I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a blast with Trails of Cold Steel, but I can’t help but feel that was more the result of the game riding the coattails of its predecessors, rather than being a great experience in its own right. After the immaculate worldbuilding of the Crossbell games, I’m pretty much game for whatever this series has to offer, which is why I blazed through this nearly 60-hour game in a week in a half, but if you’re not already invested in the world building and overarching narrative like I am, I can’t see there being all too much here to appeal to you.
When I say this game has no plot, I’m only slightly exaggerating. The main antagonists who ostensibly drive the story of this game barely have any screen time. They show up at the end of most chapters to cause some trouble, but those events don’t feel like they meaningfully build up or into one another, leaving you with what in terms of a narrative? It feels like they wrote nine character arcs, a basic outline of Erebonian political tensions, and then decided to base the whole game around that. A lot of people will tell you that characters are the most important part of a story, and I agree with that to an extent, but your characters need to be doing something to make it interesting.
The thing about this that frustrates me the most is that at the end of chapter 6, you get an exposition dump outlining several major events that seem like they would be far better shown and not told, a move that goes from confusing to infuriating when you find out that in fact, it was shown, just not in the game itself. Instead, it was relegated to a Japan-only drama CD. What? I read online that this part was supposed to be included in the game, but was cut due to the Vita’s hardware limitations. If that’s true it makes even less sense! Surely the characterization from any of the first three chapters could’ve been moved somewhere else so that they had the space to fit in these clearly important plot points, but no. It appears that including 20 hours of almost nothing was a conscious decision on Falcom’s part, and not just your usual case of a mildly bloated JRPG being mildly bloated.
I do have to give credit where credit is due though, the final chapter was a high note for the game to end on in terms of story, and the final plot twist in particular was excellent. The writers also deserve an extra round of applause for making the Noble Faction devious enough that Chancellor Osborne, the most comically evil character in this series, did not seem like the obviously greater evil between the two. As usual, Olivier comes out on top.
On an unrelated note, I finally have a reason to talk about the combat again, as it’s received its first set of substantial changes since the foundation was laid all the way back in First Chapter. My opinions are mixed. I’m not a big fan of the changes made to the orbment system. While having specific quartz directly correlate to certain artes does simplify the system in a way that makes it more accessible, it comes at the cost of more engaging customization. Now that stacking quartz of the same element doesn’t add new artes to the list of artes you already have, you’re a lot more limited in what a single character can do. Some may view this as a welcome challenge, but to me it just meant that I became a lot less interested in creating specific builds, and preferred to just throw healing quartz on the healers while giving everyone else a random assortment of powerful offensive artes.
I thought the link system was a fun addition to combat that gives the player more of a reason to use regular physical attacks, but since the links break whenever a party member dies or is swapped out for another party member, I often forgot to re-set them, and as I result I didn’t utilize the feature nearly as much as the game probably wanted me to. I wish there was a way to make them set automatically.
As a final note on the gameplay, I felt that the balancing was a little off in this one. Of course, this wasn’t too big of a problem, as Falcom solved grinding ages ago with the retry offset feature (a mechanic with which each passing game I’m becoming more and more convinced is actually the best quality of life feature ever implemented in a JRPG) but for the first half of the game I was consistently underleveled, despite not avoiding encounters any more often than I did in the Crossbell games.
I would be remiss not to mention the characters, who, considering the lack of anything else happening in the writing department, are by default the highlight of the game. I’m being facetious, but in all seriousness, most of them do live up to the series standard. Towa easily ranks among my favorite characters in the series thus far; Sharon is thoroughly entertaining if for nothing else but the fact that she could not have been more suspicious if she tried; and I liked Sara a lot, which is funny because she’s just Schera again, and I didn’t like Schera at first. I do feel the need to note that Millium’s voice is obnoxious, but she meshes well with the rest of Class VII, so I ended up being pleasantly surprised with her character overall. There was admittedly a bit of an issue with screen time. Because of the way the field studies work, some characters got solid development, only to then be cast aside and promptly forgotten about for a couple hours. This was an especially big problem for Jusis and Machias, who the game didn’t seem to know what to do with after their feud concluded. It didn’t do any favors for Crow and Millium either, as they joined fairly late in the game, but overall I liked Class VII and the game’s supporting cast.
It’s strange, because Cold Steel was the series’ most accessible entry point for a while, and so I would guess that it’s where a lot of people started, but now that the full series is more or less widely available, I would never recommend starting with Cold Steel. There’s simply not enough happening to capture new players’ attention. I know that if I started here, I wouldn’t have finished the game in under two weeks—play sessions probably would’ve been spread across a couple months, if I finished it at all. On top of that, though they don’t go into so much detail that new players would be lost, they casually reference the events of the Crossbell games far more often than those games reference the Sky arc. As someone who is in the loop, it was cool to see those events unfold from afar, but to new players it probably would seem strange that such major events are being relegated to background details.
Hardcore Trails fans would probably call it sacrilege, but if you’re not like me, and you’re a normal person who is hesitant to jump into a series of twelve interconnecting JRPGs that last 30-60 hours each, I would actually recommend you start with Zero. Of all the arc openers, it hooks you in the fastest and has the strongest world building. Then, if you like the Crossbell arc, you can go back to the Sky games to see what you’ve missed, knowing that it’s a much slower burn, and once you’re finally all caught up, you can start on the Cold Steel games.
