UPDATE: I forgot I finished this and started ToCS4. Guess that says about how much of an impression the game made for me after my original review.

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Original Review:

I've had to put this down for now. I might pick it up again at a later time, but this game feels like a huge step down from both 1 and 2.

I feel like the further I get into this particular series (Cold Steel), the more everyone knows so much more than Rean despite how much information has been revealed to us, and everyone has to have some extra-special ulterior motive or mysterious tie-in that we don't know about until way later.

Also, shoehorning in the original Class VII in small groups for each chapter and effectively diluting the level pool for the new Class VII is really frustrating -- we're introduced to these new characters, but they end up being more like bystanders on the sidelines during all of the major missions.

For reference, I made it to the Free Day in Chapter 3 and I believe there are five chapters in the game. Vantage Masters is fun enough as a card game, but it's really easy to break and doesn't really bring anything to the table other than card rewards and a minor secondary item reward in each instance.

In fact, all of the rewarding things from previous games were expanded upon in some way, but none of them felt particularly great (fishing doesn't have enough locations to make grabbing stuff really unique or interesting, especially given that trading fish in gives you items you can easily get in regular combat in most cases...just as one example).

It's...just not inspiring me to want to play through to see the end in Part 4 when it drops next year or whenever.

Might come back to this at some point, but wow...what a poorly-designed Metroidvania.

Magical features include:

-- Double jumps that only sometimes work!
-- Dashes that serve little purpose and occasionally have long lag between executions!
-- Using an ability to make enemies able to be hit that takes about eight seconds to charge up!
-- An options menu screen that has its text off-centered and sitting above the title logo for the game, making it really hard to read!
-- Poor enemy design!
-- Literally a boss that is three plant heads that don't do anything but sit there and occasionally a few flies come out from near them and you hit the flies and then keep hitting the heads and that's the entire fight!

Seriously, that second boss was magical. I almost died at one point because of knockback from the flies, but at the end of the day, it was quite literally slash-slash-slash-backup, followed by slashing some flies, followed by backing up, followed by moving forward again and repeating. No nifty dodging or worries. Just...hit some flies, then hit the plant heads that have giant gaping maws of doom and don't do anything but sit in one spot (they don't even have animated features...they literally just sit there as static objects).

I might give this a go later, but what a turdburglar so far.

Updating this review upon completion of the Norzaleo campaign:

The tl;dr version up front: it's a decent game. It improves a few things from the original, adds a few interesting ideas, and takes several steps backwards with other aspects of the game.

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The load screens are choppy, the music is uninspiring, there's lots of typos and incorrect / extra words in sentences (see the Brendan / Maximillian scene for a great example of this happening about four or five times).

It's arguable that the art style results in a step backwards in some cases -- in the original Brigandine, the locations of rivers and forests and mountains were readily visible in the overworld for the most part, so you had an idea of what you might be getting into when you invaded a city. Not so, here.

The worst offender so far is the lack of cutting to the side-screen animations where you got to watch monsters attack each other. Regardless of whether it took more time to play the game with them present, it gave a genuine feel to the combat that's missing when you just watch your characters do minor animations on a semi-overhead screen.

There are some welcome features, for what it's worth -- it's a bit less hassle now to figure out your class changes and the proficiency system is probably useful (though I haven't utilized it yet). Equipment on monsters is a nice touch.

Having a 9999 mana reserve limit and 100 max monsters seems kinda silly in this day and age, especially with how basic this engine feels.

In all fairness to the music not being particularly interesting, I haven't checked to see if the other countries have their own themes yet and just defaulted to starting with Norzaleo. I wouldn't mind something snazzy like Iscalio's theme from back in the day.

Upon completion of the game, you are given access to a few extras -- most notably, a Challenge Mode that basically functions as your own personal Arrange Mode that is reflective of what you've done in the main game. You get to pick one of the six countries, get the main leader for your team at Level 1, and pick nine more Rune Knights that also will start at Level 1 from the pool of Rune Knights in your country and ones you saw in the main campaign. You then get one base and a pool of free monsters to allocate (also all at Level 1) and go forth!

Challenge Mode plays on Hard difficulty and cannot be adjusted, though that's probably a good thing because a quasi-randomized mode deserves as much tactics as can be mustered. Challenge Mode gives you goals to do within a certain timeframe or the game ends, and some turns will result in random positives or negatives for all players -- you and the AI. I've only started with Norzaleo again and it definitely feels like an added push trying to make it through invasions, as leaning on high level Rune Knights isn't an option here. Also, you can only have a max of 20 Rune Knights, so good luck on your planning!

Not much to say regarding the Records system -- it's a good way to try and see what you've missed, but it's reflective of other problems with the game. When I was looking at the Norzaleo-based story/event situations, I failed to unlock a couple because of conditions beyond my control. For instance, some of them ask you to beat a country (which you'll inevitably do playing the game) -- but it's expected that the leader will be in the final fight of that country. In at least one instance, I knocked out the leader in another invasion the turn before, so she wasn't there when I took her final location on the next turn.

It's just a lot of unpolished issues and they culminate into a very okay and sometimes even good game, but not a great game. 3.5/5.

For all the extra stuff added in this game from the original, I don't know if it's an issue with the Switch version or in general, but it feels like one hell of a quality drop for the game.

Boatloads of lag and extra load times (especially for combat), unintuitive selection options for some scenarios, the UI being all over the place in terms of functionality...it's just kinda sad because I loved the original game.

Maybe I'll feel better whenever I go back to it again, assuming I ever get around to giving it a second chance. Three sections into the campaign and I'm not feeling particularly inspired.

If ever a game that wanted to try and be a relaxing puzzle game needed to abandon the concept of a timer system, this was the one. This game screams that it should be relaxing but is hellbent on introducing new mechanics with tutorials that go over stuff WHILE the timer is counting down.

Also, both the D-Pad and Analog fail to work well when trying to string together combos because the game sometimes decides that you want to select the wrong items and have to scroll backwards to fix the game's mistakes...decreasing the time you have to work with in the process.