I think it's one of the worst game I ever played in my life.. I need to tell to tales of Aliseee the new warrior of the crystal, everything began when she got throw in a city with new indication except a NPC that gave her 50 gils which you can do nothing with them, after that she had to spend around 20 hours on the wiki to even understand how to start the game correctly which lead to a series of the worst dungeons ever which you have no maps from them if you don't buy the map for 3000 gils. Each story mission her mental state went even more and even more crazy when she realized x mission would take 2 hours because the zone have 9 types of this monster, take 10 minutes to respawn and they were 10 fellow adventurers doing this mission. AND THEN suddently a story started out from nowhere about an evil bad guy coming back and bla bla bla don't kill the beasttribes except, she wanted to kill them after all those shitty dungeons with them, you can't tell me they aren't evil to the poor Aliseee young adventurer. Thus this story started, Aliseee got it by random flashbacks and she went to the shadowlord shitty dungeon to finally fight him, with the help of her trusts companion, we was able to defeat him and finally open the path to the apparently good FFXI story

Also a Filler episode happened when a veterant of Vanadiel went to help her, give advice and 500k gils, I guess Alisee e-girl power have some future in this dark world that is vanadiel

Welcome and well met, my brave little spark
How long you've wandered, burned bright as a star
Oh I have longed waiting patiently all this time
Past every fate, now sing with me once more
Share of your life far greater than memory
These lost and loved words can not hold
Boundless, the tale overflows and carries your light out to sea

How to start.... I have alot to say about that game which will be definitely a favorite of mine for a very long time. I'm pretty confident that I played the game at the right moment without adding more to that, people who know me will know what I'm talking about.

I personally loved almost all aspect of the game ? I know the gameplay definitely can put away some people but I think it was actually good ? At the moment that you take thing.. as a gameplay mechanic it just become a really interesting way to solve puzzles across all the levels in the game. Talking about them, I think the game have a really great variety of levels and puzzle, the zones are construct in a way where they introduce you the new mechanic in an easy way and after that they start to mix it with old mechanics. In the end I played the whole game in one day and it was a really fun experience to do in one sitting, I actually recommend that alot because of how the story is told.

The story use a classic schema of puzzle narration where they start by giving you very few informations and start to adding more and more info to in the end let the player solve the whole story by themselves.

Talking about that, it's worth to note that the content of the story can really hurt some people at a certain point since it show really hard topic to handle depending of who you are. I really feel like this the one part that I really want to put a content warning trigger because it can hurt really bad.

Personally on that specific point without going in specifics... It really got me hard lol. like I only finished the game 2-3 hours ago so my thoughts about it aren't that much clear currently but.. it just spoke to me and I actually can't believe a cis guy living in Japan wrote that. The narration is just so impressive in the last part and it just make everything you experienced before so worth it.

Now talking about the musics, The levels themselves don't really have musics, but the game use alot ambient sound to give an uncomfortable which really work with it. Some musics play at specifics point and they are all great, specially the sounds with vocals just have fantastic lyrics.

I don't really have other stuff to add.. well I would want to talk alot more.. but I keep for in private with my friends because the game got me on a really big personal level again.

Yeah... in my top 5 of all time for a long time.

Trails of Cold Steel II…. where to start.. Well I think the game is just Bad. Literally it’s beyond saving me, but since Trails fans won’t probably like that, let’s start with the development of Cold Steel II and why the game was beyond saving from the beginning.

We are back in back 2013 and Cold Steel I was in development, stuff wasn’t going well, Falcom struggling with working on PS3 and PS vita hardware at the same time, Cold Steel clearly wouldn’t be finish for September, so what they can do? Well they can completely remove the final chapter of it and transform it as a whole game later. So Cold Steel 1 release, the game have many problems on launch etc, but non-relevant for the review. Then you arrive at the moment that would be the climax pre final chapter like in Ao and the… the game end here ? So this is where Cold Steel II start, a final chapter in Ao no Kiseki scale transformed into a whole game, what could have go wrong…. Everything.

Between the game trying to feel for stuff that clearly need more character developments before, whole character development lock behind bonding events, stuff that was cut from CS1 because of the same reasons as cold steel becoming relevant to the story and just confuse people who didn’t read the material outside of the games, strange love interest stuff that shouldn’t happen in a series with a supposed one canon (Ao have the same problem, I’m not Crossbell is perfect mode dw) a broken battle system clearly not intended to have characters at this level at the end etc.

Even without talking about the systems and development, I think too the main story have so many flaws everywhere, like it’s literally impossible feel anything about the noble alliance because of how much they were showed as cartoon villains, why I should care for that dude death ? Because they gave us a backstory about Osborne being bad guy toward him like 2-3 hours before ? nah this won’t make me feel anything toward him or anyone else in the noble alliance. Timeline being completely broken and don’t make any sense at some points because of the calendar system and the game happening at the same moment as Ao, like Duvalie going constantly between Erebonia and Crossbell like this ??? Oh yeah about the villains, the game turn way too much around a structured repeated system that all the villains are always in mode “I’m holding back lol” because apparently each act part in act 1 needed a “ouroboros” members at the end with the same schema. I think too the game should have end at the finale and the divertissement probably being the intro of CS3 and plan more some stuff to have avoid shit like black record in NG+ or the whole last section with an ass dungeon with the most useless boss in the whole series.


I could probably keep going on I guess, but I already expect that review to be memed on by some big cold steel defenders and probably use it as a reason to on Crossbell because a of Crossbell fan attacked some cold steel game, don’t worry I won’t review CS4, I’m not using my energy for that game lol.

Eiyuu no densetsu IV : Sora no Kiseki, or just The legend of Heroes : Trails in the sky in west is the first game of the "Kiseki" franchise even if it's technically the 6th one of a long series of spinoff in the Dragon Slayer series. Like the games prior in that spinoff series it embrace the label of "Story-RPG", so basically games focusing first on the story and then the RPG elements. As the first game of this series that Falcom launched way back in 2004, it have the mission to introduce the player to the universe, the terms, the characters, the systems etc and try to hook them into the series, first Second Chapter the sequel and the all the other games that expand the universe even more, planned or not from the beginning.


Did Sora no Kiseki succesfully completed this mission ? I think the answer is yes and surely without problems. Between the OST, the envrionement, the diversity of all characters, the charming art style, the slow story but surprising having an enough good pacing to hook the player from the start. Sora no Kiseki did succesfully all those points. Also in West we were lucky to have the excellent translators and Localizators from Xseed giving us probably one of the best translation in the industry, well in PC rerelease, we don't talk about the first translation on PSP.

Personally Sora no Kiseki is one of my favorite game in the series, I probably love everything about it, from the characters to the exploration of grancel sewers. I think this game is a masterpiece in terms on an introduction of an universe and sadly outside of Zero no Kiseki Falcom wasn't able to reproduce something on this scale for me, maybe Kuro no Kiseki in the future, but we will see at that moment.