When I say this game has no plot, I’m only slightly exaggerating. The main antagonists who ostensibly drive the story of this game barely have any screen time. They show up at the end of most chapters to cause some trouble, but those events don’t feel like they meaningfully build up or into one another, leaving you with what in terms of a narrative? It feels like they wrote nine character arcs, a basic outline of Erebonian political tensions, and then decided to base the whole game around that. A lot of people will tell you that characters are the most important part of a story, and I agree with that to an extent, but your characters need to be doing something to make it interesting.
The thing about this that frustrates me the most is that at the end of chapter 6, you get an exposition dump outlining several major events that seem like they would be far better shown and not told, a move that goes from confusing to infuriating when you find out that in fact, it was shown, just not in the game itself. Instead, it was relegated to a Japan-only drama CD. What? I read online that this part was supposed to be included in the game, but was cut due to the Vita’s hardware limitations. If that’s true it makes even less sense! Surely the characterization from any of the first three chapters could’ve been moved somewhere else so that they had the space to fit in these clearly important plot points, but no. It appears that including 20 hours of almost nothing was a conscious decision on Falcom’s part, and not just your usual case of a mildly bloated JRPG being mildly bloated.
I do have to give credit where credit is due though, the final chapter was a high note for the game to end on in terms of story, and the final plot twist in particular was excellent. The writers also deserve an extra round of applause for making the Noble Faction devious enough that Chancellor Osborne, the most comically evil character in this series, did not seem like the obviously greater evil between the two. As usual, Olivier comes out on top.
On an unrelated note, I finally have a reason to talk about the combat again, as it’s received its first set of substantial changes since the foundation was laid all the way back in First Chapter. My opinions are mixed. I’m not a big fan of the changes made to the orbment system. While having specific quartz directly correlate to certain artes does simplify the system in a way that makes it more accessible, it comes at the cost of more engaging customization. Now that stacking quartz of the same element doesn’t add new artes to the list of artes you already have, you’re a lot more limited in what a single character can do. Some may view this as a welcome challenge, but to me it just meant that I became a lot less interested in creating specific builds, and preferred to just throw healing quartz on the healers while giving everyone else a random assortment of powerful offensive artes.
I thought the link system was a fun addition to combat that gives the player more of a reason to use regular physical attacks, but since the links break whenever a party member dies or is swapped out for another party member, I often forgot to re-set them, and as I result I didn’t utilize the feature nearly as much as the game probably wanted me to. I wish there was a way to make them set automatically.
As a final note on the gameplay, I felt that the balancing was a little off in this one. Of course, this wasn’t too big of a problem, as Falcom solved grinding ages ago with the retry offset feature (a mechanic with which each passing game I’m becoming more and more convinced is actually the best quality of life feature ever implemented in a JRPG) but for the first half of the game I was consistently underleveled, despite not avoiding encounters any more often than I did in the Crossbell games.
I would be remiss not to mention the characters, who, considering the lack of anything else happening in the writing department, are by default the highlight of the game. I’m being facetious, but in all seriousness, most of them do live up to the series standard. Towa easily ranks among my favorite characters in the series thus far; Sharon is thoroughly entertaining if for nothing else but the fact that she could not have been more suspicious if she tried; and I liked Sara a lot, which is funny because she’s just Schera again, and I didn’t like Schera at first. I do feel the need to note that Millium’s voice is obnoxious, but she meshes well with the rest of Class VII, so I ended up being pleasantly surprised with her character overall. There was admittedly a bit of an issue with screen time. Because of the way the field studies work, some characters got solid development, only to then be cast aside and promptly forgotten about for a couple hours. This was an especially big problem for Jusis and Machias, who the game didn’t seem to know what to do with after their feud concluded. It didn’t do any favors for Crow and Millium either, as they joined fairly late in the game, but overall I liked Class VII and the game’s supporting cast.
It’s strange, because Cold Steel was the series’ most accessible entry point for a while, and so I would guess that it’s where a lot of people started, but now that the full series is more or less widely available, I would never recommend starting with Cold Steel. There’s simply not enough happening to capture new players’ attention. I know that if I started here, I wouldn’t have finished the game in under two weeks—play sessions probably would’ve been spread across a couple months, if I finished it at all. On top of that, though they don’t go into so much detail that new players would be lost, they casually reference the events of the Crossbell games far more often than those games reference the Sky arc. As someone who is in the loop, it was cool to see those events unfold from afar, but to new players it probably would seem strange that such major events are being relegated to background details.
Hardcore Trails fans would probably call it sacrilege, but if you’re not like me, and you’re a normal person who is hesitant to jump into a series of twelve interconnecting JRPGs that last 30-60 hours each, I would actually recommend you start with Zero. Of all the arc openers, it hooks you in the fastest and has the strongest world building. Then, if you like the Crossbell arc, you can go back to the Sky games to see what you’ve missed, knowing that it’s a much slower burn, and once you’re finally all caught up, you can start on the Cold Steel games.
2 Comments
@theadhdagenda_ Yeah, no, Sky is definitely the best place to start from a narrative perspective, I more just meant that if you're not totally sold on the series and want to dip your toes in first, I think Zero would be more likely to grab you.
theadhdagenda_
9 months ago