The Legend of Xenogears: Trails of Cold Saga IV
(the game that broke my brain)
Where do I even start with this game? The lore is batshit insane (derogatory), everyone treats Rean like he's the second coming of Anime Jesus, the characters take literal days to rest in the middle of WW3 after doing a day or two of hiking, the vast majority of the returning cast is flanderized to hell and back TO THE POINT IT HAPPENS IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CUTSCENES IN THE GAME (thankfully Renne is at least spared such a tragic fate), they revive 3 separate characters (Toval, Olivier, and Victor) who died very much onscreen, in a very unambiguous way, to which the party's reactions were very apparent, because Falcum can't stand killing off their OCs (yes it's a spoiler and no I don't care), they revive Crow 3 times by taping his soul to Valimar or some shit, the curse only exists to make the party have 3 billion boss fights with the most rando characters imaginable (WHY AM I FIGHTING THE FUCKING MUSIC TEACHER FROM CS1 GET ME OFF THIS TRAINWRECK), Thomas fucks off for the 4th game in a row despite being built up to hell and back (hey remember when Dominions were actively involved in the plot and eventually became party members? well that sure is a thing of the past), TOWA ISN"T PLAYABLE YET AGAIN, Musse becomes a grand chessmaster or something idk, McBurn sure is a boss fight and mcburninates everyone and activates his inner Trogdor and gives you an item that unlocks the true ending (?????) and you can only get the true ending by completing all the quests in the game (????????????) and the last quest is beating up the dragon Holy Beast (???????????????????????????????????????), all the women party members, INCLUDING REAN"S FUCKING STUDENTS (INCLUDING FUCKING ALTINA) (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA), are romanceable (screaming internally) (I still can't get over the Laura cave scene and that's a whole other bucket of worms), TOWA ACTIVELY FORGIVES CROW ON SCREEN FOR BEING DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ACTIVELY AND QUITE POSSIBLY KNOWINGLY PUTTING HER LIFE IN DANGER IN CS1 (that shit should give her PTSD at least and that's not even getting into her very possible abandonment issues SET UP ONLY 1 GAME PRIOR), Alberich is there to be a bad guy who does evil bad guy things because that's what the evil bad guy do (on top of functionally being a really bad ripoff of Dmitri Yuriev which should be a war crime on its own), Kloe isn't playable yet again AND IS LITERALLY PUT IN A POSITION TO BE PLAYABLE but Falcum didn't want to animate her or something I guess (I don't think she even gets a Brave Order either when Schera of all people does which is extra retarded, especially with hindsight from Hajimari BECAUSE SCHERA IS PREGGERS AND IS IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ACTIVE WARZONE), the party fights Osborne and Arianrhod at the bottom of the Gnome BDSM factory hobbit hole thing (??????????????????????????????????) way before the end of the game which takes away what little crumbs of gravitas he had left (I don't think he even gets an Anti-Order WHICH YOU"D THINK HE WOULD SINCE HE APPARENTLY CAN SPREAD THE ANTI-ORDER VIRUS TO THE IRONBLOODS), the writing generally being barely passable at best and an absolute fustercluck at worst, the gameplay being the easiest it's ever been even on Nightmare and every enemy being walking bags of HP (I checked at least a few times per chapter if I didn't accidentally switch it to an easier difficulty even when I wasn't optimizing everyone), and a lot of other stuff that probably slipped my mind but I don't care because this game's plot is frighteningly worthless.
Before I start ranting about the game's comically lopsided reception compared to how it actually is, I want to say that there are a handful of things I did like about the game.
-I liked that Juna was basically the protagonist for the first chapter of the game (and honestly she should have just been the protag, or at least a deuteragonist, for the rest of the game). Alisa entirely dropped being the deuteragonist during CS2 and it would have been nice to have someone fill in that role, especially since it would give a chance to split the cast to focus on other parts of Erebonia with Class 7 focusing on one part and Class 7 2 focusing on another part (why in the shiny fuck we didn't get to go to Jurai or North Ambria instead of farting around for the entirety of Chapter 2 I will never fathom). But anyway, Juna protag I very much appreciated for the short time it happened, since she's easily the only one left with any amount of tangible reason to want to stop Daddy Osborne from being a big ol' meanie (and NO, Crow no longer counts).
