Trails of Cold Steel 3 : The Troubles of Continuity


As I’m playing through this series and writing these reviews, I came to actually question my own sanity.

Why do I keep up with this ? “This makes no sense” I ask myself, there’s so many games out there, so many experiences that I’d rather be having than playing through these titles. Some of my friends who have followed my journey and have shown much more appreciation than me towards this franchise all told me to stop.

“You’re simply not getting it” they say, “You nitpick every aspect and don’t let the games enthrall you by its simple yet sophisticated beauty” they say, “It was never about class warfare but rather imperialism, you literally have reading comprehension issue you fat fuck” some of the more virulent people said.

And yet, here I am, still on the grind, still trying to find out the appeal of this admittedly niche RPG series made by the video game company equivalent of your local Pakistani Store Clerk selling you its finest expired bottle of room temperature sangria for you and your friends at 1am on a Tuesday. If this wasn’t apparent on the tone of my previous two reviews as well as my admittedly less vitriolic but similarly mixed reviews on other titles in the series (“Trails the 3rd” aside), I don’t particularly hold this one close to my heart and by that I mean that despite this being the 8th entry in the series, I never became a “fan” of Trails.

“Fan” is a strong word to describe my relationship to this game series. I appreciate a lot of what the series tries to establish though. The scope and ambition on such a multi-generational scale is something almost never before seen in the history of Japanese Role-Playing games. The only 2 exemple that comes to mind is the Suikoden series that I’ve mentioned countless time in my reviews (and I still advise many Trails fans who haven’t got the chance to try it out to do so expeditiously) and the Rance series that I’ve also mentioned in my previous post and which you can even get to see a review of its ninth episode on this very account (and this one is a bit touchy to fully recommend unless you are really as open-minded and shameless as myself).

But these 2 cases never really reached quasi-mainstream appeal, Suikoden is appreciated by many people in the old-school JRPG community but less so people who grew up on more modern hardware and even so, the Suikoden franchise got discontinued by its own developer Konami because they’re still in the top 3 worst gaming company in history. As for Rance, well, after 30 years of services it finally ended its run in 2018 in one finale conclusive episode that has yet to be translated (and which I’m extremely excited for) and even then the franchise had to pretty much reboot itself in the early 2000’s to reach a wider audience and recalibrate its lore (which is mostly contained outside of the games themselves).

Trails for now has existed since 2004 meaning that next year, the series will celebrate its 20th anniversary and ever since the release of the first title, they’ve pretty much been super consistent on releasing these games to the point that starting with Cold Steel 3, the games will release on an almost yearly basis.
No other JRPG series has this much potential for quasi-autistic level of brain rot. It’s also interesting to note that all of the franchise's thorough worldbuilding and lore is contained entirely within the games themselves. Each games comes with its set of NPC’s who changes dialogues for every minor advancement in the plot, there’s an almost nuclear level of attention to detail and little easter eggs to find (some of them missable through pretty cryptic conditions), entire Skyrim book size novels you can gather as collectibles in each titles to get the characters final weapons and which foreshadows events to come.

Other franchises would make you do extra-homework to get the juice out of that stuff but here all of that extra-homework is integrated into the actual gameplay loop, you don’t usually have to reach for an obscure novel or interview where the author says all elves are gay or something like this to get juicy tidbits on the world around you and it helps those games feel more lived in and fleshed out than any other setting in the history of RPG. And at the core of it all, it’s a human story, it’s called “Legends of Heroes” not because you play as heroes but because you hear about them constantly, you just play as the random little people who yes are going to save the world from impending doom but you’re never going to be on the same level as the heroes of old.

In Sky FC, all of that game is spent running around the world and hearing how much of a badass your dad is, how much good he has done for people and how inspiring such a person is and yet he’s a military general. To some he probably is a war criminal but to his people, he’s a hero and you’re just playing as his kids. It’s a very Dragon Quest V approach although that game was more thorough on one’s journey to adulthood.

And yet, I never found myself to be attached to the point of autistic obsession (and for context, I’m literally autistic, I swear I’m not just using that term as a meter for how addicting fictional crack can be) and it’s weird isn’t it ? I should be all over a series like this, I should be celebrating its ideas and hailing those games as an example for JRPG’s to follow like it seems to be the case with most of the people who play these games but for the most part I don’t and I can’t really explain myself why.

The lore and on-going mysteries of the universe are only marginally interesting to me as they are attached to some elements I’m not super crazy about (aka : Ouroboros and their “plan” more on that later). The themes the series explores can be fascinating in spurt but the actual execution always finds itself lacking and I guess most importantly it’s the general package that I find to be a tiring drag at best and a grind at worst.

Many hail these titles as hidden gems or even must-play masterpieces of the genre but I don’t see it myself and for cause, I think they’re lacking in several areas where most other RPG franchises or individual games don’t. Trails is so derivative of the trend of its different eras and not always to the series benefit. I know the JRPG genre is a big hodgepodge of mutual influences that keeps bouncing from another but that still doesn’t mean a series can’t have a solid identity on top of it all and Trails definitely has one… and then immediately abandons it to follow the next popular trends and causing the series to lose its sense of consistency.


At times, it’s hard to imagine CS1 and CS2 were either planned or thought out by the same minds who imagined the Sky or Crossbell saga and yet here we are. I guess this is also due to the fact that the series main head lead Toshihiro Kondo doesn't actually have much control or hold over the actual development of these games, perhaps due to the fact he’s too busy running the company than actually working on titles himself. So this series despite being this long sprawling tapestry of ideas that are meant to fit into one another don’t actually have anything resembling a true solid artistic vision.

And that’s what happens usually when a series goes for so long, people change, people get older, teams are reformed, priorities and aims get rethought and eventually you end up with something that divides people rather than unite them under a common front.

There’s a reason why many enduring franchises in the history of JRPG don’t usually do the whole continuity thing or when they do, it’s very sparse and almost a non-factor. It’s because titles such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tales Of, Shin Megami Tensei always try to reinvent their wheel, proposing new settings, new universes, new lore so that everyone can jump on any titles and get a fully complete experience and also allowing new creative leads to put their spin on them without compromising the sanctity of other titles.

Yes of course, some of the game in the Final Fantasy series had sequels but most people agrees that their often times inferior and an hindrance on the original game legacy (hi collection of FF VII) but Trails is different because unlike those franchise it decides to stick to its gun and have this continuity play a big part of its development history and that means that this game series more than any other JRPG franchise need a strong vision to hold itself together.

You can say that despite me not being a fan of Trails, I’m still somewhat fascinated by its ever-growing popularity and the sheer praise all across the board the series get (even for Cold Steel believe it or not), if anything it’s fun to discuss about these games, to theorize about them, to talk about what they did wrong, what they did right. For how much vitriol I gave the first 2 Cold Steel games, they still occupied a masochistic part of my brain, I couldn’t think about anything else.

More than anything, when I dislike something beloved by many, I find myself questioning “why can’t I like this ?” Especially something like Trails that literally has almost all of the ingredients to make for the perfect blend of JRPG goodness because I really want to like Trails. I'm jealous that I can’t be a part of this cultural effervescence, being a Trails fan is like a commitment, it’s a promise, it’s like being a part of something.

This franchise somehow has put a curse in my brain that forces me to desire more, even when I know I’m going to probably end up frustrated or disappointed. If anything, the promise of Trails is a beautiful one ! It’s the promise of being a part of something bigger than yourself, something that will follow you for how much longer it wants to be, even running to the grave. It’s grand, it’s infinite, even at its worst it's presented with such confidence that you can’t help but want it to succeed and you want it to be at its best because I know it can work, I know how good these games can be when they actually try and by god… I WANT TO LIKE TRAILS AND IT FRUSTRATES ME THAT I CAN’T ! IT’S LIKE BEING A KH FAN ALL OVER AGAIN FOR ME ! IT’S A ROAD PAVED OF GOOD INTENTIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS !
Trails is like a toxic relationship, it hurts but somehow you can’t get away from it, it’s a slow acting poison that hurts your brain and every Trails fan, as cult-like as they are, feel like crypto-scammers pulling off a successful rugpull. I don’t know why I keep going with this franchise but I sure am too deep into this to back down, I should’ve probably done so years ago.

Do I think the Trails promise is fulfilled or is it a promise filled with lies and self-sabotage ?

Today, I want this review to be less of a review and more of a thought piece on my troubled yet loving relationship to this beloved series.

Because if anything, Trails of Cold Steel III finds itself in an interesting spot when it comes to the history of its own franchise and in many ways feels like a turning point that the franchise will have trouble ever coming back from.

Trails of Cold Steel III was released 3 years after the end of the previous episode, funnily enough that’s also the length of the time separating the event of CS2 to the event of that game in canon. Yes ladies and gentlemen this game is a timeskip arc much like One Piece did midway through its run. As such Trails of Cold Steel 3 had the time to actually think about ways to actually improve its formula and also its presentation and in many ways let me put it briefly, I did actually enjoy Cold Steel III more than its two predecessors at least on some of its more frivolous elements.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, CS3 is the first game in the series to be entirely designed for home consoles, specifically the PS4, while the game isn’t winning any medals in technical prowess, the game is overall kinda pretty and has an overall nice art direction. Some people might write the entire thing off as generic anime bullshit and they’ll be right, but at least it doesn’t look like a PS Vita game with “cutscenes” that looks like a puppet show by the world's worst puppeteer. The environment design allows itself to be much more detailed and creative, most of Western Erebonia’s location are far more striking visually and more memorable as a result than any town or cities from the first 2 games and while the dungeon design can be up to discussion, I’d say the roads and the more “natural” environment definitely are more pretty to look at.

CS1/CS2 had awful direction when it comes to its many cutscenes or extended dialogue section which wasn’t helped by the absolutely colossal size of the character roster which didn’t help setting up these scenes especially with the limited budget and that problem definitely carries over in the late game of CS3 when the party is fully complete and you get an especially hilarious scene where Rean enters an hotel room followed by 14 character model slowly walking and trying to fit somewhere onto the screen. Here most of the scenes actually have proper stage direction and feel more cinematic which is what one could expect from a 3D video game from the year 2017 and is probably the results of Falcom’s experimentation on their previous title (and most successful title in their line-up) “Ys VIII : Lacrimosa of Dana”, which already significantly improved the presentation from that series.



The action segment are hype, there’s multiple camera angle and some pretty creative use of direction to convey certain feelings or emotions even during the more intimate moments and while we’re not reaching Square’s level of cinematography (this ain’t this series forte anyway) it’s definitely cool to see that Falcom is finally coming into their own to match the rest of the industry instead of falling behind as their status as a double AA studio would’ve suggested (even if the most technically impressive thing about that upgrade is the addition of bouncing physics on the ladies which were… certainly an interesting priority from the studio to say the least…). Another cool thing I could mention about the presentation is how seamless the battle transition are, previously in the series you’d be teleported to a different area entirely here Trails decide to take on the more standardly modern approach of having the battles take place directly on the field and while it doesn’t really matter from a strategic perspective (or at least very little) it’s a pretty cool thing to see and speaking of battles.

A lot of things actually changed between CS2 and CS3 when it comes to the battle system, in my review of Cold Steel 1, I’ve mentioned that while the general fluidity of the battles has improved I still felt like the game was a significant downgrade compared to the series earlier output because of how it streamlined the customisation process to an almost baffling degree making for a less fun and engaging battle system (definitely not helped by the series jump to 3D) that was easily breakable and rendered many of the series core mechanic (namely its magic system) completely obsolete. CS2 in particular was a broken mess of a game, thanks to this game being balanced around late game abilities which made most of that game an easily breakable one even by accident.

CS3’s takes a lot of the more solid elements of the battle and progression system of its two predecessors and expands on them in surprising and interesting ways. First off, the battle UI has changed from a circular menu system to something similar to Super Mario RPG or Persona 5 where each button corresponds to a menu. It needs a little getting used to after so many games of using a similar UI but the change really is welcome and greatly improves the fluidity of battle. Links and Brave points are back and better than ever. First off, Links aren’t tied to bonding points anymore and while it removes the gameplay reward of bonding events I don’t think it really matters because it’s definitely an improvement. Now links levels ups by having the characters linked to one another which was already the case in the previous two games but here it grows much faster and makes it so that pairing any characters with one another instead of just Rean a much more viable option.

But now chaining link attack to obtain brave point actually is more interesting this time around, in the previous game chaining attack had two purposes :

-Triggering passive abilities to help you in battle
-Gaining brave points that could be used to unleash a small combo attack known as “rush attack” for the price of 3 BP or an all-out attack known as a “Burst” which makes the entire attack the opposing team.

While these mechanics are still present, they’re now counterbalanced by the addition of a second use for Brave Points : Brave Orders. Brave Orders are instant buffs that can be applied for a set number of turns and stays active for the remainder of those turns and are only canceled out by the end of that order or the activation of another.

A mechanic quite reminiscent of Master Arts from Trails to Azure which sadly were not all that relevant as they were tied to the rather slow growth rate of Master Quartz in that game and were as such an entire mechanic relegated to the endgame (and even then, more so the final dungeon).

Brave Orders are a fantastic addition to the game battle system as it makes them more dynamic and offers new options to approach fights or get yourself out of tough situations and this game has plenty of those especially early on to make their usage more than necessary to bypass some of the game's tougher challenges. In fact, due to some nerf to crafts (especially support ones mostly replaced by an equivalent in Brave Order) and the addition of some brave orders encouraging that playstyle, Arts are now more relevant than they used to with some brave orders outright removing casting time or boosting magical damage output to absurd degrees. Arts were always presented as the best option to deal huge damage but because of the way CS1 and CS2 were balanced more in favor of crafts (which were plenty in that game with most of Class VII being absolute beast on that front), arts became completely irrelevant and the way the orbment system was changed as to give you less flexibility when it comes to getting spells and the available pool of spell selections, literally there was no real reason to give a shit about it.

In fact, Orbment have also been slightly touched up to go in that direction, now instead of one master quartz, each characters can equip up to two master quartz and stacking their effects to one another, you can even set another character main master quartz as its sub-MQ in order to do interesting combo builds which greatly improves the flexibility that was lost with the orbment system. Unfortunately this means a lot of Quartz who are simply giving out spells (most of the time the ones you get early on in the game) becomes complete filler as 2 MQ fully leveled Master Quartz on one character is more than enough to give you a full kit of Offensive and Support Crafts at your leisure.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean than sticking to a strict craft-centric playstyle isn’t viable (especially on normal difficulty which is how I’ve played the game) but it’s really cool to see Arts make such a comeback which also ties to a new combat mechanic in this game known as “break”. If you’ve played FFXIII (or any JRPG released since 2009 who seem to have ripped off that mechanic) then you’re probably familiar with this. On top of having a HP bar, enemies now have a break gauge that you need to deplete in order to “break” their stance which cancels out any buffs they might have, delay their turn as well as skipping it when reached and of course making them more vulnerable to attack and receive extra damages.

So now the objective is less going to be about strictly depleting the enemies HP’s and debuffing them when necessary (since debuffs unfortunately still doesn’t work on most enemies sadly) but breaking their gauge to then chain their asses with your most powerful abilities by combining all of your tools to make tons of damage and even not make them play at all (by the end of the game, it becomes quite ridiculous when some bosses just straight up did NOT attack me for the entire duration of the fight).

Some enemies such as bosses can enter a “enhanced” state that makes them stronger encouraging you to break them as fast as possible as to not get your ass kicked and it’s overall a pretty fun system that keep each encounter engaging and the customization aspect being put in the front of the battle system once again truly makes it a really fun game to play.
Unfortunately, some elements within the game kinda ruins the fun of such a system and I’m going to cite them for good measure :

The boss design in CS3 is noticeably god awful in more ways than none, almost all boss encounters have the tendency to have an instantaneous un-cancellable healing spell (which also acts as an all-encompassing stat buff) they just randomly spam whenever they feel the need to, that’s pretty much true of 80% of the numerous boss encounters in this game and it becomes so tiring that eventually most of the boss-fight will make you want to cheese them rather than engage with this rather annoying mechanic.

On the topic of boss fights, there’s definitely some weird power creep when it comes to the speed stat of most of the game major bosses, what I mean by this is that for some reasons a lot of bosses have an insane amount of speed and can just play for multiple turn without letting you play at all. One of the bosses late into the game (the Dark Dragon) on top of having annoying healing spells, also summons a shit load of minions which are all faster than you but worst than that, all of his attack are meant to delay your turn or force you into a state of slow agonizing death as your turn gets skipped because of a random status effect which forced me to just endlessly tank hit with damage resistance order and spam S-Craft for survival and it wasn’t fun at all. A non-negligible number of bosses and even regular encounters operate on the same logic, so if you’re willing to play these games, I suggest finding ways to upgrade the speed of your characters as soon as possible as it is perhaps the single most important stat in the game.

I also said the game was more focused on giving priorities to Arts but for a good chunk of the early game all the way to almost the end of the second chapter is pretty stingy when it comes to giving you Sepith the currency that allows you to upgrade your orbment and customize your characters more. This makes a lot of the early game encounter stupidly difficult because of a clear lack of option rather than because it’s a fair challenge and on the opposite side, the late game gives you an over-abundance of options thanks to the roster of playable characters growing exponentially to eventually attain a number of playable character that’s somehow higher than what Trails the 3rd gave you and that game was built around the idea of having so many party member to switch from whenever necessary.

I say this because the initial cast of characters, namely New Class VII, are overall pretty well-balanced and work in pretty good synergy with one another. Their brave orders are not too stupidly broken and encourages you to make strategic use of all of your available option but rather quickly in some segment of the story and during almost the entirety of the end-game, you will be joined by several characters most of which have absolutely stupidly unbalanced battle orders that completely nullify any semblance of challenge in the last few hours of the game sometimes to a ridiculous degree as it’s simply going against established power-gap between some characters inside of its own lore (namely McBurn who is always claimed to be the strongest baddest motherfucker around but melts when Laura equipped with the domination quartz does little as to breathe in his general direction).

On that last point, the game does mitigate that issue a little bit by having many fights where the requirement to finish them is not to beat the enemy but to reduce its health to a certain percentage. It’s kind of an artificial way to keep the consistency between gameplay and lore power-level but the game completely forgets about it by the end which makes it pointless.
Lastly and coming back from CS2 are the mech battles and this time around they’ve been vastly expanded upon than its original incarnation and as such feels like proper boss fights with actual strategy involved. For starters, Valimar isn’t the only playable unit during those fights and you can be joined by two other characters with their own mechs and their own playstyle. The game keeps a lot of the fundamentals of the original system where it’s a guessing game of touching the enemy in certain area of their body to unbalance them and chaining attacks but it’s definitely less arbitrary and with more characters on the field, some of those encounters become much more strategic and the system also incorporate the burst and break system from regular fights which makes them much more dynamic.

Most of the mech fights in these games aren’t particularly difficult tho and much like CS2 mostly serves as some sort of victory lap to conclude certain key point of the story but it’s also terribly badass to get to fight the 3 Aions from Trails to Azure in giant mech fights when they didn’t have the luxury to have those in the game they originally came from which makes for some nice bit of fanservice in a game already filled to the brim with it.

In fact let’s segway into my next segment right away and talk about CS3’s approach to storytelling, worldbuilding, exploration, game structure and fanservice and the reason why I think CS3 is both a return to form for the series who chooses to heavily embrace its legacy and an unfortunate turnover that may as well stopped me from being fully engaged with its main proposition.

CS3 is a game which is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its own arc and even the whole series as whole. On the surface CS3 is both a continuation of what came before it and some sort of a soft reboot of its own arc bouncing off of new foundation and re-focusing on establishing a new story arc within the Cold Steel Saga. What this entails is that unlike the other arcs in the series which were constructed in a “Build-Up” and a “Pay-Off” game similarly to how old PS1 games divided their stories on multiple discs due to space limitation except each disc is its own fully complete game experience.

In the case of the Sky Arc this resulted in a trilogy in which its first 2 games constituted the main bulk of the story they wanted to tell and the appropriately titled “Sky the 3rd” was an isolated story set in more or less the same premise and served more the purpose of an anthology title expanding on minor plotlines and characters from the previous two game while preparing the terrain for the future (and despite its very derivative, experimental and budget direct to dvd nature is arguably the best game in the entire series but you’ll have to check my review on Sky the 3rd that I probably plan to re-write at some point to truly understand my position). The Crossbell Arc stuck to a duology format and skipped the anthological third game in favor of a more tight and complete experience (even if Azure ends on a pretty sour note which obviously sets up the events to come in the Cold Steel series regarding Crossbell).

Cold Steel on the other hand is 4 games long and instead of being a huge game divided in 4 discs, it’s rather 2 games both with different aims and themes which are loosely connected by the throughline of Osborne Shenanigans and Rean Schwarzer doing some Rean Schwarzing. What that means is that CS3 is less a sequel to CS2 than it is a second intro game in the middle of the arc (which creates some issues down the line, more on that later).

This can be explained by 2 factors, Falcom troublesome development cycle when it comes to these titles and an excess of ambition due to the scope of the region presented in the arc (Erebonia is a much bigger territory with a long running history draught in different war, conflicts and different cults and even other races running the place, Erebonia being “the land of fairytales” as the game says at some point). Initially Cold Steel should’ve been 2 games one focusing on the eastern part and one focusing on the western part but due to the games becoming too long for their own good and Falcom having trouble transitioning to the HD era like most of their contemporaries (which hit them even bigger due to the company smaller size) both of these titles were separated into four rather than 2 and we already see how that became an issue with Cold Steel 2 which had very little to say with its plot in comparison to the actual length of the game (which was filled with countless hours of fetch questing in a quest hub in the mid-point of the game reminiscent of FF VI’s World of Ruin).

As such CS3 being an intro game feels somewhat like a repeat of CS1 both in its ambition but also its story structure. We go back to the rigid chapter based structure of CS1 and the rest of the series ditching the three act structure of CS2 and we also go back to a very similar repetitive routine of “Fetch questing at school then fetch questing on road trips” with all the same stop of “old school house, free day, practical exam day and train trip” that made CS1 a drag to play for most of its runtime but this time around CS3 has less chapter and as such less places we actually go to, you could think this would mean that the game would be much shorter and you’d be wrong because each of the game 4 main chapters last for an ungodly amount of hours and could each constitute and entire SNES RPG length by themselves and I mean that both for the better and for the worst.

So all of the ingredient were there to make this game a terribly boring and mindless experience, the mandatory spinach to go for the desert and while it is true on some level and we’ll develop that in a bit, I can say that this game at least make an actual effort in an area Cold Steel traditionally spectacularly failed at and its : The Characters.

I can’t believe I have to state this as a major improvement because you’d assume than any games of that length would at least put some effort in its characters but the first 2 Cold Steel might as well had the worst cast of characters of any RPG that I’ve played and that’s saying something when I played some pretty heavy stinker. In many RPG’s, there would usually be a few weak link or some characters you simply can’t fucking stand, for CS1 and CS2, if you go back to my review of those games, you’d realize ALL and I mean ALL of them were underwhelming, annoying or outright bad to the point that the side characters (like my sweet and beloved Towa who actually gets to play a bigger role in this game and I’m happy for it) and even the fucking NPC’s were miles more likeable and interesting despite not being the main focus of the story. It was a failure on all levels and even the sequel couldn’t elevate them to anything other than a nuisance to the story and this was also not helped by how Rean was characterized in CS2 which ended up killing all the interest I had in the character and gave me a lot of disdain for him.

In comparison New Class VII looks like they came from a completely different dimension and had a completely different narrative design philosophy behind their writing to the point that I’m actually shocked they belong into the same series as characters such as Machias or fucking Laura of all thing. Let me put it simply, I love New Class VII and I love them to bits. It's not my favorite cast in the series but they definitely reach the same standard as the SSS.
Probably in response to the criticism made to the cast of the first two entries as well as other technical difficulties of having such a large roster from the get go, the initial cast of CS3 is composed of only 4 characters (Rean included) later joined down the line by two other additional party members during the midway point of the game (and which aren’t really a surprise since they show up in the opening) for a total of 6 characters, a far cry from the 9 initial party members of the party that evolves into 11 by the second game. What that means is that unlike CS1, there’s no real necessity to separate the team for balancing issues or to procedurally introduce their gameplay style over the course of multiple hours and that’s great because that means that New Class VII can have something the original never actually had : An actual group dynamic.

