This review contains spoilers
Cold Steel IV is one of the poorest attempts at creating a compelling narrative, let alone an enjoyable game experience, that I’ve ever seen. While it’s not all bad, I feel like it fails in so many basic aspects that make a story entertaining or meaningful in any way. And it makes me sad that’s the case.
In a way, this long review is going to be a critique of the arc as a whole, since it’s the final entry.
I love Trails, I really do. Previous to the start of this arc I had the time of my life going through the games, and they’re full of things that mean a lot to me. Now, if you’ve had the displeasure of speaking about the series with me, then you know what I think about Cold Steel as an arc, and I would love to say that how I judge this game is done separately from those previous negative notions but, unfortunately, pretty much everything I dislike in this entry is just the culmination of all the problems I’ve noticed since Cold Steel started, poor writing and handling that has been stacking up over the years.
The elephant in the room and the easiest thing to criticize is the sheer size of this story, and how it works against it. Cold Steel is very, very ambitious and it always has been. It deals with the problems of the largest setting in the series yet and the ramifications of that story affect the entirety of the Trails world as a whole. Erebonia has been a subject of buildup since the very first entry in the series, having characters and places be directly affected by the Empire’s actions, and this arc had the role of dealing with said buildup and try to find a satisfactory conclusion to it. Unfortunately, it presents so many copouts that I can’t help but feel those years of buildup were done a disservice, but I’ll get to that later.
The problem with said ambition comes in the form of bloat, and there’s no better word for it. Everything in this arc is just completely bloated. The cast is too big, there’s too many maps, there’s too many stories going on at the same time, there’s too much of everything. What ends up happening where there’s too much of something is that most of it feels out of place or meaningless. Old Class VII is a massive cast and most of them feel underutilized or undeveloped. New Class VII was a step in the right direction but ultimately they still have to deal with all the stories they’ve started in the first two games, and that means bringing back OC7 immediately whether they fit in the story or not. It’s a mess.
And speaking of messes, this also affects the pacing. Pacing has always been a massive problem in this arc. They will have a story that could be resolved in a single game and stretch it out into two full length JRPGS. What ends up happening is that one of said games will be 60 hours of nothing but setup and the next one will have to try to resolve all of that, often unsatisfactorily. Both CS1 and CS3 are nothing but the tease of a story, you will visit new areas and meet new people, the same repeated formula will happen over and over again thorough the story and you then the game will end and nothing will have happened.
And because of this split into 4 games, CS2 and CS4 are left with a phenomenon where they’re supposed to be the climax of the story but at the same time, they have to make a full length game, so they will pad the story out as much as they can, adding situations and events that feel like they have no reason to occur. In these two games that presents itself as Act 2, and dear god is Act 2 a slog to go through in this game. Nothing of note happens, you’re presented with, once again, the same formula repeated over 20 hours until you’re deemed as worthy of continuing with the main plot. The same events will happen, the same exact cutscenes, but with a different location and different characters. This is also nothing new, it’s one of the many problems in Cold Steel.
The character bloat makes this even worse, because since now you have a cast of over 20 characters with ongoing stories, which this game as a final entry of an arc is trying to give them, you now find yourself in situations where the story artificially goes out of its way to presents problems that these specific characters, who haven’t contributed to the story for hours, have to deal with.
Characters associated with members of the OC7, who were previously seen as ‘good’, will ally themselves with the opposing forces for no discernable reason other than to have said member of OC7 go against them and arrive at a character ‘conclusion’. And it’s especially infuriating because none of them are presented with consequence. They will provide the enemy forces with machinery or men or whatever and fight against you, only for them to go back at how they were before going through that dance, meanwhile the protagonist just accept them back. I think the idea they’re trying to go for is that these people care for you and are trying to “””TEST YOUR RESOLVE””” by standing in your way, but when that happens 6 times in a row it’s starts to be draining.
This tiring song and dance also makes it so most villains have no real motives to be evil, they’re all actually ‘good guys’ but are either forced to stand in your way because they’re spineless and can’t fight the situation they’re in, or they’re trying to “””TEST YOUR RESOLVE”””. There are a few standout Good Villains, who I love, but as with the main cast, the sheer bloat just sours the experience. Especially because that villain bloat means you have to go through two dozen boss fights before anything happens.