-There were a handful of bonding events I liked, despite easily being the worst handled aspect of the arc. I liked the one with Altina where she tried to help liberate Ymir from Imperial soldiers, the one where Emma tried to purge Ishmelga from Rean at great personal risk to herself (even though, let's face it, the only reason they did it was to have a reason for Emma to be naked), and the one with Musse showing Rean her suicide gun. There were a few problems with the setup for each of them (and frankly for Emma's it really should have just been a plot scene instead of Insert Epic Anime Fight #236754762354) but the fact that I really like the ideas for them more than makes up for their shortcomings.
And now for the rant.
If it isn't obvious, this is one of the worst games I've ever played, and not just because it's such a massive blueball for longtime fans who want something more substantial than having shiny objects dangling in front of them. And it really stinks because the plot can be summed up as "Xenogears meets Highlander during WW3" which sounds fucking awesome, but somehow Falcum made it the most boring, mind-numbing, tedious waste of time ever. Falcum has been building up Osborne since FUCKING SKY THE THIRD and his scene in Ao where he was openly threatening Dieter in a room full of dignitaries from other countries was easily one of the best scenes in the entire series, and in this arc he's been nothing but an absolute tin can of a person. I legitimately can't even tell if it's one of those "iT wAs JuSt iShMeLgA aLL aLoNg" plotpoints or if Osborne was completely in control the entire time because the way the writers explain the mind-melding whatever the hell was going on with him and Alberich is extremely confused and misleading. To be fair I completely clocked out by that point in the game, but I actively tried to look it up and ask other people what was happening with that, and either method didn't help me to understand much better beyond "Ishmelga and Osborne were doing stuff together". To put it in perspective, one of my favorite game series is Xenosaga. There is a very delicately woven, intricate plot of subterfuge, corporate spying, fucky experimentation, and intrigue all centered around an event that took place 14 in-game years ago. There are many different factions with different interests either trying to vie for control or to oppose the factions that would disturb the peace. To say that the player needs to almost take notes at some points while playing the games would not be an understatement. And those games are much easier to follow than most of anything in this game and Cold Steel because the writers had a goal they wanted to accomplish and actively articulated what everyone was doing when they were doing it, and the player can easily see what was happening and can make reasonable guesses as to what could happen next, and has many twists and turns to keep it interesting that don't come out of the same nowhere that Ishmelga showed up from. With this game, that sense is very much absent, at least for me. And Takahashi's plans got derailed partway through making the series; he had to cut down from 6 games to 3 games, with some supplementary content to fill in necessary gaps that couldn't make it into the games proper. What Takahashi accomplished in just 3 games, a VN and a phone game was monumental; what this game accomplished with all the buildup, time to develop and money that Falcum could muster was a tragedy. And for the final nail in the coffin, the entire Xenosaga series can be 100% completed in roughly the same time someone would 100% complete CS1.
And I'm not here trying to say everyone who likes this game is bad or anything, but I genuinely envy the people who can just turn their brains off and enjoy this shit. Superficially, longtime favorite characters make appearances and generally do things that they might do in this situation, so the immersion isn't ruined. There's a lot of pretty crazy stuff happening after Rean makes a comeback which amps up the stakes for the latter half of the game, and Cassius comes out of retirement to teach Rean a pretty cool and (relatively speaking) mechanically interesting S-craft that, admittedly, is one of my favorites in the series and can reasonably compete with all-time greats like Sakura Morning Moon.
All that being said, the amount of praise this game gets despite how much of a shitshow it is at a glance deeper than cursory always baffled me. There's people who either love this game to pieces or there's people who absolutely hate it with every fiber of their being, which is really unfortunate because the writers (might) still have an amount of passion for the series but to have it fail on this scale, especially with a relatively decent track record, says to me they need to slow production of this series down and let the series breathe a bit and have them think through everything properly. With the few things that I liked, even when it's an unfortunately very small part of the runtime it's genuinely up there with some of the other games I really enjoy. And to top it all off, I don't think Trails is even recoverable after this game; Hajimari did a decent job of trying to retcon a lot of the really dumb nonsense that was set up in this game and is basically just CS4 2: The Search for More Hanging Plot Threads, but Falcum's braindead insistence on having characters futz around on screen until the plot happens has finally caught up to them, and the plot is no longer something I can take seriously in any capacity.