New Class VII actually talk to each others, take actions together sometimes without needing Rean’s approval on everything, not all of their relationship involves sucking Rean’s dick off (well outside of Musse that is but that’s because she’s an horndog which is set on making Rean fired) and they even develop relationship with one another. There’s even a slight hint at a potential romantic pairing with Juna and Kurt and while I’m not especially crazy about it, it’s been a while in this series where romance was allowed to exist outside of the main character in the available vagina equipped individual breathing in their general direction for more than 5 seconds. The interactions between these characters are really nice, they have cool back and forth with one another, they feel like an actual group of friends and you get to actually see their relationship form and grow unlike Class VII which they tell you these characters care for each others but really they just all collectively care about Rean and that’s about it.

They also are much more nuanced and fleshed out characters than their senior counterpart, you feel like these characters weren’t just made with one word making up their entire personality this time around. Juna is definitely the outlier of the bunch in my opinion, she’s probably my favorite character in this game (probably because she’s literally Lloyd with tits and more personality woops) and some of the scenes later on definitely cements her as one of my favorite character in the series, she could’ve easily taken the protagonist seat instead of Rean and I wouldn’t have minded. The only unfortunate thing about Juna is that her entire existence is a retcon, she feels like Graggle from the Simpson when they talk about how she’s super buddies with the SSS (but really only with Randy tbf) when she wasn’t even a playable character or even an existing one in some version of the Crossbell arc. I would’ve much preferred if Juna was just an SSS super fan and a Lloyd Larper trying to find an identity of their own to carry on the fight that the SSS couldn’t continue themselves as a real passing of the torch moment, it’s a missed opportunity but she’s still an amazing character nonetheless.

The other cast members are also nothing to shy on about, Ash is a punk with attitude who constantly disobey the rules, gambles and partake in underage drinking while still having a soft spot from time to time, he’s definitely the most entertaining character and his problematic behavior contrast well with Rean’s new position as a teacher trying to set him straight and speaking of setting thing straight let’s talk about Musse.



Musse is not the most well appreciated character in the game simply because the entire schtick about her is that she’s a 16 year old temptress trying to bait Rean into the dark side of Discord moderation. Personally, I like Musse, they could’ve made a character like this much more awkward if they wanted but thankfully Rean’s newfound maturity allows him to quickly set boundaries between him and her which creates a somewhat fun dynamic of playful one sided flirting between the two that got a few chuckle out of me since Rean is trying really hard not to get fired and I just kinda like her mischievous little devil attitude which actually hides her real identity as this game version of Lelouch VI Britannia funnily enough that I’m curious to see more developed in the upcoming game (actually one of the only thing I’m excited to see developed in the sequel… because… well we’re not there yet so let’s move on).

Altina is a daughter type character, in this game you learn that her and Millium are artificial beings known as homunculus and while Milium is this peppy little girl who jumps around everywhere and feels a wide array of emotion, Altina is closer to a robot and is only learning through being around her classmate and Rean that she’s more than just a tool for war and she can be an actual human being with feeling. Some people might say that she’s just Tio again and yeah, she kinda is a K-Mart brand Tio but I don’t really mind it as much as her arc differs in some areas and since she’s also the closest character to Rean by that point, it makes for some interesting retroactive commentaries on what happened in the first two games (and probably the only relevant connective tissue from 2 to 3 aside from the late game revelations of CS2).

Lastly there’s Kurt…

Kurt…

Well…

He… exists I guess ?

Yeah sorry, I got nothing on Kurt, all JRPG parties need to have a few weak links and he’s definitely one of them. His entire deal is trying to live up to his family’s legacy and … yeah his existence makes you wish Mueller wasn’t completely shafted by the developers of the game honestly, I don’t know Kurt is kinda there, he’s inoffensive and has a few cool moment but he’s as basic as a “boy with sword” archetype could get.

BUT WHAT ABOUT REAN THOUGHT ????

In the last episode of my Kiseki journey, I said that Rean went from a character I was neutral about to one who actively grinded my gears for the entirety of CS2. I still don’t really care much about Rean, I still think he’s one of the weakest aspects of this arc and since he’s the main protagonist so much of the element in the story revolves around him. However, I will say that the premise of his character in this game at least makes him more tolerable. Rean is now a teacher at Thors Academy instead of being a student, this new position of power alongside his experience in the first two games at least makes him somewhat wiser and is a more interesting foundation for his character and the relation he’ll have with the rest of the cast.
Rean is also directly punished for his lack of decision making and spine in the original game, so he’s now pretty much tied on a leash by Osborne who uses him to do his bidding. Rean, of course being the little bitch that he is, agrees to play into the Ironbloods game and is forced to do shit against his will. That lack of agency coupled with Rean not really knowing what Osborne is cooking is going to be the main hook of CS3 and I’d say that for once it’s a good thing. Rean being forced to do stuff that he doesn’t want to do well… Actively forces him to take a position and do stuff rather than bitching about not doing stuff and bullshitting his way into acting up anyway without really thinking about the consequences of his action and when you know how Rean is when he actually HAS agency over his actions, you can’t help but think that it’s a better outcome for his character rather than the contrary.

That doesn’t stop Rean from being spectacularly flat in this game, not helped by the plot tendency not to clues us in or develop what’s the deal with him and Osborne in this episode and only playing cat and mouse with your expectations once again to make you excited for the sequel (as all of those Intro games tend to do just be gigantic teaser for their sequel anyway).

The plot also completely gave up on Rean being a nuanced character whatsoever, he seems to have troubles due to some events that happened in North Ambria and some level of trauma from losing Crow in the previous game but much like CS2 these elements are not strong enough to counterbalance how much of an absolute unstoppable giga chad he is at any occasion, in fact because Rean is an instructor now, everyone thinks he’s this real badass mf that can’t do no wrong and multiple time within the narrative are meant to show just how strong Rean has become and how heroic he is. There’s a hilariously out of touch scene rushing at super speed to stop some soldiers from killing themselves and I’m sorry but it’s so over the top and corny that it makes it impossible for me to take this seriously. I’m also pretty sure that Rean is slowly but surely repeating his self-doubt arc from the previous two game on the pretense that his traumas are lil bit more believable than killing a bear as a child but since the game never expands on what happened in North Ambria and all dialogs points out to him having done nothing wrong because god forbid Rean doing war crimes while actually killing people in war to actually affect his mind and give him PTSD, what do you think this is a mature video game ?

But I think that’s enough about talking positively about the game here, I’ve promised a thought piece, not a review and I just wanted to get most of the positives out of the way first to prove to you that while I’m on the side of the game being a general improvement over the first two Cold Steel games, it doesn’t mean that the game was a success in delivering on all of its ideas and that’s probably why CS3 won’t end up joining its brethren in keeping the series afloat and bring back the standard of quality brought by the older entries as the shadow of Falcom’s wacky game and narrative design philosophy come creeping its way back on the soup no matter how fresh the ingredients are.

CS3 has a bit of an identity crisis because it's both a sequel to what came before it but also seems to want to wipe the slate clean and build off on new foundations. We already stated how CS1 was a game designed for a new generation of players who wants to be introduced to the wonderful world of Kiseki and as such it kept most of the reference to earlier entry to a minimal and didn’t really dare involve elements from older title too much (sometimes very inelegantly, such as Ouroboros being first introduced in a throwaway line in the mid-game).
What I mean by that is that the game isn’t really a sequel to Cold Steel 1 or Cold Steel 2 and the main conflict that was the central piece of these two games (the class warfare between commoners and nobles) is only a foot-note within the story. The Civil war did happen and is mentioned at several points throughout the game but the actual main conflict which started the whole thing and how it affected the country is completely glossed over and never mentioned again. CS3 doesn’t seem to be interested in bouncing back from how poorly it handled its political themes in the original two games and it’s really strange how little CS2 and the events that transpired in that game actually matters in the plot of CS3.

Perhaps Falcom realized how poorly it handled the entire thing and seem to want to sweep all of it under the rug but it’s nonetheless very bizarre that the game never actually properly addresses the consequences of the civil war and how it could’ve probably affected the public's perception on nobility and how the noble faction got punished from such careless action and seems to only want to pretend that the very existence of the noble alliance and its action wasn’t the result of some deeply rooted systemic issue but rather the folly of a couple of bad apples within the noble faction namely Duke Cayenne and Lord Albarea (which btw, CS2 explicitly said was the bad apple of the noble alliance and the noble alliance didn’t claim and actively wanted to stop this man from committing the atrocities he committed in Celdic so that’s even fucking crazier).

Heck one of the first character you meet in CS3 is Aurelia Le Guin, a former general of the Noble Alliance and a pretty minor character from CS2 who has been appointed as the principal of the branch campus and was even said to be a major player in the annexation of North Ambria a couple of years prior to the events of the game. The game will rarely if ever explain how Aurelia never got punished for her crimes, if she still believes in the ideals of the noble alliance, if she has some resentment for Rean (she seems to have none) for stealing the glory of the alliance, none of that shit is explored, Aurelia just seems to exist to be badass and steals the character arc Laura should’ve had in this game.

Another thing that CS2 spectacularly fucked over is how it portrayed the civil war and by that I mean that it didn’t portray it at all since most of the action took place in the western region and what part of Erebonia are you visiting in this game ? Well of course, it’s the western region ! And yet, the civil war is only a passing thought, everything seems to be normal, no citizens seems to have been harmed by the situation, no citizens seems to hold resentment towards the nobles, no citizens seems to try and heal from potential traumas or loss brought forth by this seemingly pointless conflict. Absolutely none of that thing is explored even when you are actually visiting the Province who belonged to Duke Cayenne himself (remember ? The Antagonist of the previous game ?) where the only thing that seems to matter is to try and elect a new Duke Cayenne (in fact Musse later reveals herself to be Duke Cayenne’s niece like what is going on with the world ?!?!) and trying to gain the favors of the population.

This is such a bizarre turn over and seemingly makes CS2 an even bigger waste of time than it actually was since it seems to matter very little into the plot of this game. In fact the only conflicts that seems to matter for the game’s plot is the annexation of North Ambria, a war that isn’t explored or explained to you at all unless you’re reaching for an optional book found in Towa’s house and was only ever shown in an anime released 6 WHOLE DAMN YEARS after the release of Cold Steel 3 and it’s weird as shit since it seems that it was a pretty big deal. But the game does not really care and wants to start over on new foundation.
I must ask myself how did they plan out this scenario sometimes because making it so none of the important stuff from the previous 2 games actually matters into its third entry is pretty wild, you could literally be skipping CS1 and CS2 and just read a summary of them and you will have almost the same level of comprehension as someone who actually got through the games. WHAT IS GOING ON ?

A friend of mine who actually like these games (and we’re still in good contact despite his dubious taste in video games) was constantly repeating to me that I was looking at the Cold Steel arc wrong and that it really wasn’t a story about the division of social class and how these dynamics affects and changes society, but rather about the “fear of imperialism and how to act against it” which is represented by the Osborne faction. And while he’s definitely right on some level (because I don’t think CS3’s handling of this topic is particularly stellar either but I’ll develop this further down this already long essay)

You may think that maybe Falcom did this as to make this entry more accessible to newcomers who might want to start the series with this one in spite of this being the third entry in the series or to focus on the new conflict of this new sub-arc without having to deal with the dust left by their failure at delivering anything of substance for 2 whole damn games but surprisingly and that’s the whole paradox of this episode, despite wanting to act as a soft-reboot of its own arc and a potential new jumping point to the series for newcomers, this game more so than any other entry in the series hinges heavily on the series everlasting continuity and constantly referencing past events from older entry in the franchise and in fact the main conflict of the narrative this time around is definitely more focus on the lore of the franchise rather than a singular theme or even political stakes like it was the case with Azure and the first Cold Steel duology.

You see many returning faces, you get to visit places that were mentioned previously in the franchise and heck one chapter takes place entirely within a new 3D rendition of Crossbell which despite how dumb that’s going to sound made me smile despite this being just an obvious overly expanded technical flex by the developers but hell if it didn’t work on me.

These moments are also treated with the utmost respect for their legacy, at one point you visit Hamel a place where one of the most tragic event in the series happened and you get to visit the grave of Loewe the second main antagonist of Sky SC and the most memorable character from that game and its treated as this solemn quiet moment like you’ve just stepped into sacred ground and as a somber melancholic rendition of Silver Will plays over flashbacks from SC, you feel some level of faint nostalgia mixed with uncertainty as you walk towards that gravestone and it’s probably one of the best story segment in the series.

At one point, you get a boss fight with Arianrodh in a setting similar to the moment you fight her in Azure complete with the same theme song from that game and an equally high step in difficulty and it’s literally so freaking hype it’s insane.

So yeah, I think that on average, I didn’t completely loose any kind of attachment to the series continuity since literally all of these moments made me enjoy the game significantly more than its predecessors and made me happy I stuck with the series despite it all but here lies another issue of … what do you even do between these member berries moments that are obviously meant to please old time fans of the series ?
Well…

That’s something we’re going to discuss now to observe how Falcom pretty much lost control of their own ambition once again and ended a game that could’ve been the long awaited return to form the series needed into pretty much its death sentence.

Cold Steel 3 suffers from what I will refer to as “Tales of Syndrome” (and please don’t see a criticism of that franchise as I happen to have a lot of sympathy for it). Like I mentioned in my first review of CS1, “Tales of” tend to compensate a passable/mediocre story with other things such as a great combat system, some technically impressive stuff for their time (I’m still blown the fuck away by Tales of Phantasia technical flexes like what the shit) and most importantly, incredible cast of characters and amazing characterization which its “skits” system is no stranger too. Oftentimes, it’s not surprising to see a “Tales Of” story fumble near the end or heck even in the middle of it, Vesperia is an amazing game up until its last 10h or so which completely annihilate any credibility the story had left.

However, the “Tales Of” series is different in one key element : It’s standalone. It’s easier to forgive a Tales Of game for not delivering because at least it’s not going to ruin your enjoyment of other entries in the series (“Graces F” corny ass writing ain’t going to ruin how stellar “Abyss” was for exemple.) and more generally it’s not going to feel like all the hours you’ve spent playing these titles weren’t worth it. “Trails” on the other hand and especially the one puts a higher emphasis on its world building and its different geopolitical stakes. Trails will always go in excruciating detail about how almost every facet of its universe works (I mean for fuck sake, how many JRPG series will stop you to infodump you on freaking Tax laws) and as such, you expect the series to do something with all of the stuff it’s setting up and as such expect nothing but excellence from it (and with this series, excellence is always close but never reached).

You can’t just disguise yourself as Yasumi Matsuno to be Yasumi Matsuno, Cold Steel and the Trails series has a whole has a rich universe but for the most part I feel like the franchise likes to use all of that as a carrot at the end of a stick to make you keep playing rather than something that truly wants to say anything and what is a rich detailed universe if it’s wasted on shitty character trope and weak stories.

Cold Steel 3 abandons the main conflict it desperately tries to establish for over 2 games in favor of another more lore-centric conflict. Instead of Noble and Commoners, the story revolves around Ironbloods vs Ouroboros which is less risky but also not as interesting because… well… if you think about it for a second… What does the game even want to say with this conflict ?

For the first time since Trails in the Sky SC, Ouroboros take center stages in the narrative of Cold Steel 3, I’ve ranted multiple times about how I don’t care much for Ouroboros but I think in this particular case since they’re in the forefront of the narrative, I will probably make my position a little more clearer on them.

I think Ouroboros is a hindrance to the series' ability to tell intriguing and interesting stories with its universe since their very first appearance.

First introduced in Sky SC, Ouroboros has quickly been presented as the main antagonistic force of that game but the ending of SC and some elements from Sky 3rd showed that Ouroboros are not done yet and they’re here to stay. Trails in the Sky FC had probably what is in my opinion the only good villain that the series ever had : Richard. Richard’s motivations in that game were believable, understandable and worked in tandem with the kind of setting the original Trails in the Sky wanted to portray. In fact, Richard is a character that only gets better with time because all of the stuff he warned us about and the very reason why he did the things that he did pretty much became true as the series moved forward.

However, Richard’s much like many other similar villains in the series (all of varying quality : Dieter was pretty much like Richard but was robbed due to Azure’s obsession with introducing a bigger fish to raise the stakes even when those were already pretty high and it wasn’t necessary to do so) was used as a pawn for Ouroboros which were the people who helped but most importantly used and manipulated Richard to further their own agenda.

What agenda you may ask ?

Well wouldn't you like to know ? Haha…

Ouroroboros to me is a complete enigma, it’s like their very presence exist solely to make the story worse and it’s not helped that most of the lore surrounding the more supernatural aspect of the universe (and thus what the villains will eventually seek to further their goals) are sought after by them too. Ouroboros introduction in Sky SC was dubious at best, they forced the game into a repetitive sluggish structure for most of its run and their saturday morning cartoon personality which only existed to prop up other characters in your party didn’t really help. And whether or not you like Weissman, I also think it was a mistake to make him the first big shot of Organization XIII since apparently according to the game, he was a renegade to the cause and to the plan.

But what plan ? What cause ?

Well… wouldn’t you like to know ? Haha…

Ouroboros are, for lack of a better term, annoying. Falcom really wants you to think of them as this chaotic organization with people of all horizon working together towards a certain goal but then it also wants most of its members to be a free atom that can do and think whatever they want and even temporarily or permanently leave them without any consequences especially for its enforcers since the Anguis (Team Magma Admins type of beat) seems to be all obedient to their grandmaster. A lot of fans told me that I’ve always misread Ouroboros as just “mustache twirling villains” but to be frank… there’s not much elements pointing to the contrary so far in the series ? And even if they want us to think that their cause and their cause is just… maybe a hint towards that cause would help.

But Falcom refuses to let us know, Falcom will just forcefully put them inside of a game’s plot and since they’re the main antagonistic force driving the overall plot forward that means that they’re always going to be the bigger fish in the room, the only antagonist that matter because in the end any new villains no matter their motivations or how elaborate their plans are will always end up as a new pawn for Ourobozos, they’re not interesting villains to me.
Ouroboros are just cryptic and bizarre, they’re just chaotic for the sake of being chaotic. Sometimes they will help you defeat the local bad guy, sometimes they will join them, sometimes they will oppose the villain or join them when they don’t fit their agenda anymore. And it’s really hard to take them for anything but random villain of the week when that’s exactly how they behave and present themselves for most of the series only for them to make you go : “WHAT IS THE SOCIETY UP TO” and the answer always being something like….

Well… wouldn’t you like to know ?

These villains have far outstayed their welcome for me and I’m just tired of their existence and their continued influence on the franchise. It’s impossible to take any stake, any other villains seriously when they are in the middle of the arena selling you on empty promises and “mysteries” which aren’t even that interesting to begin with. In SC at least, there were personal stakes in going against them but in CS3, you only fight Ouroboros because Rean is forced to by Osborne… but other than that… this conflict is pointless and meaningless and worst of all… actually wants to tell nothing.

CS3 has the same repetitive plot structure for all of its chapters, some people say that CS3 isn’t boring because a lot of stuff happens this time around but does it really ?

You still do a lot of pointless stuff that end up accomplishing nothing not just on a micro-level but also on a macro-level. Stopping Ouroboros isn’t an inherently interesting thing to center your plot around and it feels like a distraction at best, CS3 legitimately has nothing to say and nothing interesting to either tell or make us experience with everything that we’re doing in its main plot aside from some carrots at the end of a stick based on complete “trust the plan” rhetoric that leads to more frustration and some nostalgia bait to keep old time fans from snoozing too much at everything happening here.

I don’t know why they felt that the third game in a quadrilogy must be so light in actual substance, heck making this another intro game is also kind of an ass backward narrative choice because there’s not many things left to introduce so they need to pad the story out with the same boring structure as CS1 (which feels even less justified here than it did in that game) and new characters which, yes, are more interesting but feels like a band-aid on an open wound.

And even then, this identity crisis continues, between wanting to be a fresh start and hinging on its continuity.

At some key points in the narrative, some of your old squadmates from the first two games will get you out of a tough situation and temporarily join your party. This reunion with old characters is the emotional core of some of the game's more intimate moment but it hinges heavily on you buying into Class VII as a group and as we stated in the first two games, these titles did nothing to make me care about them in the first place and when they’re put in contrast to the new characters in this game, it’s even worse because despite some dubious attempt at making them more interesting (like Gaius being a Gralsritter which is just ???), they never get any better than what they were before and continue to be a weak narrative element of the story and steal the show of characters I’d rather be playing as.
A friend of mine insisted on telling me this game is supposedly about “the fear of imperialism and how to act against it” but for a game about imperialism, the game really doesn’t seem to want to make any sort of deep thoughtful commentary on the subject or even address it heck most of the time it tries to lowball the issues in multiple ways. Osborne is said to be an expansionist but yet all of the wars he launched to annex neighboring countries have been explicitly stated to have happened without bloodshed which to me is just a strange fact to put in the forefront of the narrative. While Trails has often been afraid to kill off important characters (to the point of extreme absurdity cf : Illya in Azure) it wasn’t really afraid to portray death of civilians or even main characters committing or being the victims of atrocious crime.

But here, you have a seemingly fascist dictator who… conquers the world…pacifically … and makes decisions who… benefits most people ? And make the old nobility fold ? And reducing taxes ? And make Rean do things against his will like… stopping random terrorists from doing terrorist shit ?

Wow that man is awful… I wonder how Crossbell is doing in the ending of Azure. It looked kinda dire and… wait… what do you mean it’s doing better than it ever did on its own ? And what do you mean everything about the ending of Azure was retconned and they didn’t respect continuity just to have Randy chill in a giant robot and Tio being an important searcher ? Weren’t they supposed to be fugitives ?

Oh wait only Lloyd, KeA and … ARIOS ??? Are ?

I mean what about Rean, he seems to be pretty troubled to have lost the control of his abilities and that’s like a main theme of this new arc about him and… wait… what do you mean he just lost control of himself for 5 seconds and didn’t actually kill anyone ? Wait but… huh ?

Hey if this is a story about imperialism, maybe they’re going to finally address why we haven’t seen the emperor yet and why he let his chancellor and the nobles do a bunch of shit while he’s supposed to be ruling the country and …

Oh… you mean he read a bunch of books that predict the future and decided… not to do anything about it and just let things burn ? Because what … What do you mean ?

“There is something in Erebonia”

Oh no

…

Can you hear it ?

The trumpets of the bullshit writing apocalypse are ringing ! The deads are rising from their graves and pretend to have a secret identity, an ancient dragon is awakening out of nowhere and forces you to do a dungeon that looks like the final dungeon but will later be revealed to have nothing to do with the actual main threat of the plot… and… oh no… are these…
GNOMES ???

GNOMES…. GNOMES…. GNOMES…

Nobody’s going to read this fucking review this far so might as well just fucking lashes out. So there’s actually a third faction in this Ironbloods vs Ouroboros thing the plot has going for it and these are…

God…

The Gnomes…

So huh… the gnomes (yes the fucking gnomes, not the dwarves, not the elven, not the any potentially cooler pick for a villain faction just FUCKING GNOMES) are this MyStErIoUs faction working in the shadow of everything with their black workshop, they do all sort of cray thing like bringing people back from the dead and killing all tension and stakes in the narrative, have incredibly obvious secret identity like…

Man…

GEORGE NOME

THEY MADE THE DOINKY SPLOINKY FAT GUY FROM THE FIRST TWO GAMES A VILLAIN BUT NOT JUST A VILLAIN HE’S A GNOME AND HIS FUCKING NAME IS GEORGE NOME GET IT BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME AND HE HAS A GUN AND KILLS ANGELICA (I hope she stays dead) BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME !

BUT WAIT THAT’S NOT IT !

DING DONG

Hey ! It’s me ! Kondo-San !

You wanna come inside my clubhouse ?

KINDA KONDA KONDO-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57oU-xqiXek

Suddenly the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse rises from the grounds and nothing starts to make sense anymore. The game lore dumps you on a bunch of shit that it already info dumped you on if you read most of the book in the game like I did so thanks… collecting these was pointless I guess. You fought a dragon ? It Does not matter there’s an eviler bigger dragon now, all the villains who've been fighting against each other start teaming up for no reason. People start switching allegiance left and right, Ash is now the secret 3rd Hamel child and HE SHOT THE EMPEROR WHAT THE HELL LET’S GO TO WAR BUT FIRST YOU GOTTA GO DOWN THE LAMEST FINAL DUNGEON IN HISTORY AND ONE-SHOTTING EVERYONE BECAUSE POWER-SCALING ? CREDIBLE THREATS ? NOT IN MY JRPG !
And…

As you enter the door to the final boss…

You prepare yourself…

For the shittiest

Most brain melting succession of events you’ve ever seen.

