The best part of this game is when it ends.

I'm still not quite sure how to critique this game. In some ways, this game is the natural followup to everything CS3 had built up. It represents the oversaturation of a series which spent over a decade and a half adding characters upon characters without knowing what to really do with them. The bottom line, is at the end of the day, this game is only one thing for certain: it's bad.

I, notoriously, hated Cold Steel III. The game that everyone said was the best Cold Steel game leading up to it. People conversely acted like CS4 was the worst piece of fiction ever made, so my expectations going in were very low. I already hated CS3, so you're telling me there's something even WORSE?

As such, this review might read like a comparison piece between CS3 and 4. I really don't know what to think about this game on its own since so many of its issues stem from CS3, and to go even further, how this game handles plot points from all of its preceding games significantly impacts my impressions of it. That might be part of the reason why this game felt like a load of nothing to me—it DOESN'T stand on its own. It doesn't stand up for itself. It has no merit without having played all the previous games prior to it, it is consistently only acting to bring Cold Steel to an end.

=ACT 1: Gameplay=

This game plays pretty much identically to Cold Steel 3, but gives you a lot more freedom when roaming the world—like in CS2. As someone who typically talks to all the NPCs in a Trails game, this can be overwhelming. However, the fast travel menu is incredibly robust and tells the player when there was something new to interact with in any particular area. For me, this made it easy for me to mindlessly do an NPC sweep without worrying too much about whether I missed anything. What also helps immensely is that hidden quests and hidden items (such as book chapters) are all marked on the minimap, although you need to actually travel to the area to be able to see it first. Thanks to this improved quality of life, however; it made the gameplay experience of Cold Steel 4 much smoother than normal. This is something I think Trails games have been consistently improving upon since Cold Steel 1, and I'm glad to see these have improved to this point.

I will say though, there was a sort of charm to finding a hidden quest or hidden item yourself without having your hand held by the game, so part of me is mixed on these improvements, but overall I believe they are for the better when the side content in these games are normally significant enough to be of value to your understanding of the world, story and characters... which is not something I can say about CS4's side content! Most of the side quests in this game are abysmal! I will touch on these later, however.

Battle mechanics remain the same as in Cold Steel 3 with very little change. For full disclosure, I played this game on the Normal difficulty setting.

The usual bell/cast spam works with arts, and craft spam is the way to go with this game as usual. Issues arise with the amount of party members you get in this game, since there's no realistic way you're going to be working on optimising the equipment and orbments of all 37 of them, so the game seems like it was balanced around that idea—it's piss easy. I quickly realised that it's not really worth spending much time in optimising or grinding since this game is so easy that just a modicum of optimisation into even just three main party members will get you through the entire game. I similarly began to run by enemies with frequency because levels don't matter either, you gain them fast enough to keep up if you're underlevelled and it's very easy to kill enemies while underlevelled anyway. S-Craft spam is a strategy that remains sound, especially when you sometimes have up to 4 support members who will come in and take the place of your main party if they were all K.O.'d.

Ultimately, the gameplay segment of this game is as mindless as it has ever been, perhaps even more so than CS3, but it is still a fair amount of fun to play, it's just not very deep so it can get boring very quickly.

=INTERMISSION: Music=

KINGA COOKED!!!!!!!!! DEEP CARNIVAL BEST TRACK IN THE GAME!!!! PEAK OST!!!!

Despite what they might say, I do think I enjoyed the new tracks in this game more than what CS3 had to offer, but I can't help but feel that Falcom OSTs are starting to, overwhelmingly, just be "there" these days. I am aware Falcom pretty much has no sound director role and the composers don't even have input on where their tracks are used in the game, but this is DIRE. I barely even realised that there was a new motif written for CS4 by Takahiro Unisuga and I only know that because my stream chat told me. There was nothing about this game's music usage that communicated this to me, and I almost think the soundtrack direction actively ruined the experience half the time. The reason this section of the review is so awkwardly put in between the gameplay and story segments is because I deadass forgot to talk about the OST... me, the OST guy. This is getting real bad guys.

=ACT 2: Story=

This game is split up into a prologue, three acts, an intermission, and a finale. It is pretty much identical in scope and structure to CS2, a game which I also wasn't a huge fan of at first but have come to like more in hindsight. In many ways, this game is just Trails of Cold Steel II-2. In execution, however, this game falls flat in comparison.

I enjoyed Act 1 of this game, I really did. I liked it way more than I had enjoyed almost any moment of CS3. I don't think much really happens in it, but making it such a relatively focused gameplay experience while taking the focus away from Rean gives such us such a unique lens to view the current situation of Erebonia, even if it's just taking a bite out of CS2's piece of the pie. I really do like Act 1.

However, that, is where my praise for the story ends.

Playing this game feels like going through a checklist of character moments organised in such a segmented fashion that there's barely a coherent plot. It makes for a hollow experience because by the time you're not even a quarter into the game you start to realise that all you're doing is getting everyone on your side before going to the final confrontation, including characters who were previously thought to be dead. Half of this isn't even necessary to do either, they artificially make more content by having characters change allegiances on a dime just so the main party has another character to seduce over to their side with an anime pep talk. In most cases, these only occur to give OTHER characters their 'character moment' for the game which usually amounts to just convincing their friend or relative to change back to the heroes' side. Most of this, is effectively filler.