Anyway, Cold Steel in general is an arc that I suggest people skip (the amount of stuff the player needs to know from it to get into Kuro can literally be summed up in a paragraph) but especially skip this one. The only parts of it that I think are worth watching are up on Youtube so just search around there.
(the game that broke my brain)
Where do I even start with this game? The lore is batshit insane (derogatory), everyone treats Rean like he's the second coming of Anime Jesus, the characters take literal days to rest in the middle of WW3 after doing a day or two of hiking, the vast majority of the returning cast is flanderized to hell and back TO THE POINT IT HAPPENS IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CUTSCENES IN THE GAME (thankfully Renne is at least spared such a tragic fate), they revive 3 separate characters (Toval, Olivier, and Victor) who died very much onscreen, in a very unambiguous way, to which the party's reactions were very apparent, because Falcum can't stand killing off their OCs (yes it's a spoiler and no I don't care), they revive Crow 3 times by taping his soul to Valimar or some shit, the curse only exists to make the party have 3 billion boss fights with the most rando characters imaginable (WHY AM I FIGHTING THE FUCKING MUSIC TEACHER FROM CS1 GET ME OFF THIS TRAINWRECK), Thomas fucks off for the 4th game in a row despite being built up to hell and back (hey remember when Dominions were actively involved in the plot and eventually became party members? well that sure is a thing of the past), TOWA ISN"T PLAYABLE YET AGAIN, Musse becomes a grand chessmaster or something idk, McBurn sure is a boss fight and mcburninates everyone and activates his inner Trogdor and gives you an item that unlocks the true ending (?????) and you can only get the true ending by completing all the quests in the game (????????????) and the last quest is beating up the dragon Holy Beast (???????????????????????????????????????), all the women party members, INCLUDING REAN"S FUCKING STUDENTS (INCLUDING FUCKING ALTINA) (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA), are romanceable (screaming internally) (I still can't get over the Laura cave scene and that's a whole other bucket of worms), TOWA ACTIVELY FORGIVES CROW ON SCREEN FOR BEING DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ACTIVELY AND QUITE POSSIBLY KNOWINGLY PUTTING HER LIFE IN DANGER IN CS1 (that shit should give her PTSD at least and that's not even getting into her very possible abandonment issues SET UP ONLY 1 GAME PRIOR), Alberich is there to be a bad guy who does evil bad guy things because that's what the evil bad guy do (on top of functionally being a really bad ripoff of Dmitri Yuriev which should be a war crime on its own), Kloe isn't playable yet again AND IS LITERALLY PUT IN A POSITION TO BE PLAYABLE but Falcum didn't want to animate her or something I guess (I don't think she even gets a Brave Order either when Schera of all people does which is extra retarded, especially with hindsight from Hajimari BECAUSE SCHERA IS PREGGERS AND IS IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ACTIVE WARZONE), the party fights Osborne and Arianrhod at the bottom of the Gnome BDSM factory hobbit hole thing (??????????????????????????????????) way before the end of the game which takes away what little crumbs of gravitas he had left (I don't think he even gets an Anti-Order WHICH YOU"D THINK HE WOULD SINCE HE APPARENTLY CAN SPREAD THE ANTI-ORDER VIRUS TO THE IRONBLOODS), the writing generally being barely passable at best and an absolute fustercluck at worst, the gameplay being the easiest it's ever been even on Nightmare and every enemy being walking bags of HP (I checked at least a few times per chapter if I didn't accidentally switch it to an easier difficulty even when I wasn't optimizing everyone), and a lot of other stuff that probably slipped my mind but I don't care because this game's plot is frighteningly worthless.
Before I start ranting about the game's comically lopsided reception compared to how it actually is, I want to say that there are a handful of things I did like about the game.