Put on the music : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3G5IXn0K7A&t

Ok so get this, there was a hobo looking scholar who showed up regularly so of course the guy is a villain because that’s like the 4th time they did this in this series already. His name is actually

BLACK ALBERICH CHIEF OF THE GNOMES (I’m not even kidding, that's his full name and title) and he’s also Alisa’s Seemingly Dead Father who came back from the dead OH BUT GET THIS !

This random guy who hasn’t existed in the series until this episode, he was actually the one behind EVERYTHING, that’s right EVERYTHING, he looks at the camera and tell you to your face “Hamel ? I did that shit, the Orbal shutdown ? I did that shit, EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN CROSSBELL AND THE CIVIL WAR ! I DID THAT SHIT”

THE GNOMES MANIPULATED EVERYONE FROM THE SHADOWS ! THEY EVEN MANIPULATED THE MASTERMINDS OUROBOROS AND OSBORNE AND ALL THE EVIL PEOPLE IN THE SERIES OH AND GUESS WHAT

REFILL YOUR POPCORN YOU’RE GONNA LOVE THIS NEXT PART

FLASH NEWS :

DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE’S NO REAL REASON FOR WAR HAPPENING ? DID YOU KNOW THAT PEOPLE AREN’T EVIL ? THEY’RE JUST DRIVEN TO DO EVIL THINGS AND KILL EACH OTHERS BECAUSE … wait what do you mean clearly established and believable reasons according to the series clearly established geopolitical stakes ?

NO SILLY ! IT’S BECAUSE OF THE CURSE !

WHAT’S THE CURSE ?

WELL IT’S A TOXIC GAZ THAT WAS FARTED BY THIS ANCIENT GUNDAM WHO ALSO MANIPULATED EVERYONE BTW AND WHICH TURN PEOPLE EVIL AND RACIST !

EVEN THE CAT TURNS RACIST ! OH NO REAN HAS TURNED INTO SUPER RACISM WHAT THE FUCK QUICK EVERYONE STOPS HIM ALSO OOMFIE IS DEAD NO CLIFFHANGER “THIS STORY IS AS DARK AS INK, SEE YOU NEXT TIME IN CS4”
COLD STEEL 3

IS A SCAM

THIS FRANCHISE

IS A SCAM

THEY SHOWED YOU IMPROVEMENTS BUT IT WAS ALL A LIE !

FUCK AND I WROTE 21 PAGES FOR WHAT

FOR THIS

OH MY GOD

This is amazing…

I…

I need to play CS4…

This is fraud writing, the kind you only see once every 15 billion years when the planet aligns !

I was supposed to have like a conclusion about how Trails doesn’t deliver on its promises and I’ve tried to approach these games in good faith but holy shit…

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOMES

GNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMES

(Towa is still really cute tho)

Trails of Cold Steel 2 : Fascinatingly Bad

Previously, in my journey through hell the Kiseki series, we covered the first game in the third arc of this now cult classic series and I concluded rather harshly and in length that it was indeed one of the worst JRPG that I’ve ever played.

In response to such vitriolic hatred for what is essentially a very mediocre bargain bin RPG of the week, my friends quickly responded to me with the following statement : “If you think CS1 is bad, I can’t wait for you to try the 2nd one, it’ll make you think it was actually a masterpiece” which instead of dissuading me from continuing on with the franchise actually got me curious about what that might entail.

You see, Trails of Cold Steel 2 had a bit of a rocky development history. Around 2012, the PS Vita was slowly but surely put on the front as the successor to the PSP, Falcom just went through what could be considered their 2nd golden age with the PSP with a wide variety of titles across both PSP and PC a lot of action-rpg of course since it was until recently their main activity as game devs but also the Trails series which was picking up some speed, so much so that the fabled “Zwei 3” was instead released as “Nayuta No Kiseki” to profit off of the Kiseki brand (a fruitless effort since it was one of the last RPG on the PSP and by that point people have already moved on to other things).

This transitional period was a bit rough for Falcom which had two big projects for the PS Vita, the first one was “Ys : Memories of Celceta” a (bad) remake of Ys IV and of course the next entry in the Kiseki series aka “Trails of Cold Steel”. However, in a moment of extreme “lucidity”, Toshihiro Kondo asked the team at Falcom to develop the game for both the PS Vita and the Playstation 3, marking the first time Falcom has worked on a a game for home console since the mid 2000’s (if you can count porting Ys VI on PS2 as making a console game).

This of course lead to a lot of undesired results, the game was a buggy mess on release with tons of issues running on both platforms and on top of that they had to cut corner everywhere because Cold Steel was simply becoming too ambitious for the studio to reasonably finish it in time, but no worries because they just decided to cut the last hours of the game and release it later as its own standalone experience. What was supposed to be one game probably followed by one more sequel like the Crossbell saga became a 4 game long epic separated into 2 sub-arc each, of which Cold Steel 2 was the second half of that first arc (yeah it’s a bit complicated to follow, I swear I’m trying my best here).

So what exactly is Trails of Cold Steel 2 ? Well imagine if you took the second half of Final Fantasy VI and made it an entire 70h game instead because for some reasons Falcom decided that it would be a brilliant idea to do the “Search for your friends'' bit from FFVI again making it the third time this has happened in the series and I really must ask myself.

“Does Falcom think we wouldn’t notice they’re just shamelessly recycling ideas from other titles AND themselves ?” Well perhaps.

But I don’t really mind, if it’s done well, it could still save itself from the plagiarism allegations and besides the series has its own set of quirks to compensate (for better or for worse).
I’m sorry in advance if this review is gonna be shorter than the previous one (post edit note : this is a lie) because honestly my thoughts on this game are not nearly as intense, most of what was bad about CS1 still carries over from CS2 there’s very little change between the two titles, it is for the most part a straight continuation of what was done previously and that’s gonna be the main bulk of the issue.

Because the foundations that CS1 established were so weak to begin with, it was really hard to get invested into what CS2 wanted to tell me with its story. One thing that I will say CS2 has over CS1 is that the story is a bit more “engaging”, it’s less about experiencing slice-of-life moments between the most boring RPG party you’ve ever interacted with and more so about following a terrible mess of a story that would make Nomura’s writing seem sensible in comparison.

I guess I’ll get the gameplay out of the way first since there’s a few new additions, the battle system remains almost exactly the same as CS1 with the little addition of the “overdrive” gauge, if you’ve read my review of Azure I’ve explained that this game had something called a “burst” gauge which could unleash a massive boost on your characters abilities, getting them priority moves, let them cast spell cost-free and acting as an emergency heal button on top of that, pretty much the “fuck shit up button”. Well overdrive is more or less the same except instead of acting for the entire party, it acts only for the two characters that are linked together on the field and also only acts for three turns instead of dropping down based on your actions.

This small addition is welcome and definitely make battles a little bit more dynamic but it still a very feeble addition with the only real strategic use being to buff your party very very quickly (and the main reason why I used Jusis way more often this time around) during boss fight to more quickly dispatch of them in one hit thanks to Laura aka “What if we turned One Punch Man into a party member” s-craft.

Because yeah, unsurprisingly, the game balance here is even more awful than it was in CS1. Again, I've played the game on normal like with all the other entries but here it almost felt like I was cheating the game and I probably should’ve upped the difficulty to give the game any semblance of challenge. The reason why the game balance is so bad here is because you retain most of your broken crafts and stats from the previous game, since this game acts more like a 2nd disc than a sequel. This means that you start the early game with what were end-game abilities.

It’s nothing new in the series mind you but here since the game is so craft-centric and they didn’t even bother to nerf your crafts like Azure did coming off of Zero, it makes the early, mid and endgame stupidly easy, heck the second you obtain the “Domination” quartz which doubles the damage output of any attack/crafts/s-craft first used in battle, you can pretty much destroy any bosses in one-hit with a turboboosted Laura.

Which further emphasizes how the changes made to the orbment system to make it more accessible/straightforward only made the game battle system a complete mess and while it is fun to break the game in half, it doesn’t necessarily make for an engaging combat system for more than 70 or so hours. Some fights required a bit more strategy like the cryptids which are superbosses scattered across the map but even then, it’s often not that deep either.
But now on top of the regular battle system, you have GIANT MECH FIGHTS !

Those were already featured in the last 20 minutes or so of CS1 but here they are more present, punctuating or sometimes concluding big stretches of the main story for spectacle purposes and while they definitely do a good job at making me hype thanks to the music and the presence of giant robots and all of the implications surrounding their existences on the battlefield, the actual gameplay is a bit rough… but if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve rarely seen any RPG 100% nailing mech combats so I’m not gonna hold it against the game for not perfecting the formula.

The fights are just a guessing game where you have to hit your target in specific areas of their body, that part changing depending on the stance they’re having, a pretty interesting concept bogged down by the fact it’s never obvious what part of the body becomes the weak point and that even if you do hit the weak point, you don’t have a 100% chance of breaking the opponents guards, meaning the best strategy to win most fight is to put yourself in counter stance and let the game break the guards for you. There’s definitely room to improve those fights, they’re a nice little distraction from the mundanity of the main combat system but they definitely need some tweaking to be more engaging and less gimmicky.

Now that we got the most minimal change out of the way first, let’s talk about the actual big ass elephant in the room which is, you guessed it, the story !

CS1 was meant to be an introduction to the world of Erebonia but if you go back and read my review of it, you will quickly notice that this introduction was not only lackluster but also presented in the least engaging way possible. From long drawn-out info dumps dropped in the worst places, the repetitive, dull and predictable structure of its chapter based narrative, its bland and shallow characters I ended up having little to no attachment to by the end of the game and of course a confused mess of a main political conflict backed up by Kondo’s new weird obsession with centrism and faux gray morality and complete misunderstanding of basic concept such as class warfare and the separation of power.

Out of all the 90+ hours it took me to finish CS1 only the ending portion was of any significant interest because that’s where the game started to have an heavier atmosphere with soon to be child soldiers dreading the very real possibility to be drafted and of course the introduction of the big giant mechs introduced earlier as well as the heel turn of one of our party member Crow who is somewhat of a rival to Rean in this game in a kinda Amuro-Char kinda way (which is equally as gay but not equally as good as that aforementioned dynamic).

We start the story in the mountain range separated from all of our comrades with an understandably distraught Rean crying over the potential loss of his friends and after a quick walk in the area, you get saved by your sister Elise who welcomes you to your hometown of Ymir.

Ymir which by the way is a place the team have already visited in CS1 and even fought an Ouroboros member one time, don't you remember it ? Of course you don’t because it was a chapter that was completely absent from the original game instead being repurposed as a freaking Drama CD and let’s be frank, nobody ever in the history of forever listens to those.
After an altercation with the local Ouroboros super bad guy working for the newly established “Noble Alliance” who acts as the main antagonistic force in this game, your sister and the princess of the country gets kidnapped so now Rean has to gather all of his comrades thanks to his giant robots convenient teleportation magic ability.

One thing I appreciate about CS2 compared to CS1 is how the game decides to shake up the core structure of a Trails game, not by much of course but enough to be noticeable. Instead of the game being separated in chapters, this time the game is separated into 3 acts, meaning the narration and overall game structure can be little more free form and if the first act is pretty straightforward (gathering your friends by revisiting previous areas), the 2nd act decides to do something that is in part interesting from a game design aspect but also terrible from a story pacing perspective.

See CS2 was originally meant to be the last 10 hours of the original game, this game’s final act and the entire game pretty much feels like one drawn out quest to gather up your forces and take on the bad guy which I guess is fine if like for Azure it’s the last arc of an otherwise pretty long and substantial game but here, you quickly come to realize that CS2 really struggles to fill its gametime with meaningful story content somehow even more so than the original game which was mostly about nothing.

But the few story bits there are, are in fact a bit more substantial, I just wish that they were actually good.

Starting with the character writing.

It’s no surprise that I value good characters in my stories and the first game completely failed at making me care about the massive cast of playable characters it had. But the Kiseki series is a long series of games with a solid sense of continuity and usually can surprise me with the way they shake things up and manage to make me care about characters I didn’t truly have any reason to give a shit about in the sequel.

But sadly, CS2 manages to somehow fuck up that aspect beyond belief, none and I mean NONE of the characters aside from the main protagonist goes through any form of development, arcs or anything of the sort during the course of the main story. The only character in this game that approaches something even resembling a character arc is Jusis and it just isn’t a good arc whatsoever. It’s an arc about having to come to terms with his family's shitty actions and fight for himself and what he believes in, pretty standard stuff and honestly not handled super well because of something about this game story I will develop in a minute.

Any semblance of characterization or even minuscule amount of development these characters are contained almost exclusively within their bonding events which means that for some reason, the developers thought that something as basic as character writing should be given to the discretion of the player and be completely optional and missable contents !



Alisa or Machias could be the most 10/10 characters to ever grace the medium and I will still have nothing to say about them because I didn’t focus on them at all when allocating bonding points and I certainly wasn’t going to save scum to see all character events which often times can be up to fucking FIFTEEN AT EACH CHAPTER TRANSITIONS. This design philosophy is not only completely asinine but also completely antithetical to the idea of good character writing or just good writing in a video game in general.

Since my love for these characters have been almost non-existent, I had little to no desire to learn more about them and if they wanted me to care, they should’ve given me something to chew on outside of this pathetic excuse of a social link system which completely misunderstood the appeal of such a system from a game which itself already had issues balancing it correctly, but at least Persona feels somewhat competent in the uses of such mechanics, CS1 and even more so CS2 are embarrassingly bad with their take on it.

It’s not even like the bonding events are all that good either, the ones I’ve focused on mostly for gameplay reasons (focusing on characters I actively use in battle for stat boosting rather than because I’m interested in them) have been for the most part barebones, bland and uninteresting.

How come a character like Laura even get past the conceptualization process, all of her bonding events involves her either talking about swords, swinging a sword or philosophizing about… you guessed it SWORDS. Her entire personality and arc revolves around the idea that she’s a swordswoman like she’s a knight class character from some 80’s RPG on the freaking NES and those usually didn’t TALK about their job so goddamn much.

And you can apply this to pretty much any characters in your party, somehow the development team sat at a table and probably pinned drawings of the characters on a white board and then glued sticky notes on them with random words and said “yeup that’s going to be the whole character !”.

Millium is a literal super-spy working for the government but all of your interactions with her will be about cooking stuff and generally be the resident pedo-bait character because this is yet again a very self-indulgent japanese RPG aimed at teenagers or creepy weirdos with reprehensible fetishes.

Emma literally is a walking plot device, her entire character can be summed up as “I knew about it but I didn’t tell you because of my secret mission as a witch” and then bla bla bla exposition and self-pitying about having to hide shit from us, weirdly enough that makes her the most relevant character in the story because she’s pretty much the spokesperson for all of the random lore shit the game plot gravitates around during certain key point of the narrative and she’s also related directly to one of the main antagonist and resident Team Galaxy Admin : Vita Clotilde, a witch that can manipulate people through her singing.

I could go on and on about the characters in this game but really who cares, if the game doesn’t even make the bare minimum to make them interesting or likable, why should I make efforts trying to analyze and discuss them in the first place.

They had two 70-90 hours worth of gametime to do so and they failed miserably so fuck it fr.
HECK EVEN TOWA, THE ONE CHARACTER I LIKE IN THIS DUOLOGY DOESN’T HAVE ANY MEAT TO HER BONES IN THIS ONE, I’ve still defaulted to her for continuity reasons (which further emphasize how dumb that bonding system is in a game series with a supposed one true canon) and because I like her the most but Jesus Christ they even managed to not make me care as much about the only character I had even the slightest of attachment to in this cast.

Which leaves us with our homeboy, our hero, our guy, our light at the end of the tunnel, our shining beacon of hope and righteousness ! Our Protagonist, Rean Schwarzer !

In the original game, Rean was… not that interesting, he was a rather bland, uninteresting character that I didn’t have much attachment or even strong opinion about, he was generic but I guess that in a world full of walking anime clichés passing off as real human being, he fitted in as a player stand-in and blank slate.

That’s not to say he had nothing to his name in the original, we saw the beginning of his self doubt and self-pity linked to an ever consuming desire to protect others oftentimes prioritizing the well-being of others before his own. We also had some hints about his inner powers, like how he can go beast-mode sometimes and have cool white-hair like the dude from Tokyo Ghoul (do people still care about Tokyo Ghoul ?). And lastly, he’s an awakener, one of seven chosen ones (to which we only see 2 of them) who can control the fabled Divine Knights, powerful ancient machines that can do cool magic robot things (and I’ll admit that Valimar’s design is pretty sick !).

But it’s in this game that Rean finally come into his own as a proper character and let me tell you, I wish he kept his mouth shut because Rean went from a character I was completely indifferent towards in the first game to one I actively fucking despise and perhaps one of the worst protagonist I’ve had the displeasure of playing in a JRPG.

Rean is a whiny insufferable little centrist who believes in literally nothing, wants to get involved with nothing in the story and just accepts whatever comes his way like a good little dog without thinking about his actions or developing a single thought or philosophy of his own… NOT A SINGLE FUCKING TIME. Rean lives in a world drought in conflicts and injustice. A world with a rigid class-system that divides the country he lives in. A country where an elite of people can decide on a whim to start a war on its own people in an attempt to push their domination. A world where a minority of its population have nothing but contempt for the people below and will literally sacrifice civilians to prove their superiority.

And yet, the game insists on painting a morally gray framework on such a basic class-warfare type of conflict with the noble alliance presented as “not entirely in the wrong” except the Noble Alliance does absolutely nothing commendable or justifiable for the entire duration of the game, if anything most of them are random cartoon villains who commits atrocious crimes (that you never get to actually see aside from that ONE time but we’ll get back to that) because of their pettiness and need to push their domination on the masses not just through propaganda but also through literal honest to god warfare !


You can’t get more nazi than the noble alliance and yet Rean will still be like : “Yeah but we shouldn’t interfere, we shouldn’t take a side tho, not all nobles are bad people” and I get that being a noble himself, he doesn’t have the perspective to really refute that status-quo but that’s what character development is for, it’s to make him see the injustice of the world and change his vision and work towards making the world a better place. That ideological nonchalance and hypocrisy isn’t just shared by Rean though, it’s shared by all of his comrades of Class VII who are too busy stroking his One Leaf Blade when they’re not busy being drones with no thoughts or personalities of their own.

Which brings me to my next problem with CS2 storytelling, it’s over-confidence in thinking you care about things. See, in most stories you have a build-up and a pay-off and ideally you’d want both of the ends of that rope to be equally as solid to create a good memorable piece of work. CS2 sadly doesn’t have that luxury and as such needs to ride on the very little highs left by CS1 which they weren’t many. What I mean by this is that CS2 being a sequel is normally a game all about pay-offs.

The entire first act is about reuniting with your long-lost friends and seeing what they’re up to in the turmoil of the war, these moments are meant to be filled with joy and relief at the sight of our friends being ok and fending off for themselves pretty well which on paper is great but since CS1 failed to deliver on any reason to care about these characters you just end up sighing when Machias becomes the first party member to join your party in this game because out of any character you wanted back in your crew, that dude should’ve been left to rot inside his freaking windmill.

And the thing is that the entire game has this sort of warm atmosphere to it but since the characterization was so poor in the first game and also didn’t get better with this sequel and at points even got worse, there’s tons of moments that just fall flat !

For example, there’s a scene in between Act 1 and Act 2 where Rean is having a little moment of self-pity, now that’s also something about Rean that just simply doesn’t work, his inner “demons”. During that scene, which is the culmination of hours of character build-up for the guy and a significant character growth moment, we learn that the reason why Rean protects others to the point of self-sacrifice is because of that one time he killed a bear as a child to save his sister Elise. Since then, he swore to be the baddest, strongest motherfucker around to protect others and … really ?

That’s the reason Rean is such a whiny piss baby boy sometimes because he feels weak for… killing a bear as a child ? Either I’m completely media illiterate and feel free to shit on me in the comment for this or the writers had absolutely no idea how to add flaws to the guy to make him feel more human or relatable. The conclusion to that scene is Alfin (Olivier’s adorable but slightly pedo-baity sister) telling Rean that you know… he’s not just the one protecting others, his friends also protect him because they love him. And then Rean takes that information as a completely shocking turnover realization followed by a text box telling you that you can now transform into Kaneki mode in battle at will now in one of the lamest directed and worst written “character realization” scenes you’ve ever witnessed.



Are you fucking serious ? Are we talking about the guy who is disliked by nobody to the point that any vagina equipped individual in a 100 miles radius of him wants his divine blade inside their baby room going “wait a minute… people … like and care about me ???”. I swear on christ that this isn’t a fucking joke, I’m not making a bit here. It’s been a while since I’ve read or watched any of those “Light Novel” related media but oh my god, I love anime but fucking hell it’s stories like these that make me remember that yeah… anime can also be… that bad.

If you really wanna play on a real flaw the character has, why not play out of the fact that the dude is an indecisive fuck who has so little awareness of himself and the world surrounding him that he can’t pick a side or form a single thought of his own that isn’t “let’s go class vii, we’re gonna do it!” and it could potentially lead to some catastrophic situation down the line.

Rean is such a nothing character such a bland power fantasy schmuck for teenagers to project themselves onto that they relied on the oldest trick in the book by sticking a good old “trauma” to the guy to make him somewhat more relatable, because every kids these days have self-doubt so it’s cool and relatable you know ! It’s cool when the character that exists to be my ideal fantasy also has doubts about himself, he really is just like me ! A random whiny zoomer with no thoughts and no real conflict in their life but still want to pretend they’re making a difference while the only thing they’re good at is changing nothing at all and being a pretentious little shit that need to stay the fuck out of adult space because they have nothing to add to society aside from their ADHD riven rant on basic morality while never acting for the good of anything but the small little problems that only concerns them and them alone.

A problem which is even made worse by the fact Rean has a rivalry with another character, Crow ! Crow in the previous game was revealed to be a terrorist dead-set on killing off Osborne for some misdeed he did to the people of Erebonia and while his reasons for living a life of terror and danger is somewhat justified by his circ…

Wait…

What did you say to me ?

They’re not ?

Oh but of course what did I think, that this was a good game with a good inside political, ideological or philosophical conflict ?

Silly me, I almost thought I could develop empathy for an antagonist in this freaking series. Nah, Crow’s backstory is that his home country got annexed by Chancellor Osborne, not because of a violent cold raid but simply through a simple business manipulation tactic that he won fair and square. His grandpa wasn’t even killed by Osborne directly or indirectly nor did he kill himself off of the guilt of losing their territory to the hands of the Empire. His grandpa simply had to retire and live the rest of his life in regret sure but he simply died of old age at least. Heck, Crow even says it himself, he doesn’t think Osborne is that bad of a guy, he simply killed because he got involved with the wrong people in a moment of his life where he was lost, afraid and unsure about how to live his life… YOU’RE THE LEADER OF A TERRORIST GROUP MY MAN HAVE SOME FUCKING SPINE WOULD YOU ????
He even warns us before dropping his backstory that “his story is just yet another sappy story, don’t mock me please” like Falcom themselves are excusing this sorry attempt at character motivation and backstory.

In fact, why the fuck does Crow and his crew still hang out with the noble alliance and helping them committing atrocious war-crimes, his goals and motivation doesn’t seem to align with the noble alliance and he has already accomplished the goal he set for himself by teaming up with the noble alliance so why the fuck does he still commit warcrimes on account of the Alliance… oh yeah probably to fulfill some dumb prophecy about the war of the lions that the people at Phantom Brigade reject are looking to activate for their stupid anime villain plan.

Kingdom Hearts has a better ambiguously homo-erortic rivalry relationship between an MC and his lover rival and if you’re worse than freaking Kingdom Hearts writing, there’s something severely wrong with you as an author.

But could Crow be any better than this ? Yes of course he could, if he had a rival who actually believed in something but since Rean doesn’t believe in anything but solving only the issues that affect him and his friends I guess we’ll never have the Amuro-Char of the zoomer generation but oh well.