Padding like this completely takes away from the experience, you’re just begging the game to go anywhere but they keep throwing new dungeons to go through or more boss fights to take on. You start flying towards what seems like an objective and -‘oh no they’re putting up a barrier!! We have to go into this dungeon to destroy it!!!!’- It’s never ending and it completely drains away at you.
But these are mostly gameplay grievances, and I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like it’s anything new to the series. But when it’s something that takes 4 games to finish it starts become noticeable more and more. And these are not my main problem with these games.
Said problem comes in the way of its story, of the overall higher plot of Cold Steel. I dislike the Great Twilight, I dislike how they handle Erebonia, I dislike the divine knights’ plot, and I very much strongly dislike the Great One and the Curse.
As I’ve said, this arc deals with being the conclusion to a lot of Erebonia build up. Characters who had suffered because of the actions of the Empire as a militaristic force, and I’ve always found that to be really cool setup, it was exciting to see what they would do with it and how they would go about dealing with the Empire’s sins. So imagine my face when I got to talk with the Emperor himself and he told me ‘Everything the empire has done has been the consequences of dealing with an ancient Curse, I am powerless to stop it’
The game itself is not even sure about how they want to utilize the Curse as a narrative device. Sometimes you’re lead to believe it’s nothing but a ‘devil in your shoulder’ sort of deal, doing nothing but accentuating Erebonia’s nationalism and tendency for conflict. Other times they say the Curse has a mind of its own and it is controlling people, taking away the blame from them.
What I believe happened here is that it was easier to portray the Empire as an antagonistic force when we only say the consequences of their actions, but now that we have a cast inside it and most of all, we have Rean inside of it, there’s no way we can say our heroes are fighting to save a flawed country. Therefore, it turns into a completely spineless story which wants to have its centrist cake and eat it too. Now, ’m told the Curse was handled better in the original JP text and the implication was that they committed fully to the devil in your shoulder, but the text I read leaned against it so this is my takeaway from the story.
And it’s spineless in a way that affects every single aspect of it, especially the villains. No one is allowed to be evil, everyone is secretly rooting for you and fighting to protect the world, they’re just trying to kill you for your sake I promise. Some of the reveals like that are cool but do you have any idea how frustrating it is to go through your 27th boss fight in a row only to be told ‘heh, I actually wanted you to win’ every single time. It takes away from the experience, it makes it feel like they’re making fun of you for wasting your time even fighting bosses.
The absolute biggest offenders in this are Lecther and Claire, not once are they given a proper reason as to why the hell they’re even siding with Osbourne until the very end. Both their backstories are about how much The Chancellor destroyed their lives and yet they are just constantly, for the lack of a better word, dickriding him while so very sadly wishing they could do something else and help the cast, we’re good guys I swear !!
And going back to the curse, it turns out even Osbourne, the guy they’ve also been setting up since Sky, the guy who took away our previous heroes’ home in Crossbell, he was ALSO just a victim to the Curse and trying to make it vulnerable so the main cast could destroy it. It is just SO frustrating of a story.
In the end the Curse ends up being nothing but a generic JRPG device to say that humanity will find a new way, it is the common trope of creating a big huge bad guy at the end of a story to put the blame on everything that has happened, and by killing this force of evil everything will be okay now. It’s fine, it’s been done before and it works. But personally I end up feeling like an idiot for thinking they would approach the concept of the Erebonian Empire in an interesting way.
The ending is also a copout, this arc is utterly afraid of writing consequences. Dead characters come back 5 hours later, villains become good and are presented with no retaliation after what they do. Crow is a literal terrorist and he’s allowed to come back as if nothing happened after dying. Nothing that happens feels earned in the slightest because nothing feels ever lost. They go on about how the Curse is a metaphor for how humanity can only grow in strife but said strife is barely noticeable because no one dies in this story, no one gets really hurt, everything happens with little to no real conflict.
