Mishelam
2021
The story and characters really carry the game, which is sad since there's the potential for a neat combat system here. You explore dungeons from a top-down perspective, but the battles are from a side-scrolling perspective and it plays like an action-RPG , but even on harder difficulties you never need to do more than spam charged attacks to win.
2022
This game goes from "Oh hey that's a pretty neat way to use the mechanics of classic JRPGs" to "Holy shit" real fast.
2018
The game was kind of disappointing at release, but being able to play as basically every character in the series is really cool.
Eat the car. Become the car. Use the car to tour a lost civilization and bear witness to mankind's hubris.
I don't know if I prefer this version to the original or not, but LA is still a fantastic 2D Zelda game.
Free camera control is nice, but it's basically the same game as the original.
This review contains spoilers
Trails of Cold Steel IV contains both my favorite moments of the Erebonia arc, and my least favorite moments of the arc. This game sold me on Fie after not really liking her for three games, but other parts of the game like the handling of past series protagonists just fell flat. Relationships between characters that were forming during Cold Steel III were offered up on the altar of the Mean Rean Machine's ever-growing harem, but at least Falcom knew to limit his conquest to characters from the Erebonia arc.
This review contains spoilers
Cold Steel III is probably my favorite game in the Erebonia arc. The new Class VII is much smaller than the Class VII of the first two games, so they actually get time to develop as characters. Rean's hesitancy to rely on power despite his desire to protect those he cares about is a much more interesting dynamic for a teacher than a student, making him a more interesting character in III and IV than he was in the first two games. The fishing system from I and II was better than the one Falcom made for this game, though.
This review contains spoilers
This is the game where Rean stops holding back except not really. The Erebonian Civil War is pretty cool but there really aren't enough long-term consequences of it for the rest of the series.
This review contains spoilers
This was actually my first Trails game, and although my opinion of it has definitely soured after playing the Liberl and Crossbell games, it's still one hell of a journey.
A great sendoff for the Liberl arc and a surprisingly fun dungeon crawler with plenty of options for how you want to build your party. I HOLD IN MY HAND THE CHALICE OF HEAVEN and SAKURA MORNING MOON are permanently burned into my mind.
It's interesting to see a bunch of the Trails series' tropes (characters holding back, the party getting bailed out by a sudden arrival, etc.) kind of just pop up here after they were mostly absent from FC, while not being nearly as obnoxious as they would get in the Cold Steel games.
Playing this on Hard was a mistake.
This game really needed a Critical Mode update. The extra options for difficulty that Square included don't make the tracks harder, just more annoying to play.
If I'm Sisyphus, this game is my rock. I got close to completing every Adventure Mode map on Wii U when Legends was announced for 3DS, so I got it and started from 0. Then I was about halfway through Legends when Definitive Edition was announced for the Switch, so I stopped playing Legends, got Definitive Editon, and started over from 0. I've only made it through the original Master Quest map in the four years since this version came out because I keep getting distracted by other musous, but one day I'll sit down and finally complete it. The game is a real love letter to the Zelda series, from recreating locations from Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and Wind Waker as maps for the classic 1 vs 1000 combat of a Warriors game to letting you play the Ocarina on loading screens, it's clear that everyone who worked on the game loved the series. Even after eight years, two rereleases, and countless hours of playing, this game still manages to make me feel that love of Zelda that the developers had. Also you can play as a giant Cucco.