Cold Steel has this tendency to try and make you pretend that you care, it doesn’t actually make you care through clever writing or proper scene direction and good dialogues, it only does it in clichés and a complete lack of talent, that whole section I just mentioned took place during the time where the game literally forces to go talk to every single person on the Noble Alliance ship to try and see the other side and understand their point of view. They never actually show you anything, they just tell you stuff in hopes that you would feel even an ounce of empathy for the people on board except for the fact that the noble alliance has really nothing for them aside from either “Osborne did some mildly bad shit to me back in the day”, being literally hired mercenaries or being Ourobozos which might as well be hired mercenaries but see, they’re only helping because of “THE PLAN” ya know, can’t wait to wait another 30 years or so for these chaotic neutral fucker to boast about how strong and powerful they are and how cool and intriguing their “plan” is… (can you tell I’m just tired of Ouroboros at this point, this game as some new members showing up and I’m not even giving a damn… Oh well… I guess Duvalie is cool).

The game always fails at making you feel for anything in its story, world or characters. The game takes place in the middle of an actual honest to god civil war but you never get to see any of it, the world is mostly unchanged, cities and towns are running pretty much the same as usual except you see a soldier from time to time to remind you that this is a war.

Act 2 of the game in general is this gigantic narrative void where the story goes to a halt and turns into a fetch quest hub of epic proportions where you fly around in your airship left and right to do side-quests, explore the world and kill some superbosses. Pretty much doing anything but progressing the story or exploring the consequences of the war (which aren’t even shown since most cities are just kinda… fine and NPC are not all that bothered by the situation either), nah instead you’ll be finding someone’s horse or find ores to craft a neat sword for your cool robots in a McGuffin hunt that only pads out the game story even more.
Act 2 is neat in concept, having a more open structure inside of a Trails game isn’t something this series is known for but the actual content and things you do in those fetch quest are just boring and doesn’t change from the typical mmo-type shit you’d expect from a shitty modern JRPG and the length of that second act is freaking absurd too which only further emphasize how little actual story the game has when out of a potential 70h game at least 30 of those hours are dedicated to… literally nothing !

Most of the action is taking place on the western front but since Rean and his crew doesn’t wanna fuck with the war, they never actually go there and only take back random places because a friend of them was conveniently placed their to be kidnapped and making Centrist Che Guevera intervene.

Yeah isn’t it strange how Rean and his crew is all about not picking a side and not intervening but all they do since the start of the game is infiltrate military bases, do sabotage and other stuff to mess with the noble alliance which just helps the imperial army anyway.
You can even just run around Imperial Army camps no worry, they’re not antagonistic to Rean’s group, heck your party literally has 2 spies working for the (for now) deformed reformist faction which isn’t even something Rean doesn’t know yet it rarely if ever get brought up during the course of the game. Nothing is here to put into question Rean dumb behavior and position in this war. I just think this is actual insanity, Olivier even gives them the key to a literal warship to just go nuts and do whatever.

There is no nuanced political framing here where one camp is so obviously evil that the game fails so hard to find situations to make you feel that what they do is justified and not every noble is evil…

Which leads me to talk about…

The Celdic Incident

So in the middle of the Act 2 Fetch Quest grind, one of the towns, Celdic, gets destroyed by Jusis’s father, a tragic event that claimed the lives of…

check notes

1 random NPC and a couple of non-important, non-habitable buildings… ?

Well whatever, I can’t believe my man Otto freaking died, they must pay for this ! Quick ! Rean ! Activate your sperging power to find a way to psy-op yourself into intervening yet again without you explicitly making the conscious choice to do it… oh wait ! Rufus the 2nd in command of the army and Jusis’s brother made a call, they need to stop Jusis father because he only did this for himself, not for the noble alliance cause, we don’t actually kill people in the noble alliance… at least not on screen !

Well huh… ok then time to fuck him up !

During that entire time, we get to see noble citizens having nothing but contempt for the low-lives of Celdic because they deserved him and also how dare they put Jusis dad in prison ! He was a good governor ! A true noble at heart (a literal war criminal).

So… are we going to have a scene where Rean reconsider his point of view and realize the system is fucked and promise himself to find ways to change it by casting his outdated system of beliefs and make real progress ?

Well no… but maybe closer to his political alignment he would try to reconcile the two sides or find a compromise, well he can’t do that either because centrists never provide solutions, they just observe, say “well that sucks” and move to the next McGuffin dungeon.

This is the closest CS2 has gotten to portray any consequences of this conflict and yet it still amounts to a footnote at best before moving on to the next section of the game.

For a game that take such obvious cues from FFVI in terms of structure and story setting (with the world being fucked over and our heroes having to gather their forces), they never quite understood what made that part of FFVI so memorable and good to begin with...

In FFVI, the world is dead, it’s destroyed, you start the second half in control of Celes stuck on an island with Cid, an old dude and the closest thing Celes has to a family, you go outside your tent and the world is dead, the music is harrowing with a feint empty wind being heard on the overworld even the random monsters you fight die on their own as even they can’t support the corrosion brought forth by Kefka during his rise to power. You're tasked to go get some food for Cid, something you can actually succeed at but the context of the situation will likely make you lose Cid…

Celes, overtaken by all of her bottled up feelings and anxieties and loosing all hopes commits freaking suicide in a freaking 90’s Super Nintendo game, you miraculously survived and back on the continent by that point the game tells you nothing more and your free to see what remains of the rest of civilization and it’s not pretty, eventually, you get back with Edgar and then Setzer the only 2 other mandatory party member to finish the game and with hopes of defeating Kefka by gathering all your forces the most beautiful Airship theme plays out as you go on a quest to “Search for your friends” !

Everything you can do next aside from taking on the Kefka tower is completely optional but highly recommended if you want the best ending and of course because taking on the Tower with 3 under-leveled character is suicide meaning that all the thing you do in this game is to prepare yourself to defeat Kefka, no matter how innocuous the activity may be. When you meet your party members back it’s not just a sappy reunion, it’s more complex, most of the characters are still carrying over the traumas of the days the world wasn’t completely fuck and they now need to find a new place in this new fucked up reality while dealing with the remnants of the demons of their past and grow as persons all of this leading up to your confrontation with Kefka.



Heck, nothing state in the game that taking on Kefka will magically heal the planet, Kefka already won, it would take years for civilization to rebuild itself, you’re just taking one burden off of the people on Earth, it’s an ending that is equally as bittersweet as it is hopeful GOD I LOVE FFVI SO FUCKING MUCH !

NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES ITS STRUCTURE AND GAMEPLAY LOOP IN COMPLEMENT OF THE STORY ! NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES THE UNIQUE TOOL OF THE MEDIUM OF VIDEO GAME TO TELL A POIGNANT STORY THROUGH A COMBINATION OF MUSIC, DIRECTION, GRAPHICS, MECHANICS TO MAKE YOU FEEL SHIT FOR THE CHARACTERS AND THE FATE OF THE FUCKING WORLD ! NO TIME WAS WASTE HERE, EVERYTHING FUCKING MATTER AND THE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY DO STUFF TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER AND MOST OF IT IS TECHNICALLY OPTIONAL SHIT BUT WHO CARES YOU WANT TO DO EVERYTHING AND YOU’LL MISS OUT ON STUFF BUT THAT’S OKAY IT’LL MAKE YOUR NEXT PLAYTHROUGH MORE INTERESTING AAAAAAAAAAAH

SEE FALCOM ? THAT’S WHAT YOUR STUPID VIDEO GAME LACK ! IT LACKS AMBITION, IT LACKS FINESSE, IT LACKS ALL OF THAT SHIT YOU STUPID MONGREL HOW DARE YOU EVEN TRY TO EVEN ATTEMPT AND PRETEND TO COPY FF VI WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN REACH 1/100th OF ITS BRILLIANCE WITH QUINTUPLE THE RUN TIME AND A BIGGER SCRIPT THAN IT HUH ???

Hey you wanna know what all that stupid fucking fetchquesting leads toward the reconquering of Trista, you know the hub-town from the first game ? That’s an exciting moment the entire game has built toward I wonder how it i-

ITS ASS

The army just… leaves for no reason and task the hostages (?????) to run the school and keep it under control, so Rean and friends take on this occasion to go there and low and behold, the noble hostages just confront Rean.

“But this is pointless ?”

“Yeah we know, but we still need to fight because pride of the nobles or some shit”

So you do a boss fight that had literally zero reason for happening and then everyone nods, the hostages were actually fine the whole time and it was just a playful fisticuff for the older students and… Trista is taken back… ending act 2 on a very anticlimactic note…

Hope you enjoyed the 35 or so hours you wasted on Act 2 that lead to this…

The game… really doesn’t give a fuck… it’s insane, there was zero effort put into the actual story.

Yeah sure, you still have Falcom sense of details in NPC dialogues and books but… not the main fucking story, it’s just… wild as shit to me I can’t even begin to process how much this game doesn’t give a fuck and constantly cucks you from experiencing a little catharsis.
It just doesn’t care, even the neat idea of making this game set during the same time as Azure is just an after-thought and the conclusion to that leads almost fucking nowhere and impacts the story very little.

This nonchalance not only translate during the story but even boss-fight, most boss-fight you win in this game by the skin of your teeth (that is a joke, the game is Press Laura to win what did you expect), your characters are on their knees, the boss is going “mmph, that’s all you got ?” then you get your glory stolen by the adult cast which are all way cooler and way stronger than you, you’ve been doing all the heavy lifting but at the end of the day, you guys are just a bunch of students heh ?

I get that this is part of the series to make you understand that the MC will never be the strongest dude around and there’s so many people equally as strong if not more but it wasn’t so in your fucking face before and to lead to something so anticlimatic…

Heck the ending of the game ends on a barely moving death scene (aaaw) followed by the big revelation ! OSBORNE IS BACK AHAHAHA…

Wait a minute…

But we already know that from Azure ?

Wait a minute…

The game just reveals shit to us that we already knew ?

So all of this was for nothing ????

Anyway, Osborne comes tells Rean that he is his real father and then look at Ourogoonos and tell them to fuck off while stealing their plan like a chad because he planned this entire war on himself this entire time to turn Rean into a national icon for his newly establish fascist ethnostate.

Rean of course… agrees to participate in doing warcrimes for the reformist because… well huh… gotta help daddy I guess ???

Look fuck this game

And like a bad joke, it even keeps going after the credit because you thought the final chapter was the final chapter ? Well no you dumb fuck, there’s 2 MORE EPILOGUE CHAPTER

One is … legitimately the only good part of the game because you get to play as Lloyd and Rixia ! OH MAN I MISS PLAYING AS ACTUAL PEOPLE IN THIS GAME THANK GOD ! AND YOU EVEN GET THE CHANCE TO KICK REAN’S ASS WITH LLOYD FUCKING BANNING 10/10 GAME ON FUCKING GOD !!!!

Followed by several hours of the worst fucking final dungeon you’ve ever played through.
Yeah in the last chapter of the game, you go through a randomly generated multi-floor dungeon where you fight recycled bosses from the main game AND a swap color of the final boss of the first game who literally tells you that doing this dungeon… was actually pointless, he literally says it verbatum, I’m not making this up ! Gotta love Falcom’s brand of cheeky humour ahahaha…

I kneel Kondo, I really am kneeling hard, one last final goodbye to the cast and …

OH NO FUCK OFF KONDO ! WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO PLAY ON NG+ TO GET IMPORTANT LORE FOR THE NEXT ENTRY WHAT THE FUCK MAN WHAT THE ACTUAL SHIT I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD THIS GAME SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS

RAAAAAAAAAAAGH THIS GAME SUCKS

So you’re probably wondering why I’m ranking this slightly higher than CS1 well…

For 2 reasons :

Witnessing a story failing at everything it sets out to do in marvelous over the top fashion is somewhat entertaining in its own twisted kind of way
As mentioned earlier, I like what this game does structurally compared to the rest of the franchise (any game where you get to fuck around in an airship and built up an home base by recruiting people has a few more points in my book) and even the dungeon design has seen a significant improvement that I hope to see come to fruition in the rest of the series so there’s that.

CS1 was literally just “white noise : the video game”, homework to do to experience true gaming in the sequel and I must admit that at least CS2 didn’t commit the sinful crime of making me bored to death, there’s definitely a good game buried under all of this trashy nonsense…

But you won’t find it here…

Which leaves me to my conclusion…

Why would you play this ? Yeah the obvious answer is to experience the next chapter in the epic Trails saga, especially if you’re a fan or a masochist like me looking to satiate my curiosity but in general… Why ?

The few good things that CS2 does and heck even what it’s trying to do story wise are things you have likely seen done better in other titles some of which I’d consider true work of art worthy of your attention. Trails is being championed left and right as this life-changing franchise but all I get almost everytime are some average at best game with good ideas and good feelings behind them… But CS1 and CS2 only exacerbated the problem with this franchise, I actually now regret to have been so harsh towards Azure or SC because man, at least they tried, Cold Steel is just chasing trend, taking ideas and throwing them at a wall to see what sticks and if they could bait out the fishies with some good old waifu war.

But if it was only the anime bullshit, it’s also a mediocre attempt at political commentary ? I guess ? Even ideologically speaking, this game is spineless to the point of no return and is constantly trying to sound and look smarter than it actually looks but doesn’t have the balls or the shoulders to carry the boats and the logs ! The writing team behind this game must’ve felt so fucking proud for this last plotwist !

“Hey guess what it’s actually about how centrism is bad because it helped the bad guy !” and it could’ve been almost clever except it’s not and even after that revelation, Rean continues to be a good puppy dog with no spine, no thoughts, no choice no freaking nothing god I hate that character.

So yeah gameplay aside which sucks anyway, there’s the structure and yeah, it’s fun, I must admit I wasn’t completely bored playing this. But… is it really enough ?

If I wanted to play a poor’s man Persona, I’d play Persona
If I wanted to play a game with heavy political writing and a complex nuanced geopolitical setting, I’d play any Matsuno game
If I wanted a game about going around the world to gather people and grew my forces by doing tons of side-content, I’d play FFVI
If I wanted both of the previous statements, I’d play Suikoden which also has the benefit to be like Trails with each entry building off of the previous game in cool ways like .hack did too and those games are also damn good.
Heck I’d even throw Chained Echoes a modern indie RPG that did all of what I just said aside from Persona way better than what CS2 did

Heck if I wanted to play a series with a rich lore to chew on and a solid continuity with charming characters and humors, creative gameplay systems and some surprisingly insightful and dare I’d say ballsy attempt at delivering political messages

I’d play fucking Rance, yes… Rance, an actual honest to god porn game with the most reprehensible protagonist and content in existence but which has more heart and soul poured into it than anything I’ve ever played in my life.

I’d rather fully admit to being a degenerate and a Kingdom Hearts fan (which I am… I know… shocking) than playing Cold Steel 1 or 2 !

CS1 and CS2 are just a copout answer to a regular game recommendation, a good person will direct you to the good restaurant but the weirdoe cultist member who only knows the confine of his cult temple since childhood will tell you that you never eat better than at Veggietales.

Heck by the the time it took me between finishing the game last month and writing this shitass review, FFXVI came out and it had many similarities to Cold Steel especially in terms of structure, pacing and quest design (and not in a good way if you ask me) but by god, after playing FFXVI, CS2 barely was thought at the back of my head, it’s like a version of CS2 that actually worked, with an interesting story, a war setting that takes itself seriously, a badass anarchist hero and some seriously kick ass boss fight that is humanity pilled as fuck.

CS2 was a fascinatingly bad experience and I can’t believe I’m too deep enough into this shit to not hop on CS3 and … CS4 (that one seems to smell some exquisite taste of ass that I just can’t wait to experience)

So TL;DR : Play FFXVI, it’s on PS5 right now and it’s fucking awesome and Clive uses Rean’s asshole as an onahole anytime of the day

Trails of Cold Steel : “It’s a game about nothing”

Been a while since my gigantic review of Azure right ?

I think taking a break between the arcs or heck even between these games is important if you don’t want to end up burning on them. You know, give it a fresh start, give it a fresh new look, give yourself the time to forget about the bad things and enjoy the serie's strengths in retrospect.

Well good for me because the Kiseki grind is not over and there’s a whole new arc to explore this time around with the Cold Steel series. Now to be frank, I was wary about this one, I got a lot of mixed signals from my friends about this, some people loves Cold Steel like it’s the second coming of Jesus Christ but then you have others more reasonable people who have a lot of criticism of the game and let’s be frank neither of those people managed to sold me on Cold Steel.

And looking at it from a distance, this didn’t seem like a good start, a high-school setting, a main character that look just like every Kirito wannabe on the face of the earth even more blatant coomer bait otaku pandering than usual and some stuff I heard from my friends did not bode well for the future of my mental health getting into this game. I knew what I was getting into, it’s trashy JRPG stuff for teenagers to get crazy about on Twitter dot com and kneeling at Rean for being an extreme giga chad of normalcy.

So I went in, tampering my expectations below the ocean floor for this one, thinking that, the series already proved itself enough already and maybe there was a way that my prior investment into the series and the few qualities all the games share with each others in terms of worldbuilding might keep me invested and interested in this right ?

Like this series has set a standard of quality, I’m not a fan of Trails but I can’t deny that in all the issues I had with the series (namely what frustrates me about it that I mentioned in my other reviews), it’s still an ambitious, sincere piece of work with a lot of charm to carry you out for hours even when nothing is happening.


So here I was, bored out of my ass once again in one of my afternoons, and I felt ready, I needed to know what Cold Steel was all about, I needed to form my opinion on it, heck with my expectations being so low it can only positively surprise me right…?

Let’s not play around any longer.

The Legend of Heroes : Trails of Cold Steel is one of the single worst JRPG I had the displeasure of playing and every minute of it felt like actual mind numbing mental torture.

Now claiming such a bold statement for a piece of work with a decent following of people who loves it to death might as well be a death sentence and please, do re-direct all of your future death treats to my dm’s or in the comment so that I can completely ignore them and pretend I’m morally superior to you for not partaking in such trivial display of self-defense and bad intentions.

But I need to get this out of my chest anyway, not only because I have nothing better to do, giving my unneeded opinion on everything is pretty much the solid foundation of my career and because this looks like a job for me, so everybody just follow me cause we need a little controversy cause it’d be so empty without me.

I’m not going to do the old song and dance in this review by re-explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the Trails formula because at this point very little has changed (or at least they took a worse direction overall in terms of execution, more on that later) so let’s just talk about the game itself.

The game is set in the Empire of Erebonia, a vastly overhyped land that was constantly mentioned in the earlier entries in the series most of the time as an antagonistic force so let’s at least address the one positive of such as a setting.

You’re witnessing the event leading up to a full-scale war launched by an expansionist faction who just love to colonize and annex stuff from inside the invader country, it’s a really interesting setup as we rarely get games taking place inside of the “evil empire of doom” most RPG’s tend to have and Erebonia’s situation is a bit more complex than it may seem at first since the Empire itself has its own sets of issues mainly a social caste one. With the nobility still being a thing so we have dukes and lords and barons and the plebs, the commoners but with the advance of technology and change in social habits and custom some commoners have gained prominence in the higher state of society and are now politicians, CEO’s, Generals and some of them have formed the “reformist” faction who are opposed to the “noble faction” which have two lines of thinking “Nobles are cringe and commoners rules but expansionism is based and we should conquer more land to get the point across'' think of it as Stalinism interpreted by a Japanese author who is not super well read on those ideologies.

That is arguably, a fascinating setting for a JRPG and one that could if done correctly rival with the setting of Crossbell which was a whole can of worms onto itself and this is in those instances that even thought the entire rest of the game will absolutely fail at doing anything remotely interesting with that setting that if anything Trails is good a framing the action of their stories in interesting coat of paint.

But then you scratch the paint and you realize that the game is very, very, very rusty and full of cavities and holes and its inner machination is faulty and at times completely out of touch with any form of tangible reality or common sense.

So what POV does the game choose to tell this story, in the Sky Series we played as bracers a private militia with the goal to help the common people without involving themselves in politics, in Crossbell we played as the SSS a special brigade of the police who does the job of bracers but unlike them can actually run investigations and involve themselves with political affairs.




In this game, you play as Rean Schwarzer (a piece of white bread that the game will pretend to be a good protagonist) , a fresh new student going to Thors Military academy. So yes, the framing for this story is that you’re playing as… high-school students… and yes… it’s as thrilling as it sounds…

Look, I don’t mind school setting, I really don’t and in fact some of my favorite pieces of media have a school setting or heavily feature teenagers but as I grow older and bitter and more cynical, my tolerance and patience towards those elements decreases with time. I guess this is my L for playing a video game aimed at a certain demographic of people and complaining about not being catered to but let’s see how the game execute that concept, afterall, I’m all for a good, funny, wholesome high-school slice of life from time to time and it seems like the main bulk of the game anyway.

Now ok, what is the single-most important aspect of any story ? Regardless of genre, regardless of conventions, regardless of scale or ambitions.

That’s right, it’s the characters, my rule of thumb is that you can make even the most basic mind-numbingly cliché story amazing if the characters are awesome (cf. Most of the “Tales of “ series) and boy we sure have characters this time around because guess what, you don’t just have 1, not 2 not 3, not 4 but 9 !

9 fucking playable characters in this game which compose your main party, as you can see this is a large cast of characters which I mean, fine, I don’t mind it but that’s a bit overkill this early into a story as you can’t possibly hope to make all of them standout by the end and you will run into the issues of having a few weak link amongst the party.

Heck even my favorite RPG, FFIX with its cast of 8 playable characters by the end of the game, ends up having 2 characters pretty much being slot fillers that don’t contribute much to the story as a whole and are just here to break the game in half with their abilities but at least you meet them progressively and not all of them dropped on you from the start so they can get a bit of breathing room for them to get introduced before they can wipe the floor with Death Blue Magic.

And you know at least, these characters have personalities, interesting dynamics, layers to them and their arc and even though not all the characters are special, at least the ones who stand out are some of the most compelling characters I’ve had the pleasure to accompany in an RPG.

This is something JRPG understood fairly early on when they started giving a shit about pushing deeper more ambitious narrative into the forefront of the experience, if you want people to spend hours in a game and getting invested into its world, lore and themes, you need good characters to channel those elements and make them shine more brightly.

Well let me tell you that Cold Steel spectacularly fails in epic proportion at making its cast of characters likable or at least interesting, they are the equivalent of paper cutouts with a ChatGPT prompt attached to their mouth and the depth of a glass of water that’s been half-emptied and then left unattended for 9 days straight.
While it is usually a pretty low criticism to say, here it is legit the truth, most of the characters in this game are just a collection of one note anime cliché with almost nothing more going for them beyond that initial first impression. And maybe you’d be like : “But Cani, maybe they start as clichés but then evolve into fully fledged characters through trials and tribulation”, they don’t and I wish I was kidding.

“But do they have like… conflicts with the world or between themselves to make them grow as characters ? Motives that drive them to do the things they do ?” At this point, you might just be grasping at straws trying to find gold. Falcom decided to do the novel idea of making you use your imagination to imagine what these characters could’ve been had they been handled by competent writers who actually cared about the topics they were trying to talk about.

So the context behind how our ragtag team of wet towels got together to become friends and maybe saving the world or some shit is fairly straightforward. At Thors Military academy, classes are usually separated between nobles and commoners with nobles getting extra privileges like exclusive rooms for them and an actual extended vacation period whereas the commoners have a whopping 5 days of break in the whole school year (terrible news, I know right ?) but this time, things are getting a bit wacky and experimental.

Usually the academy has 5 class but this year there’s a 6th one cleverly name “Class VII” (they make a joke about it but don’t expect it to make sense at least in this entry), in class VII members of the nobility and commoners are mixed together into one group to see if they can get along and be friends with each others, they also have a special curriculum which mostly consist of going on on field trips where they’ll fulfill request for the citizen of Erebonia (which is the convenient excuse this game found to justify its terrible structure and quest system more on that later).

This opposition between commoners and nobles is the main conflict of the narrative but it’s only crystalized by two of the most annoying characters I’ve seen in an RPG yet, Machias and Jusis. Machias HATES the nobility because of some old trauma about her sister being bullied into suicide or at least that’s what you learn about after 40h of the game in perhaps the game worst chapter and the dude just can’t stand having to team-up with nobles (rightfully so) so you’d think he’d have a problem with all the nobles but he only has issues with Jusis, a snarky, indifferent asshole, who’s a noble but doesn’t care about all the etiquette coming up with it.

These two character dynamics is the most annoying and cliché thing shit ever, it goes nowhere, they grew to tolerate each other in the span of one chapter but that’s about it and their dialogues might as well be sandpaper for my eyes, they literally have the dynamic of the “enjoyer vs fans” meme, if you liked poor people before, get ready to fucking hate them with Machias… or will you ?