At this point I’m just rambling, and there’s a dozen things I could nitpick and get bitchy about. It’s so funny how this game goes out of its way to pair all the male main characters with random NPCs but leaves all the female main characters single because Rean has to be able to romance them. Speaking of Rean, I’m not even gonna start on him because at the end of the day, I like him enough. I think his spot as the best and most important guy in the world hurts the narrative a lot but that’s been said before and I don’t care enough to go into it. Just now that more than a few times I rolled my eyes and how the story treated him and how half of the characters turn into nothing but Rean drones.
Again, I don’t dislike all of this game. Some characters are very strong, especially Rufus and Cedric. Some of the lore they set up about the world is also extremely cool and I’m excited to see how it goes. But most than all this was just a draining and awful experience to go through, and I really have a hard time believing someone would find it enjoyable from start to finish without ever stopping to think why they’re doing the things they’re doing and if keeping playing is worth it. I might be too much of a hater, I don’t care.
I wish Cold Steel was good, it’s just not. There’s potential but the execution it got was flawed from the start and continues to be flawed up until the very end. It does make me sad.
Doesn’t mean I’m not excited for the future of the series, I know I’m gonna enjoy what’s next. I just really wished I like these more.
TL:DR
Ughhhhhhh
In a way, this long review is going to be a critique of the arc as a whole, since it’s the final entry.
I love Trails, I really do. Previous to the start of this arc I had the time of my life going through the games, and they’re full of things that mean a lot to me. Now, if you’ve had the displeasure of speaking about the series with me, then you know what I think about Cold Steel as an arc, and I would love to say that how I judge this game is done separately from those previous negative notions but, unfortunately, pretty much everything I dislike in this entry is just the culmination of all the problems I’ve noticed since Cold Steel started, poor writing and handling that has been stacking up over the years.
The elephant in the room and the easiest thing to criticize is the sheer size of this story, and how it works against it. Cold Steel is very, very ambitious and it always has been. It deals with the problems of the largest setting in the series yet and the ramifications of that story affect the entirety of the Trails world as a whole. Erebonia has been a subject of buildup since the very first entry in the series, having characters and places be directly affected by the Empire’s actions, and this arc had the role of dealing with said buildup and try to find a satisfactory conclusion to it. Unfortunately, it presents so many copouts that I can’t help but feel those years of buildup were done a disservice, but I’ll get to that later.
The problem with said ambition comes in the form of bloat, and there’s no better word for it. Everything in this arc is just completely bloated. The cast is too big, there’s too many maps, there’s too many stories going on at the same time, there’s too much of everything. What ends up happening where there’s too much of something is that most of it feels out of place or meaningless. Old Class VII is a massive cast and most of them feel underutilized or undeveloped. New Class VII was a step in the right direction but ultimately they still have to deal with all the stories they’ve started in the first two games, and that means bringing back OC7 immediately whether they fit in the story or not. It’s a mess.
And speaking of messes, this also affects the pacing. Pacing has always been a massive problem in this arc. They will have a story that could be resolved in a single game and stretch it out into two full length JRPGS. What ends up happening is that one of said games will be 60 hours of nothing but setup and the next one will have to try to resolve all of that, often unsatisfactorily. Both CS1 and CS3 are nothing but the tease of a story, you will visit new areas and meet new people, the same repeated formula will happen over and over again thorough the story and you then the game will end and nothing will have happened.
And because of this split into 4 games, CS2 and CS4 are left with a phenomenon where they’re supposed to be the climax of the story but at the same time, they have to make a full length game, so they will pad the story out as much as they can, adding situations and events that feel like they have no reason to occur. In these two games that presents itself as Act 2, and dear god is Act 2 a slog to go through in this game. Nothing of note happens, you’re presented with, once again, the same formula repeated over 20 hours until you’re deemed as worthy of continuing with the main plot. The same events will happen, the same exact cutscenes, but with a different location and different characters. This is also nothing new, it’s one of the many problems in Cold Steel.
The character bloat makes this even worse, because since now you have a cast of over 20 characters with ongoing stories, which this game as a final entry of an arc is trying to give them, you now find yourself in situations where the story artificially goes out of its way to presents problems that these specific characters, who haven’t contributed to the story for hours, have to deal with.
