Games that go untranslated for years normally develop this kind of mystic reverence around them, with people generally considering them better than the translated ones. Just look at how Fire Emblem fans venerate the Jugdral games (I've never actually played them maybe they're fantastic IDK) to see what I'm talking about. The Crossbell duology held a similar place in the Kiseki series until earlier this year, being stuck between the (eventually) fully translated Sky trilogy and the Cold Steel tetralogy. I had always come across people talking about how great the Crossbell games were, how they make the Cold Steel series look terrible and were the peak of the series, stuff like that. I never got around to playing the Geofront translation when that came out, so when NIS announced an official English translation, I was very excited to finally try it out. I was honestly expecting it to not live up to the hype, but this game took my lofty expectations and went so far beyond them I don't even know what to say about it. The staples of a Falcom game are here (that distinctive kind of chibi art style, an absolutely fantastic soundtrack, an almost absurd amount of optional dialogue and side content, a fishing minigame, etc) but the game is way more than that. Normally with a Falcom game there’s some part of it that feels a little less fleshed out than everything else, but that just isn’t here. It’s like the developers set out to top the Sky games in every aspect and just managed to do it. It’s hard to explain but as someone who’s played a pretty decent chunk of Falcom’s catalog and is an unapologetic fanboy of basically anything they do, I was still surprised by just how good basically every part of Trails from Zero was.

I had written this whole big thing about the story and how Crossbell is a fantastic setting for a game like this due to its rampant corruption and organized crime which brilliantly contrasts how peaceful Liberl was without external meddling, and how Falcom managed to justify having the SSS do basically the same thing as the Bracer Guild so they didn’t have to really change the structure of the game at all, but I really didn’t like how that turned out, and I couldn’t really write anything that managed to properly explain what I love about this game so I'm just going to share my unfiltered ramblings. Getting to spend the whole game with the SSS gave Falcom more time to flesh out Lloyd, Tio, Randy, and Elie than they had for most of the Liberl characters or any character introduced in Cold Steel I or II (the fact that New Class VII is so small is one of the reasons I like the second half of the Erebonia arc way more than the first one but that’s neither here nor there) and it never felt like any one of them was being overlooked to focus on someone else or didn't have enough screen time to be fleshed out. Really the whole game is like that, where the scale of it was toned down compared to the other games in the series, but Falcom took that as a chance to dive way deeper into things than they do in other games in the series. There’s also a real sense of progression in the story and the growth of the SSS, since you go from being the rookie police unit tasked with breaking up petty disputes between street gangs to stopping an assassination attempt on Crossbell City’s mayor to infiltrating a black-market auction run by Crossbell’s leading organized crime group to fighting the high priest of a cult that's fundamentally opposed to the world’s leading religion and spent centuries committing unspeakable horrors in the name of their “true god”. Look up Star Doot 15 from Trails in the Sky the 3rd if you don’t care about spoilers for that game and want to see just how fucked up they really were. Fair warning that it’s probably worse than you’re expecting, and deals with some really sensitive topics like sexual assault and child abuse if you’re bothered by that kind of stuff. Going back to my main point, this gradual progression of events really helps build up the story of Zero as this real journey and emphasizes both the personal growth of the SSS and their growth as a team. Also chest messages are back and unlike the Sky games they’re all unique and mostly make dumb references to the current events in the game’s story. There are a few too many “Haha the cops are stealing you’re all terrible people” messages and one of them near the end of the game says bruh (Thank god the infamous “bruh moment” line from the original Geofront release wasn’t in here at least) but overall they’re pretty amusing. The translation in general was pretty solid and outside of NIS’s general habit of taking really short lines and making them super long for no real reason, didn’t seem deviate from the original script all that much. Yeah I know NIS used the Geofront version as a base and still managed to fuck some things up like leaving Japanese text in a few places or having a character named Carla in dialogue be named Kara in the part of the text box that says who’s speaking so it’s not super polished, but the actual writing was really good. Anyway, I know this is a rambling mess so I’ll just say that the game is near perfect and instantly shot up to being one of my favorite Falcom games and probably one of my favorite games in general. Go play it, but you should probably play the Liberl games first. You could maybe get away with starting here since the story isn’t super connected to that arc, but there are a few scenes that would really lose their impact if you did that, and there are some concepts that the game just kind of assumes you’re already familiar with from those games so you might be a little confused at times. It is the start of an arc and the SSS is also in the dark about basically everything that happened in Sky so maybe it wouldn't be that bad of a starting place actually if you just wanted to check it out without devoting 120+ hours to some JRPGS from the mid 2000s, but I do think the series is something that's best experienced from start to finish. Granted I did the exact opposite and played all four Cold Steel games before the rest so I'm really not one to talk about the order you should be playing this series in.

But fishing is the same as it was in Sky SC and 3rd, as in it’s not good, so actually 0/10 Cold Steel is better.