See, you quickly realize that even in its own setup, the game cannot handle that conflict for shit, in Class VII there are only 9 members, 3 of which are nobles and the rest are all commoners, the ratio is a bit unbalanced but alas it gets worse. See because this is a JRPG, every character needs to be a super special character, so all the commoners in class VII do not actually fit the definition of commoners, if anything they’re a product of bourgeoisie.
The commoner characters are either the sons of important political figures, generals or CEO of a multinational company or in the case of Emma while the game doesn’t say it outright yet, she’s a member of a long lineage of secret guardians of the world which is meant to guide Rean (the chosen one of some prophecy we haven’t been briefed about yet but it might happen in the sequel). The only character in the party that can fit the definition is Gaius but that’s because he’s an immigrant from a society where social caste don’t even exist at all so the man is completely outside of that conflict except to show us a different point of view (and pointing out how dated Erebonia’s society is).

This of course gets even worse when around the 70h mark, you get 2 other party members who are also commoners and also have a deep secret past that make them super special (except one will turn out to be the main antagonist of the game real identity, woops, spoiler I guess), now mind you this is actually very thoughtful of the game to finally give us characters that are actually likable and endearing in our main party so late into the game, I’m fine with that but still it’s a bit too late on the uptake.

So you have nobles (who are for the most part not representative of the noble faction at all, nor nobles in general since they need to be “one of the good ones” to be in a JRPG party) and commoners who aren’t really commoners at all and never once represent the real struggle of the common everyday man, a great way to introduce this arc central conflict I guess but somehow it gets worse.

With this setup alone, you realize that what little conflict and themes the game had behind it is completely muddled by a confused writer who has no idea how class warfare even works, this is something I already noticed back when I reviewed yet another game by Kondo “Ys IX Monstrum Nox” which was also another boring slog of a game that shat on Ys’s entire legacy with empty fanservice and terribly bare bone gameplay and level design while trying to make a somewhat confused weirdly political point that just amounted to “Centrism the videogame”.

Chapter 4 of Cold Steel was perhaps one of the rare occasions while playing an RPG that I felt like somebody was ripping my brain apart. A whole lot of things happen in this chapter and a whole lot of nothing too, the gang goes to the capital for some annual festival. Two characters didn’t have an established character arc or any conflict yet so let’s just spawn one out of the blue despite these two characters barely interacting with each others for the past 40h so they have a bit of beef with one another which is this bizarre “I hate you because I love you, stop hiding shit from me” deal and like… what the fuck is this bizarre excuse to lead up to a character dumping their entire life story on you. I get that these are teenagers and teenagers tend to act irrationally at times but this felt very tacked on and was also presented in the lamest way possible (in the lamest in-engine combat cutscene I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing).

But on top of this, you also have more “Machias” moment who at this point of the story stopped being a shitty nerd with prejudice against the nobles and became an advocate for the #NotAllNoble movement, this scene where Machias explain his backstory and then proceed to explain how he changed his opinion made me cringe so hard that I let the game ran in the background for a solid hour and decided to take a shower and grab a beer at how asinine this take is.
Cold Steel, but I’d say Kondo is the kind of person that just runs on sophistry alone, Kondo is the type of person who is wholly uninterested in answering the political conflicts of his story that he will just either not address them or address them in the most out of touch way possible. See, the idea that a society is divided in two camps, one with privilege and the other without any is enough to set the stage for a revolution plotline but not in Kondo’s stories, Revolution is a brutal, outdated way of leading up to a deep change in power dynamics. Kondo prefers to stay in his position because there are good people in the dominant class, therefore, the system is fine and just needs some tweaking to flow better.

That is complete horseshit and sophistry of the highest level, we live a world right now where social divide is as steep as ever, people at the top are indifferent pedantic asshole with the power to get anything they want at the flick of a hand and can exploit millions of people just for being born under the right circumstances or because they stole assets and profited out of them. For as much as I’ve criticized Falcom’s villain for being corny Saturday Morning Cartoon characters, we now live in a world where these characters can be seen as almost realistic depictions of real life individuals.

Let me indulge in being a massive commie here, when people point out systemic issue in a general sense by saying X privileged group of people are responsible for the suffering of less fortunate people, if you answer is : “But not all of them are bad tho”, get ready to have my foot up in your ass because we simply do not care. What we care about is changing the system for the better or at best get rid of it entirely if its based on no solid foundation and the fact that noble exist in Erebonia don’t have solid foundation and that’s even something that the characters point out in the chapter right before it during one of the game many side-quest so why trying to push a narrative of common ground and acceptance, a so called “third” way that takes the best of both world when one side clearly is answering for the plies of the majority of the country’s population.

Mind you, this is just what I got from what little time the game actually brought up these topics up because and that’s the worst part about this game, Cold Steel seems to be wholly uninterested in its own setting and also in addressing the questions and themes they brought along with them, because this doesn’t constitute the bulk of the game and also because in order to make me even care about these topics, it would’ve been a good start to make us follow characters that are well written and likable and entertaining.

Because of the game's shitty structure, whenever tension arises in the story, the game just looks the other way and wants you to grind for more conclusions making it a game about nothing. Most of this game is just empty and void of any potential interest and is only interested in wasting the players time in pointless trivial matters like preparing for a school festival or retrieving someone’s hat (and I swear this is a mandatory quest, you need to do to progress through the game).

In great part due to the game’s structure and pacing.





As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’ve mentioned my game time at several point in my review, to contextualize when the stuff with the game I had problem with arose and that’s because I just wanted to point out that Trails of Cold Steel is a game that took me 100h to complete but since the in-game time is affected by turbo-mode, I will probably say it was closer to roughly 75-80h, nonetheless without turbo mode almost constantly on, this would’ve been the tangible reality of my game time with this game.

Trails games and this isn’t something that started with Cold Steel are long but they often struggle to justify their own length in a meaningful way. There is this common misconception in media analysis that the more time is spent on a piece of media is representative of its level of complexity and interest, that if a game takes its time to tell the things they have to tell then it must mean that it has a lot of things and a lot of interesting to either tell or to make us experience from a gameplay perspective.

Now it is no surprise that Trails game are very wordy, it’s a fact I already pointed out in the Crossbell arc which was a duology of game I’ve jokingly called “more of a visual novel than an RPG” especially for how long the cutscenes and dialogues were in comparison to the time you spend playing the game. Nonetheless, you do play the game, and the game lets you explore its gameworld to participate in classic JRPG affairs like combat, dungeons and of course side-quest that has always been the main point of contention of the game.

Now Trails of Cold Steel is the 6th entry in the Kiseki series, less than 10 years separate the first Trails in the Sky to Trails of Cold Steel so you’d naturally think that the formula has add a positive evolution from the rigid constant use of back and forth between segmented area of the first game, heck even Crossbell proposed an interesting change of pace by having an hub town attached to a bunch of adjacent routes you explore almost in its entirety in the first 15 to 20h of the game but that’s because Crossbell was a small country, here in Erebonia, to give you the sense that the country is large, you traverse the country by train. Meaning the game forces you to go where it wants you to go, but given that those games are linear by nature, it’s not all that terrible.

The problem is that the series already rigid structure has been more rigidified by some choice, each chapters and I mean each chapters plays exactly the same :

-A first day of going around talking to NPC
-A Free Day of going around doing quest and talking to NPC ending on the exploration of a new floor old school house (which is very mysterious place you visit multiple time which is just a reason to get one similarly boring se and repetitive sewer
dungeon to go through at the start of each chapters)
-Followed by a practical exam day which are literally small tutorial fights (and yes you get tutorial fight even in the final chapter 90h into the game)
-Followed by an exposition train trip where you play card games for extra bonding point (more on that later)
-2 (sometimes 3 when the game feel very spicy about it) days worth of pointless fetch quest inside one of the games many town and surrounding areas
-Concluded by (but only starting with Chapter 3) a terrorist attack where you beat the bad guy but they get away and then the news says “Damn, lots of shit happened heh?”
-Then it’s back to the start of the cycle repeat for 6 10 to 15 hours painfully long chapters
Rarely does the game ever deviate from that structure which makes every individual chapter more predictable than the last but also makes each instance of the game padding itself out even more obvious and increasingly annoying as time goes on.

In my previous review of Trails to Azure, I said that the game pacing was excellent but bogged down by the game constant need to pause its action to make us partake in pointless errant of various quality and for the first time ever some of these errant were mandatory to progress into the game with the game sometimes having a weird sense of priorities as what was considered important quest (and as such mandatory) and the ones that could be skipped (which sometimes were actually more story relevant).

And I suggested naively that if they wanted to go moving forward in that direction, they should make things more explicit as to avoid people missing out on important context and lore like that was the case with Azure and so they did the most logical move, make 90% of the side-quest in the game mandatory.

You’ve heard me right, long are the days of getting the luxury to skip on mediocre monster hunt side quests if you didn’t like going through them since this time around you WILL hunt these monsters inside sewers and you WILL enjoy it whether you like it or not. Oh sure the game still has a few game objectives that are completely optional (and even dares to still have secret side quests seriously how is it still a thing). And the worst thing is that they didn’t stop and thought for one second to change the way these games plays out, I hope you like having to arbitrarily do a random monster hunt to progress through the game because this is what most of the climatic big quest of this game consist of and it’s fucking terrible.

Let’s indulge in a bit of game design analysis and try to comprehend this sudden rise in rigidity in a series which already had an issue liberating itself from the shackles of its own faulty foundation.

See, with Trails Falcom has created a really cool world that they’re really proud of and one of the things they are probably even more proud of more than anything else is their NPC’s who constantly update their dialogues for every minor advancement in the story and help the world feel more lived in as you experience micro-level arc and the life of these random people alongside your own journey.

It is one of the core aspect of the series and one of its best idea ever since the original game but in order for this aspect to work on people, you need to condition people to participate in it and while some people are easier to convince than others when it comes to asking them to always recheck all the NPC’s every time you advance the story even in a minor way, others may not.

See most JRPG only ask you the bare minimum when exploring a JRPG town, usually you’re going to enter a town, talk to all the NPC’s to gather clues, learn more about the world or more broadly to advance the plot and maybe check the shops and explore the area to see what other thing might hide in between the streets of these bustling cities but in general this is a one and done thing and unless we’re talking about a semi or full hub town that you come back to constantly and change with time, most of the time it’s a one and done kinda deal, rarely do talking to NPC multiple time at different point worth the hassle.
But in Kiseki it is such a core aspect of the experience, so how do you unconsciously manipulate your player into partaking in such an activity ?

Well by designing the game in a way that will push the people toward that experience and it’s with this game that I finally understood the secret sauce behind what makes Trails side-quest so terrible, these fetch quest and not meant to be interesting, they aren’t meant to be fun, heck they aren’t even meant to fill out the game with content like you’d see in a lot of modern RPG’s.

They are meant to put you on a tour, each quest consist of you going back and forth around the areas the chapter take places in so that you will probably think unconsciously to re-check on all the NPC’s, it’s not about how good the side-quest are, it’s about how these side-quest will force you to a second, third, fourth or even fifth lap of the single area the chapter takes place in and as such, you will have the reflex (or not) to re-talk to the NPC who are on your path to complete these various objectives.

But then how do you encourage the people to even do the side-quest if they’re so boring ? Well before Cold Steel the main incentive behind them was to gather money, you see in Trails you can trade elemental crystal called “sepith” for money but Sepith are also used to create quartz and unlock orbment slot to make your character stronger so using too much Sepith for money means missing out on making your characters better in battle and they might be drag behind the game (very generous) difficulty curve, monsters do not drop money in this game so the only method to get money without trading Sepith were, you guessed it, the side-quest which always gave just the right amount of money to upgrade all of your characters gears as you proceed to the next chapter.

But the Sky games were smart about this by giving its players choice, you can choose to do the side-quest or not, so imagine if there’s a couple of quests that you didn’t want to do like let’s say the monster hunts which were always the most fillerish type of quest in any JRPG, well you can simply skip them, you might not obtain the money, or bracer point for 100% completion or the extra goodies that come along with them but you will spend less time doing unfun shit and you can always use some spare Sepith to fill the gap in your wallet.

But in Cold Steel a new type of Sepith was invented, Sepith Mass, the only purpose of Sepith Mass is to be sold for money, you can’t use them in any other ways (and at this point, why don’t the game simply give you money I hate that gameplay quirk) meaning that the game brought back regular money grinding into a series that has always structured its difficulty and gameplay loop around limiting the player sources of income to force them into doing things they might not have been willing to do in the first place.

Mind you, you can still use regular Sepith for money and by the midway point of the game where all your character are fully upgraded they make it so you never run out of money ever, but that risk vs reward between selling sepith over doing side-quest is completely gone and so with the main purpose of those side-quest being removed, people will be more inclined to skip them and we’ve already mentioned how Falcom doesn’t want to do that for the sake of not making the time spent on making all the NPC’s and their updated dialogues wasted because of the regular player unwillingness to be curious and it’s especially bad to lose your player, especially in a game that was meant to attract a new audience.
So what is the obvious solution ? Well if players won’t go to the side-quest, we’ll make the side-quest go to them and that’s how you end up with a game that has to pad out and fill the gap between important event with pointless errants that the players now MUST WITHOUT ANY QUESTIONS DO !

Oh sure they are still “optional quest” but they represent 10% of the quest this time around and also yes, you’re not rewarded with money for them so feel free to skip them, I did all the side-quest in this game and most of the optional quest reward was not worth the hassle of doing them, I did them just out of completionist sake and to get those sweet sweet AP bonus which are this time around the only thing pushing you towards those optional thing.

And so you’d think, maybe they would make those errant more entertaining, fun or enticing in any way, well no and most of the time the game will make you understand the definition of insanity when most of the quest in the game are regular monster hunt quest and this is how you end up with a game where you’re still rendered at killing monsters in sewers at the 40h mark of the game while the story has still gone nowhere interesting or is spectacularly avoiding to get you in on the good shit.

And this time around, this particular Trails cannot compensate for its shitty structure with good, entertaining or even charming writing for the life of it and can’t even do it through its gameplay either.

Oh yeah because it’s not enough that the game is a boring slog with almost nothing engaging or even charming going on for it, it’s also a boring slog that made the gameplay of the series worse somehow. Trails gameplay was always kinda fun, it was not the revolution of the century but you could see that the more the series progressed and they more they tweaked some of its elements to make more varied boss and monster encounter and make use of its excellent arts and craft system at the center of it all and one thing that lays the foundation of such a solid system were the Quartz system.

Well fuck me because they decided to make orbment and Quartz way worse in this game, see in the previous games in the series, you had to arrange quartz in certain way to gain access to new and more powerful spell, the players needed to struck a good balance to get access to the most move possible while still profiting of the advantages given by each individual quartz like stat increases or additional effect, the system allowed for a lot of customization and a bit of experimentation, often times limiting the player with the characters different align to push them into playing them a certain way or to try and overcome these limitations.

Not this time tho, now you have quartz that give you stat boost and additional effecst and now you have quartz who are specifically designed to give you one spell, no more messing around with crystal combination and doing math, our players don’t care about an actually good progression system or having fun with an RPG, they want to get through the shitty slog part of the game faster so they can get to the twisty twist turn shit faster. This change severely reduces the utility of Arts which used to be main meta of Trails especially on higher difficulty and as such render characters who are either full-caster or mixed-attacker in the game completely and utterly useless outside of spamming their support crafts which are for the most part absurdly good.
Now be ready to just jack your physical attackers with as much strength boosting accessories and quartz as well as passive status effect and spam the ever living shit out of AoE attack like it’s FC’s endgame on steroid, past the midway point of the game most fight can be trivialized by out-dps’ing or simply not let monsters and bosses take turn.

Because all of your characters have insanely broken crafts, the crafts are so broken in this game whether they’re offensive or support type that they render the use of certain arts completely useless, in fact most arts are useless after a while despite the game tutorial making you think that it wouldn’t be the case and that you’d still need to cast a spell and heck now with the Zero-Arts bonus in combat that can pop-up, you can still use them without any cost.

More than never, the determining factor towards victory now are the master quartz an element introduced in Azure that didn’t have much influence on combat and was this game attempt at a job system but now in a setting where Quartz have been jumbled up to favor just powermaxxing everything, Master Quartz are now going to be essential to mix up your gameplay… or not…

The one that are installed by default on your characters are for the most part the best quartz adapted to them and even if you can get new master quartz throughout your adventure, by the time you get them, you MQ would’ve already evolved past a point where it would be worth changing them (Rean and Laura Master Quartz makes them absolutely stupid from the early game all the way to the final boss)

Wow amazing how the game has 11 party members by the end but half of them are rendered almost useless by this change, what else do we have to do to save this mess of a change ?

Well the main new feature that Cold Steel adds to the gameplay of Trails is the addition of links, you can link your character between them for additional advantages in battle and by using certain type of weapons on enemies (with the damage type borrowed from at the time Ys Seven and Celceta), you can initiate a break and chained them with an additional attack.

As you progress through the game, chaining link attack become a good way to inflict serious amount of damages and after a certain point in the game, you can do the rush attack from the Crossbell titles after chaining 5 link attack (which I think is a good limitation over how Crossbell games handled that feature). The more characters are linked together and the more they gain link points and when their link levels up, they can do even more additional action like counter-attacking or protecting their allies or auto-healing.

This is a pretty neat system sadly not exploited to its full potential here in this title because outside of 2 notable exception, this game is painfully easy, ofc part of the blame is on me for playing on normal like always but no thoughts was put into most of the aside bare the 2nd fight against C which was a welcome raise in difficulty.



Sadly 2 things bog down the fun factor of the system for me, the first one is having to resettle the links everytime someone dies, resettling the link doesn’t sacrifice a turn but it’s something you can easily forgot to do until you’re 5 turns in wondering why you can’t break enemies and then realizing that you just forgot to re-link, I think link should be regenerated if one of the pair gets revived without having linked to another character in the meantime, it’d be a great way to do this, also regenerate the link after battles, it’s just kind of stupid but heh, a bit of QoL wouldn’t have hurt and the other thing is the fact than in order to make full use of this system well… you have to actually give enough of a shit about the character to bond with them and level them up faster.

Because yes, back to writing (and also gameplay).

CS1 seems to take a lot (perhaps a bit too much) inspiration from other popular RPGs at the times, the setting is like Final Fantasy Type-0 (to the point of plagiarism) and the way the game tells its story borrows a lot from the Persona series. I could make a commentary on why I don’t think NU-Persona (heck Rean strikes the same pose as Yu Narukami in battle if that isn’t enough proof) should be this influential on this market but that’s not the subject what I mean by this is that the already rigid structure of the game is completed by a bunch of mechanics and narrative trick ripped straight out of Persona without really understanding the point of them.

The game has a calendar system and even multiple time slot often mention each day but that’s about it, it only serves to place the events of the game on a timeline something that the other titles didn’t need to do in the first place so I don’t know why it’s here, there’s no time management, there’s no prioritizing activities or social link over the other, there’s no meta to that system. However what the game has is something similar to the Social Link from Persona called “Bonding events”.

Now Bonding Point and Bonding events was already an element I complained about in Azure but in that game it was sort of an hidden but hinted at feature that was sadly ruined by bad programming and also by Azure oftentimes bad sense of narrative priorities (hiding who character backstory behind the final bonding events for exemple).

I also said that while I don’t mind a bit of player agency and choice for a personalized experience in my JRPG, I also felt like this feature was a bit pointless in a game that is supposed to have one true canon and that there is no way any subsequent game especially from different arcs could follow through on the individual romantic (or not) choice of the players.

But in Azure, it was discreet, badly programmed and not implemented super thoughtfully but at least it was a subtle way to make the player experience with the game more unique depending on how he acted during the game. CS1 decides to fully embrace that aspect of the game and making it more explicit and I do not feel like it pulled that off successfully either and in fact because the characters in this game are rather dry and bland, I had a lot of trouble actually giving a shit about any of them during regular gameplay and I guess they expected me to like them more through their bonding event and fellas, let me tell that if this was the plan then I’m sorry to say that I see the vision but I feel like the vision is shit.

Persona at least try to make the characters and their dynamic compelling outside of their social link and even though the divide between Social Link and main story creates inconsistencies, at least you were probably more willing to learn more about these characters because they have fun interactions with one another that cement them as real people with personalities, doubts, feeling and not just a succession of one-dimensional anime trope with a character design.

I think a lot of CS problem also comes from the presentation of its story, being the first game of the series for the PS Vita and the first game in Full 3D, I can’t say that the change in arstyle brought with it a net positive, sure environments are in 3D but from the dungeons to the different towns and cities that doesn’t really make a difference since they seem structured in a similar fashion than in Azure except now the game presentation needs to rely on cinematography and I think that Falcom didn’t really nail that aspect at all, the scene composition and direction of the scenes and dialogues are so bad, because the party is so large a lot of cutscene just involve all of them sitting around and blocking each other from the view and it makes for very cluttered scene where not much emotions or anything could be displayed to full intensity.

While I was writing this review, I got curious and watched the CS1 musical adaptation and while it couldn’t fix the gaping ideological and thematic holes in the story it definitely did a better job in selling me on these characters in 2h than this game failed at doing in 80 and that’s saying something about how just a little change like characters being more expressive and proper stage direction can do wonder to an average/mediocre story (in fact RIP character portrait it legitimately hurt the game even more visually). I’m not criticizing the graphics here since Falcom probably wanted this game to sell to a wider audience and most of them can’t handle anything else in terms of artstyle but I will say that the transition to 3D wasn’t an improvement but could’ve been had Falcom would have cared more about directing than just dumping a bunch of text to fill textboxes and embrace other type of narration something they’ve always struggled to do even in the earlier titles.

In fact even the writing this time around I felt to be a bit stiff and lifeless which definitely didn’t help me care about what the game was trying to say, I think this is more of a prose issue this time around, I’m missing the charm and quirkiness of the writing in games like Sky (especially sky) and the Crossbell game. CS1 relies a bit too heavily on unfunny forced sex jokes because “anime” or make their character just have the most annoying dialogue ever like Machias, it’s like CS1 is Trails skinwalker because it’s trying to be like those legacy titles but can’t do it even in the NPC dialogues.

The game just doesn’t let the character group dynamic shine because it also feels the need for gameplay reason to separate the group in 2 in all field studies which makes you feel like you never get time to know these characters as people despite the game spending a considerable amount of time trying to make you care about their school activities.

Some people might say that finding CS1 boring but FC charming is gonna be up to my taste and while it is true, FC only got better with time and while FC has less things going on than CS1, at least it wasn’t trying to blueball you with a real story until the final moment which was genuinely hype as fuck, it was a game carried entirely by the relationship and complicity of its two main lead and the guest characters coming along the way.
CS1 has too many characters and doesn’t have time to spend for a lot of them, Trails work best with a smaller cast that grow larger as the game goes on but CS1 build such weak foundation that you’d rather do anything but waste your time desperately grasping at straws to find an ounce of quality to the game’s writing, atmosphere or structure which all works against him.

Even Rean, the main character of this game couldn’t be more barebone for the life of me, he’s a random LN default looking guy with a sword with the personality of a brick and the social awareness of a cloister and the narrative always try to propel him to be this incredible badass while also pushing a Shirou FSN narrative of him being reckless because he hates himself or has trauma or ofc has some sort of curse in his vein that turn him super saiyan from time to time because anime… he has almost no chemistry with any of the female characters even Alisa which is a character many people like but that I just found annoying the whole way through (definitely has at least character motives which is more than nothing I guess),

I just couldn’t bare to care about these characters or even the few good things borrowed from the series legacy had to offer, I think that after 6 games, effort should be made to improve a game formula and not making it worse in every conceivable way and a lot of the tool the game uses to keep you going and invested are really cheap including the ending.

Crow standout as a really cool character but the way the game foreshadow his twist couldn’t be more obvious and in general you feel like this game just care as much about me about all of the stuff it’s presenting to you, it’s infodumping you on stuff in the most bland way possible like in bar or classroom, it’s reflecting on subject matter it barely has any knowledge or deeper understanding of, it nullify all sense of urgency by showing and telling you that shit are happening but you’re doing things that has nothing to do with the shit happening despite having chapter names that make those story beat more badass than they actually are.

They give so little shit, that the final chapter of the game, I kid you not is the worst lead-up to a final dungeon and final boss I’ve ever seen, first of all the final chapter is about a school festival and preparing for a concert like it’s some bad Naruto level filler, you play freaking mini-games, you go on date, suddenly the old schoolhouse lights up and the characters take the whole situation super seriously, you got the epic music, you got the chuuni quotes, you got the weird surreal environment, yeup doesn’t feel like the climax of the game but it’s the final dungeon anyway and you’re going to fight the final bos which is just a really lame fight coming off of the last boss you fought which was the only genuine challenge of the game.