Characters associated with members of the OC7, who were previously seen as ‘good’, will ally themselves with the opposing forces for no discernable reason other than to have said member of OC7 go against them and arrive at a character ‘conclusion’. And it’s especially infuriating because none of them are presented with consequence. They will provide the enemy forces with machinery or men or whatever and fight against you, only for them to go back at how they were before going through that dance, meanwhile the protagonist just accept them back. I think the idea they’re trying to go for is that these people care for you and are trying to “””TEST YOUR RESOLVE””” by standing in your way, but when that happens 6 times in a row it’s starts to be draining.
This tiring song and dance also makes it so most villains have no real motives to be evil, they’re all actually ‘good guys’ but are either forced to stand in your way because they’re spineless and can’t fight the situation they’re in, or they’re trying to “””TEST YOUR RESOLVE”””. There are a few standout Good Villains, who I love, but as with the main cast, the sheer bloat just sours the experience. Especially because that villain bloat means you have to go through two dozen boss fights before anything happens.
Padding like this completely takes away from the experience, you’re just begging the game to go anywhere but they keep throwing new dungeons to go through or more boss fights to take on. You start flying towards what seems like an objective and -‘oh no they’re putting up a barrier!! We have to go into this dungeon to destroy it!!!!’- It’s never ending and it completely drains away at you.
But these are mostly gameplay grievances, and I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like it’s anything new to the series. But when it’s something that takes 4 games to finish it starts become noticeable more and more. And these are not my main problem with these games.
Said problem comes in the way of its story, of the overall higher plot of Cold Steel. I dislike the Great Twilight, I dislike how they handle Erebonia, I dislike the divine knights’ plot, and I very much strongly dislike the Great One and the Curse.
As I’ve said, this arc deals with being the conclusion to a lot of Erebonia build up. Characters who had suffered because of the actions of the Empire as a militaristic force, and I’ve always found that to be really cool setup, it was exciting to see what they would do with it and how they would go about dealing with the Empire’s sins. So imagine my face when I got to talk with the Emperor himself and he told me ‘Everything the empire has done has been the consequences of dealing with an ancient Curse, I am powerless to stop it’
The game itself is not even sure about how they want to utilize the Curse as a narrative device. Sometimes you’re lead to believe it’s nothing but a ‘devil in your shoulder’ sort of deal, doing nothing but accentuating Erebonia’s nationalism and tendency for conflict. Other times they say the Curse has a mind of its own and it is controlling people, taking away the blame from them.
What I believe happened here is that it was easier to portray the Empire as an antagonistic force when we only say the consequences of their actions, but now that we have a cast inside it and most of all, we have Rean inside of it, there’s no way we can say our heroes are fighting to save a flawed country. Therefore, it turns into a completely spineless story which wants to have its centrist cake and eat it too. Now, ’m told the Curse was handled better in the original JP text and the implication was that they committed fully to the devil in your shoulder, but the text I read leaned against it so this is my takeaway from the story.
And it’s spineless in a way that affects every single aspect of it, especially the villains. No one is allowed to be evil, everyone is secretly rooting for you and fighting to protect the world, they’re just trying to kill you for your sake I promise. Some of the reveals like that are cool but do you have any idea how frustrating it is to go through your 27th boss fight in a row only to be told ‘heh, I actually wanted you to win’ every single time. It takes away from the experience, it makes it feel like they’re making fun of you for wasting your time even fighting bosses.
The absolute biggest offenders in this are Lecther and Claire, not once are they given a proper reason as to why the hell they’re even siding with Osbourne until the very end. Both their backstories are about how much The Chancellor destroyed their lives and yet they are just constantly, for the lack of a better word, dickriding him while so very sadly wishing they could do something else and help the cast, we’re good guys I swear !!
And going back to the curse, it turns out even Osbourne, the guy they’ve also been setting up since Sky, the guy who took away our previous heroes’ home in Crossbell, he was ALSO just a victim to the Curse and trying to make it vulnerable so the main cast could destroy it. It is just SO frustrating of a story.
In the end the Curse ends up being nothing but a generic JRPG device to say that humanity will find a new way, it is the common trope of creating a big huge bad guy at the end of a story to put the blame on everything that has happened, and by killing this force of evil everything will be okay now. It’s fine, it’s been done before and it works. But personally I end up feeling like an idiot for thinking they would approach the concept of the Erebonian Empire in an interesting way.