-I liked that Juna was basically the protagonist for the first chapter of the game (and honestly she should have just been the protag, or at least a deuteragonist, for the rest of the game). Alisa entirely dropped being the deuteragonist during CS2 and it would have been nice to have someone fill in that role, especially since it would give a chance to split the cast to focus on other parts of Erebonia with Class 7 focusing on one part and Class 7 2 focusing on another part (why in the shiny fuck we didn't get to go to Jurai or North Ambria instead of farting around for the entirety of Chapter 2 I will never fathom). But anyway, Juna protag I very much appreciated for the short time it happened, since she's easily the only one left with any amount of tangible reason to want to stop Daddy Osborne from being a big ol' meanie (and NO, Crow no longer counts).
-There were a handful of bonding events I liked, despite easily being the worst handled aspect of the arc. I liked the one with Altina where she tried to help liberate Ymir from Imperial soldiers, the one where Emma tried to purge Ishmelga from Rean at great personal risk to herself (even though, let's face it, the only reason they did it was to have a reason for Emma to be naked), and the one with Musse showing Rean her suicide gun. There were a few problems with the setup for each of them (and frankly for Emma's it really should have just been a plot scene instead of Insert Epic Anime Fight #236754762354) but the fact that I really like the ideas for them more than makes up for their shortcomings.
And now for the rant.
If it isn't obvious, this is one of the worst games I've ever played, and not just because it's such a massive blueball for longtime fans who want something more substantial than having shiny objects dangling in front of them. And it really stinks because the plot can be summed up as "Xenogears meets Highlander during WW3" which sounds fucking awesome, but somehow Falcum made it the most boring, mind-numbing, tedious waste of time ever. Falcum has been building up Osborne since FUCKING SKY THE THIRD and his scene in Ao where he was openly threatening Dieter in a room full of dignitaries from other countries was easily one of the best scenes in the entire series, and in this arc he's been nothing but an absolute tin can of a person. I legitimately can't even tell if it's one of those "iT wAs JuSt iShMeLgA aLL aLoNg" plotpoints or if Osborne was completely in control the entire time because the way the writers explain the mind-melding whatever the hell was going on with him and Alberich is extremely confused and misleading. To be fair I completely clocked out by that point in the game, but I actively tried to look it up and ask other people what was happening with that, and either method didn't help me to understand much better beyond "Ishmelga and Osborne were doing stuff together". To put it in perspective, one of my favorite game series is Xenosaga. There is a very delicately woven, intricate plot of subterfuge, corporate spying, fucky experimentation, and intrigue all centered around an event that took place 14 in-game years ago. There are many different factions with different interests either trying to vie for control or to oppose the factions that would disturb the peace. To say that the player needs to almost take notes at some points while playing the games would not be an understatement. And those games are much easier to follow than most of anything in this game and Cold Steel because the writers had a goal they wanted to accomplish and actively articulated what everyone was doing when they were doing it, and the player can easily see what was happening and can make reasonable guesses as to what could happen next, and has many twists and turns to keep it interesting that don't come out of the same nowhere that Ishmelga showed up from. With this game, that sense is very much absent, at least for me. And Takahashi's plans got derailed partway through making the series; he had to cut down from 6 games to 3 games, with some supplementary content to fill in necessary gaps that couldn't make it into the games proper. What Takahashi accomplished in just 3 games, a VN and a phone game was monumental; what this game accomplished with all the buildup, time to develop and money that Falcum could muster was a tragedy. And for the final nail in the coffin, the entire Xenosaga series can be 100% completed in roughly the same time someone would 100% complete CS1.
And I'm not here trying to say everyone who likes this game is bad or anything, but I genuinely envy the people who can just turn their brains off and enjoy this shit. Superficially, longtime favorite characters make appearances and generally do things that they might do in this situation, so the immersion isn't ruined. There's a lot of pretty crazy stuff happening after Rean makes a comeback which amps up the stakes for the latter half of the game, and Cassius comes out of retirement to teach Rean a pretty cool and (relatively speaking) mechanically interesting S-craft that, admittedly, is one of my favorites in the series and can reasonably compete with all-time greats like Sakura Morning Moon.