Then it’s followed by several hours of cutscenes to complete the school festival arc with the final concert which… I understand it was meant to be this emotional peak and a huge accomplishment for the characters solidifying their bonds but because of how badly the game managed to develop or make me care about them, this doesn’t feel earned at all and then…

Well



The only really well done part of the game happens in the last few hours, a roller coaster of twist and turn and melancholic vibe featuring child soldiers being scared of being deported and giant robots punching each other in … huh… let’s say … functioning gameplay ?

But even these last moments feel like a cheap way to make you stay and check out the sequel rather than something truly impactful and earned, like yeah sure if this was let’s say FC, I would be like “oh shit” but here, not really and it’s sad really.

Because that ending really slaps dick, it’s really cool, I just don’t feel like the game earn such a finale after failing at building all the foundations necessary to make this ending worth it, the game feel like a waste of my time, a waste of my energy, a waste of my mental health.

And then it just decides to blueball you like that, I just don’t really have much respect for this, even earlier it was doing it with the intro of the game being a flashforward to an event which was a red herring and nothing really major or important and it even dares make you replay through the intro again when you reach that part, gotta love reused content and padding, well played guys.

Mind you, I do plan on still checking the sequel one of these days, not out of excitement to know what will happen next but because I’m too deep into this to stop now and I’m also morbidly curious to see how low that ship could sink.

So…

Huh…

I forgot to mention the actual one positive of the game

IT’S TOWA HERSCHEL OMG, GUYS, GUYS, GUYS, I LOVE HER, SHE SAVED ME GUYS, ALL THE MOMENT WHERE SHE WAS ON THE SCREEN IS THE BEST MOMENT! SHE’S SO SMOL AND CUTE AND HARDWORKING AND I WANT TO GET HER OUT OF THIS GAME AND SHE’S THE ONLY REASON WHY THIS GAME IS A 2/10 INSTEAD OF A BIG FAT 1

FUCK AM I GETTING PSY-OPPED INTO PLAYING MORE OF THESE BECAUSE OF CUTE GIRLS ?

FUCK YOU KONDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The sorrow of a thousand thousand worlds weighs heavy, and yet, you can walk on.

Endwalker is a tale of loss, of fire, and faith, a journey of self discovery and enlightment, teaching us to value life and to find joy even in the deepest and darkest of despair.

What people live for ? What give their lives... meaning ?

From time immemorial, Man had always tried to answer this question. But a single and simple answer it seems not to be, so when striken by sorrow, rage, despair or hatred, Man faced harsh reality and came to curse life itself. Overwhelmed by negative feelings, he deemed the pursuit of power, only to become the architect of his own demise. Indeed, doomed by the failure of finding happiness, he seek deliverance in death or conflict with others.

Our existence seem pointless, life is fleeting and hardships are an inescapable part of it.

Yet I have faith in Mankind's potential. As long as he believes in himself, there is naught he cannot achieve, so I will not give up on him. On us.

But there is so much more that life has to offer. It's because we have known death, failure and frustration that we have learned and grown from them. That we might find love, friendships, ambition and hope. No happiness is without its shadows, each and every single one of us abideth pain within but by offering understanding and acceptance, we can forge ahead in the darkness and becoming a light to guide others.

We too are miracles, each and every one of us. Born of the warm breath of life that traverses the heavens, swirling through eternity.

Never a game as poured that much of love onto us, lifting us up everytime we faltered. The boundless love of mankind that transpires from the overall message of the story is particularly vibrant nowadays looking at certain circumstances. All of us are worthy to exist and our fate remains ours to shape.

.. Here, at the end of all stars, engulfed in despair, despite all that I've done, would you still take my hand.. ?

There, Beneath the light of a new dawn, where the hopes and dreams of our friends shapes the path to follow, despite all that I've done, Would you still be my friend ?

For those we have lost, for those we can yet save.
For those whose dreams were unfulfilled, those whose prayers were unheard, those whose labors were unrewarded.

Y O U A R E N O T A L O N E

Has your journey been good ? Has it been worthwile ?

It was the best one, I can't deny that.

Monochrome Mobius was not really a game I was looking forward to play that much since the game did not look really appealing to me before it was released. But I still gave it a try since it's still Utawarerumono even if it's not mentionned in the title, since I was interested in how a prequel would work out.
The result is that in my opinion for me a very bad RPG with a nice enough story (and a lore as good as the trilogy).

I'll start with the good (since I have way more bad things to say than good) :

- The plot is interesting, it start with something really classic (finding the truth about a disappeared father), it really feels like a journey since the game make you visit a lot of places of the universe (a lot of them are new even to the Utawarerumono fan). But very fast, it takes this basic plot of finding your disappearing father to add a lot of elements to the lore, some of them are already known by the players since it was already spoked during the Mask duology, but it gives more details to it. I think any Utawarerumono fan would be at least satisfied by this aspect of the game.
- The music is nice enough, nothing breathtaking (comparing to the trilogy) but it's still nice to hear the composers working for a RPG this time. I'm a bit sad that the exploration OST are so few though.
- The dynamic of the main party is good (mostly between Mikazuchi and Oshtor), it feels like a real group, with no one being out of place (something I can't even say for the original trilogy since some characters were mostly just there, not that it's a major flaw to me). It really helps that the game only has 4 playable characters (a bit like Trails From Zero). I don't really like her but Shunya is still a solid character, with enough development (part of it is pretty subtile, so it's nice).
- The last scene of the game is really good, it opens some really interesting points for a sequel (if it's released, the game will probably flop, and the sales in the first week in Japan were really weak for a newly released game).

For the bad (of the things I didn't enjoy) :
- While the story is still interesting and the lore is rich, I really disliked how shonen the narrative structure was.
Of course it make sense but for me, it was executed in a bland way, with a lot of tropes I've already seen in other JRPG/animes (the game has some scenes with similarities to Kimetsu no Yaiba, and it's not a compliment to me). I'm not against shonens at all (I'm a Xenoblade 2 fan after all) but I was a bit disappointed by it since the Mask duology had some shonen scenes/aspects but it was less invasive.
- The game was honestly a pain to play, the gameplay is dull and balanced poorly, the game forces you to kill a lot of enemies (and there are a lot of them in the dungeons) and to complete a lot of (bland) sidequests to keep your characters at a decent level. I found myself being underleveled before the final boss even though I completed 20 sidequests, I don't think it was a good decision given how the fights are tedious in the long run for me.
- The game is also quite ugly for me, it's their first JRPG so I could have forgiven, but for a game of 2022 it's really ugly, the characters models are lacking in charm in my eyes, the graphics are really poor, and the map is really bland. And frankly, the NPCs without a face are shameful, I've never seen that in a recent JRPG (some titles at least are more elegant about that), they didn't even try to mask it a little bit. It's not an issue for some people but I think immersion is still something important in a JRPG, and the towns of the game felt really hollow and lacking in life because of this. It was also annoying to see these NPCs during some cutscenes, it was hard to take the game seriously at times because of that. But it's not the only issue with the towns, they are quite empty with nothing to do, you just go there to start some (uninspired) sidequests and to buy equipement and items. There are also a lof of invisible walls, with part of the towns you can't even access, while the towns are already very small.
- The exploration is not satisfying to me, there are some little secrets but they have nothing really worth to give to the player except nice items, sometimes it reward you with "viewpoints" but frankly it did not feel rewarding since the game has poor graphics and the art direction is lacking (even if sometimes it has nice ideas, like the final dungeon).
- There are also some aspects of the characterization of Shunya and Munechika I really disliked, but it's hard to speak about it without spoiling for Shunya. Regarding Munechika, I really didn't like how tropey her character was and how they wrote her "feminine side", it felt a bit cringe and too clichey (even if it's probably a persona).
- The cutscene direction was horrendous, the game really has poor animation and it's even more visible during the cutscenes, it was often hard for me to take the game seriously during the "hype scenes" since the characters feels really static, it was honestly worse than Cold Steel 3 and Cold Steel 3 was not good in this aspect (while being a game of 2017).
- The main "antagonist" of the game is unique in some aspects (with a good character design), but fails to be really compelling because of a lack of presence during the game, it's a shame since the motives of this characters make a lot of sense in the story/lore of the game. Regarding the other antagonists, one of them was okay, nothing really that interesting but at least his character was cohesive, but the other antagonists were just annoying and very clichey, it's a shame since the game point out that no camp is really evil, but the game still has some really cartoon evil characters. The antagonists were never the main strength of Utawarerumono but I was expecting them to improve a little bit regarding this aspect, but it did not happened.
- The visual novel sections are really poor, with not enough sprites, all the characters have like 5 different sprites. I would have forgiven this if it was fully a JRPG but these sections are separated for the rest of the game, so it's hard for me to ignore. The rare CGs of the game at least are good, even if I think the chara design of the visual novel sections is way below the style of the Mask duology and Prelude of the Fallen.
- The pacing of the game suffer because of the lengths of the dungeons, and I think the game is a bit too long for what it wants to tell, even if the story of the game is not really complete.

TL;DR : I did not enjoy the game at all even if the plot was nice (with some underwhelming aspects in my eyes) but it was not enough for me to appreciate it since it's in my opinion a bad RPG, Aquaplus should have sticken to visual novels in my opinion, even if I can still respect their wish to release a RPG. I also had no real expectations as a RPG but it was worse than I thought it would be, and I thought the story would also be better.

Style versus substance used to be a major debate in the video game industry- which do you prioritize when you’re divvying resources to each of your departments? Does the arthouse division get a bigger shot in order to craft interesting visuals or do you hire a larger writing team to hone in on the mythus you want concocted?

As major game engines and larger talent pools have gotten more economical, I wonder if this still remains as potent an issue as it once did. When I reviewed Close to the Sun (https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/464801/), I made a similar observation/question, and ultimately came to the conclusion that it isn’t as big a dichotomy in today’s day and age.

But what do I know, being an amateur critic? Without intimate experience inside a company, I can only postulate about the nuts and bolts that go into game development. Regardless, the reason I have begun this review on such a tangent is the contrast between Transistor’s aesthetic splendour and atrocious storytelling has genuinely left me mind-boggled. How can a game be so resplendent yet engage in such outdated scribal schemas?

What do I mean by this? You guys remember how, back in the days before voice acting, everything narrative-related had to be conveyed through text? Well, when you had a title that was particularly heavy on lore, it resulted in either essays worth of dialogue or (more commonly) large swaths of optional content you could dig through to find.

That latter tactic is still maintained, but rarely do you see post-2010 releases use it as an excuse to do the bare minimum in the base game, which is exactly what Transistor does. On the outset, you get a cyberpunk tale that dips its toes in the trappings of the genre, focusing on the machinations of a group of high-ranking government officials known as the Camerata. They’ve released a virus onto the city of Cloudbank that simultaneously corrupts the architecture and spawns malevolent robots, causing an evacuation. The sole person standing in the way? Red, a former lounge singer targeted by the cabal- her voice has been stolen, and the only way she’s getting it back is via a high-tech sword known as the Transistor.

The Transistor is more than just a weapon: it houses the soul of an unnamed man who saved Red’s life, and is capable of amazing feats like absorbing other spirits. But it also acts as a good transition point (no pun intended) to the kind of flawed storytelling you’ll consistently get in your 6+ hours: how did the Camerata even build it? What is it made of? Why was it haphazardly thrown at Red if it’s integral to their operations? How does it assimilate consciousnesses? Who was the man that was even killed? Why did everyone join the Camerata in their goal of purging Cloudbank? Why does Cloudbank even need this Atlas Shrugged revamp?

I’m sure there are answers in the game, and the reason I’m sure is because 99% of EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF PERTINENT INFORMATION is stored in supplementary data banks you can probe through Access Points strewn around the cosmopolis. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? If you want to know ANYTHING beyond the vague ruminations of the Transistor, you’re going to have to digest paragraph after paragraph of exposition dump, unlocked via tokens called Functions (more on that below).

Oh, but it gets worse. Each Function’s biography isn’t divulged from the get-go; you need to modify them with additional ones to get the full story. And as there are literally over 30 of these, it is abysmal that the writers expected players to mix-and-match them tens of times just to experience the full scope of the cast and their impact on Cloudbank (which, lo and behold, exposes the events prior to the start of the game).

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I didn’t bother rummaging through most of them. My philosophy is, if the developers don’t care enough about their tale to tell it properly, then why should I go above and beyond? I’m all for unconventional methods of storytelling, but this is either lazy or the result of a diminished budget for the writer’s table. It’s as though they only had two staff members- one to draft out the main game’s conversations, the other to handle all the discretionary descriptions from the terminals.

It’s a shame because there are a lot of interesting ideas here (or that I gleam to be here), from the whole brain in the vat approach of the psyche to the concept of public opinion literally impacting the ordonnance of a city. But you can’t get invested in any of it unless you put in the effort to find the one memoir that contains the relevant facts, and even then it won’t matter since the main narrative is constantly just pushing Red to the next beat without dwelling much on prior revelations.

The only non-mandatory readings I will praise are the news stations placed around Cloudbank. They reminded me a lot of the bulletin displays from the original Deus Ex, which depicted a third party’s (or state-influenced third party’s) reporting of current events, and it was just as interesting here to see how journalists would announce, describe, or speak about developing circumstances, and give their opinions on what the citizenry should do. They were short in length, numbered just enough in totality to not be platitudinous, and even provided Red the choice of responding to them, which would lead to some interesting words from the Transistor.

So, if most of the energy was put towards the graphics, do they make-up for such writing flaws? Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but my gosh, is Transistor gorgeous. Cloudbank is a metropolis drenched in fulgor- you’ve got your typical neon signposts burning on high, but also a number of other synthetic sources that bathe the cityscape with color. Not since Planet Alpha (https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/279180/) have I played a video game that embraced the full scale of the visible spectrum: this is a society that operates on artificiality, rainbow illusions molded by the will of the people. Every pavement and edifice seems like it’s made of malleable smart glass, a variegated mesh of hard and soft light constructs bending to please the masses. At a time when most cyberpunk works opt for the grunge style of their roots, it was fascinating to see SuperGiant Games take a different approach; a techno-dystopia hiding its vice under manmade mirages.

Outside of your standard gameplay, you get some cutscenes seemingly modeled after French anime like Martin Mystery and Totally Spies! (side note, the buildings in both Blade Runner and Neuromancer were heavily influenced by French architecture, explaining the country’s continued sway on the genre), and these look good, with facial expressions in particular being vitalized on the canvas-esque backgrounds.

Voice acting is principally left to Logan Cunningham as the sentient cutlass, and he is truly superb. I don’t know how to describe it, but there’s something very nice about his elocution that makes him pleasant to listen to whenever he speaks. It’s not that he’s calming (although he certainly can be) so much as he’s fully conscientious about everything he’s saying (or about to) say. If you guys ever get a chance, check out a bodybuilder named Stan “The White Rhino” Efferding in interviews and you’ll get a sense of what I mean: some humans just have the ability to be very soothing to listen to.

His performance goes a long way towards carrying Transistor above the aforestated pitfalls of its story. You’re dealing with vague notions, underdeveloped themes, drunk moments, and even a cringey rushed love tale between the Transistor and Red, and yet somehow Cunningham makes it all bearable. He’s simultaneously brutally honest and gentle, like a morally-inverted HAL from 2001.

The other voice actors for the Camerata are decent, if a little too nerdy sounding (read- slightly nasally, upper voice registers). Red apparently has speaking moments attributable to an actress called Kristin Wilson, but I don’t recall hearing her speak- instead, it’s her singer, Ashley Barrett, who deserves recognition. A gifted chanteuse, significantly aided by the option to have her hum a song at the touch of a button.

Sound effects are meager in quantity. Enemy robots creak the same, most of your attacks contain a replicated echo, and, most disappointing of all, Red’s dragging of the Transistor produces no reverberation on the ground. Like seriously, you’d think you’d hear this slick scrape, like the abrade of Surtur’s rapier in Thor: Ragnarok.

With regards to music, this is one area where it’s going to come down to personal taste. I’m someone who firmly believes in electronica for a cyberpunk OST; SuperGiant and in-house composer Darren Korb, on the other hand, went for a soundtrack many have labeled as Jazz synthesizer. Objectively-speaking, it sounds great, but subjectively I didn’t think it suited the townscape around you. YMMV.

Finally, I can talk about the gameplay, which some have compared to Fallout 3’s VATS, but that I find to be more remindful of the stop-and-go system in BioWare titles. You walk around levels until you enter a combat zone, in which case you’re walled off and forced to defeat all the baddies. While you may clash with them in-real-time, you’re better off utilizing Transistor’s freeze frame wherein you grind the spatio-temporal continuum to a halt, enabling you to map out an attack scheme. This scheme is limited to a turn meter that drops depending on your movement and choice of strike, with stronger moves taking up more cap.

Overall it works, but can get repetitive given that battles are the only gameplay you have here (besides a single puzzle). Fans may counter that you’re given a lot of leeway for experimentation, and that combining this with the locking of bios behind the polymerization of Functions encourages players to engage in said experimentation. To reiterate, I don’t think most people will find the story or world that compelling to go through the hassle of trying out all these combos, but even if they did, your standard attacks will work 99% of the time. Yes, there are variations on drones (some can end your turn prematurely, others can dodge after being struck,etc…), however they don’t alter the fights in any vital way- you still destroy everyone by knocking their HP to zero, and so I just don’t see anyone deviating significantly from whatever strategy they find feasible.

That is, unless you get hurt. Rather than die, Transistor has an interesting dexterity interface wherein the full depletion of your constitution culminates in you losing access to your highest-consuming Function, forcing you to either live without it until its restored, or replace it with a substitute. I thought this was an interesting method of avoiding game overs, and certainly removed potential frustrations that would’ve arisen from mistakes.

Transistor is an ARPG, and so there is an experience system in place. I don’t think new levels raise your durability, but they do provide the option to increase your memory storage/slots for new mods, as well as open-up Limiters: special retrofittings that appreciate your exp. earnings in exchange for some combat degradation.

A training dimension periodically appears during your playthrough, giving you access to challenge rooms that necessitate you completing their mandates (i.e., survive, beat in a set time) whilst using preselected Function(s). They’re kind of cool, but wear out their welcome with the repetitive objectives each chamber contains.

Overall, as beautiful as Transistor was, I can’t quite recommend it at full price. A lot of people have gotten something from their runs, and considering the massive following SuperGiant Games has accumulated since the success of Hades, I imagine there will be more players seeking out the company’s past library. Opinions will vary of course, but the weakly-executed story and repetitious fighting weren’t entertaining for me.

Trails to Azure : A Frustrating Masterpiece


Starting the Trails series was a wild ride, it had lows, it had highs (and oftentimes very high highs) but in general those games were overall pleasant to play although I can’t say any of them truly blown me away with the might of some of the old time greats such as Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, Suikoden II and many more that I could mention.

I need to preface this because a lot of people might say that a lot of my criticism for these games are in bad faith but no, it’s just that I feel the main public of Trails comes from a non-JRPG background that aren’t used (and tired) of some of the genre tricks and thus claim Trails as this “outlier” that seemingly does what Nintendon’t.

But when a franchise such as the Legend of Heroes series is so long and so well beloved, it must’ve at least had that ONE game, that ONE that could universally be considered as one of the all time greats, every long JRPG series need its own FF VII, the kind of title that transcend the concept of being simply yet another good game in a long series of more or less good titles and reach out of the screen to slap you in the face, the kind of game that sparks debate on whether it’s an all-time classic or an overrated piece of trash (which if it reaches that status, that usually means it’s a title worth checking out if contrarians cares so much to dismantle them).

The qualities of the Trails series is not to demonstrate anymore, I’ve talked about most of what was great about the Trails formula in my big double-review of Sky FC and SC and what was ass about that formula too but I want to preface that every time, I felt that while the core idea of Trails was fantastic on paper, it often lacked in the execution department.

Awkward pacing and structures, repeated content, filler content up the wazoo, needlessly long stretch of uneventful and unengaging story section ludo-narrative dissonance, forgettable gameplay scenario (and in opposition the ones that were great), lackluster dungeon design, uneven sidequest (which hurts the pacing even more if like me you tend to go for all of them) and cliché character archetypes especially on the vilain side of things (especially in SC and Zero) that turn games that could be amazing into simply “good” games and that’s fair and alright

Because on the other side, there was always something that made me come back to them, whether it’s the sheer sincerity of it all, the charm of its cast of character and world, the minute attention to detail, the Quality of Life stuff that are genuinely impressive for mid-2000’s RPG standard, the buttery smooth and natural writing of dialogues and how all of these elements comes together to create a world that feel alive and pleasant to explore and get through even with all the bumps in the road as they can lead to some of the most emotional pay-off ever in an RPG that wouldn’t be possible if not for the weird way these games are divided and elongated to infinity.


Which is funny because so far, my favorite Trails game isn’t even the Trails that follow the classic Trails formula and it’s weird because that can’t be right. Trails the 3rd feels like an anomaly to me because it’s amazing in spite of being a Trails game rather than because it is a Trails game and I always feel “wrong” for liking it as much because it’s like out of all the cookies in the jar, I decided to pick the weird fucked up one that’s half-baked and taste funky but boy did those edibles hit the night I’ve finished Trails the 3rd and ended up as a sobbing mess clapping to the tunes of Cry for Me, Cry for You while being on my knee ready to suck off whoever came up with the name “Kevin Grahams”.

And so coming into Zero, I knew that I was gonna face the Trails Formula again and after a year of finishing 3rd (believe me it’s better to spread your playthrough of these games in the long run to not get burned out on them) and yeah it was the usual song and dance. Zero was a fine game, nothing exceptional and in some areas I’d say it’s slightly better than FC but also more forgettable despite still having all of the same qualities and flaws of the Sky Duology but made slightly more digestible for a new audience and because the games need to evolve with time.

And coming into AO, I thought to myself “Oh no it’s gonna happen again” and I remember dreading the recycling of content, the awkward pacing and structure, the shitty JRPG villains and all of the stuff that stopped me from fully appreciating SC in comparison to FC.

So let me preface this before anything else comes through, Ao fixes every issue I had with the typical “Trails Sequel” problem.

Of course being a sequel to the first game, the recycling of content is inevitable but I feel like they took some notes out of the Sky 3rd book and made it so the ratio from recycled area and new stuff was more balanced and the structure of the game isn’t as formulaic and redundant in fact this game is the opposite of a drag, it’s actually … genuinely engaging from the first hour to the last which is something I can’t say of all of the games I’ve covered so far.

Each plot related events are linked to new areas and dungeons, yeah sure you have to back and forth on the roads and villages of Crossbell at least once but pretty early on, you unlock a fast travel option for the entire map which mitigate a lot of the tedium, no longer do you have to take the bus, now you can get access to any area on the map by using a good ol car (and later on an Airship because of course) which is more quality of life stuff on top of the ones from Zero.

And those new areas and dungeons are freaking amazing for the most part, it’s insane how much they’ve improved in the dungeon design department, it’s nothing to write home about but the dungeons have multiple paths, they have light puzzle solving, tons of chest and secrets to find and the atmosphere is generally stellar in each of them due to some kickass music (shoutout to Mystic Core that one bangs).

Out of all the Dungeons in the game only 3 do come back from the previous game but they like Trails the 3rd they rearranged some stuff to make them more exciting to go through the second time in and honestly, I like this aspect of the game a lot because unlike SC you don’t feel burned out on all of the padding linked to all of that.

Gameplay wise, the game is just more of the same and an improvement on Zero’s and the rest of the series' already solid system. The game introduces Master Quartz which is kind of a poor attempt at introducing a “job system” into the game but its effect on combat is barely noticeable outside of stat buffs, additional effects that are too situational to be useful and Master Arts which come so late into the game due to the leveling curves of MQ being slow as shit and comes out as just yet another unexploited mechanic that has potential but could never truly blossom into something unique.

Exclusive to certain dungeons and the last chapter of the game is the Burst Mode that you can activate after filling up a gauge on the right corner of the screen and lets you spam magic instantly without cool-down time, get turn priority for the entire duration of it, a free auto-CP recovery to make you spam all the craft available, serves as an emergency heal all status effect and art/craft cancel and probably will put your children to college and make your wife love you again if that doesn’t indicate how absolutely busted that shit is.

