this fucking review this far so might as well just fucking lashes out. So there’s actually a third faction in this Ironbloods vs Ouroboros thing the plot has going for it and these are…

God…

The Gnomes…

So huh… the gnomes (yes the fucking gnomes, not the dwarves, not the elven, not the any potentially cooler pick for a villain faction just FUCKING GNOMES) are this MyStErIoUs faction working in the shadow of everything with their black workshop, they do all sort of cray thing like bringing people back from the dead and killing all tension and stakes in the narrative, have incredibly obvious secret identity like…

Man…

GEORGE NOME

THEY MADE THE DOINKY SPLOINKY FAT GUY FROM THE FIRST TWO GAMES A VILLAIN BUT NOT JUST A VILLAIN HE’S A GNOME AND HIS FUCKING NAME IS GEORGE NOME GET IT BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME AND HE HAS A GUN AND KILLS ANGELICA (I hope she stays dead) BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME !

BUT WAIT THAT’S NOT IT !

DING DONG

Hey ! It’s me ! Kondo-San !

You wanna come inside my clubhouse ?

KINDA KONDA KONDO-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57oU-xqiXek

Suddenly the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse rises from the grounds and nothing starts to make sense anymore. The game lore dumps you on a bunch of shit that it already info dumped you on if you read most of the book in the game like I did so thanks… collecting these was pointless I guess. You fought a dragon ? It Does not matter there’s an eviler bigger dragon now, all the villains who've been fighting against each other start teaming up for no reason. People start switching allegiance left and right, Ash is now the secret 3rd Hamel child and HE SHOT THE EMPEROR WHAT THE HELL LET’S GO TO WAR BUT FIRST YOU GOTTA GO DOWN THE LAMEST FINAL DUNGEON IN HISTORY AND ONE-SHOTTING EVERYONE BECAUSE POWER-SCALING ? CREDIBLE THREATS ? NOT IN MY JRPG !
And…

As you enter the door to the final boss…

You prepare yourself…

For the shittiest

Most brain melting succession of events you’ve ever seen.

Put on the music : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3G5IXn0K7A&t

Ok so get this, there was a hobo looking scholar who showed up regularly so of course the guy is a villain because that’s like the 4th time they did this in this series already. His name is actually

BLACK ALBERICH CHIEF OF THE GNOMES (I’m not even kidding, that's his full name and title) and he’s also Alisa’s Seemingly Dead Father who came back from the dead OH BUT GET THIS !

This random guy who hasn’t existed in the series until this episode, he was actually the one behind EVERYTHING, that’s right EVERYTHING, he looks at the camera and tell you to your face “Hamel ? I did that shit, the Orbal shutdown ? I did that shit, EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN CROSSBELL AND THE CIVIL WAR ! I DID THAT SHIT”

THE GNOMES MANIPULATED EVERYONE FROM THE SHADOWS ! THEY EVEN MANIPULATED THE MASTERMINDS OUROBOROS AND OSBORNE AND ALL THE EVIL PEOPLE IN THE SERIES OH AND GUESS WHAT

REFILL YOUR POPCORN YOU’RE GONNA LOVE THIS NEXT PART

FLASH NEWS :

DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE’S NO REAL REASON FOR WAR HAPPENING ? DID YOU KNOW THAT PEOPLE AREN’T EVIL ? THEY’RE JUST DRIVEN TO DO EVIL THINGS AND KILL EACH OTHERS BECAUSE … wait what do you mean clearly established and believable reasons according to the series clearly established geopolitical stakes ?

NO SILLY ! IT’S BECAUSE OF THE CURSE !

WHAT’S THE CURSE ?

WELL IT’S A TOXIC GAZ THAT WAS FARTED BY THIS ANCIENT GUNDAM WHO ALSO MANIPULATED EVERYONE BTW AND WHICH TURN PEOPLE EVIL AND RACIST !

EVEN THE CAT TURNS RACIST ! OH NO REAN HAS TURNED INTO SUPER RACISM WHAT THE FUCK QUICK EVERYONE STOPS HIM ALSO OOMFIE IS DEAD NO CLIFFHANGER “THIS STORY IS AS DARK AS INK, SEE YOU NEXT TIME IN CS4”
COLD STEEL 3

IS A SCAM

THIS FRANCHISE

IS A SCAM

THEY SHOWED YOU IMPROVEMENTS BUT IT WAS ALL A LIE !

FUCK AND I WROTE 21 PAGES FOR WHAT

FOR THIS

OH MY GOD

This is amazing…

I…

I need to play CS4…

This is fraud writing, the kind you only see once every 15 billion years when the planet aligns !

I was supposed to have like a conclusion about how Trails doesn’t deliver on its promises and I’ve tried to approach these games in good faith but holy shit…

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMES

(Towa is still really cute tho)