The ending is also a copout, this arc is utterly afraid of writing consequences. Dead characters come back 5 hours later, villains become good and are presented with no retaliation after what they do. Crow is a literal terrorist and he’s allowed to come back as if nothing happened after dying. Nothing that happens feels earned in the slightest because nothing feels ever lost. They go on about how the Curse is a metaphor for how humanity can only grow in strife but said strife is barely noticeable because no one dies in this story, no one gets really hurt, everything happens with little to no real conflict.
At this point I’m just rambling, and there’s a dozen things I could nitpick and get bitchy about. It’s so funny how this game goes out of its way to pair all the male main characters with random NPCs but leaves all the female main characters single because Rean has to be able to romance them. Speaking of Rean, I’m not even gonna start on him because at the end of the day, I like him enough. I think his spot as the best and most important guy in the world hurts the narrative a lot but that’s been said before and I don’t care enough to go into it. Just now that more than a few times I rolled my eyes and how the story treated him and how half of the characters turn into nothing but Rean drones.
Again, I don’t dislike all of this game. Some characters are very strong, especially Rufus and Cedric. Some of the lore they set up about the world is also extremely cool and I’m excited to see how it goes. But most than all this was just a draining and awful experience to go through, and I really have a hard time believing someone would find it enjoyable from start to finish without ever stopping to think why they’re doing the things they’re doing and if keeping playing is worth it. I might be too much of a hater, I don’t care.
I wish Cold Steel was good, it’s just not. There’s potential but the execution it got was flawed from the start and continues to be flawed up until the very end. It does make me sad.
Doesn’t mean I’m not excited for the future of the series, I know I’m gonna enjoy what’s next. I just really wished I like these more.
TL:DR
Ughhhhhhh
2 Comments
yeah in the event before the finale starts they allude to how pretty much every old class VII except for Machias and Crow have at least one girl lmao
AND YEAH Olivier would've been such a perfect pick, he even has a line himself where he laments not being chosen instead of Cedric so it's really interesting to see that they're aware of it but are now stuck on said route because of CS2
AND YEAH Olivier would've been such a perfect pick, he even has a line himself where he laments not being chosen instead of Cedric so it's really interesting to see that they're aware of it but are now stuck on said route because of CS2
LinuxWizzerd
5 months ago
Also yeah, big agree on the Japanese text generally being "clearer" on what the curse did, but if it's any consolation Hajimari at least makes it a lot more consistent in how it works and has actual consequences beyond "oh hey we're gonna make you fight randos you vaguely remember for 30 hours straight" which is one reason I liked it the most out of all the Cold Steel games; it doesn't reach the levels of even Zero or Ao but it's at least a decent start imo
And lastly, yeah the mechs were handled really poorly. I would say it's how the writers didn't consider how the mechs in general would affect the world, being incredibly vague on what the Divine Knights even were other than Ishmelga, Valimar and to an extent Testa-Rossa and what the consequences of the totally-not-Highlander plotline with the mech fights would be other than "Ishmelga's gonna make everyone super evil or something idk". I think they were assuming that the civil war plotline would make up the first half and then the mech stuff would make up the second half but the mechs absolutely should be a factor in the entire story and spread out the mech awakenings more throughout the arc so that the player can have the sense that they'll be relevant in both halves, and then they can build up to whatever the big master plan is more gradually.
As a side note, I really think instead of Cedric (???) and Rufus (??????????????????), who to be fair have done basically nothing for a while, Olivier and Laura should have been the pilots that take their place. Olivier is literally the one who started the conflict with Osborne through Class 7 and I think would be very willing to take on the burden of piloting a cursed mech instead of his siblings, and Laura's basically just been there since the start of the arc and I think it fits decently fine for her character. Plus it's fitting that the other canonically heavy-hitter Class 7 member gets a significant story upgrade like Gaius did. If the whole "Duke Cayenne's gonna steal a mech" plotline in CS2 were slightly rewritten to include Olivier in it literally anywhere instead of him doing whatever he was doing at the end of CS2, I think it would work way better as a dramatic end and would help cement his love for his siblings.