In fact, the game has so many options for “breaking the game in half”, like for the other titles I’ve played the game on normal so I’m pretty sure I’m missing out on its true depth but damn with so many options on top of combo craft and s-craft, this game is very generous when it comes to combat option and trivialize a lot of combat scenario even though thankfully near the end of the game there’s quite a few challenging boss fight (and the final boss which is about as bullshitly hard as its main theme song is pure literal cum in music form) and some superbosses that are in the main game and don’t penalize you for losing against them but rewards you with more lore and a shit load of EXP if you manage to fully beat them properly (but I’ll get to some problem about missable content later trust me) there’s even some bosses with unique mechanic, sadly only two of them are like that in the game which is a shame because the game could use more unique boss encounter that fully exploit the semi-tactical RPG positioning aspect of the battle system because a lot of bosses just end up being big hard hitting, hard tanking HP sponges that are more long that they are difficult to beat (especially since most of them also are resistant to all stat debuffs and status effect which is always the lamest shit ever).

But enough about all of that, I already went long enough on this write-up and I still haven’t talked about the strongest and at points most divisive part of the game which is the story.

And boy is the story of that game the best in the series yet.

To start up, the initial premise of the scenario is amazing, following the events of Zero most of the Mafia controlling the city and the government officials corrupt by them got properly arrested and put to prison, in the after-math of the events that transpired that day a new Mayor was elected, this guy is Dieter Crois the drippest capitalist pig you’ll ever know who decides to perform a bunch of reform within the current government, build a tower the size of his ego and organize an international trade conference between each nation of West Zemuria to discuss the future of Crossbell.

In the wake of all these changes lies a dormant conspiracy that involves Crossbell status as a buffer state between the war-mongering expansionist Erebonian Empire and the Politically divided Republic of Calvard as well as all kinds of third parties wanting to profit off of the chaos to advance their agenda such as Ouroboros serving more of a support role this time.
In fact the main political conflict throughout the narrative is deeply fascinating because it puts into light how complex and nuanced Crossbell political situation is, Liberl was already a country prompt to the menace of the Empire (which made Richard a superbly written villain for the first game) but Crossbell is an individual state that’s not only rotten to the core with weak governmental and military structure, an awkward national identity due to be the crossroad of the continent but also a huge economic asset for the greater power as Crossbell neutrality combined to being the center of the world's economy makes it a tool for anyone that dare to profit off of that status.

Crossbell is constantly on the verge of exploding onto itself and while the mafia and the cult were terrible they kinda served as a mean to balance the fragile ecosystem of the Crossbell criminal and political underworld, of course a country ruled by mobs that fight over drugs and gang wars is never a good thing and Revache was a pretty goofy bunch of goons but once they’re gone, that stability isn’t so guarantee anymore and between keeping them around and eliminating them is like choosing between the lesser of two evils which is naturally the narrative and thematic throughline of the game.

Late into the game during the Zemurian conference, Dieter announces wanting to make Crossbell an independent nation to save itself from the calculating hands of Erebonia and Calvard and the argument presented are pretty convincing and naturally as someone who spent so many times with these characters, with these places with these inhabitants you do lowkey wish for that stability, you feel proud for them to be able to reunite as a nation and become a legitimate state because they deserve it.

In fact I believe it’s in these high stakes narrative with constantly rising tension that the Trails Formula shine the best for me, in the other game talking to all the NPC and experiencing micro-level story arcs while roaming around the world felt like at nice addition at best and a distraction at worse something that’s good on paper but not something that truly enhances the narrative of each entry main plot significantly enough to enrich it but here it’s such a core element of the conflict at place that you’d be missing out not to talk to every NPC, each of them having different opinions on what’s going on reinforcing the hard nut to crank Crossbell as a setting is.

Eventually these political elements cross the path of the Supernatural aspect of the series and even when it enters full bulshit JRPG mode the main themes and struggle presented by the game never truly fade away keeps being a narrative throughline for the entire duration of it and actually brings out more questions.

The typical “Trails pacing” is almost completely absent here, there is not a single dull moment in the narrative but because of the plot being so engaging on a micro and macro level at all time, it makes some of the Trails formula problem shine a bit brighter than they should and I think it has to do with the way the game handle its side-content.

The side-quest system of the series needs to go away or needs to be reworked, even tho this game has a lot more “good” or even “great” side-quest, a lot of them mechanically speaking involves pretty menial and dull task and the monster hunt is also just unnecessary but it’s not like you can skip on them either because they give you money, crucial plot elements and new mechanics to mess around with such as combo craft or quartz.
The game pushes you to do these side-content so much so that now some support requests are mandatory to progress through the game, like do we really need to go on a wild goose chase to bring a cat back to its owner just to set up a future rivalry between two characters ? I think not but the game feels like this part was absolutely necessary and crucial to the progression of the plot while some are not despite being of equal and even greater importance.

And don’t get me started on the secret side quest and all the missable content like the bonding events which are hidden behind cryptic and completely ass-backwards conditions. I wouldn’t be complaining so much about that since I do think it’s ok to have missable content in an RPG you will probably likely replay if you ever feel like it to keep it fresh on subsequent playthrough and with how massive these games get in terms of sheer volume of text and events to discover, it’s impossible not to miss on anything just playing casually without a guide.

But the game has no priority on what should be considered plot crucial quest to setup for a future conflict within the narrative (especially regarding one of … the “twist” …. uuugh… we’ll get there) and things that are unimportant but nice to have nonetheless and outright HIDE CRUCIAL LORE AND IMPORTANT CHARACTER MOMENT WITHOUT GIVING ANY WARNINGS OR HINTS TOWARD THEM.

WHY IS THIS SO INCONSISTENT I SWEAR TO GOD AAAAGH

This system slows down everything, make these games longer than they should be, ruin the pacing but because the game was so engaging, I was ready to forget its flaws because again I’m making a mountain out of a molehill because in general they are significantly more fun to go through here (for the more part) but these are minor but still infuriating little things (and as we’ve seen with this franchise both the good and the bad are always in the little things) that spits in the face of what could be a genuinely great experience instead of a chore, homeworks to do to get to the good and juicy parts.

I’ll talk about the newest addition to this game side-content aka the Bonding Event later when they become relevant because I want to talk about the story like the actual story.

While the context of the story is important to understand why this game works so well with the Trails formula, it’s nothing if the story has no good characters to back it up and interesting character arcs to go along with them so let’s talk about those.

Like I said previously in my Zero review, I think the SSS is a solid group of characters but they lack the oomfs of the cast from Sky and this remains true here, this cast lacks an Olivier, it lacks a Scherazad, a Kevin or more importantly an Estelle and Joshua. I also think that individually they don’t shine but together as a group that’s where the true force of the SSS lies

Joining the crew of the first game is two characters that were sporadically available throughout the course of Zero : Noel and Wazy, these additions are decent but with how solid and iconic the original 4 are they feel like Graggle from the Simpson (look it up) and the plot in general put much more importance to the main group than the entire SSS as a whole.
But I do like them a lot. Noel is a spunky tomboy with a great ass and a great attitude. She likes 2 things, cars and serving her country, the perfect tradwife to put as an avi to make terrible conservative twitter posts with pretty much.

Wazy is a cool and sleezy sexually ambiguous and smooth talking delinquent turned policeman with a secret life as one of the Graslitter and that plot wist was genuinely awesome as it made an already awesome character into an even bigger badass than he already was, I kinda regret not using him as much during the game because character wise, he’s really cool.

Most of the returning characters are still about as solid as ever, while Tio get a bit side-lined since her story arc is kinda over, the rest finally got the development they desperately needed.

Randy in particular is actually amazing, like I already loved Randy in Zero but this time around he really came into his own as the best character in the cast for me and the one with the best arc in this saga.

Rixia also joins the party later on and her arc was genuinely a nice surprise, she lived a life of strife where killing and perpetuating the burden of her family’s tradition while trying desperately to cling on to something to finally be truer to herself and see that reality shatter around her and not being able to forgive herself (AND I ALSO WANT TO MAKE BABIES WITH HER)

Rixia and Randy share more or less similar arcs but it’s also probably one of the main throughlines of the game, the so-called “barrier” the characters have to get over to reach their happiness.

The world of Trails is a cold, indifferent godless world, its inhabitant dancing to the tunes of these roaring factions, countries or cults or anything of the sort playing games of chess with every life in Zemuria.

While Trails always suffered from a very black and white approach to morality when it comes to its storytelling with clearly well established good guys and bad guys especially in SC, it often dabbled into the moral grayness of the world of Zemuria and how uncaring that grey can be.

And I think this is an aspect that the series shied away from for too long, while some sparks of it have been showing here and there with characters like Richard it was always overshadowed by Falcom need to establish a clear cut evil in the world and I honestly think the existence of Ouroboros, their continued influence within the narrative and many antagonist who are just evil for the hell of it is a complete waste of potential for this series.

But Ao embraces it, it embraces the terribly crude nature of the world of Zemuria, countries are set aflame, lives are lost or ruined, your protagonist are but pawns in a greater conflict, too weak to make a significant difference but determined enough to find a place in this world, to find their happiness and grasping it with their own han to assure a better tomorrow not by taking the easy path but by taking the hard one.
Everything feels bigger than us in this game, what is justice in a world where such concepts are malleable ? Can we truly escape this grayness, can we truly escape our past and our heritage ? Can we really hold the world on our shoulders when we can barely hold our sins crawling down our back ?

In this game, the characters are faced with those difficult situations and the game often asks the character what’s better between what they truly want and what seems like the most rational thing to do ?

And the game is fully in support of self-determinism of letting humanity and society grow and evolves through a complex cycle of mistakes and hardship because because in all that is beautiful and in all that is ugly, lays the indomitable human spirit that will one day transcend pain and suffering and lead to a better tomorrow.

The game knows that the characters are not fully in the right and that the villains aren’t fully in the wrong either. Sometimes the character will feel hypocritical, refusing the divine protection of infinite retry and reality altering shenanigans to assure Crossbell prosperity in the coming future just for the sake of saving one human life and make a little girl happy and not let them shoulder the pain of the world.

Even at the end of the day, the decisions taken by the characters didn’t lead to an happy ending, it’s a bittersweet reality that the game prepares you for during most of the game story, the villains in all of the bad they’ve committed did so to assure no one has to suffer and Crossbell can finally be free and independent and the characters knows this, they know not everyone will approve of their silly rpg nonsense motivations and actions and that they will have to carry the burden of the inevitable bigger evil that will loom over the horizon once the lesser of the two evils, the one keeping the balance of the world in spite of its darkness and toxic aspect will crumble…

In this ending, the game goes full circle, the same way removing Revache troubled the fragile balance of Crossbell, so was removing the cure to that balance just so that humanity can march on with dignity and they pay the ultimate price.

The ending is actually both terrible and genius, terrible in that it’s obvious sequel bait for future entry while also being conclusive in a “We did our best, and it didn’t work out yet we’re still here continuing the fight so that one day the conflict will end and peace will prevail.”

Now you must be thinking, that I love this game story, that I feel it’s deserving of its perfect 10/10 status among the fandom and the JRPG landscape, a game that’s both thought provoking, fun to play and terribly engaging the whole way through and a total “must-play masterpiece of the medium ?”

That’s because I wanted to demonstrate that Azure is a story that works, it’s a story that should work, it’s a story that had all the ingredients to work, they’ve baked the perfect cake with the perfect amount of icing and the cherry on top for good measure, it’s a beautiful cake.

But then Falcom was like : “But we do like Olives tho, it could be a great idea to spread olive haphazardly on our cake it’ll definitely make it better !” said the Falcom baker before getting his nuts kicked in by yours truly.

Everything up to Chapter 4 even with the Intermission which is funny character moment that helps you breathe between two heavy chapters and set up some rivalry as well as the “Fragments” mini-chapter that serves as the introduction to the last fifth is genuinely incredible, like every piece fitted into place, the puzzle was almost complete and at this point I was ready to SLAP that 10/10 rating almost instinctively because I can sense great art when I see and this smelled the smell of a pristine work of art that’s gonna stay in both my mind and my heart for the rest of my life.

But in the wake of realizing that they did something 100% right for once, Falcom decided to shoot themselves in the foot with a Bazooka and make some of the most completely ass-backwards narrative design decisions you could ever think of given the context of what they had built for 40 or so hours.

Like I said, the chapter starts really strongly, Dieter declared the independence of Crossbell and established himself as the new ruling president of the country, he reformed the police and the military to form one super giga defense force and the guy has gained the heart of everyone in Crossbell while gaining the favor of Arios as the new leading commander of the armies.

This send off a series of event that are way too fucking crazy and rise the stakes significantly, pretty much the Crois Family rose into power through gaining the favor of the people and this allowed them to carry their plan to claim back an ancient artifact that can pretty much over-rule basic scientific concept and this artifact is KeA herself and the plan of the Crois Family goes way back and is kind of meticulously calculated to sway the public opinion of them despite all of this, we need to remind ourselves that a good majority of people are ok with Crossbell gaining access to something equivalent to a nuclear bomb to protect the independance and sovereignity of Crossbell and establish world peace through fear mongering by being stronger than everyone on earth, people will have to accept their legitimacy and plan to create a United Nation of Zemuria but some are not because this is an illegitimate government that was established through non-democratic means.

After uncovering that plan, Lloyd and his friends get arrested for treasons and terrorism and the game fast forward one month later in Prison where we see Lloyd in Prison with Garcia a minor antagonist from the previous game as they break out of prison and kick Lloyd’s ass so that he can be a man and claim his life for himself and the people he cares about amidst the chaos.

You’re now left alone and the game goes on a “search for your friends” moment similar to Final Fantasy VI when you revisit the world in the aftermath of the villain's plan succeeding to reform your group and see what happened to everybody.

On paper, this last part is nice, I mean if it worked in esteemed classic Squaresoft 90’s JRPG classic, it should still work here but this is where the praise I gave to the game kinda falls aparts and the cracks start to form and show their ugly faces.
This last fifth of the game is where most of the issues with the game lies, after raising the tension, the stakes and the scale of the conflict to such absurd degree to build-up for this finale (and remember all of that buildup was honestly pretty phenomenal) sticking the landing was not gonna be an easy task.

For starters, this last chapter is long but like really long, I would say it’s about as long as its FFVI counterpart but at least in FFVI most of it was optional and you could ignore most of it (now why would you do that is completely up to you and you will miss out on stuff and have a least satisfying ending but that’s not here nor there) but also what happens in it isn’t really worth the time dedicated to it and you’re forced on a set path without any freedom of orders on how to do these rescue mission.

And I say this because the pacing of the game was generally excellent and there was no recycled area but here you kinda have to drag your ass across Crossbell once again and while there’s some visual change to most of the areas, it’s not much. The game shows that cryptids (big ass kaiju monsters) are roaming the world but outside of the first area you revisit, you don’t see them ever again (and thank god cause they’re a pain in the ass to defeat).

You get an exclusive party member for this part of the game only then he fucks off to the back row of your party not being playable once you gathered enough forces. But like these series of rescue missions are already pretty long and while some make sense why they would be there during the conflict, Tio and Ellie are just trapped somewhere for no apparent reasons on why they were there in the first place.

Of course I get it, going back to these areas lets you talk to more NPC’s and generally speaking this does work for the story but I still feel like the chapter is a drag because after saving your friends, you have to deactivate 2 magical artifacts protecting the Kefk… I mean the Orchis Tower.

Which is, you guessed it, an excuse to make you fight 2 Organization XI… Huh I mean Ouroboros members in their respective recycled dungeon (even with a self-aware joke about how they recycled one of the dungeon and at this point, given the precedent of the series to do that shit consistently, you’re really not having that kind of wink at the camera meta-humor anymore)

Which leads me to talk about Ouroboros and their role within the story, unlike SC when they were the main sources of conflict and were pretty ridiculous in their role, Ouroboros serves more as a neutral third party this time around a support role to provide the villains with the necessary means to carry out their plan, now of course this is just a total sham for further progressing their big plan which we still don’t know half a shit about, not even a slight hint.

All we kinda know about Ouroboros is that they have a big plan, they're gonna do some stuff to unleash that big plan and one day trust me it’s gonna pay-off while being the most obvious mustache twirling Saturday morning cartoon villain while doing so. It’s difficult to take that aspect of worldbuilding and continuity seriously because of a bigger issue that’s not just part of this game's core issues but the whole series issue when it comes to handling antagonistic forces throughout the different games.
See, Falcom has ideas but they also don’t have the balls to commit to these ideas, I said earlier that the world of Crossbell and Zemuria was a complex and unforgiving world especially for the small everyday people within it which in this case you are a part of. It’s a world prompt to conflict and political unrest, people die, people kill other people, some of your party members were either the victims or the perpetrators of terrible acts that now haunts them and have to carry their sin on their back (sometimes quite literally for characters like Kevin or Wazy) and it’s not afraid to show blood on screen or cities being set aflame.

But while all of this is said to you, no true significant loss is happening, if a character has a name or a face, they will simply not die, they will simply not suffer for too long. During the events of the story there’s a raid that happened earlier in the story, during that raid multiple characters which you come to know and love almost met their fate to the cruel hands of the world.

Illya is a character from the previous game and a pretty important character for one of your party member Rixia, Illya is also a shining beacon of light for the people of Crossbell being the living proof that the people of Crossbell are capable of culture that unites the heart of many outside of the realm of politics and ideologies. During the raid, she is supposedly dead but during the next chapter, she’s actually alive and fine.

Now mind you the game will be keeping you wary of her situation that she might suffer heavy consequences, her spin has been completely shattered, multiple ribs were broken, she’s barely hanging in there, here surviving this incident is a miracle but a miracle that might be a fate worse than death, she might not be able to dance and go back on stage.

But the characters say the opposite, that she has simply too much willpower and will come back on the stage and if you watch the end credits they were right as she comes back on stage like nothing happened (Crossbell probably has some of the best surgeons in Zemuria go figure at this point).

Another character, Fran (Noel’s sister) takes a literal grenade on her face, the fact that she survived is also completely unbelievable but also the fact that she survived while not being at least disfigured, injured or crippled and can carry on her life being as cute as a button and serve as a crew member for your newly acquired airship is just the icing on the cake and the accident or the troubled relationship with Noel going to the Defense force is but a fluke in the unrest of the chaos that this part of the story is.

Now it’s not like character deaths are an automatic peak fiction button but it’s kinda like salt, too much salt will hurt the steak, none at all will make it tasteless but just enough salt spread evenly with care and you have yourself a wonderful brisket.

I just think that for a game that loves to make the character in front of their own contradictions and carry the consequences of their actions, the game want to have its cake and eat too by not having loss be an actual part of that narrative process and I’m pretty sure it’s that way only so these characters can come back and say hi in future titles for fanservice but Sky wasn’t afraid of killing off characters. Here even the villains don’t die or face any real harsh punishment for the things they did and I feel like this is where the core demographic and aim of this game become painfully apparent.
This game is made primordially for teenagers, now there’s not anything wrong with that mind you tons of great stories are meant for a younger demographic and JRPG’s and anime are no strangers to that but that explains a lot about how it treats its audience but also how it treats its characters.

Remember when I said that as a group and a part of the narrative the SSS are solid but each member individually are kinda lacking ? Well I think it’s time to talk about the most awkward part of the game which is the character writing and yes we will also be talking about the hidden “bonding mechanic” and how that too hurts their development.

I think the issue with the characters is that while a lot of them are pretty solid, the group as a whole gravitates way too much around the central main character Lloyd, now I had a lot of apprehension for Lloyd coming from the first game where he’s a pretty flat classic shonen protagonist and it doesn’t really change too much here but I think Lloyd works for this kind of story because it needs a truly happy optimist guy to push away the grayness of the conflict.

Nah in reality the problem comes from the fact that the ideas behind the different character arcs are solid but oftentimes the execution can be a bit lacking or disappointing, I have nothing to say when it comes to Randy and Rixia, these two are the clear outliers.

But let’s talk about Harem.

Harem is a cancerous plague of Japanese writing and this game sadly suffers from it in full force, let’s take Ellie for example as this is the most flagrant exemple.

Ellie is an important figure within Crossbell, being the daughter of the previous mayor and someone knowledgeable on Crossbell’s internal politics, she chose to become a police officer to see the problems of Crossbell from the little people point of view but she knows that this position is temporary and that she’ll inevitably have to go back to politics if she wanna change the world. She also is really close to Dieter and Mariabelle Crois two of the main antagonist of the game and while she is shocked to learn about their heel turn, she’s not really that much concerned about their actions which is especially dumb in the latest scene involving Mariabelle where she gets off scott free and Ellie barely makes any comment about it or try to reason her or have discussion or intervene in any kind of manner.

Ellie has a main conflict but the game never truly expands or touches upon it, in fact contrary to what her chest area might indicate, Ellie is a pretty flat character with the only real piece of personality being the main love interest of Lloyd…

And that’s not even something unique to her because like we said earlier, this game is dead set on giving Lloyd a personal harem and this hurts most of the female characters that just breathed in the direction of Lloyd even if it often time makes very little sense at all like for Noel, you tell me when Noel showed any sign of affection for Lloyd before the final chapter happens and suddenly Mr.Smoothtalker convinces Noel to give up her position and abandon her heel turn in like 5 min just because Lloyd is so sexy, he can even convince a patriot to love him instead of the country they swore to protect somehow.

And do I really need to get into Tio ?

First of all Tio is a minor, the previous game has Lloyd even making a comment about how the legal age of consent is 16 (yeah this is this level of writing) and while their relationship is cute and pretty heartwarming, it’s more so in a lil sis and big bro kind of manner, not a romantic one but because this is a very self-indulgent Japanese game for teenagers to live their fantasy, of course it needs to be romantic.

Lloyd is too good, he has no flaws except being boring in his flawlessness, he seems to have no weakness outside of being kinda dense and that’s how average the dude is but in Azure they rise him to a level of absurd importance as even for the male character, Lloyd has become the most important person in their life and the catalyst towards their growth. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing but this is something the previous saga managed to avoid, while Estelle was the main protagonist, she wasn’t the object of interest of everyone around her and if everything Estelle was a character with depth.

A spunky tomboy with a heat or gold, a great personality but still unaware of the pain of growing up and facing hardship and claiming your happiness for yourself and she had great dynamic with all the party members in that game and of course the game was dead set on setting with one romance within the game and a beautifully touching one at that, sure there’s a love triangle with Kloe, her and Joshua but pretty quickly does Kloe give up since she understands the fact that she’ll never be the one and her responsibilities will stop her from pursuing his affection in the long run while not letting feelings be unheard and also she’s literally super best friend with Estelle on top of that and their relationship as love rivals and comrades is the cutest most adorable shit ever.

And you just… WISH that the SSS and the different guys and gals within it had that kind of chemistry with one another, kinda like how in Muv-Luv all the girls are in a competition for the main character but at the core of it all they’re just really good friends that does thing together and have an actual group dynamic outside of the MC and also that there is a supposed “canon” romance to pursue that make the most sense for the game narrative.

But here even the “canon” romance isn’t even canon and isn’t even unique and just the fact that it’s there is weird because it troubles me for the continuity of these games, I don’t mind romance at all and I do like to have choices but also whenever a game does that like FF VII for example, it’s a one game or one saga thing and not a piece of a bigger puzzle and I don’t think that that kind of narration has its place within the series you feel me ?

I bring the FFVII comparison because much like that game there’s a hidden “bonding” mechanic that the game never tells you about where by favoring certain characters you get more events with them, you get to know them better and you have one final scene with them which serves as the conclusion to their arc.

I don’t mind it in theory as I always welcome a bit of RP in my RPG and I’m all for giving each player a somewhat personalized experience tailored to them and forcing replay value to see what outcomes might happen but I say here it’s an issue for two reasons.

The first one is that this doesn’t work really well, there are 7 possible characters you can bond with and somehow I got none of the bonding scenes at the end, what was the trigger ? Where was I supposed to get that scene ? Did the algorithm that determines how many flags you have with one character broken ? Because in a good game, I would’ve had at least one of those scenes but here I got none. I get that this is a personal experience issue and that I probably should’ve looked at a guide but as someone who likes to enjoy my games blind it irks me off to miss on something like this because of bad programming or bad game design.

The second is how crucial these bonding scenes are especially for Randy, Rixia and Wazy because in the case of these 3 their entire backstory which the game teases but never fully touches upon are contained entirely in these bonding events at the tail end of their character arc. Even for the ones which don’t have such crucial information, it’s sad that depending on your actions, the game will not give you closure on characters if you didn’t go out of your way to get interested in them.