On the flip side to this, you have the bonding events which probably feature some of the best writing this game has to offer, at least as far as the non-romance scenes go. Almost all of these felt like they had substance for each of the characters involved. The issue here then stems from the main story being predominantly filler—why wasn't this incorporated into the main story?

Similarly, most of the side quests in this game typically fall into one of two categories:

1. "oh no.... the curse got them...."
2. Appearance of a significant character with 'stakes'

I'll touch on the curse in a moment, but when you KNOW that it's a side quest and important main characters and even antagonists show up, you already know there will be no stakes. They can't do anything significant enough to affect the main story, otherwise they can't have their important moment take place when it REALLY matters. It just makes me wonder why a lot of this was shelved for side content rather than being meaningful content for the main story, because as it stands the plot is incredibly flat.

There really is no way to discuss this game's story without bringing up The Curse. The damage this single concept has done to this series in immeasurable. Not only is it inconsistent with itself, it actively ruins past parts of the series. There is no consistency to how it behaves, probably the only consistent thing about this curse is that it somehow respects state borders? As a result, the way it gets used also suffers. It actively goes AGAINST every single character motivation of Chancellor Osborne prior to this game and ruins his character. It'll rewrite memories to get NPCs to behave in a certain way, but it'll also physically force Count Arseid to comply without rewriting his memories? It's such a mess.

The curse is used well about... 10% of the time maybe? I think Ash beating the curse allegations at the start of Act 1 was fairly powerful albeit a bit abrupt, and Cedric's arc in the finale of the game was surprisingly engaging despite it all because it worked in tandem with his existing motivations from the previous games. I'm not saying the concept doesn't have potential on paper, however; in execution it caused irreparable damage to anything Cold Steel could have potentially achieved by the end of its life.

A Japanese review I read said the curse is a plot point "an elementary schooler could've come up with" and I don't think more accurate words have been said. This story is a meme and so are the characters.

=ACT 3: Legacy=

How does it feel seeing the characters you love having their personalities stripped to nothing?

This is the first game in the series to bring back so many characters in the series, but they really serve so little purpose in the story it's laughable. It's really sad to see that all these characters amount to are character traits now—some which even DOUBLE UP on characters we already have in Cold Steel alone, so having their presence even just for the party dynamic feels excessive. Any two characters meeting for the first time feels like "oh haha look we're similar" or "oh haha we have a mutual friend" and there's really nothing of substance here.

Some of these characters return specifically just to make other characters look better. Cassius came back JUST to make Rean into a divine blade, which, huh? Where did that come from? This was never a goal or anything of the previous games and suddenly I'm supposed to believe that Rean is on the same level as Arios or Cassius despite him being such a non-presence in the story of CS3 and 4, it's such a weird moment.

Getting to finally meet Elie's mum is cool, but seeing the ghosts of Hamel felt like an awkward re-appropriation of an old event just to milk a plot point that had already been tied up neatly in previous games. Not to mention, Loewe coming back from the dead to say 2 lines is comical. On top of that, WE PLAY VANTAGE MASTERS OVER LOEWE'S GRAVE. WITH JOSHUA.

I don't understand Lechter or Claire's motivations anymore. Lechter, a character who has been cooking since Trails in the Sky the 3RD even had nothing good come of him. He wanted to avoid a war in previous titles, so why were all his actions from CS3 onwards to instigate one? Nothing makes sense anymore. This is just but one of the many wasted setups from Sky 3rd. If they were going to retcon out Sky 3rd stuff, why didn't they cut out the Tita and Agate jokes?

There is nothing in this game that doesn't feel outright disrespectful to the series' legacy. I think it's outright blasphemy to even call it "fan-service", it actively depreciates everything that has been building up until this point and then proceeds to rub salt in the wound AND spit in its face.

=FINALE: Where to next?=

To my surprise, this game wasn't any worse than CS3, nor was it better. It was perfectly in line with everything I hated about CS3, but somehow managed to have moments that I did care about despite it all. I would describe this game as having higher highs than CS3, but ASTRONOMICALLY lower lows than CS3, but I'm not sure I could say which I hate less.

CS3 set CS4 up to fail. I am convinced this is the unadulterated truth about these last two games in this series. My expectations were already low because of CS3 and thus I was kinda ready for CS4 to also be a mess, but when everyone acted like CS3 was the best CS game and CS4 was the worst piece of media to ever be created, I'm not sure I was expecting to feel so much... the same about both games.

Falcom company president Toshihiro Kondo once said that part of Reverie's reason for existing is to try to make up for some of CS4's failings. I have heard nothing but praise for the game, and also that it tries to backtrack on a few points from CS4. I don't know how salvageable this series is moving forward, but I will let them cook and see.

Despite it all, I am just glad it is over and I can finally get onto playing good games again. Thank you for reading.