A much better put together game than the first one but also a lot more streamlined compared to the first. Where 1 feels like its throwing darts at the wall and sees what will stick. 2 is a lot more of a straight forward Point A to Point B action game. There isn't anything particularly wrong with that but its an observation i want to make and keep in mind with my replay of the series and see if the memory of "the series slowly devolved into and lost its identity to the pop culture idea of itself" is actually true. Gears exists in pop culture and memes as the dude bro action game for beer guzzling frat boys but you see in the first two games they are trying to be more than that. Sure its still filled with stuff put in the game because the devs thought it was cool, which is a design philosphy i am all for. But it tries to have more of a story than but some of it goes by so fast that it comes off comedic.

You spend an entire game trying to prevent the sinking of a city only for Marcus to hear a single voice recorded sentence of his father saying they should sink Jacinto and he is now going "we have to sink the city before they do." It looks and sounds stupid because its a complete 180 in a matter of seconds after hours of build up in the opposite direction. When you stop and think about it the idea makes sense. Marcus is a man that has been consumed by a world at war for 15 years and if this is the hail mary to stop it in one fell swoop he is gonna take it, for the good of humanity even if its a very difficult decision to make. As said by Adam Fenix in the game "end the war at the cost of humanity's last refuge"

To go back to the topic of Gears slowly leaning in to the memes of itself and morphing into the games everyone thought they were there is no better example of this than Marcus's voice performance by John DiMaggio. This was one of if not the biggest thing parodied at the time of the series peak in cultural relevance. In this first game his performance is a lot more subdued but in 2 DiMaggio is a lot more gruff sounding. He is putting a lot of tension on the muscles of his throat to give his voice this gravely texture to it which results in Marcus sounding a lot more aggressive. I can't say for certain what was the cause of the change in direction and if it caused more parody and memeing than what already existed but it definitely felt like it didn't help and was a sign of where the series was being steered towards.

Overall a good game if not a little bit more forgettable in areas than 1 because its mostly just hallway fight after hallway fight. Excited to replay 3 which was my favorite

It's an improvement over the previous two Cold Steel games, but its still pretty rough overall.

The smaller core cast works well and gives the new characters a much better chance to shine than those in CS1 and 2, but keeping so many other legacy characters involved in the story made it feel much more bloated than necessary. The plot suffers a fair bit from the need to simultaneously flesh out its new characters and remind you that all the other characters still exist and are doing important things, bloating the story with way more than was really needed.

At least the team building side of the gameplay was handled well since the old and new characters were kept separate most of the time, letting you both put a lot of effort into building an effective team for the new cast (since you'll have them for the whole game) while still offering variety thanks to the occasional involvement of characters from previous games.

As for the actual combat, I like the theory behind the new mechanics but they're horribly unbalanced in their current state. Bosses take a huge amount of damage before their defenses break and, unless you're using Juna's order to boost break damage then they'll heal whatever damage they took before long anyway. The only strategy I could put together that consistently worked was to stack orbs and orders to increase break damage, unleash a bunch of S-Crafts right off the bat, and hope to god that you can finish them off before they recover from the break. Anything else just failed to work, leaving the boring and exploitative strategy as the only real option.

Cold Steel 3 isn't bad. I like it better than the previous Cold Steel games. But its still far from the peak of the earlier titles in Sky and Zero/Azure.

A very interesting look back on this game since its the one that really set the trends of the 7th gen for 3rd person shooters for the most part. It feels a lot more like a 6th gen adventure game than you probably remember compared to the later installments. Way more rough around the edges than I ever realized back in the day. The framerate is awful, the visuals flicker and blur all the time thanks to unreal 3, its buggy as fuck. But the online still works in 2024 which i couldn't believe initially. Its charming in how earnest a lot of the shit in this game is. A bunch of stuff feels like it was put in there because the devs thought it was cool as hell and you know what, i agree. Gears is cool and don't let anyone tell you otherwise

A very interesting look back on this game since its the one that really set the trends of the 7th gen for 3rd person shooters for the most part. It feels a lot more like a 6th gen adventure game than you probably remember compared to the later installments. Way more rough around the edges than I ever realized back in the day. The framerate is awful, the visuals flicker and blur all the time thanks to unreal 3, its buggy as fuck. But the online still works in 2024 which i couldn't believe initially. Its charming in how earnest a lot of the shit in this game is. A bunch of stuff feels like it was put in there because the devs thought it was cool as hell and you know what, i agree. Gears is cool and don't let anyone tell you otherwise