This is the reason why systems like the one from Persona and its social links always bothered me because it creates a disjointed narrative between what the characters are in the context of the narrative and their character arc which is a side-dish that you can completely miss out on and also will never matter and often contradicts what is told about them in the main game…

Here there’s not even a mechanical reason to reach for these bonding events, maybe a special craft or a special equipment or some bonuses would be cool but you get legitimately nothing and considering that Lloyd can end up with at least 3 female characters, it’s also pretty saddening that your Lloyd can end up single through no control of your own and Ellie is the most canon romance but I wonder if they’ll bounce back on this in future title or pretend like this entire thing isn’t entirely canon and back off from it, again there’s a contradiction between a system like this being implemented and the need to create a continuous narrative where these characters will eventually come back and see continuous development, it’s just too big to be ignored and I feel like it’s not as rewarding for the players who invested time into these characters because at the end your favorite won’t be the ones you liked the most, but the one you gave the most attention too (if that even make sense).

And this is for the good guys, I didn’t touch upon this game's treatment of antagonists and this review is already pretty long but damn, I need to talk about how the game treats its antagonist because here lies another core issue of the story.

I’ve mentioned earlier that the game presents a gray moral filter between its protagonist wanting for what they believe is the right thing for them but not the best solution for everyone and how the antagonist actually works toward the greater good but are misguided in the solution they came up with and the actions they had to take to reach these goals.

While all of this is true, the game still feels the need to write these characters in the most cartoonishly over the top way that even if deep down you and all the characters good, bad and neutral may think they have a point behind their action, you can’t help but realize that Falcom desperately need to establish a clear evil because it can’t handle a morally and philosophically complex situation like this with the tact and the subtlety that they should have.
But I will give credit where credit is due, the antagonists this time around are both the best and the worst ones of the series. Dieter is a great villain, I genuinely believe it was a fluke that he ended being as good as he is. The guy’s a cunning bastard and an idealist with natural charisma, he has money, he has power but most importantly he has influence beyond his ego. Dieter is a guy you can’t help but sympathize with, his idea of justice and the means necessary for a paradigm shift to occur in the world and the way he presents his arguments makes it hard not only for you but for the protagonist to fully disagree with his actions.

But he can be a little goofy but goofy in a Senator Armstrong kinda way, in the words of Jack he’s not greedy, he’s bat-shit insane. And I like that, he’s an entertaining and really good antagonist and his rise to power and the development of his plan make sense felt natural and earned and it was really great to see all of that happening at once with the people being united under his cause because they realize that this guy is the man that can bring about real change within the current system.

I think so far, Trails excelled with its “political” villains aka the characters that work toward achieving a certain goal to put into light a fundamental issue with the way society is handled and try to bring change even if it’s through extreme means. Richard did the coup d’etat out of love for his country, realizing the impending doom of the Erebonian Empire looming its ugly face over Liberl and the need to re-create a strong military force to prepare for the worst because no time of peace lasts forever. Dieter did so out of an ideal to create a better world, a united nation where war and conflicts would be things of the past with his motto being to use war as a mean to end all war (with the Aions being clear metaphor for nuclear dissuasion) with Crossbell at the front center of this newly established world order not through conquest but persuasion because if you want peace you need to prepare for war and Dieter knows that as long as Crossbell keep its neutrality, it’ll never be free of the clutches of Erebonia and Calvard and Crossbellians will never be considered a nation with people that can claim that land as theirs.

But for every villain like Dieter, Falcom likes to introduce his favorite trope : the “True Antagonist” , another plague of JRPG writing that should’ve died in the pits of hell in the Dragon Quest vault where it belongs (side note : I love Dragon Quest).

Azure is a game with many twists and turns to keep the story fresh and exciting at all times which include twists, lots of them and twist villains and for this game in particular they went a bit overkill in that area. The Crois family was already the true antagonist compared to Joachim because they’re the ones manipulating the D.G Cult to further their own agenda of awakening the Sept-Terrion of Mirage which was a family treasure the Crois family was trying to perfect for thousand of years through alchemy and other magic bullshit but it’s fine because Mariabelle is at first presented as an evil whorish side-kick while Dieter was the main dish and for good reason because he doesn’t care the Crois heritage more so than using said heritage to further his agenda.

But then once Dieter is defeated in what I swear was going to be the final dungeon of the game because that last chapter reached its most climatic point yet… Dieter gets cucked by the Ouroboros member who sold them the mech and then in a surprise reveal…

The actual villain comes out of the frey…

IAN

FUCKING

GRIMWOOD

Oh…

Man…

Where do I even begin with this absolutely unbelievably dumb plot-twist ?

Oh maybe the fact that Ian Grimwood is a total nobody, an absolute nothing character that had very little bearing on the plot for the past 50h, a character that I had rightfully ignored or even forgot the existence so far into the game or the fact that the side-quest leading to that revelation is AN HIDDEN MISSABLE QUEST THAT YOU CAN ONLY OBTAIN BY BACKING OUT OF THE ORCHIS TOWER AFTER A CLIMATIC CAR CRASH WHERE YOU SWEAR YOU COULDN’T GET OUT OF BECAUSE YOU’RE TAKEN BY THE FLOW OF THE STORY ????

HOW ASS-BACKWARD DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO THINK FOR EVEN A SECOND THAT YOU CAN PULL A TWIST VILLAIN OUT OF NOWHERE BY FORESHADOWING THEM IN CONTENT THAT’S MISSABLE YOU ABSOLUTE MEGA IDIOTS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

Outside of how bad this twist is, you wanna know the worst part about this ?

It’s completely pointless, like actually pointless, Ian is such a nothing villain that you could remove him from the story entirely and give his motivation to Arios which had an heel-turn during the events of the game and was Lloyd’s rival and the presumed murderer of his brother (according to his own term) and has motivations that are the exact same as those of Ian Chad ThunderCock Grimwood god even his DESIGN is like the stupidest shit ever, he’s just a regular fat dude lawyer how the fuck did he got all the connections and knowledge to carry out a plan like this that involves politics and the knowledge of an ancient art only known to a secret family of well-kept billionaires ???

The motivation of Ian is to use KeA aka the Sept-Terrion of Zero to rewrite reality so he can create a world where Crossbell rules over the world and no suffering could exist just because he lost his wife in a plane crash but guess what, that’s also the motivation of Arios WHO UNLIKE MEMEWOOD IS AN ACTUAL CHARACTER WITH PROPER BUILDUP, TENSIONS AND CONFLICTS BUILD AROUND HIM !

FOR FUCK SAKE, IT’S RIGHT FUCKING THERE, MAKING THE BIG ANIME BISHONEN SWORD GUY BETRAYING HIS OWN MORAL CODE AND WHAT THE BRACERS STAND FOR JUST FOR HIS OWN WISH THE FINAL BAD GUY ? THAT’S OBVIOUS AND THEY EVEN FUCKED THAT UP, IT MAKES ZERO SENSE FOR THIS CHARACTER TO EXIST.

The only reason Grimwood exist is so that Arios couldn’t be the real murderer of Lloyd’s brother so Arios could be forgiven for his “sins” and come up in subsequent entries but it’s not like it matters to do such mental gymnastic because no vilains in this game faces hard enough punishment for the crime they commited they either get forgiven by the protagonist are convinced of their wrong doings…

BUT IT’S NOT OVER YET

After Ian Grimwood got convinced to put a stop to his 5 year long super complex 5head plan after hearing the most 7/10 Shonen talk no jutsu speech ever by Lloyd FREAKING BANNINGS which is like wow… that … THAT WAS THE DEPTH OF YOUR CONVICTIONS ? (seriously fuck that character why is he a thing ?)

Turns out MARIABELLE WAS MANIPULATING GRIMWOOD FOR…

Reasons ?

Oh no it’s another one of those Ourobozos Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Umizoomies Rollie Polie Olie plan isn’t it ?

BUT OF COURSE IT IS BECAUSE HER MOTIVATION EITHER SEEMS TO BE SO THAT SHE EITHER

Did it for the lolz
Did it to preserve her family legacy
Get a free sit at the ouroboros club of bad Akatsuki Reject Extraordinaire table

Why is she the final villain and why does she also get scott free for the things that she did including killing (but not really and fuck her for that) Ian in front of them in fact when she says “Oh dw he’s fine, I specifically didn’t hit his vital organs” and everyone pans out to him because even I forgot he was still a thing in this story cause I simply cannot believe this wasn’t a complete fever dream that my mind made up out of fatigue for this game that does not seem to end…

I mean of course at the end of the day, all of these sets of villains were themselves controlled by a greater force which is the will of KeA aka the Sept-Terrion of Zero aka the Demi-urge in a pretty clever plot twist involving an intentional inconsistency between the first hour of Zero and the last hour of that same game and how she pretty much rewrite history to arrive at this place and time.

I think KeA, her inner struggles with the role she’s meant to fit, the nature of her own powers and simply how adorable and endearing she is and how you want her to be happy and not have to shoulder the sins of the world and end up like the old Demiurge is a pretty interesting take on the concept of “killing god” in a JRPG. And I think that everything surrounding her, her relationship to the SSS, her desire to make everyone happy and not having to face hardship kinda saves the last few remaining hours as the emotional crux of the story as a whole.
Falcom has this tendency to write good villains only for them to end up as the pawn of a greater more clear-cut evil and I think it’s a testament to what this game lacks to carry on the weight of all of its ideas

MATURITY

Maturity is a nebulous concept, but I think in this it should be about acknowledging the forces of your series and not self-indulge in your own fantasies for the sake of pleasing a niche of neckbeard who can’t think further than the back of the 4 walls that cover their sweaty mother’s basement.

Instead of treating its audience with respect by giving them what they need, they were contempt with giving what the “Falcom audience” wanted and it’s a damn shame because had it fully committed to its ideas, had it taken even more risk than it already did, had it stopped itself from falling into clichés and absurdly outdated JRPG tropes.

That’s really what’s stopping the series from reaching more than a simple niche cult status because it didn’t reach for the sky, it reached for the bottom and is contempt with doing so.

It’s also sad because for as much flack as I give the Sky Saga more so because of its structural issues, I felt that sense of maturity was real there but not in Crossbell but while the Sky series only had an ok premise and an ok story served by beautiful emotionally poignant writing that will get you one way or another.

Azure crumbled under the weights of its own self indulgence which tampered its ambition and by flying too close to the sun Falcom burned their wings in the process which is a shame because I think such an alignment of planets between story, themes, pacing, structure, ideas, politics, morality, hope, despair and the indomitable human spirit is not something that the series had achieved so far and likely will achieve ever again.

The reason why I’m still rating this game highly despite my numerous complains is because the game cheats, it cheated me, it cheated with my heart by giving me the classic cani-core soup that I love so much.

At times, Azure is Xenogears, at times it’s Suikoden or Tactics Ogre and at times it’s Gurren Lagann one of my favorite piece of fiction of all time to which they took direct inspiration when it comes to the character of Lloyd, his brother, KeA and the narrative of an ultimate force for good and an optimist at heart doing what they feel was right in the face of the dark grayness that plague the sad reality of the real world facing villains who asked for lighter burdens when they should’ve asked for broader shoulders which is exactly what Lloyd, the SSS, KeA and Crossbell stand for.

None of the dumb twist, the awkward pacing of the ending actually ruins the beautiful yet bittersweet message of the finale and the game as a whole in fact Ian is no different than Dieter or Arios, all three men wanted the best for the world but had to resolve to means that weren’t right, that were eradicating the very idea of freedom, democracy, individuality and human dignity.

These twist are just additional barriers and maybe with time I will grow to ignore them or maybe these twist will grow on me (except Mariabelle, she can go fuck herself) or maybe will I cross the barriers of Falcom’s terrible narrative priorities to enjoy what they truly accomplished especially after 4 chapters of a complete perfect run of good to great to brillant ideas and twists.

An ambitious, beautiful title, that’s a masterpiece that never actually meant it’s potential due to some creative decisions that needed more time to be thinked about but I think that at the end, I enjoyed this game and I wished I enjoyed it more, it’s a game I have lots of respect for what it is but also for what it fails at being

The beauty of an RPG that will stay with me for the rest of my life both in my mind and in my heart and that I personally feel everyone should get a feel for regardless of what I could’ve said and my very ambivalent feeling towards its almost legendary status.

And this is why Legend of Heroes : Trails to Azure is a frustrating Masterpiece

Trails from Zero : A Successful Return to Form

If you've seen my review of the previous 3 entry in the series

My journey with the infamous Trails franchise has been kind of a rocky one, on one hand I absolutely adore what the Trails series does when it comes to presenting its setting world and character but I also have some mixed feeling regarding not only the actual game-part of this game or the structure of it all (especially SC where it pretty much ruined what would otherwise be a pretty satisfying conclusion to the first 2 games which thankfully 3rd was there to cover back and make me actually care about the series)

My favorite (and spoiler alert : Still my n°1 game in the series so far) improved on a lot of things while sacrificing on some of the core aspect of the franchise to be the odd one out and do it's own thing and succeeding so well that I honestly didn't know if I was even going to enjoy the rest of the games since it was gonna return to the old try and true "Trails Pacing"

And at first while playing this new arc, I was suddenly feeling this sensation creeping in on me during the first few hours of the game and I was ready to file many complaint about how boring and uneventful the first 15 to 20h of the game is (which no matter what you think about my patience running low, is still a long ass time for an RPG to kick in).

The game was worse on that front because for that small period of time, there is no hook, you just join the Crossbell Police Department and you're just doing random stuff.

At least in Sky FC, the motivation for going on your journey and accomplishing your bracer task was to graduate from Junior Bracers to Professional one and the game was structured and punctuated in a way that new things are thrown at you every time either be new characters or events but for Zero, there is no underlying plot for a grand majority of the game, stuff just kinda happens

You solve some wolf problem there, you solve an assassination case there, you track down a hacker, you solve gang wars and mafia shit and while you eventually get into the flow of it rather quickly, the plot much like FC really starts to truly kick-off during the mid-section of the game with the Introduction of KeA (who's a pure ball of unsaturated sugar who's too good for this world).

But I will say that despite this, I did get into the flow of it much earlier than even FC because the scrimblo chapters all had bigger stakes and machination behind everything, now that's not to say that the Mafia shit is the most fascinating thing in the world (and trust me they're not that threatening, not much than Team Rocket in the early days of Pokemon) but it does its job well at hooking the player.

It also help how compact the region of Crossbell is, it's a small country much smaller than the likes of Liberl which divided its different chapters by territories

The main city is ofc the main attraction here, it's bustling with life and memorable locations and aesthetically speaking is better than any city from Liberl, the outskirts of the city in comparison are a bit weak, there's 2 villages that are of relatively low importance plot wise and a bunch of side-areas, you go through all of it in a matter of 2 chapters out of 5 which means that the game locks off a bunch of the late game areas to keep at least some new areas by the second half of the game.

There's also fast travel although only inside the city which definitely does help when doing side-quest, I Wish there was a fast travel option for the entire country but it's only available for 1 (one) chapter, otherwise you have to travel in the city then take the bus and while it's definitely less egregious on making you go back and forth in places, the game still does that a lot albeit to a lower amount than the game.

In fact aesthetically speaking, the game ditches free camera control in favor of fixed camera angle that changes perspective from time to time like the 5TH Generation Pokemon games and there's a lot of areas when it does that to great effect.

Gameplay wise, it's pretty much the same as Sky, the 4 main characters are pretty well rounded and balanced for one another (even though I did replace Ellie whenever I had the occasion cause she's kinda ass for a long period of time) and it's relatively easy to make them stupidly broken by the mid-game trivializing most fights, it's probably the only real complaint compared to Trails the 3rd which seemed to have an higher focus on making the game way more challenging so that even normal mode doesn't feel like a walk in the park.

In comparison, this game is more on the easy side of things outside of the final boss or some random surprise bullshit encounters, but the game in general is pretty braindead and most of the "difficulty" comes from how tanky the bosses are and most of them are kinda forgettable and straightforward compared to the head-scratchers of the 3rd bosses, also somehow the game has less spell than 3rd too, in general I do miss the crazy team building and progressive dive into bullshit territory that 3rd had with its bigger gameplay focus.

There's also tons of QoL stuff such as stunning the ennemies to finish them faster with a team rush or a bunch of crits, proper Dual Arts that are visually really cool and unique compared to how SC and 3rd did them, stackable

A big improvement are definitely the different dungeons you visits, taking cues from 3rd dungeon design and the few good new areas of SC, the dungeons are long, sprawling, have some killer atmosphere to them (shoutout to the Star Gazer tower and the Haunted Ruins), a bunch of diverging path an even some light puzzle solving which is definitely more than I was expecting from this franchise and it was a pleasure to go through all of those.

Because that pleasure is a bit short-lived, you do very little rpg-ing in this RPG, in fact the joke about Crossbell somewhat being a VN is true because there is a lot more talking even by Trails standard up to that point, there's a lot of long stretch of moments when all you're going to do is walk and talk to people with nothing else.

It does lead into some pretty annoying moment where you're in an area and you have to check and talk to everything to progress, the mission to stop the assassination of the mayor in the 2nd chapter was pretty eggregious on that part because the triggers to progress are not clear so you're just kinda stuck there going back and forth in the same tiny area, definitely the low points of the game killing any momentum great scenes could have.

Zero does the classic Trails formula the best, and I'm still impressed by the sheer amount of work that was done in order to make this world feel alive and lived in with NPC dialogues changing at every story moment but it's crazy how the game expects you to really go check-in on everyone but this game updates the dialogue for all people in the whole region an like... Ain't nobody got time for that lol ? I did talk and re-talk to NPC whenever I was passing by them but at some points and espcially with how slow the pacing of these games can be, you just kinda wanna move on to the next story bit and finish the game. But I still commend the effort for having such an high amount of text most people will likely completely ignore on their first playthrough and tons of things you have to reach for.

Storywise, I mean it sure is an intro chapter but they made it so it can definitely stand on its own, the game is a good mix between tying some loose plot thread of the previous trilogy and be a solid new entry in the Trails mega-series with a new cast of characters and new conflicts to be interested about.

The main cast of the SSS are... Ok, they definitely don't reach the same level of endearing and lovable as the cast from the previous arc (yet) but they do work and I ended them liking them a lot by the end especially Tio who's probably my favorite out of the main 4 with Randy as a close second.

I can't say much on Lloyd and Ellie tho, as the game stand-in for Estelle and Joshua, I feel like they're both relatively flat characters that don't break any grounds, Lloyd is an optimistic and dense shonen MC like you've seen a lot in those type of story, most of my likeness for him coming from his voice actor (who did Simon in TTGL and the fact they gave his brother Kamina's seiyuu was just here to bait me and it even managed to make me tear up a little albeit for a reason that are not related to this game proper) and Ellie has an inner conflict about getting to the nitty gritty of it while being a member of the nobility but it's not really that well explored.

In fact, only Tio has a lot of development around her which is normal considering that she's linked to the main antagonist goal much like Renne.

Speaking of Renne, it's really funny how the best part of this game story-wise was things that bounced out of the previous arc, in that sense Zero feels like a very nice epilogue to her story-arc and those of Estelle and Joshua and if it wasn't for them stealing the show during the final act, I would've written off the ending of this game has the weakest in the series.

Cause yeah...

I'm gonna be honest, the antagonist this time manages to be even worse than Ouroboros somehow, like I can't believe they did the whole "aloof scientist who's secretly the leader of an evil cult" thing a second time and got away with it scott-free while winking at the audience at how similar this is to Weissman, the guy is quite literally a dollar store Weissman and half of the reasons you wanna see his downfall are linked to the stuff that happened to Renne back in Star Door 15, but he even fails at being genuinely threatening or entertaining unlike Weissman and I can't believe they made a dollar store Weissman all so I can praise Weissman who is an antagonist I also didn't think too much about lmaoooo

It's kind of a shame too because his goofy ass kinda desamorced all the fucked up shit that he caused indirectly, because my dude is just a random fanatic, he really has no motivation beyond his religious fanatism and gives a vibe of "I did it for the lolz" which definitely is hard to stomach since that shit involve fucking Child Abuse (in all sense of the word) and human sacrifices, the cult is bad that's a fact, but their leader is just lame, yes Joachim is a lame vilain and I wish that Falcom tried to be a bit more original there instead of trying to be "in on the joke" and I hope that the pool of good antagonist expand because outside of Richard and Loewe, shit aren't looking great.

Zero is solid, a lot of it is way more entertaining than even FC

If you have to ask me which one I prefer between this and FC, I'd say Zero is the strongest game of the two but the vibe of FC's are immaculate and I can't detach my feelings from it enough, they're about equal and they both shine differently in different places

Now I hope Azure can live up to the hype much more than SC did for FC, I'm already scared of the amount of re-used content or the structure of the game, because while Crossbell is solid for one game, I don't know if they can throw more meaningful gameplay or story content past this

But oh well I can be wrong on that front, we'll see o/

On one hand Chicory is possibly the best 2D Zelda game ever made. The paintbrush is such a cool concept to design little mini-dungeons around, and the expanding move-set and list of mechanics play with this idea beautifully and make for some simple but enjoyable puzzles and some pleasing tests of whether you understand your environment. These parts of the game are modest, joyful and fun, are thankfully free of any combat, and when they do culminate in boss fights these make for emotionally intense audio-visually spectacular highlights.

On the other hand Chicory is such a charming, genuinely thoughtful little game. It has a lot of things to say about the process of making art, a lot of different perspectives to share and investigate regarding inspiration, motivation and how to take healthy attitudes towards your artistry and treat yourself with kindness. The game handles all of this so tenderly that I ended up tearing up at a few points, especially during one particular side-quest that explored the frustrations artists can go through trying to get their art seen, measuring themselves against others, and feeling pressure to become known and how those frustrations can lead to losing track of why they loved making art in the first place. More than anything Chicory just wants, for a moment, to get you excited to be creative, and to help you find enjoyment in making messy and imperfect (the way the brush works feels like it has been designed precisely to make sure you can't be a perfectionist) art.

I love these quiet little towns, each with their own little identities, each with a collection of silly little animals all with just enough personality that you'll recognise them as they migrate around the map. The vibes are often very comfy, aided by the lovely musical score, so much so that when the game veers into darker or more disconcerting territory it genuinely got under my skin. I also adore this game's attitude towards how you engage with it; you can hand-paint every single screen if you want, or ignore that completely and make a beeline through the story, the rewards for completing side-content are (with one minor quality-of-life exception) only ever aesthetic in nature meaning there's no mechanical pressure to complete them and it's just a case of whether you want to do so, and there's no visual counter pointing out how many more collectibles there are to go find. You are simply presented with the tools to play with, the space to play within, and are allowed to engage with that to whatever extent you wish; this might not be a lot to ask for, but in a world where so many modern games bombard you with quest lists, daily challenges and collection completion trackers it's such a relief to play a game with such a plethora of side-content that doesn't feel the need to pressure you into doing any of it.

Of note, as someone who generally prefers controllers I strongly recommend playing this game with a mouse-and-keyboard instead of a controller if possible due to the nature of painting in-game. I was lucky enough to get to go one step further thanks to owning a drawing tablet, making for one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had in regards to controlling a game, and whilst I can enthusiastically recommend this way to experience the game it is hardly necessary.

Just a lovely little game, through-and-through, overflowing with heart.

Chicory was the best surprise i had in a game in a while, while in the surface it looked like a game about painting, it is so much more than that, and as Chicory herself would say "there's no only one way to do things" and there's no one way to play chicory.
For starters yes chicory is a game about painting, however, you don't need to interact with it at all if it's not your thing, the act of painting is used for a lot of things and the black and white scenarios are still great.
It is actually a great puzzle game! You use your brush in the most diverse of ways to interact and solve puzzles throughout the experience , and as with the painting if you aren't good with puzzles, that's fine, you have phone calls to call your mom and dad and they will tell you how to proceed in the most adorable way.
And my lord the soundtrack, it makes all of that work, Lana Raine yet again achieved greatness, from the menu, to the citys, to the amazing boss fights and incredible duets tones, it's incredible to see a soundtrack just as good as Celeste's.

In the end, more than all of that, chicory is a game about it's character's, about you (in my case Pizza!) and chicory, about how you don't need to do everything by yourself and you shouldn't push yourself just because someone says so, it's narrative accomplishes brilliantly what it goes for, and that alone is a reason to play this game, even if you don't like all of the rest, chicory is just THAT accessible, don't miss out like i almost did.