All that being said, the amount of praise this game gets despite how much of a shitshow it is at a glance deeper than cursory always baffled me. There's people who either love this game to pieces or there's people who absolutely hate it with every fiber of their being, which is really unfortunate because the writers (might) still have an amount of passion for the series but to have it fail on this scale, especially with a relatively decent track record, says to me they need to slow production of this series down and let the series breathe a bit and have them think through everything properly. With the few things that I liked, even when it's an unfortunately very small part of the runtime it's genuinely up there with some of the other games I really enjoy. And to top it all off, I don't think Trails is even recoverable after this game; Hajimari did a decent job of trying to retcon a lot of the really dumb nonsense that was set up in this game and is basically just CS4 2: The Search for More Hanging Plot Threads, but Falcum's braindead insistence on having characters futz around on screen until the plot happens has finally caught up to them, and the plot is no longer something I can take seriously in any capacity.
Anyway, Cold Steel in general is an arc that I suggest people skip (the amount of stuff the player needs to know from it to get into Kuro can literally be summed up in a paragraph) but especially skip this one. The only parts of it that I think are worth watching are up on Youtube so just search around there.
3 Comments
It's honestly impressive how so much of nothing is crammed into the longest arc in the series. I remember feeling such wonder and intrigue in the world, characters and overarching plots in the Sky arc, and it's incredible how much CS fell off for me.
I truly do believe all the people who think CS is the best are truly there for the waifus- because when you strip it down to its essentials, that's all there is. The story's a slog and a mess. The main character has no defining traits beyond 'nice guy oblivious to women' and it's so jarring any time they try to throw any ounce of character on Rean (like protective older brother) because he is just so nothing, it feels like they are trying too hard. Too many characters bloat up the screen and it's almost embarrassing and shameful to see the returning characters from Sky and Zero because the sheer appearance in CS dumbs them down to their bare essentials. Quests are boring and have no heart to them.
And the plot, like you mentioned, is ridiculously stupid. I shouldn't have to blink and miss it when Osborne briefly tells Rean at the end that he was good all along. I don't even know if he verbatim says that- he just tells Rean he loves him and blips away into oblivion while we are supposed to infer through poor exposition that he was fighting against Ishmelga the whole time? Shameful what they did to Osborne. The curse takes away all of the antagonists' agency- no one in Trails can do bad things for the sake of being bad or in a believable downward spiral path. Everyone has to be redeemed and the only way you aren't is if an ancient Gnome chief possesses you. This problem has always existed in the series but now that we are at the part where there are 20+ antagonists, it leaves you feeling like the conflict shouldn't have or didn't happen if everyone's part in it gets handwaved away.
1000% agree with everything you said. Don't really know if the series will ever be like it was in the beginning and that's a tragedy.
I truly do believe all the people who think CS is the best are truly there for the waifus- because when you strip it down to its essentials, that's all there is. The story's a slog and a mess. The main character has no defining traits beyond 'nice guy oblivious to women' and it's so jarring any time they try to throw any ounce of character on Rean (like protective older brother) because he is just so nothing, it feels like they are trying too hard. Too many characters bloat up the screen and it's almost embarrassing and shameful to see the returning characters from Sky and Zero because the sheer appearance in CS dumbs them down to their bare essentials. Quests are boring and have no heart to them.
And the plot, like you mentioned, is ridiculously stupid. I shouldn't have to blink and miss it when Osborne briefly tells Rean at the end that he was good all along. I don't even know if he verbatim says that- he just tells Rean he loves him and blips away into oblivion while we are supposed to infer through poor exposition that he was fighting against Ishmelga the whole time? Shameful what they did to Osborne. The curse takes away all of the antagonists' agency- no one in Trails can do bad things for the sake of being bad or in a believable downward spiral path. Everyone has to be redeemed and the only way you aren't is if an ancient Gnome chief possesses you. This problem has always existed in the series but now that we are at the part where there are 20+ antagonists, it leaves you feeling like the conflict shouldn't have or didn't happen if everyone's part in it gets handwaved away.
1000% agree with everything you said. Don't really know if the series will ever be like it was in the beginning and that's a tragedy.
This is the way.
Cani
4 months ago
I'm beyond baffled anyone, any sensible person can look at the absolute mess CS in its entirety but mostly 4 was and say to themselves with full confidence "Yes, this is still my favorite franchise, It did not fell off and I'm gonna play the next arc" which I'm sure is gonna have all of the same problems the series has been carrying since at least Azure.
I can't even recommend CS4 as a "so bad it's good" game because that would recquire the game being fun rather than dull and boring.
Anyway you don't just have to disguise as Matsuno to be a Matsuno